Akshay Iyer

I launched a product called Polymath earlier this week. The core idea is that your LinkedIn and resume do not know you very well. But your AI does. So Polymath will let you run analysis on what your AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code) know about you. It will run this analysis completely locally, and on your own Claude Code or Codex subscription. If Polymath thinks you're good, it will get you opportunities in the real world. Today this would be intros to smart people, and referrals into great companies. This sounds like a recruiting agency with some bells and whistles. It is, right now. However I have been building in the education and hiring space for 10 months now. I have pivoted through 4 different ideas before this. And I think this has a shot at changing education by navigating around the dysfunctional education institutions of the world instead of through them. And I know this puts me at risk of sounding like every other delusional San Francisco founder you may have spoken to before, but I would love a chance to show you what the market taught me, and maybe you will see it the way I do too. What the market taught me In October last year I launched a product that would convert book PDFs into 1.5 hour long interactive audiobooks. I and a few of my friends used this and loved it. It completely replaced Kindle and Audible for me. This was the first product I ever built that felt like early PMF to me, and a few of my friends agreed. All of us being avid readers. But the market taught us why only a single digit percentage of people in the world read regularly. The reason is that it's not mission critical. This is true for both adults and students. People simply did not prioritise continuous learning much, it got pushed to the bottom of their TODO list and then out of it. This is why book summary companies like Shortform and Headway have tens of millions in ARR but not billions. This taught me that a genius AI tutor would not get wild PMF, not unless it