Arijit Sengupta is Founder and CEO at Aible. Previously, Arijit founded another AI startup, BeyondCore, which was acquired by Salesforce.com. This is an excellent discussion, and I urge you to check it out.
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 466th 1Mby1M Roundtable November 21, 2019: With Arijit Sengupta, Aible
Sramana Mitra: It’s a very good strategy. Where you can show ROI easily is where the sales cycle is going to be the fastest. Arijit Sengupta: It’s easier for the champion to go up to the management and say, “I’ve made you this much money.” People are used to years’ payback. Sramana Mitra: You are
Arijit Sengupta: They won’t tell you how much they’ve made, but you can tell that they have made more than you are going to charge them. That changes the conversation. I like to see this pattern. If somebody starts buying and within 24 hours, you see a couple more people buy. We had a client
Sramana Mitra: What was your lock-in period? Did you go to Salesforce? Arijit Sengupta: I had a three-year resting and two-year non-compete clause. I did my two years. Salesforce is a wonderful place. Even if you leave Salesforce, you’re part of the family. I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I wanted to solve this problem and
Sramana Mitra: The data sources are the ERP systems of these customers? Arijit Sengupta: Initially, [the data sources were] CSV files. Eventually, we built connectors to SAP and Salesforce. At the time of funding, we were still taking CSV files. Not all of the features existed at that time. What was important for them was
Arijit Sengupta: We had done a project with McKinsey where we looked at 30 million patients across a million variable combinations. At that time, McKinsey had come out and said, “What would have taken us three months, we can now do in two hours using the software.” Clay ended up writing an article around that
Sramana Mitra: You started thinking about BeyondCore around 2004. What did that entail? Did you do this full-time? Arijit Sengupta: Clay doesn’t admit this story as being true so I’ll tell you the story as I remember it. You incorporate the company as part of the business plan concept. I told Clay, “I’ve got this