SFG 47: Ashutosh Garg on managing talent with AI

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Eightfold AI is a talent management platform used by hundreds of large organizations like Vodafone and Activision Blizzard. It helps them leverage data to find great people with the skills they need, both internally and externally. Last valued at $2.1 billion, Eightfold was launched in 2016.
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In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Ashutosh Garg, co-founder and CEO of Eightfold AI.
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‍Be sure to check out more Startup Field Guide Podcast episodes on Spotify, Apple, and Youtube. Hosted by Unusual Ventures General Partner Sandhya Hegde (former EVP at Amplitude), the SFG podcast uncovers how the top unicorn founders of today really found product-market fit.

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Episode transcript

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Sandhya Hegde

 Welcome to the Startup Field Guide, where we learn from successful founders of unicorn startups, how their companies truly found product market fit. I'm your host, Sandhya Hegde, and today we'll be diving into the story of Eightfold AI. Eightfold is a talent management platform used by hundreds of large organizations like Vodafone and Activision Blizzard.

It helps them leverage data to find great people with the skills these companies need, both internally and externally. Last valued at over 2 billion, Eightfold was launched in 2016, and we are joined today by its CEO and co-founder, Ashutosh Garg. Welcome to the Field Guide, Ashutosh.

Before maybe we dive into Eightfold, I'd love to‌ go back and talk a little bit about your own career, your first startup, Bloomreach, as well. I know you were a very early hire at Google. It was 2004 when you joined Google. What was that experience like and how did it contrast with kind of your previous roles, which had been at bigger companies?

Ashutosh Garg

I joined Google, as you mentioned, in 2004. Prior to that, I was at IBM for a short period and before that got my PhD now I say, fortunately, in machine learning and AI from Illinois, Urbana Champaign. My experience at Google was quite interesting. This was one of the, probably the best days at Google. So I joined in and I was told that you go figure out, do something good. My manager was like, yeah, I don't have time just to do what you want to do, right? But have an impact. And the beauty is that, that gave me the way I leveraged it is that, what can I do to not only learn about the business, but this was the early innings of AI and machine learning, right? And even in those days, Google had access to billions of documents across the web, each and every activity users were making on Google's platform, and access to thousands of machines. So I could go in over the weekends, run my own mapreduce jobs, and analyze the data to make sense out of it. Now, whether it is trying to use text to understand images. Whether images, Whether it is around learning about people to see who is likely to do what next in their career. Sorry. So for example, as a buyer, right? You go to Google product search, what are you going to buy next? You go to Google News, what news article are you going to read next? If you're going to Google Reader, there was RSS feedback in those days, what article you're going to read next , and so on and so forth. So it's building all those models. So the good thing is that over the years, I've always been a zero-to-one person at some level.

So even at Google, it was not about, let me just become a part of a large product team, which is already working on a mature product and making it incrementally better. But it was always about, how can I invent something new over here? In that sense, like when I started Bloomreach, that experience was very similar. It was about let's look at a problem from the first principle. Let's start from the ground zero and see how we can solve the problem of helping enterprises. And in the case of Bloomreach, the problem that we were working on was in the early days was around search engine optimization. Till date, right, Google is the largest channel to drive digital marketing and every business depends on that, right? But it's almost a black box, like how those things work. And quite a few times, companies just don't know what to do. What's the right thing to do? And as a result, sometimes people end up doing the wrong things, which ends up hurting their experience. So it was like, can we solve this problem through technology? So that was the early innings at Bloomreach that we started with. And that mindset of innovating, starting from zero to one, worked out really handy.

Sandhya Hegde

And, so you went from being the CTO and technical co founder at BloomReach to eventually starting Eightfold AI in 2016. What was the impetus and the founding insight for you? What made you say, okay, I'm going to, this time I'm going to be the CEO, I'm going to run this company.

Surprisingly, it's going to be in HRtech, which I would argue is probably considered a less attractive space in SaaS. I'm sure you got that feedback from a lot of people when you started. So could you take us back to 2016 and share what it was like starting for a second time?

Ashutosh Garg

It's scary, but I think the way I approach the problem is that if there is a big fundamental problem and I feel like there's a path to solving it, then let's just go and make it happen. So I see myself more as a problem solver versus a technologist, versus an engineer, versus a person or a go-to-market person. Give me a problem and I'll work on it.

But if I know, I'll solve it. If I don't know, I will learn from others. And again, we'll go and try to solve it, right? I was at Google, so at Bloomreach for eight years. And working on this problem of digital marketing, working with large enterprises, e-commerce companies, trying to see how we can help them. And while it was really good and impactful, I felt there's something always, I always felt that something is missing in what I am doing. I wanted to do something that is very core and fundamental to our society. And initially, I was looking more for things like education and healthcare. In fact, I left Bloomreach to start some company in the healthcare space. But the aha moment for me was realizing ‌how important employment is for people.. If I can help everyone get a better job, a better career, the world will be a much, much better place. And then suddenly I recall the story that the first time I applied for a job at Google, I didn't hear back from them for three months. The next time I met someone who introduced me to Google and I met this person at a social gathering. And within weeks, I had an offer letter in hand. I'm still the same person, but today we get the job based on who we know, not what we know. And I was like,‌ making employment better is a very fundamental problem in our society. So then let's just go and solve it. So that is what was the impetus to start Eightfold, and I think the advantage of the CEO role is that it gives you a broad spectrum. You're no longer just focused on solving a technology problem or a product problem, but you can look at the problem holistically and see that what is needed to solve this, right? That was the initial journey.

Sandhya Hegde

How did you go from the mission, right? Which is, okay, I want, and I love how big and fundamental that mission is. So I think a lot of founders make the mistake of not thinking big enough, right? And then you're not able to attract like all the talent and attention you need to get started.

So I love how big and fundamental this mission is of, how do you make employment better for everybody? How did you go from that to okay, here's the initial beachhead problem that we will solve for one specific customer?

Ashutosh Garg

I will start by telling you a story on that one. In the early days at BloomReach, pretty much every email that came to our website would come to me. Like careers, and jobs, and support, and info, and all those, right? And I saw an application that came in. This person was finishing her PhD from Wisconsin, Madison. One of the top database colleges under the professor Jeffrey Norton, who was one of the most famous professors in the database space back in those days. And she was applying for a job at BloomReach. So we interviewed her, but during the interview process, I asked her, why did you apply on our website? Why didn't you just reach out to someone? Right? Almost in a black hole. And the reaction was, but Ashu, isn't that what we're supposed to do? And there's a difference in that naivety, right? As an enterprise, you're like, oh, you know what? Good people never apply. We will just source the candidates. All those kinds of things, right? And that was again an aha moment to realize that‌, if you really want to solve for employment, we have to really look at enterprises, what they are doing, because ultimately they are the employers. If we don't understand their processes, we won't solve for their challenges. We will never solve for the candidates or individuals. So that made us think about we need to really understand what's happening in enterprises, how they're looking at the profiles, how they're looking at people, how they're assessing people. Sometimes they say that it's harder to get a job within your own company than applying outside. Like, how even internal mobility is happening. So that forces us to think about, let's look at enterprises and solve the problem for them. And then we started from there.

Sandhya Hegde

Got it. Oh, how long did it take you to get to, okay, here's a minimum viable product and did you approach it as a design partnership. Were there customers that were helping you really think through the core jobs that this product would do for them?  What were those early days like?

Ashutosh Garg

First, start by understanding the market. What is the market? What does the market need? And what is a fundamental problem that needs to be solved in this market? And in the case of Eightfold, it was very clear that every enterprise is struggling to have the right people, and every individual is struggling to get the right job. So we said, this is the core fundamental problem that we are going to go after and solve. And now the market is set Then, and within that market, is this an important enough problem and a big enough problem? So what we did was even before we raised a penny, we called numerous CHROs from organizations of varying sizes to better understand what are their pain points and does this pain point resonate or not? And if we were to build something to solve this problem, would they be interested in talking to us and buying our offering? And right now, when you say, what is this problem, right? It was more around, the first version. The MVP was, I will help you better assess, match the people to the right opportunities. And the answer we heard from all the CHROs was overwhelmingly, yes, this is a hard problem. This is a tough problem, and we really need to solve this problem. Then through friends, family networks, identified five, 10 customers and started working with them. Now the journey, which is different for Eightfold, is very quickly, we realized that‌ the pain point is bigger in big companies than the smaller companies.So we very quickly pivoted to working with some of the largest enterprises across the globe and started talking to them.

Sandhya Hegde

Makes sense. Because the small companies probably their first order problem is they don't have enough applicants, right? No one has heard of them.

Ashutosh Garg

 They don't have enough applicants. They don't have enough, or the scale of the magnitude of the problem is much, much smaller. And in that case, also the impact you can have on those companies is smaller in the early days, right?

Sandhya Hegde

Makes sense. And I'm curious, with large companies being slower adopters of new software, taking much longer to work with startups in our procurement cycles, how did you deal with all that? Given that, as a small startup, they think you need the most is velocity in the early days. Was that challenging? Any kind of tips for other founders who also need bigger companies to be early adopters rather than just are not solving a problem that is relevant to the typical fast movers?

Ashutosh Garg

I think in our case, I would say the problem is so important, so critical, so severe. To be honest, even I am surprised. Some of the largest companies across the globe are our customers. And it's not that they are buying it for part of their organization or one team here and there. With Eightfold, it is a wall-to-wall deployment. And even in the early days, they were deploying us in 20-plus countries. But yes, is procurement going to take time? The answer is yes. Will you have to go through massive scrutiny? The answer is yes. And the common wisdom is don't start over there. So I totally hear it. But now again, as an entrepreneur, whatever is the challenge for that person, there lies an opportunity for you. And a very interesting example I will give you over here is if you want to sell to the public sector, especially the Department of Defense and federal agencies, and so on, there's this concept of FedRAMP certification that you have to go through. And anyone who has gone through that will tell you how painful it But what I can tell you is that it's probably 1000x painful if you are a 10, 000-employee company than if you are a 50-employee company. You put things together in the right way, the better it is for you. So sometimes, while early days may look more painful, selling and working with large enterprises, the foundation that it enables is so much more valuable in the long term. So yes, we have to bite that and also test how important and critical of the problem it is that you are solving. But if you can break through that, you will be super successful.

Sandhya Hegde

Yeah, because that's almost now your competitive advantage, right? The fact that you invested in that early. I'm curious what would you say are, like, some of the fundamental choices you made that helped you get these massive Fortune 50 companies as early adopters?

Are there specific architecture choices, compliance choices? What were the things that made a difference?

Ashutosh Garg

It'll sound like a cliche. Just hire the right people.

Of course, this is not just a cliche. It's coming also from HR company who have done it and there are people who have not done it. And the people who have not done it have no idea how to even approach it. And in my case, Eightfold case, we were fortunate enough to have the right team in place on day one. I would say that solving the engineering problem on the architecture and infrastructure is the easiest part of the puzzle. When I was at Google we were building systems that could Google, not a problem for us, right? I think with cloud, building SQL systems is no longer that hard. You can do that, right? All that infrastructure is available. But being aware of what kind of challenges other enterprises have, like when they are procuring your solution, right? What are they looking for? What kind of compliance they're looking for?

Understanding that is very important. And in our case,‌ we apply AI in the HR space. And it's a highly sensitive area. While outside HR, it's, yes, you can talk about it, it's a lot of fun and excitement, right? But as soon as you start talking about AI in HR, then the question of bias, responsible AI, ethical AI, all those things come in. So in our case, what we did was from day one, we worried about those things. And partly because our mission was not, and my investors may not like it, but I'll just say it, right? That my mission was not how to maximize the shareholder value. My mission was ‌to solve for employment. And if I'm solving for employment, how do I solve it for everyone in an unbiased ethical fashion? So we started focusing on those things from day one. And that has become a massive advantage over other companies. Now that can be scaled.

Sandhya Hegde

Makes sense. Because now when,they are figuring out what their internal governance policy is for this, they can count on you and your kind of previous investment in that direction.

Ashutosh Garg

Absolutely. And another one is that quite a few times people think that it's a product and engineering problem, selling to large enterprises, are you ready for that or not? Equally important is, do you have a go-to-market organization that knows how to sell to large enterprises. You can't just go find one person and say that here's my product, buy it, right? You have to go through the hoops, you have to navigate their organization. You have to find multiple champions. You have to understand their procurement process. You have to understand their buying cycle, the legalities of what they are going to ask you, right? So you have to really not only be strong on the technology and products side, but equally strong on the go-to-market side.

Sandhya Hegde

Makes sense. And any surprises for you? If you think about the first couple of years, what you thought, the product needed to be, the go-to-market needed to be, any surprises that you adapted to along the way?

Ashustosh Garg

One of the very funny ones, I would say. You mentioned like selling into HR, right? You could say that I have no HR experience. Before Eightfold, I didn't even know what HR systems looked like. So we got into this new space and people would ask me, Ashu, but you don't know anything about HR. And frankly, one of the reasons we have been successful and the most successful of all the companies in our space that started around the same time is because we have no HR experience. And the reason is quite a few times as an insider, you are too constrained in your thinking by what you have already seen. And as an outsider, you are able to bring a fresh perspective to the problem. So a very simple example was as you think of the hiring, right? I was like, whether you're hiring an internal person or an external person, right? It should be the same concept. Seven years later, that seems wow, that was such an insightful thing. At that time, it was more of a naivety, again, that, let's just build that. You can have internal candidates come in and external candidates come in. And I still remember talking to one of my early customers. So we pitched to them. We sold them. As they were implementing, they called me. They were like, Ashu, you said that we can also use our internal employees to be matched to a job through your system. I was like, I don't remember if I said that, but if I said that, sure, we can do that, right? But as I reflect on the market, now, internal mobility is another multi-billion-dollar market by itself. And in that moment, we said, yeah, sure, it's the same problem. It's the same system can solve both things for you. So those kinds of simple decisions, partly because you were an outsider in this space, helped us‌ do much better.

Sandhya Hegde

 Makes sense. You also avoid some of the pessimist traps of “this hasn't worked in the past,” which can be valuable. Maybe, speaking of things working in the past, if you had to contrast your early days at BloomReach with the early days at Eightfold, what did you consciously do differently? And thoughtfully say, okay, I'm going to do it differently this way. Because of the learnings you had at Bloomreach.

Ashustosh Garg

 The journey with Eightfold is still going on for me, so we'll see. Some of the things that we are focused on are done differently is the focus on the market has been huge. Like at Bloomreach, especially in the early days, we always struggled to figure it out how big our TAM is. And quite a few times what you do is you take this top-down approach and say that there's so many people in the world, so much marketing span, so that is our TAM, right? And that makes sense, which is fine, but that is not your true addressable market‌. I would say your true addressable market is really a function of what product you have that you're selling today, who's a buyer. If you were to replicate it to 10, 000 more companies, right? And with companies, what happens every time they come across a new customer, very early it becomes a question of how do I disqualify this customer? Or we should say no to this because this customer doesn't meet these 50 criteria for me, right? So another thing that we did very differently at Eightfold was always focused on TAM are we solving a big, important enough problem in a large market or not? So one example, a manifestation of this is many people in the early days were telling us, yeah, I think this is an important problem. Why don't you solve it for Bay Area tech companies? Or why don't we solve it for technology talent? And my thing was that if I'm learning from the data, I don't care whether it is a technology talent or a marketing talent or a sales talent or someone else, right? It's a horizontal problem and let me just approach it by solving it horizontally. And the beauty of this is that we have never worried about TAM at Eightfold. Every company under the sun is a potential customer for us. So I would say that's one very interesting example of what we have done differently. But it's a long list and I can go on and on.

Sandhya Hegde

Any disadvantages of being a repeat founder? Is there something that you feel like, okay, I assumed too much because that's how it had happened in the past, for instance.

Ashutosh Garg

 I would say the trap that people get into is the expectations are high the second time and as a result, sometimes you're like, I'm not going to work on a small problem. I'm not. I need to raise $50 million on day one versus 2 million. I need ‌a big team on day one versus a small team, right? But frankly, whether you're a second-time founder, a third-time founder, a fourth time founder, you still don't know much. You're still learning every day, right? You are back on ground zero, where no one cares about you. No one knows you, right? And just get in with the ground again. And I think if you do that, then you can minimize most of theThings that can go wrong. Sometimes there's a pessimism that can come in. Sometimes in second time things may not go as well as in first time. And you can get depressed very quickly. So you have to always make sure that you stay grounded.

Sandhya Hegde

And this time, obviously, you've had a much more volatile macroeconomic climate, right? With COVID, everyone works remotely. Now everyone has to come back to office, and there's war, and the market is going crazy. What has been the impact on kind of the labor market and how companies think about employment, retention, hiring? What has that looked like when all these macro shifts have happened over the past four years?

Ashutosh Garg

 I think if anything, all these macro shifts have highlighted how important talent is for enterprises. In today's time and age, the only thing that will make or break companies is do they have the right people to succeed or not. And more and more companies are realizing that. Now, at any point in time, in the short term, it creates some issues. So, for example, when COVID happened first three months looked like gloom and doom for everyone.

In our industry, what happened is that pre-COVID, the primary focus of the market was, how do I hire people from outside? During COVID, the focus shifted to how do I manage my own employees? As the recovery happened from COVID, the focus again now balanced between hiring from outside and internal talent. Last year, for example, ‌there seems to be no end to layoffs in Bay Area. Companies are still scrambling, trying to figure it out, right? So there have been a lot of shifts in the talent space, but the focus on the importance of this problem has not decreased. If anything, it has gone up multiples. And as a startup, the thing that works in our favor is that if you are agile, we can adopt, adjust very quickly. Second is because we took a platform approach, saying that ultimately it's for talent. It's not about one part of the journey, but the entire funnel, right? The entire process has helped us ‌ not only survive, but thrive.

Sandhya Hegde

Makes sense. I'm curious how you're thinking about the future at Eightfold AI. What does the innovation happening in generative AI, like how does that impact the Eightfold vision, the product roadmap. And how are you thinking about your executive team? I noticed you have added a co CEO to the table. I'd love to hear more about that.

Ashutosh Garg

I think with generative AI, frankly, at some level, what will happen in the future is uncertain. What we can see is that the amount of advances over the last one year are more than we have ever seen. The rate at which things are evolving is much faster than ever. So one part, which is a very obvious one, is that how do we leverage generative AI in the Eightfold platform? So from simple things like how do you write better emails? How do you better communicate to candidates and employees? How do you write better job descriptions? How do you better index-search the content? How do you answer ‌HR questions a lot more efficiently? How do people create better resumes and profiles? How do you use it to do the automated assessment or automatically identify questions to ask people? Variety of things you can apply Generative AI on, right? The next extension of this is that, as they are saying, right? Generative AI, think of it as a replacement of a browser and now everything can be done through a chatbot, right? Providing those kinds of interfaces through Eightfold is another big focus area for us. So I think that's one big bucket that we are working on. But the second one, which is probably even more interesting and exciting is because of what we are doing, but not only what we are doing, what every other company is doing out there, the way the work is being done is very different.

If the way the work is being done is very different, what is the implication of that on the employment market? Like four years from now, Sandhya, how will your job look like? Maybe today you do two interviews a day, two podcasts a day. Four years from now you might be doing eight a day, and a number of other things might get automated, right? And you can now apply the same logic to each and every function in each and every organization. 

The second big area where Eightfold AI is focused on is thinking through how the work is changing and how can we help large enterprises understand the future of the workforce and then provide them with tools and technologies to guide them through the transformation. So in that sense, we are more excited than ever. While the world is uncertain, what is certain is until all of us are living on social security benefits, you will need employment, you will need a purpose in life, and Eightfold AI is here to support, guide people through that process. 

The second question you asked, I'm sure many people are curious, right? What's going on, is Ashu leaving? Why are you bringing in a co-CEO? Why is it a decision? And you talked about ‌product market fit as well, right? This is one of the key topics of your podcast, right? I feel like one of the biggest mistakes founders make is that they're too much in love with their own product. What matters is this problem or a solution to the customer's problem. What does not matter is your product, right? Similarly, like as a CEO, as a founder, sometimes you care too much about your own job, your own power, your own authority. And you want to be in control of everything that is happening in the company. What you don't realize is that there are many things that you don't know. I'm a big believer in if I have a team, it is better than me. Nothing like that. So in our case, we have brought in Chano Fernandez as our co-CEO, as my co-CEO. If you look at all the people in the enterprise space, there's a handful of people who will have an experience similar to Chano being at the helm of an 80, 90 billion-dollar company, building a business with a 6, 7 billion-dollar ARR, and so on. And of course, there are very few people in the world who have that level of experience, maybe 5 or 10 at most. And there's only one person in the world who has ‌experience in the HR space doing that.

So I couldn't have found a better partner in this journey to bring on board to see how we can grow Eightfold. And this is more of a testament to... employment is not a smart problem. It's not a problem for just you and me, or only the people who cannot get a job. It is everyone's problem, at all levels. The amount of money that gets spent on talent is north of a trillion dollars. The productivity impact for now because of not having that talent is north of multi-trillion dollars across the globe. And I think if you want to build a generational company in this space, I will use all the help I can get in the world, and Chano was a great addition to the team or is a great addition to the team.

Sandhya Hegde

Yeah, quite the catch. I think he's like pretty much the only person who's also has experience with the co-CEO model, which, you are making it sound like it's easy, but I know like how much humility and emotional intelligence it takes to make that work.

I'm curious, you talked a little bit about this, but. How do you think the broader labor market will change? Nothing ever gets fully automated away if history is an indicator of the future, but there's this level of kind of accessibility and commoditization of skills as things get more automated. I'm curious, what do you see as some of the big impacts on the labor market happening over the next few years? What to you is obvious will happen and what are some big question marks?

Ashutosh Garg

I think multiple things ‌are likely to happen. Automation is happening. And there are many jobs. All right, or maybe at least a few jobs that will get automated. Then there are a number of jobs where a large portion of the activity will get automated. Third is what makes someone an expert in a certain job. That definition is going to change. And‌ that, to me is the biggest labor market impact. So to give a bit more color on that, if you take software engineering, 20 years back, if I were to go back to my days of coding, I was very good at algorithms. I was very good at system design. But I was very slow in typing. I still always had to look at the keyboard as I was typing. And that made me a good programmer, but not a great programmer, because my speed was slow. Today, that skill set no longer matters. In fact, knowing coding languages won't matter in four years from now. So the skills that are required to be a great programmer will change.

Sandhya Hegde

Right, so I'm no longer asking, do you know this, but do you have experience coding in this particular language is suddenly an irrelevant interview question.

Ashutosh Garg

Can you design well? Because of access to Dall-E and all kind of other things, right? So basically automation of a certain number of activities and changing the definition of what requires someone to be successful in a job. If you take these three things on one axis, the other axis is that what does the new generation want in their career? It's no longer I need to have a job to earn money, but it's also to find a purpose. And if you combine these two things, the workforce of tomorrow is going to look very different from the workforce of today. And the other thing is that the rate at which these things will change is going to be faster than ever.

The implication is that people will have shorter tenures. Even further, you will see a lot more agile workforces. Companies no longer getting organized by departments and functions, but by task and skill set. It will mean that not everyone is going to be a full-time employee. You may take specialized jobs across five companies in parallel. So we are up for a lot of change. Five years back, we would have never imagined remote work. Now that's the norm. So I think we are up for all those changes. Now it will depend on how fast these technologies come in, how fast organizations adopt them, right? It may take a bit longer than all of us anticipate right now, but once this adoption starts, it will go much faster. And those are the kind of things I'm anticipating going to happen in the coming years.

Sandhya Hegde

Now, I'm really fascinated by that idea of if you take a shorter 10 years, which is already a trend, and you take that to much more of an extreme. You take the idea of specializing in tasks rather than the knowledge, which is a bit more commoditized if there are knowledge bases that are accessible to everybody. Fascinated by that idea of okay, am I just like doing a specialized task for multiple employers? Do you think companies are thinking about this or preparing for this future already, or it's too much and do you see anybody ‌thinking through what their organization might need to look like in five years?

Ashutosh Garg

It sounds like a very foreign idea, right? What I'm saying, but think about doctors, right? If you were to hear a doctor, that the same doctor is working both with UCSF and Stanford, would that surprise you? Probably not. This doctor goes to five different clinics over a period of a month. It won't surprise you, right? But today, if you were to hear that this engineer goes through Google and Facebook, you'd be like, what's going on? That's another, cannot happen, right? If you were to say this lawyer works at two firms or does private practice and also works at a firm, it won't surprise you, right? Then that is, anytime you get into super-specialization, task-based specialization, that ‌becomes very common. So can that happen? I think that will certainly happen. And‌, companies have started thinking about it already. And we already have a few customers. So we recently launched an offering around resource management, which is around agile workforce, project-based workforce. And we are seeing a massive adoption of that already in the market. So I feel like the trend is happening in that direction. It's only going to get accelerated.

Sandhya Hegde

Makes sense. Maybe as we wrap up, any advice to first-time founders getting started, especially as a part of this AI hype cycle. What would be your advice to them?

Ashutosh Garg

Entrepreneurship is a great thing. Go do it. Yes, you will have tough days, but this is the most fun thing you will ever do. But because you also mentioned the AI hype cycle Don't do it because something is hot today. Do it because you believe that something will be relevant for the next 10-plus years. If you think the problem that you're solving is going to stay important for the next 10 years, go jump on it and do it. But if it is only for the next two, three years, you may still get lucky and you may build something and sell it to someone, but that is not the recipe for success in the long term. So just welcome to entrepreneurship.