From MIT PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Verta.ai CEO Manasi Vartak (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Besides the guy you brought in from Twitter, who else did you bring in as your key team member? How did you find them?

Manasi Vartak: I recruited through normal channels whether it was through Angel List or emailing people. I also started with a small set of contractors overseas. This was after I had some seed money. That gave us a good start. We still work with them.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of functions?

From MIT PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Verta.ai CEO Manasi Vartak (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you’re an MIT founder, I don’t think gender matters at all.

Manasi Vartak: Based on my experience, I would push back. It’s definitely different. I don’t think it’s terrible. MIT gives you a significant leg up. The other thing that was helping here was that it was an open-source tool that people were using. It wasn’t a question of building, it was more of getting people to pay for it.

Sramana Mitra: You have the product out there as an open-source tool.

From Developer to 2-Time Successful AI Entrepreneur with Exits: Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you work in Europe and when did you start coming into the US market?

Valon Xhafa: I worked in Europe for two years and then we started to gain a lot of traction. We suddenly found out that we were getting traction from US.

Sramana Mitra: How were you finding customers?

From MIT PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Verta.ai CEO Manasi Vartak (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about the transition from being a PhD student to becoming a startup founder.

Manasi Vartak: As with all startups, it’s fun and hard. While I was wrapping up my PhD, I had been reasonably connected in the VC community in Boston. I was on the student team that ran a VC program, so I got exposed to the VC world. I started gathering information and talking to people who might want to buy the system we were building. Also, trying to learn about fundraising and building a team. It was many months before I incorporated and got things rolling.

From Developer to 2-Time Successful AI Entrepreneur with Exits: Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you decide who was going to be the CEO?

Valon Xhafa: It was a common agreement. We didn’t have a concrete discussion about who’s going to be the CEO. For us, the vision mattered more. This was a really important thing. I learnt from my friends that they have a lot of issues with their co-founders about this specific decision instead of focusing on building the MVP.

Having a co-founder with whom you have a common agreement and having open communication is really important. We have different perspectives on different things. My co-founder is more like going step by step and checking stuff. I’m a bit more into going faster and spending more money. We average out in the middle.

From MIT PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Verta.ai CEO Manasi Vartak (Part 1)

Manasi made the journey from a technologist to a founder CEO, raised over $10M in funding, and has built over $5M in revenue with her first startup.
Amazing execution!

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?

From Developer to 2-Time Successful AI Entrepreneur with Exits: Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Valon Xhafa: I wanted to start something else. I wanted to build something from scratch. I tried to use different matchmaking platforms for co-founders. I met my co-founder. We matched. I liked his profile. He was doing his Ph.D. in behavioral science. He was talking about how you can incentivize customers in online stores to make specific decisions.

From Developer to 2-Time Successful AI Entrepreneur with Exits: Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: There were two things that you talked about in this case study. One is there are so many developers out there who want to be entrepreneurs. Very often, they don’t know which problem to solve or they don’t have the domain knowledge.

In your case, you went to this media accelerator and met journalists who had a problem they wanted to solve. This enmeshing of non-technical domain knowledge and a technical person creates very interesting company opportunities. That’s one way developers can become entrepreneurs.