The Exchanges

Q Can you share top three decisions that you know?

A Yeah. So I'll give you the best ones. I think, you know, when we were building AI Companion, we were in a race. We wanted to beat Microsoft to market, and we did beat, we did beat Copilot to market by a couple of weeks. And about a month and a half before our launch, we, we, we had basically, we were at that time, most of the market that was adopting early AI solution, this is 20, 23, was using customer data to train models. Um, they were using a single model like OpenAI or Anthropic or Lama. Um, and they were, um, they had Very loose, I would say security and governance. So one day, about a month and a half before our launch, we had built with the idea that we were going to use customer data to train the model and that we were going to charge for AI companion. So imagine that we built everything for months and months at not sleeping. Teams are awake all night building. And about a month before the launch, Eric called a few couple of us into the office and said, I've made some decisions. And he said, what, what are the decisions? He said, number one, we're not going to charge for AI companion. He said, what? You know, we're going to monetize this. It's going to cost us money. We're going to be underwater margin-wise, you know, and he said, no. He said, all these things will commoditize. The model costs will commoditize. It's our job to make it affordable. Everybody in the world…

AI assessment note: “He said, number one, we're not going to charge for AI companion.”

Q is, uh, right. You, you have lived and breathed by ethos of, you know, that you want to give, solve complexity for people, uh, And give them back their time. And you have done it across many different, uh, you know, use cases, be it customer service, be it education, tax, legal, like across, you know. So where does this ethos come from that you have lived your entire life?

A I think it's, um, as, as most things for, as with most founders, I think comes from personal frustration, you know, in the, in the legal and tax space, you know, the idea that before we built the expert systems, it used to take weeks for a company to incorporate itself and qualify to do business in all the 50 states in the US. Yeah. And there was, and a lot of it was people having to go to the state offices, do filings, multiple forms. Each of the states had their own forms, and it just seemed Incomprehensible to me that, that you would need dozens of people and weeks of time to do this when in fact the information was highly repetitive. Of course, it varied by case to case. So that, that frustration, I think, with seeing how things were done and then when you actually dig in and understand why it's being done, there was actually no logical reason why that complexity existed except that technology hadn't caught up. To being, to having a solution. So once you see the technology coming and you see the complexity in there, and I think you have a tremendous opportunity to do that. In other cases, the complexity is, is extraneous. And by, let me give you an example. Today, as we speak, somewhere between one and a half to two billion people in the world are trying to learn or improve their English.

AI assessment note: “I think comes from personal frustration, you know, in the, in the legal and tax space”

Q So you're the executive director for Funda, right? It's a very interesting name. It's a nonprofit serving Indian founders in the US, right? Tell us more about the founding team. How did you build it and who is this serving and what the purpose

A So Funda has been one of the most pleasant surprises of my, of my career and life. Uh, Funda is a completely not-for-profit community designed to help Indian origin founders. And that wording is important, Indian origin founders, because it's, it's all embracing. So it covers, um, your generation of kids like my kids who've grown up here, who are, you know, Who are still Indian origin, but may not have a connection to India per se, uh, as well as, uh, cross-border founders who are coming over, uh, to the U S as well as, you know, veteran founders, uh, who are there. And it was started as, um, kind of an idea with a few serial founders of Indian origin, including. Who you know, and a few others and just getting together and thinking, okay, let's get something together and see if there's an interest. And. The interest was overwhelming. So, um, I took over as executive director last year after we had many events and certainly clearly there was a lot of interest, but it has just exploded. I think today we have over 2000 founders in the community. So I think founders have collectively raised over three billion. Um, I think at least a dozen exits in the last few months that I know of. And if I know a dozen, then there must be another 50 that I don't know about. Um, we do events. Seven, seven to eight big events a year. Um, and we also do have a very, but the most interesting and exci…

AI assessment note: “Funda is a completely not-for-profit community designed to help Indian origin founders.”

Q officer rather than the chief sales officer. Uh, right. Uh, And, and ask, don't, don't be fixated on a problem. Uh, ask customers what are the problems that are, that are dear to them, that they are trying to solve. That's what you did. That's all we, right? That's how you observe that Cloudflare is not the right way to go. Whereas, Solving for the end consumers for the company.

A We actually did a commercial at Global English about this. We said, and the whole premise of the product, it was a product pitch. It was like an animation, but it was the whole idea was we kind of made it that our persona buyer, what would it take to get them into the corner office to become the customer office of the company? And so we kind of built that. And so we built it around the idea that the person we're selling to our job is to get them promoted. Yeah. And if you think about it from that perspective, actually a very, it's actually a very, uh, liberating way to think about it. If my job, you're the customer, my job is to ensure that you are celebrated, promoted, made to look like a hero or a heroine. I have done something right. It's actually a great way to think about it, and it never fails. So in the case of, you know, we're going to HelloFresh, thinking about, okay, if they can go, instead of going from thousand agents to 2500, and they can, and, but they have the budget for 2000, but we can save them that, they're gonna look great. CFO's gonna love them. I think that's the, that's the other thing is just keep thinking about, put yourself in the shoes of the customer. While they're taking a risk on you, how are you going to reward their risk? What's their reward risk and how can you maximize that? And then when you get a few of those, celebrate those wins and have th…

AI assessment note: “we built it around the idea that the person we're selling to our job is to get them promoted.”

Q And they said, if you were starting today Solvee or any other problem, what would you have done differently?

A Well, obviously I think the technology framework is completely different. I think the idea of, you know, automating everything and starting out with, you know, no manual process, I mean, that's a self evident, obvious principle, I think, but it requires a radical shift in the way you, you think about building companies. So I think that is inherently different. Um, so everything about that is different, right? Thinking that you need, um, Somebody, I think generalists, the ability to hire generalists who can, who can harness this technology to do things is better. In the old days, you would have to hire somebody very specific specialists. Today, a generalist can learn a lot of things. So that would be something I would do differently. Um, the second thing I would do differently is, um, go much, much, I think data collection. I think the, you know, it, today the ability to capture data It's greater than it ever was, but the data that you need to capture is actually quite different. There's been a lot of con discussion about context graphs.

AI assessment note: “hire generalists who can, who can harness this technology to do things is better.”

Q And would you advise the same? Because, uh, when founders get questions all the time and I've talked to large funds, billion dollar funds, even they don't have an answer. What if Claude comes in your portfolio or to a founder? What if Claude just, you know, your, your vertical or what you do is become the focus area.

A You know, I'll give you an example of a company that I think Has durability. And I think as a company that I know well through the investor is a company, uh, Cecilia Zaniti is the founder and CEO of a company called GC. GC stands for general counsel. And she comes from the world of legal general counsel, and she's selling software similar to what Harvey does with law firms. They're selling to general counsel. And I think when you get deep into what general counsel care about, The, the governance, the identity management, all the privacy, security, the proprietary data, mixing and matching publicly available data with public, with private data. It's going to be old. It's going to be quite a while before Cloud Cowork solves that problem. Now could one, could, could somebody at Uber General Counsel take all those tools and build something specific to this? Sure. But the one thing we forget in Silicon Valley We are too immersed in our own Kool-Aid. We're drinking our own Kool-Aid too much. You go out to the rest of the world, they're not even using AI. I recently came back from a trip, you know, internationally went to Vietnam and was talking to people there. They're not thinking about agentic AI. I don't even know what it is. So we, we realize that like vast proportions of the world are wide open to coming up with a solution that worked. If you really understand the pain, you know…

AI assessment note: “It's going to be quite a while before Cloud Cowork solves that problem.”