Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Right, you’ll learn as you go along. But there will be these three buckets, I think, even when you are a $100M or a $1B company. This is going to be the structure of your company. So the question then is, what is the distribution?

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Feroze, there are a few things that come to mind as I’m listening to you. First and foremost, you talked about delivery constraints and supply constraints in terms of the expertise that give you this moat. You haven’t talked about domain knowledge.

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, I’ve a number of questions. First and foremost, you said you acquired or acqui-hired the software from somebody that you started with. What is the financing of this company? Did you raise money? Did you self-finance? How did you acquire?

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, talk about what you pitched to your first clients and how you got them. Where does this begin?

Feroze Mohammed: Sure. I think even before we started, one thing we learned from our journey in Sierra Atlantic and later with Hitachi is to play the game only when you have an unfair advantage to win. And that comes from having very specific differentiation.

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 1)

IT Services is going through a profound shift. Huge opportunity for more companies like Palantir to be built. This discussion parses the nuances of building such ventures. Needless to say, VC money is now going to flood into this model.

Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Okay, got it. You just took me through a bit of the pricing and ROI analysis. What did you price your product at?

Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, you got to prototype in a bootstrapping with a paycheck mode. Your two co-founders who were doing the design and implementation work, stayed on working in a bootstrapping with a paycheck mode. You quit and went full-time. Then you got to a release in June of the next year, in six months. Which side did you decide to build the product for? Was it the buy side?

Ganesh Shankar: No, the sell side.

Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Got it. Let’s go back to when you started the company. What was the premise of the company? What were you going to do?