Vishnu's Podcast

Mo Bitar, Founder of Standard Notes, returns for Part 2 of his conversation with Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente — diving deeper into building privacy-first products, his burnout from privacy, life after Proton, and the lessons learned along the way.

Listen as they talk about startup struggles, the mental toll of building in public, and why Mo believes the future of privacy needs a different path.

Mo Bitar – https://mough.xyz | https://x.com/atmoio

Conquer – https://conquer.dev/

Ente – https://ente.com/

Mo Bitar, Founder, Standard Notes talks to Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente on building Standard Notes, selling to Proton, and why he left Proton.

Part 2 coming soon.

Mo Bitar - https://x.com/moughxyz

Conquer - https://conquer.dev/

Ente - https://ente.com

Vladimir Prelovac, founder of Kagi, joins Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente, to unpack the story behind a search engine built on trust, not ads.

Vlad explains why “free” search is a trap, how Big Tech’s incentives distort information, and what pushed him to build Kagi — a paid, privacy-first alternative.

They dig into the origin of Kagi, the browser built by one engineer, the vision for an independent ecosystem, and why incentives matter more than features.

If you care about privacy, the future of the web, or the mindset behind mission-driven products, this one’s wo...

Henry Fisher of Techlore talks to Vishnu about privacy, surveillance, and the future of the internet.

They discuss why it’s never too late to leave Big Tech, how age verification and online surveillance are reshaping our lives, and why this is the best moment to take control. Henry also shares how he has personally grown up along with Techlore over a decade and his plans for the future.

This is a pragmatic, optimistic conversation about fighting for a better internet without losing your sanity.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:57 Why privacy ma...

How do you build internet-scale financial systems without venture capital, ads, or growth-hacking?

In this episode, Vishnu speaks with Kailash Nadh, CTO of Zerodha - one of the world’s largest trading platforms. They cover how Zerodha stays fully bootstrapped, remains highly profitable (USD 500 million+ in profit), and grows with zero ad spend.

They dig into Zerodha’s engineering philosophy, self-hosting, open source, privacy, and why the internet feels increasingly broken. This is a grounded conversation on scale, incentives, pessimism, and building companies that last.

Kailash: https://nadh.in/

Zerodha: https://zero...

Mozilla announced Firefox would become an "AI browser" - and the internet lost it. Users called it tone-deaf. Reddit threads exploded. Mozilla promised a kill switch.

So I sat down with Raffi Krikorian (CTO, Mozilla) and John Dickerson (CEO, Mozilla.ai) to get answers. We talked about the AI backlash, Firefox's future, open source AI, Mozilla.ai's developer tools, small language models, on-device AI, Mozilla's $1.3 billion war chest, raising venture capital, and what their "rebel alliance" for open source actually means.

00:00 Intro

00:57 Raffi's story

03:27 John's story

06:27 Mozilla's structure

Carl Dong, CEO of Obscura talks to Vishnu Mohandas, CEO of Ente on all things VPNs, Bitcoin, Privacy Tech, User Experience and a lot more.

Carl Dong - https://x.com/carl_dong

Obscura VPN - https://obscura.net/

Vishnu Mohandas - https://x.com/VishnuKVMD

Ente - https://ente.io/

Links mentioned in the video -

https://obscura.net/blog/bootstrapping-trust/

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

https://reproducible-builds.org/