Ashwini Asokan, founder and CEO of Mad Street Den, discusses organizational design and leadership principles while scaling the company.
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: 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.”
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…”