Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: A lot of pre-seed investments happen in the alumni network. An engineer in a branded company like Twitter works. Swapnil Jain: Of course. The other thing I would say is the Bay Area is more lenient in terms of supporting people. Did I have a great idea? Maybe. Maybe not. People’s willingness to

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Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 3)

Swapnil Jain: When you call your bank, you hear that the call is being recorded for quality and training. A human would come in and listen to it manually. While listening, they are filling out a form about the call details. Then on the other side, the supervisors who are coaching the agents are doing

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Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 1)

Swapnil makes a very clear distinction between his goal of becoming a Centaur ($100M+ revenue company), not a Unicorn ($1B+ valuation). Read on to learn about his journey. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Language models have evolved a lot. Arvind Jain: There is that vision for the future. The nature of knowledge work is going to change. We are going to have these powerful assistants that are going to take care of most of the repetitive time-consuming tasks as well as the tedious parts of search.

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you this question, computer scientist to computer scientist. Really great work in search is a matter of great algorithms. Algorithms are not necessarily people intensive. Five people can write great algorithms. Is this really a people-intensive business? Google was never a people-intensive business. They hire a lot of people,

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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

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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

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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

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