Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So, now I have a picture of your timeline to double click down on. So, tell me about the startup that you did – where you got acqui-hired. How long was that journey?

Ganesh Padmanabhan: This is the beauty about starting something. I’ll tell you a little backstory. I was at Dell for 11 years, and we grew a business from almost zero to $1.3 billion in revenue in five years. It was super fast and did a lot of international business development and launched several new products out of it. I got to meet a lot of entrepreneurs like Dheeraj Pandey and team at Nutanix who OEM that as a Dell product. I learned a lot then.

Then, like any self-respecting immigrant, I got my green card or permanent residence in 2015. Then after that I was plotting to go out and do something. When I left Dell, I went through a range of emotions. Imagine you’re an executive. You have the entire support structure. You learn everything.

Sramana Mitra: Big salaries.

Ganesh Padmanabhan: Big salaries, very comfortable life, and all of that stuff; and you are just entering this world of pain of entrepreneurship, right? I mean, pain, but a lot of long-term pleasure. The first month was amazing. I was so excited. Second month, I was a little bit lost on my mission.

Sramana Mitra: So, you left Dell without really anything in mind? You just wanted to start something, but didn’t know what.  

Ganesh Padmanabhan: I just wanted to start something. Very candidly, I think this when the Dell-EMC merger happened; and there was a lot of change. I took that opportunity as the right time for to leave. Otherwise, I’d have had to invest into new relationship building and everything. So, it was the right time or inflection point.

I knew I wanted to do something in AI. This was circa 2016. I had been in big data, data analytics, infrastructure solutions platform. I knew that this was going to be huge. But then there’re two parts of it that I need to model through. One, I wanted to make sure that I can actually get things done outside the confines of a large company where when people take my call, it’s not because I’m calling them but because I’ve got a big banner called Dell Technologies in the backend, right?

Sramana Mitra: People forget that…

Ganesh Padmanabhan: People forget that, right? Also at Dell, you learn very quickly. Like in any large company, it’s all about relationships and your reputation. You can get almost anything done. I can call the European Head of Business and say, “I need you to actually go apply this particular spiff structure for your sales team so I can get this part of the business to start growing.” And they’ll say, “Yes, sure. What’s in it for me?”

It’s a very different mindset than when you are an entrepreneur and you’re starting something. You can just while away your day, read, listen, and talk to people. You don’t have any structure to look back to. You don’t have a goal or a plan or anything. You need to really think through all that, right?

So, to your question on how long was that journey, it started with me wanting to have a very open mind. I knew I want to do something and build something on my own. I didn’t know what it is. I knew vaguely it was in this particular technology area, and I knew that I had the skills of working with large enterprises. That was the frame.

I spent about the first two or three months just talking to everybody I can find with a very open mind. I didn’t have a hypothesis to validate, I was just purely blue sky – understanding what people think about where we are in the journey of the industry as well as technology.

That gave me a lot of insights around a few things. I was asking them about AI. I had to educate people on what AI was in 2016-17. I didn’t want to skate to where the puck is, but to where the puck was going to be. One future I saw was that enterprises will adopt AI. But it’s black box AI, it’s algorithms that you don’t know and can’t explain.

So, the forming of the idea was that I can give them a Jiffy Lube checklist for their machine learning model and the training data set. I’ll tell you the 25 things that can go wrong or go right. Explainability as a service was way ahead of where the research was in 2017, but I knew that a concept like that will drive enterprises to embrace AI with a more open mind and not be so scared about it. So, that was the idea of the startup.

Now, it was hard to find the right research team members to think through it. I worked very closely with the University of Texas system. I found an intern to work with me and think through the technical part of this idea. Then that led to me trying to reach out and talk to several companies who are already in the space of enterprise AI.

One such company was Cognitive Scale. I connected with the executive chairman of the company and the lead investor.

Sramana Mitra: Is that Manoj?

Ganesh Padmanabhan: It’s Manoj Saxena. Has Manoj been on the platform before?

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely.

Ganesh Padmanabhan: That’s awesome. Manoj was so kind. He said, “Hey, you should probably talk to the team and find out what’s happening.”

So, I talked to the team, and then the biggest aha for me was, it’s all about the people. When you embark on a journey like this, the most important thing is to solve a valuable problem that has a meaning, especially in B2B. The more important thing was that you get to work with your team and try to solve something together. I really got interested in getting to know the team and spent about a year like that.

Sramana Mitra: Cognitive Scale has also been here on this platform.

Ganesh Padmanabhan: That’s amazing. So Akshay Sabhiki was probably on the platform. Akshay, Manoj, and I really hit it off. I got to know them, and they said, “Why don’t you just come and join us; help build us out?”

They’d just closed a Series B at that time. I had the skills of growing and scaling a business and market making.

Sramana Mitra: Ok, that’s how the Aqui hire happened. I got it.

Ganesh Padmanabhan: That’s how that happened. So I ended up joining them. I loved the mission. That was the best job I ever had.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI
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