Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We are in the 2018 timeframe now?

Swapnil Jain: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What are the next few strategic moves that got you further?

Swapnil Jain: 2019 was a big product year. We had a product that we were shipping every day, but we didn’t know if this was strategic or not. The big strategic decision in 2019 was getting a strong VP of Product. If I look back, that is something I should have done sooner. I acted as a product leader, but I was not good.

Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: A lot of pre-seed investments happen in the alumni network. An engineer in a branded company like Twitter works.

Swapnil Jain: Of course. The other thing I would say is the Bay Area is more lenient in terms of supporting people. Did I have a great idea? Maybe. Maybe not. People’s willingness to support is also a big factor. It’s the pay-it-forward kind of thing.

Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 3)

Swapnil Jain: When you call your bank, you hear that the call is being recorded for quality and training. A human would come in and listen to it manually. While listening, they are filling out a form about the call details. Then on the other side, the supervisors who are coaching the agents are doing the same thing. The operations team, which is trying to improve processes on how to best handle these calls, is doing the same thing.

Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the idea that you zeroed in on? What was the process?

Swapnil Jain: It was a pretty long process that lasted two years. Towards the last two days of my job, I started formalizing some ideas. More often than not, you pivot. I started with one idea. I had eight different ideas during that period. I’d test and idea; if it’s working, keep moving forward. If not, then pull back.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Language models have evolved a lot.

Arvind Jain: There is that vision for the future. The nature of knowledge work is going to change. We are going to have these powerful assistants that are going to take care of most of the repetitive time-consuming tasks as well as the tedious parts of search. While the technology is powerful, it’s also very hard to make it work for you. There are problems with instability in the sense that you can ask the same question four times and it comes back with a different answer each time.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you this question, computer scientist to computer scientist. Really great work in search is a matter of great algorithms. Algorithms are not necessarily people intensive. Five people can write great algorithms. Is this really a people-intensive business? Google was never a people-intensive business. They hire a lot of people, but the core products were not scaling by hiring people.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another positive impact that happened during the pandemic. On the sales side, organizations became comfortable buying products over Zoom calls. You do everything on Zoom. Large deals were closing purely on Zoom calls.

Arvind Jain: Yes. In our first year, we had one sales person. Then we hired the second one. We were able to get a lot of customers signed up. Zoom is interesting. It’s very efficient. You don’t spend a day to travel to a customer.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This strategy that you followed is good for companies that have a lot of early-stage funding. It’s not so easy to follow for companies that are trying to work in a very constrained financial resources situation. What did you learn? Focus on the nuggets of what you learned from the early customer engagements when you were not charging yet?