So today I am going to talk about my Antler Residency Experience in detail, my jourey and my point of View.
So I met Siddhi Advani at ZuGrama and she had amazing laurels to back her. She has done her Masters, Doctors and Post Doc from notable institutions. She was amazingly professional when I met her. We decided to work on createMCP together, a project I had been planning as I am really fascinated by MCP (Model Context Protocol) Servers. I shared the project with many developer friends, who were in the same space (AI/MCP), and it turned out "I was building a startup nobody wanted". During my discovery calls with them I realised they were all looking for a better agentic coding solution. During these discovery calls, I also applied to Antler SEA Launchpad - where we got selected. I also applied to EigenLayer Residency (based on createMCP) in Seattle (we got shortlisted there). If I am selected to Eigen Residency in Seattle and Antler Vietnam, I would objectively select the former. If I am selected in YC over Antler, I would choose them as well. I have huge respect for Paul Graham and YC because of their legendary essays on entrepreneurship. I think that's the best decision for my startup. If I am selected or not is another story :-P
So I land in Vietnam on Monday, 06/10/25 and have a meeting with Antler team on 07/10/25. I want to make my intention of working on almondCoder very clear to the Antler team. Antler Vietnam team is headed by Erik Jonsson. We tell him that we intend to work on almondCoder and he is totally fine with it. He wants to help us by sharing leads to potential early customers and I make a promise to launch the product as early as next week.
Proof this photo is taken on 07/10/2025.
S represents Siddhi, V represents Vaibhav and R represents Ruchi (designer). We create this plan. Creating first version of deck is two day task at best. Siddhi picks up Competitor Analysis and I get busy working on the product. Creating a product is much difficult task than creating the pitch deck. After the first week when I ask her to share the pitch deck, she retorts that even I have not completed the product. (Fair Allegation??)...
For the next two weeks as a cofounder,
- she has created a google form
- she has created an excel sheet with market sizing
- she has done competitor analysis
- she has created graphic on dev features of almondCoder
I personally think this is one days' work, at best two. I want her to move into content space, asking her to create creatives (videos, posters, images) about almondCoder but she wants to work on market sizing and competitor analysis. The outcome for doing competitor analysis / market sizing was to create a pitch deck! She keeps bringing up how we should focus on Scientists as ICP as well, which I disagree with compeletely.
After two weeks of this to and fro, I message her "If she is not interested in this project then she should leave for india", she asks me to meet her. I miss that time and ask her to meet later instead. Then she stops responding to my whatsapp messages, and a frustrated me texts "If she has booked her tickets for india or she is still in vietnam" something of that magnitude. Instead of resolving it out, she takes all of this to Antler Vietnam head Erik. He sees a "passive aggresive" and "rude" founder and decides to kick me out (I will say me becuase how minimal Siddhi's contribution was so far).
You may ask what have I done? (Nobody from antler team did)
- Launched the landing page - https://www.almondcoder.com/
- Worked with the designer to create the figma of the product (https://www.figma.com/design/92G6OUZbFS9d7DgliBk9W3/Almond-coder?node-id=5472-2146&t=2hZgD3zjXqWyn4cj-1)
- Completed 70% of the product (screenshot attached). 
There was not even iota of help from Siddhi while doing any of these tasks, which is essentially the heavy lifting for this startup.
WHY IS ERIK FROM ANTLER WRONG?
A good investor always listens to founders' point of view. He did not care to listen to my point of view before kicking me out of their program. I think if a cofounder dispute reaches any VC (no matter how early), they should give time to both sides of argument before reaching conclusion. He did not even let me give product update on third week, thus implying that momentum or what you do does not matter to me, I have made the decision without hearing your side of story.
It's their accelerator and they can do what they want honestly.
It's their accelerator and they can do what they want honestly.
"Half truth is more dangerous than outright lies"
WHY IS SIDDHI WRONG?
I was laser focused on momentum and she was little lazy with her work. There was expectation mismatch on work she focused on. Even after me communicating that to her, she was focused on perfecting market sizing and TAM/SAM/SOM. She did work on talking to customers (not by creatives but via a survey form) on the last day we worked together.
WHY AM I WRONG?
I think I was wrong with how I communicated to Siddhi. I was rude and arrogant. I was rude and arrogant because I never thought she would nuke the entire efforts. I guess she knew that I had more to lose than she had to gain.
Anyways lessons learnt. Peace out and Happy Diwali to me.
P.S almondCoder does not think I am guilty. <3 almondCoder (ironically it's just claude in background)
Claude Sonnet 4.5 thinks I am guilty.
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