Ashwini Asokan, founder and CEO of Mad Street Den, discusses why building deep tech and AI teams in India is more capital-efficient than competing in Silicon Valley.
Opinion
Asokan: AI industry prioritizes infrastructure over human-centered consumer applications
“We were living in a world where, you know, people are building AI for the sake of for the sake of the technology, pushing the boundaries on the underlying technology, the infrastructure, the hardware, the software, and there was entirely the human component of…”
Insight
Asokan: Off-the-shelf AI components fail to solve specific business problems
“Especially in the space of AI we were strong believers that picking up off the shelf components was not necessarily very helpful all the time because, you know, they're built for scale, for generic problems. They don't necessarily solve specific problems very …”
Insight
Asokan: Deep tech startups must hire product marketers on day zero
“And so for me, like, you know, I always tell people, make sure you have a product marketing person on day zero. Especially if you're a deep tech company, especially if you're a B to B SaaS company, you really have to talk about the value of your product from a…”
Opinion
Asokan: Early-stage startup fundraising has become a prescribed, copy-paste process
“I feel like it's become much more cut, copy, paste today. Like, you have an idea, You pitch an early idea, you go to one of these accelerator programs, you know, you, it's very prescribed.”
Disclosure
Asokan: Mad Street Den completely refuses to employ pure people managers
“We don't do this whole people manager thing at MSD at all. We only do people who are very actively producers of whatever, you know, and are responsible as independent contributors as well, right?”
Opinion
Asokan: Founders should avoid consuming generic startup scaling playbooks
“I'm just totally done with that, that, that, you know, I'm just done with that genre of startup books for, I think I've had enough of it. And so I think you know, it's messed with me if anything. So I'm going to actively tell everybody listening to the Podcast…”