Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 7)

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 selling a product that customers are using directly.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 6)

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 where their firewall blocks any product that is not whitelisted. It was blocking Aible. The customer fought with IT and got us whitelisted. It was helpful. It wasn’t a conflict. They really pushed IT to get Aible whitelisted.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 5)

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 started Aible.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 4)

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 that we had customers talking to Menlo saying we replicated something we had spent months doing.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 3)

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 time in Harvard Business Review saying BeyondCore was disrupting the consulting market. It got us into a lot of trouble with consultants.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 2)

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 great job.” He looked at me and said, “All that business plan you did, was that real?” I said yes.

Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 1)

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As AI companies start to find adoption, we are now starting to see real successes emerge. Arijit Sengupta has built one company and sold it to Salesforce.com. He is doing a second one that is also moving right along. Many insights to draw from this conversation!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Meaningfully Impacting the Economy in The Philippines: John Jonas, CEO of OnlineJobs.ph (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When was this launched?

John Jonas: 2009.

Sramana Mitra: How did the revenue ramp up on that one?

John Jonas: It was slow. I was teaching how to hire people in the Philippines. We had made $250 that month teaching it. He said, “I think this job board can make $10,000 a month.”