From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who’s we?

Aparna Dhinakaran: I went through YC with my brother.

Sramana Mitra: What’s his background?

Aparna Dhinakaran: Also computer science. We jumped in and did YC. I recommend this to entrepreneurs. If you get into YC, it’s absolutely worth it. For it is for a first-time entrepreneur, there are two things that you need to focus on. One is building the product and then selling the product. They just focus on how do you remove every other noise. That’s the focus of that entire program.

You hear from all these people who started exactly like you. Of course, you hear about the flagship companies like Airbnb and Dropbox, but there are a ton of other companies. Mixpanel’s founder was in our cohort.

Sramana Mitra: What did you come out of YC with? YC gave you some seed money. Did you have customers at this point?

Aparna Dhinakaran: After YC, I had a rough MVP. We had some design partners that we worked with. Post-YC was when I was thinking of raising seed round when my current co-founder, Jason, started to put together mocks and pitch customers as well. He kept hearing my name come up and I kept hearing his name.

One of my mentors said, “There’s a guy called Jason. He’s interested in the same exact space that you are.” We ended up just grabbing coffee and talking about the space. It was clear to us that we were thinking about the space in a similar way.

This is another insight. Sometimes early on, your competitors might end up as your co-founder or business partner. You try to find people that think about the space in the same way. Who can you work with? The entrepreneur journey is hard. You don’t want to have to convince someone to join the journey with you, especially a founder.

Sramana Mitra: You merged your companies.

Aparna Dhinakaran: Right. We created a new company called Arize. That’s the beginning of Arize. Jason, in his previous company TubeMogul, was on the other side of it. TubeMogul became a company by the joining of two other companies. It happened once for him and went really well. There are things you need to think about. Can you work with this person? It’s been two years. Jason is probably one of the best entrepreneurs I’ve met.

Sramana Mitra: He’s doing the CEO job and you’re the product?

Aparna Dhinakaran: Right.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the customer acquisition with Arize.

Aparna Dhinakaran: You look back and you’re like, “How did we do this?” The early stages is probably the hardest stage of a startup. You’re going from zero to one. You’re going from the category not existing and maybe the market doesn’t even know that it needs a product like this.

You have to go from nothing existing to creating the product that solves that market need. How do you then build the customer base to help inform you what the right product should be? We just did a class of Berkeley entrepreneurs. We told them that the secret to getting started is not to immediately go and build a product. Engineering hours are so valuable.

Sramana Mitra: We have a mantra in One Million by One Million. Do not write a line of code until you figure out your go-to-market strategy.

Aparna Dhinakaran: We put together a bunch of mocks. Then we shared those mocks with people we were pitching on sales calls. We set up calls with people who are potential users. In our case, ML engineers. ML engineers are the people who do the hard work of putting those models into production.

Sramana Mitra: You know a lot of ML engineers in production personally that you called on?

Aparna Dhinakaran: I knew a fair amount. I’ve been personally surprised by how many just reached out over LinkedIn.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize
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