Date: March 20, 2026 Context: Response to Karthik Kamalakannan's "give me your unfiltered feedback" email (sent March 16, 2026)
What's Working (Keep Doing)
- Product vision — "You have a nice vision for the products and the things that could be built." Keep doing this.
- Tool discovery — Varun credits Karthik with introducing Claude Code and other tools the team wouldn't have found on their own.
- Team autonomy — "You're way more calm and welcoming about how the development team works now." Gives Varun more breathing space to be creative and fast. Notes he has better control over the team than before.
What's Not Working (Where You Suck)
1. Not Branching Out Into New Business
"I think we're not branching out for new things these days in terms of business. I still think that is kind of stopping us from doing what we did in 2017-2018 times."
- Feels the company has become conservative compared to the early days.
- Wants more experimentation with new business lines.
2. CEO Is Too Hands-On in Dev, Not Enough in Distribution
"As a CEO I wouldn't suggest you sticking to development like website and content, you can delegate that to others and start meeting people and being in places to get more visibility."
- Notices Karthik is spending time talking to new people (Vijay, Chakravarthy, etc.) — that's good.
- But wants him to turn that into a major part of his work hours, not a side activity.
- Direct ask: delegate website/content work, focus on being out there.
3. Too Scared of Scale
"We're too scared of scale... we're not taking huge bets like before, it's not only your problem it is also mine. We need to start testing out things for scale and growth."
- Shared ownership of the problem — not just blaming the CEO.
- Wants the team to take bigger swings and test for growth.
Process Request
- Wants an in-person meeting for deeper feedback exchange. Feels written feedback is limiting: "I feel very limited thoughts come across when I type them out in one sitting."
My Read on This
Varun's feedback reinforces the same pattern as John Bosco's but from a different angle:
- John says: We don't have a marketing system, KPIs, or budget. (Execution gap)
- Varun says: The CEO is doing dev work instead of being out meeting people and taking big bets. (Leadership allocation gap)
Both are pointing at the same root cause: the company builds well but doesn't distribute, and the CEO's time isn't allocated toward fixing that. Varun is essentially saying: "You're good at vision and tools — now go be the face of the company, not the person tweaking the website."
The in-person meeting request is worth taking seriously. Varun clearly has more to say than he put in writing.