Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another positive impact that happened during the pandemic. On the sales side, organizations became comfortable buying products over Zoom calls. You do everything on Zoom. Large deals were closing purely on Zoom calls.

Arvind Jain: Yes. In our first year, we had one sales person. Then we hired the second one. We were able to get a lot of customers signed up. Zoom is interesting. It’s very efficient. You don’t spend a day to travel to a customer.

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Catching Up On Readings: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2024

This report from Gartner identifies the top 10 strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2024. These include democratized Generative AI, AI trust, risk and security management, and AI-Augmented Development among others. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This strategy that you followed is good for companies that have a lot of early-stage funding. It’s not so easy to follow for companies that are trying to work in a very constrained financial resources situation. What did you learn? Focus on the nuggets of what you learned from the early customer engagements when you were not charging yet?

Video FAQs

Colors: L’hermitage VII

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – L’hermitage VII

L’hermitage VII | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 8  x 8, On Paper

Roundtable Recap: October 19 – Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later

During this week’s roundtable, we worked with two entrepreneurs.

RAVC Solutions

First up we had Ratan Agrahari in Lucknow, India, pitch RAVC Solutions, a solar services venture with serious ambition.

Aladdin Digital

Next we had Darlington Onyeagoro from Lagos, Nigeria, pitch Aladdin Digital, a cross border payment company for the African market.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In your selection of which investors to work with, what was your decision making? Was it people you worked with before?

Arvind Jain: There are two key investors in our first round. One of them was Ravi from Lightspeed. I had worked with him in my previous startup. It was an easy choice from that perspective. We also raised from Kleiner Perkins. They had the right experience for us.

People.ai Leverages GenerativeAI to Make Selling Simple

According to a recent report, the generative AI market is expected to explode to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032 from a relatively modest $40 billion in 2022. The more than 40% annualized growth rate is expected to be driven by continued investments in large language models (LLMs), digital ads, and specialized software and services. Sales focused automation platforms such as People.ai are harnessing generative AI’s capabilities to improve the overall efficiency of sales teams globally.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This problem has been identified a long time ago. People have tried to build such enterprise knowledge management companies before. I’ve seen many of these attempts. Mostly they’ve failed. While these attempts were made and failing, there was an explosion of digital tools and data. All this was happening in parallel.

In 2019, the enterprise world is more data-rich. There’s more to draw from. AI has become mainstream by this time. What is it in your approach that is different in 2019?