Polynomial Studio — Applied AI product studio

Hello I’m Kartik, and I write here.

Polynomial Studio began in mid-2023 as a solo-founder experiment in what AI-native companies can become, run on curiosity and coffee.

I explored ideas across hiring, mental health, work, marketplaces, and decision-making through customer research and small MVPs. Most did not survive contact with the market. One did, and by 2025 it had become my operating focus.

For the last two decades, the dominant technology model was to build software and charge customers to use it.

AI creates a larger opportunity.

Software is becoming easier to build, while AI can perform a growing share of work that previously required people. Technology companies can move beyond selling tools and take responsibility for outcomes.

I am most interested in markets where customers already spend heavily, important outcomes remain expensive to deliver, and AI can structurally change the underlying economics.

The goal is not to add AI to an existing business.

It is to ask what the business would look like if today’s technology had existed from day one.

As software becomes easier to build, other advantages become more important.

Distribution, proprietary information, and understanding customer intent matter. Participating in the outcome creates learning that sitting outside the transaction cannot.

I believe strong AI-native companies can combine these advantages:

• Build direct distribution around an important problem.
• Understand what customers actually want.
• Use software and AI to perform a growing share of the work.
• Keep exceptional talent close to the parts requiring judgment and relationships.
• Deliver the outcome.
• Then use what each outcome teaches you to make the next one better.

Fursa grew from this worldview: an AI-native hiring company built around the belief that technology should take responsibility for outcomes, not simply sell tools.

Bold Efforts became the public notebook around the same questions: how AI, work, markets, cities, and technology were reshaping the way people build their lives.