Ashwini Asokan, founder and CEO of enterprise AI startup Mad Street Den, explains why the company built proprietary computer vision and NLP stacks rather than relying on existing generic models.
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: 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: Competing for talent in Silicon Valley requires 10x more capital
“You're not going to compete with the Google in the Valley. You are absolutely not going to be able to compete without, you know, 10 times, 20 times the capital that you get to raise in India, right?”
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…”