Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What you did had a major impact.

Pallav Pandey: They did that and they swept the election. While we were consulting them, something crazy happened. There was a batchmate of mine in the US. He was consulting for McKinsey. He was after my life. We were doing some interesting stuff, but it was person-dependent. I was also getting tired. Not to mention that the people I had to work with were not great people to work with and look up to in life.

Building a Terrific EdTech Venture in India: Pallav Pandey, CEO of Uolo (Part 1)

Pallav is a serial entrepreneur and one of the cofounders of Knowlarity. Readers may recall our Knowlarity story as told by Ambarish Gupta. Pallav’s newest venture is a fantastic case study in positioning and Go-to-Market Strategy for EdTech.

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 a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did AI do that was really unique to your product?

Swapnil Jain: We’ve always used LLMs in our tech stack. The key technology was transcription. A human doesn’t need to listen to a call. We can make it much more easier for them to understand the call. Then we also built a lot of NLP technology to further crystallize that. They won’t even have to go through the transcript or look at the keywords. We can just give them a summary. This was all not possible before.

Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We are in the 2018 timeframe now?

Swapnil Jain: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What are the next few strategic moves that got you further?

Swapnil Jain: 2019 was a big product year. We had a product that we were shipping every day, but we didn’t know if this was strategic or not. The big strategic decision in 2019 was getting a strong VP of Product. If I look back, that is something I should have done sooner. I acted as a product leader, but I was not good.

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 support is also a big factor. It’s the pay-it-forward kind of thing.

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 the same thing. The operations team, which is trying to improve processes on how to best handle these calls, is doing the same thing.

Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the idea that you zeroed in on? What was the process?

Swapnil Jain: It was a pretty long process that lasted two years. Towards the last two days of my job, I started formalizing some ideas. More often than not, you pivot. I started with one idea. I had eight different ideas during that period. I’d test and idea; if it’s working, keep moving forward. If not, then pull back.

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?