Aatish Nayak
Partner, Kleiner Perkins. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Aatish Nayak is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins focusing on AI-native founders and applied AI startups. He previously served as Head of Product at Harvey and held product leadership roles at Scale AI and Shield AI.
2shows
2appearances
31statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Aatish Nayak said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Nayak: AI Product Teams Should Over-Fit to Frontier Customers
“Find the customers who are really good at what they do, and then, you know, chase them, even over a fit to them as long as you have conviction that, you know, everyone else will follow.”
Nayak: Foundational AI models are not products in themselves
“I don't think the foundational models are products. You're seeing this with OpenAI right now. They're more pivoting to a product company, and Satya even said this.”
Nayak: Text-Based AI Chat Is Merely the MS-DOS Command-Line Phase
“Definitely not. It's the command line starting point of this new frontier, like the MS-DOS was, you know, way back when.”
Nayak: Cloud Providers Will Drive AI Inference Margins Down to Zero
“The cloud companies, they're going to run the best software. They're going to, you know, drive margins to the ground. And so competing on inference with cloud companies is really hard over time. And so if all your revenue comes from inference and, you know, de…”
Nayak: Consumers Trust Humans Using AI, Not Standalone AI Agents
“Ultimately, I think the humans don't just always trust AI. They trust other humans using AI. I think, again, depending on the domain, the right thing is more likely that the agent partners with the producer of the work to deliver for the consumer.”
Nayak: Anthropic Is Surpassing OpenAI in Attracting Top AI Talent
“I would have said OpenAI maybe six months ago, but I think Anthropic is really starting to appeal to a lot more people.”
Nayak: PMs Suffer From Main Character Syndrome and Try to Be CEO
“PMs have a main character syndrome sometimes that they have to be the CEO of the product, be this face of the product.”
Nayak: Claude 3.7 Outperforms Other Models in Harvey's Legal Reasoning Evals
“We did these evals recently. Claude three seven, in particular, for legal reasoning, it's better at long form legal reasoning and drafting long form outputs.”
Nayak: Hypergrowth PMs Should Act as WD-40, Not Organizational Glue
“The framing that you should probably have is you're not glue, you're WD-forty.”
Nayak: Early dictatorial mandates caused internal organizational thrash at Harvey
“So I think particularly early on at Harvey, we did the dictatorship. Me and Winston are just like, we're going to do X, Y, and Z and Go, go, go. I think again, as you hyper grow, you assume everyone has the same context that you do. And that's just not the cas…”
Nayak: AI Product Teams Should Always Prototype Before Writing PRDs
“I actually always say prototype before the PRD, whenever you have an idea, whether it's engineers, designers, PMs, whatever, you should do the prototype before, because you're not going to really know how to build the product or what the exact UX should be, pa…”
Nayak: Claude Is Empathetic for Personal Advice, Whereas ChatGPT Is Not
“Claude does. Jatchputi doesn't. It's not as empathetic.”
Nayak: Domain Experts Are Increasingly Driving Primary Product Decisions
“Domain experts are driving more of the product decisions.”
Nayak: Scale AI Partnered With OpenAI on Early GPT-2 RLHF
“Scale partnered with open AI very, very early on before chat GPT came out. This was like very early on RLHF when they were trying to tune models to summarize better based off of Reddit passages. And this is on GPT two.”
Nayak: Scale AI labeled e-commerce data for Meta, Instacart, and DoorDash
“Like I started the e-commerce team at scale where we were labeling e-commerce data, like from Meta, from Instacart, from DoorDash.”
Nayak: Hypergrowth Means Scaling Revenue and Headcount 1.5x Every Quarter
“So maybe defining hypergrowth is every three to six months, let's say, your revenue is more than 1.5 x, 1.2 x, your Employee count is more than 1.5 to X. Like it's a different company every single quarter, let's say, or, you know, half.”
Nayak: Harvey PMs Build Product Prototypes Using Cursor and Claude
“PMs on my team create prototypes all the time using cursor or using a Claude to show, you know, show their ideas.”
Nayak: Technical debt cleanup requires evidence of revenue or customer impact
“You actually want evidence of technical debt affecting revenue, affecting customer outcomes. And you want to compile the evidence because otherwise if you don't have evidence or you just refer it to as like technical debt overall, it is just like, you can go f…”
Nayak: Legal AI Users Prefer Direct Grid Control Over Prompt Auto-Decomposition
“The thing that we did wrong there was actually people want to just make those terms in the grid itself. People don't want the AI to convert it. They just want to say for these 10,000 agreements, I just want this one thing created in the grid itself. They want …”
Nayak: AI products should route queries automatically, not force model choices
“That is an example of where the right user experience is the AI should just pick for you. The AI should just know what user query and intent is, or it should ask you questions to understand it better. And then it should just route you to the best system. For t…”
Nayak: Engineers Should Retain Coding Skills Rather Than Rushing Into PM Roles
“The, one of the most valuable things you have is your ability to code if you're an engineer, let's say, and I wish I stuck to it more. But I think it's super important to stick to that at least because it's much better with vibe coding or whatever now.”
Nayak: Software unit testing should be entirely automated by AI
“Individual engineers still use AI somewhat for writing their own unit tests, but that whole layer of unit testing should just be all AI.”
Nayak: Harvey focuses on legal productivity tools over end-to-end automation
“Right now we have to focus on Harvey, the productivity suite, the software that lawyers use, and not the Harvey that, that does the work end to end.”
Nayak: Perplexity AI's Latency-Focused User Experience Is Second to None
“I do think perplexity is honestly just killing it. Like I have a lot of respect for that team and the speed that they're moving. Like, Sure. You can say, oh, they're doing a lot of things now, but I think the focus on the core experience of making an answer re…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Aatish's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Partner, Kleiner Perkins | 1 | 31 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |
 a16zLEDGER | Partner, Kleiner Perkins | 1 | 0 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |