Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You are from Utah, right?

Ram Swaminathan: I spent 20 years in India. I grew up in Chennai and had a full scholarship at Utah State for electrical engineering. I always wanted to go to Utah. You might be surprised, but NASA has a sister division of JPL which is called Space Dynamics Lab (SDL) in Utah. It is located 80 miles north of Salt Lake in a city called Logan, Utah.

I wanted to work in satellite communication and I did some projects. The lab that I worked at was associated with SDL. I got the opportunity to work on some classified NASA projects on digital signal processing. It was mostly communication that happens from the base camp in space.

I spent half a year on my master’s degree when I was watching the show American Idol, and then the newspaper the next day said that 80 million users watched American Idol. I went to my professor at the college and said, “Prof, how the heck did they know that I watched American Idol?” We started researching that. We started white coat sessions to see how they could have done it.

It started as a curiosity, but it became my first startup. I founded a company called Raw Data where we built audio fingerprinting technology. We built the technology in 2002. The problem we had at that time was the fact that we were very early in the market. We didn’t have a device to listen when people are watching television or when they are listening to the radio in their car. We had to wait until 2005 when Apple launched the iPhone. That kick-started our business model. Long story short, my entrepreneurial journey dates back to when I was 20 years old. 

Sramana Mitra: The reason why I was commenting is that we have done a lot of case studies of Utah companies that have followed this Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later philosophy. Look at Inside Sales and Qualtrics.  

Ram Swaminathan: I don’t know this. I am picking up new facts from you. Utah entrepreneurs are typically more conservative than the rest of the entrepreneurs. They like to stretch the dollar as much as they can. 

Sramana Mitra: I wouldn’t call it conservative; I would call it fundamental focused. 

Ram Swaminathan: I agree. For every startup, the goal is still to focus on revenue with fundraising. 

Sramana Mitra: Yes, I think that is a better way of building companies than flushing companies with venture capital. 

Ram Swaminathan: I cannot agree more. I like to keep track of my angel investors and my core team all the time. It helps you get the focus and get you stretch the dollar as much as you can. There have been several months where we couldn’t pay our utilities’ bill and salaries. We have gone past all of those. I think that I might have done too much because our first equity raise is going to happen within the next 90 days. It is happening after eight years. That will show you the pain that we have been through. 

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI
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