KP built an audience by narrating his own work, then made a career out of doing it for everyone else

Building in public is now such a standard move that it has its own visual language: the revenue screenshot, the transparent churn post, the thread that begins today I want to share something hard. It is easy to forget that a few years ago this was weird behaviour, and that somebody had to keep doing it long enough for it to look normal.

Karthik Puvvada, who everyone calls KP, is one of the people who did the keeping. Five-time founder, doing the whole messy arc out loud, until an audience of more than seventy thousand had assembled around a person whose main output was candour about the work.

The turn from self to everyone else

The interesting move is the second one. Plenty of people build an audience narrating their own progress and then monetise the narration: a course, a cohort, a paid community teaching you to do the thing they did. KP went the other direction and pointed the same skill at other people's work.

At Paddle he ran Founder Relations and a programme called AI Launchpad, which put more than 340 founders from 68 countries through building and launching. He started the Build In Public Fellowship in 2023 to do it at smaller scale and higher intensity. He now runs community at Netlify, a company valued in the billions, which is a strange and slightly brilliant place for a five-time founder to end up.

That is the duality worth noticing. His personal brand is built on the founder's-eye view, the person in the arena posting from inside it. His actual job is infrastructure for other people's arenas. He is not a founder who became a community person; he is a founder who worked out that community was the thing he was best at, and took the job that admits it.

Why it holds up

The build-in-public genre has a credibility problem now, because the incentives got obvious. Once transparency reliably produces followers, it stops being transparency and starts being a format, and you get people performing vulnerability on a content calendar.

What keeps him on the right side of that is the receipts sitting behind the posting. Five companies. An accelerator with hundreds of founders through it. A podcast and a newsletter that have run long past the point where they were novel. The audience came second.

Start with the podcast if you want the long version, or just follow the feed for a week. It is the rare case where someone who talks constantly about building is also, verifiably, building.

The "Build In Public" Guy.

KP's own bio, which is four words and a job description