What Young Founders Get Wrong About Startups | Articul8, Arun Subramaniyan

Intro

00:00So the biggest thing that is different of course being in a startup is that you don't have any safety net. You really need to have a hustle that goes way beyond anything you've seen in life. You don't have any time to sit and think. You just have to deal with it and keep rolling.

00:13I would say the biggest thing I'll do differently is to make sure that people who come to the company understand the fact that there's no safety net. And we've had our fair share of turnovers. And even people who were in the early early teams, we've had to let go.

00:28Partly because they may be perfect candidates, perfect employees in a large company, perfect candidates or outstanding candidates in a medium company, but a terrible misfit in a small company. Like I'll tell you a general conversation that would usually go.

00:41We ask for say going and meeting with a customer or something. We're expecting a week goes by. You go ask them, "Hey, did this get done?" And they'll say, "No, I sent an email. We still waiting for a response." Now, in a large company, that's a perfectly fair statement to make.

00:53No problem. You'll get a response. And typically, say you're an Amazon or you're in Google or Microsoft, you send a response, people respond back. The same people, if you're sending an email from a startup, they don't respond. Most of the time, they don't have time to do that.

01:05But second, we don't have the time to wait. We send an email, then call the person, then text the person, and text their wife if we have to to make sure we get a response. There have been cases where we would say, "Look, do you want me to go pick up your kids so that I can actually get 15 minutes with you?"

01:20It's that kind of hustle that you rarely almost ever need in any other job, but you need it here. And for that, you also need humility because normally you would say, well, I am the CEO. I can't be going and doing something. It's exactly the opposite.

01:37In fact, you have to do everything. Meaning, I can work 18 hours a day. I can work 7 days a week. I would still not get to even 30% of my tasks. If you're an early stage startup, there is no such thing called work life balance. Don't kid yourself.

01:49That is work. That is life. It's the same thing. The real definition of entrepreneurship is aiming to do something for which you don't have the resources. That's the definition of entrepreneurship. I am Arun Subraman, founder and CEO of Articulate.

02:04Articulate is a domain specific Genai platform that enables enterprises to get value from their deep domain expertise and data they've collected over decades.

Principle 1: Make a Dent in the Universe

02:25I grew up in a family where technology was a given. Normal quintessentially Indian uh upbringing in the 80s and '90s assumed that you have to do well in school. That was the number one priority. I was fascinated by anything that flew even before I got to college.

02:39And very early on I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. Um there are very few places you could go to study aerospace engineering at the time and I was lucky enough to get into one of the top schools. I went to Anna University and there's a school called Matas Institute of Technology.

02:50My college education was just fun for me all the way through. So I finished undergrad there went off to do my graduate studies at Purdue. Many people may not know this is called uh the birthplace or cradle of astronaut is a school where most astronauts in the US actually come from.

03:06Neil Armstrong actually graduated from Purdue. There is a particular incident that deeply touched me. I had never thought about it that way. This was when I was in college. I was attending a seminar by somebody and he said something that I had never thought about.

03:19You need to feel ownership and responsibility to actually help. And what that means is he gave an example which is think of the people who first designed dams and built dams. Whoever they might be, they stopped the flow of rivers. At the time that they started building dams, it was all an act of God.

03:39Wherever whichever culture you were, they really wanted to make sure that floods didn't happen. They didn't people didn't die. They didn't suffer. They didn't sit and think, "Oh, this is an act of God. God wanted floods to come in. We can't do anything."

03:50They actually thought that I will help people not suffer and actually go build dams. When they first built it, it's an impossible act to be doing. Now, it's a natural thing. Sure, engineering marvels. We build dams all over the place. But it's not for the first person to have thought about it.

04:06Think of the responsibility the person took to stop an act of God, right? And that's a massive responsibility. And not only they they thought about it that way, they went and built the dam. And if you actually think about it from the perspective of ownership and responsibility, you don't need to have anything to take responsibility.

04:23You can do your own small thing to make a massive impact in anybody's life. That made a very personal impact for me because it was mind-blowing to me as at that time probably I was still a teenager to think about life like that. Until then I just thought like the world just happened around me.

04:40We didn't think we manifested something in the world right that's one thing. The second thing that affected me very deeply was the concept of paying it forward. So when I was in AWS we ran the simulations helped scale the simulations for running COVID predictions in terms of spread of COVID.

04:56And at the time of course COVID was just starting. The shutdowns had never happened anywhere else. No state had ever shut anything down. And we helped one of the state of California divisions scale their simulations to predict when the state of California is potentially going to run out of beds.

05:11So what we ended up doing was we helped them take their models and then scale them on massive amount of compute cuz that's what we're really good at doing. And it predicted that in 5 days or so the total number of beds in California would be exhausted.

05:22And uh that simulation along with all the other data they had was instrumental in the state of California announcing the first statewide shutdown. And that same simulation is being run by many countries today. And it was a a deeply touching project to be working on because I didn't go to Amazon thinking that's what I would be doing.

05:40At the time we didn't realize it but it had a huge impact on a lot of things in the world. And it is truly humbling that the work we did helped in a small way in making the world a better place. In Steve Jobs's world, it is like make a dent in the universe.

05:54But it's really around saying, look, whatever we find ourselves in, whatever little we do, make sure that we leave the place in a better world than we found it. The group of people that we have with us, I would say none of them need this job.

06:06None of them need to be here working God knows how many hours they're working daily. They're here because they believe in the mission. They believe in why we do what we do and how we do what we do.

Principle 2: Don't Put Yourself in a Box

06:21If you ask me how my career got built is really being dumb enough not to say no. And the reason I use the word is whenever a problem was given to me even very early days I didn't know that other people would never touch that problem. It was given to me because I was silly enough not to ask why would we do this?

06:39We basically said oh it is an interesting problem. Let me go try solving it. I failed more often than I succeeded. But the times I succeeded, I succeeded in things that everybody else said cannot be done. The problems that were the highest value, the problems that were the most difficult to do and failure was okay.

06:55So the way it started was I was at Intel. I was leading the cloud and AI strategy and execution teams. My charter was to help Intel sell more AI hardware. But we knew that the largest workload was large language models. Genai is going to happen.

07:09This is 2022. And this was 6 months before Chad GBD was launched. So we had built an AI supercomputer and then we were trying to build a model for that one. And we actually worked with a very large company trying to get them to buy Intel hardware and the project went all the way up to a final approval where everything broke loose.

07:28There was a misunderstanding in terms of who was going to fund what portions of it which basically ended up being the project completely stopping and it almost like the rocket analogy is the rocket blew up on the launchpad. That was a failure everything started with.

07:43But because we had already done the modeling, we then went to a customer and said, "Hey, we can do this for you. Would you want to do this?" They said, "Oh, okay. We can try this. Let's do a search model." We actually built a model for them.

07:54That model ended up being a software product. We built the software. We did all that to sell hardware. The customer comes back and says, "Maybe we'll buy your hardware at some point. Can I buy your software?" So, in a sense, that was the second biggest failure.

08:07We tried to sell hardware. We couldn't sell the hardware, but we could sell the software. And within a year, we went from having a project that is almost in the bag that was already going to become the biggest project out there. That project failed.

08:21Then we went and got another project to sell hardware. That project also failed. Ended up being Articulate the Company. And if you think about if we had stopped at the first failure, we would have never gotten the second project. If we had stopped at the second failure, we would have never got an articulate.

08:33The perspective of looking at it from failed projects getting turned around. Doesn't matter how many times we fall down, can we actually get up

Principle 3: Why 95% of AI Projects Never Reach Production

08:45say principles we go by in the company which is we typically do not do PC's. PC's meaning proofs of concept. We only do production pilots. You may ask what's the difference? The difference is a P is something that anybody can do. Honestly, even a high school student with a good enough knowledge of some of these tools can build a PC with a few tens of documents.

09:03The difference between a PC and a pilot is pilot is production scale. You have to go after your most complex use cases. In fact, we go into a customer and say, "Give us your messiest of data set. Give us your most complex problem and let's actually show you how to actually take that to production."

09:18Right? That's what we mean by a production pilot. And the other big difference between a production pilot and a PC is once you're done with your production pilot, turning on the production is just a matter of a contract signing. All the technical work is already done.

09:30And the third thing you might ask is okay that means this should take a long time to do. We actually cap production pilots to be between 4 to 8 weeks long. No more than that. Even the most complex of use cases that we do is entirely done within 8 weeks.

09:43It's very important because when a customer hears this statement which is like give me a nice clean data set and it's nicely curated give me a small problem for me to show you that it actually works after you make the P to get to production it ends up taking 6 months or a year and most of the projects if you see the latest MIT study that said 95% of genai projects don't go to production is because of that because people do PC and it never moves forward but it's a very different uh philosophy

Principle 4: Stop Chasing Low Hanging Fruit

10:16Last count a few months ago, there were 28,600 startups in the world that claimed to be Gen AI startups. I'm sure the number is more than doubled since. The reason for that is everybody, I believe, believes that they're solving an important problem.

10:30I don't think anybody goes out and starts a startup or works so hard to solve a problem they don't believe is important. However, what they're solving for is in different domains and what they're solving for is in domains that they think is hot.

10:42Now, there's two ways to solve a problem, two ways to tackle a problem. The first way is, of course, go after where things are hot. That's the red ocean theory. Or go after things that are the blue ocean theory, where there's nobody there. Now, a path less traveled is less traveled for a reason, is hard, and it's filled with more failures than the path more traveled with.

11:02But it really depends on what you have stomach for and what you're actually going and solving and what you have resources for that you can go do that. I don't think there is any one right or wrong answer. It is just about what is personal for you.

11:12Now do I believe that these companies are going to make an impact? Absolutely. They already are. They've changed the way the world in so many fundamental ways that it's no longer going to be the same. Same thing that OpenAI did. Open AAI was a small startup when they started.

11:25they have fundamentally changed the world and I think that's going to continue growing that we believe that the lowhanging fruit is first and foremost the most crowded market out there every company is a geni company and every large company is trying to do something with genai where do they go they usually go to marketing they go to finance they go to HR partly because it's the lowest hanging fruit because you have use cases but if you make a mistake not much is going to change it's not a a company threatening event however if If you look at what is the most important thing that

11:59the company is doing, it's mostly not related to any of these things. A manufacturing company does manufacturing. An aerospace company would do design or manufacturing or maintenance. We go after use cases in those particular segments. And we actually go after what makes a big difference for the company's topline.

12:16And the reason for that is if a company can actually find new business, find new ways to make money out of AI, that is something that will be longerlasting. Whereas productivity use cases typically go after the bottom line which everybody's going to do whether you like it or not today you're doing it or not every company is going to use some productivity tool to get their AI use case to reduce their burden for what they're doing that's not going to give differentiation for any company so we believe that we work on things that give a company differentiation that gives you

12:47longerlasting value and we also have a philosophy that we fundamentally grounded on saying look we build our business based on the fact that we added value to your business. So we can share in the value that's how our business grows. Our business is not necessarily growing by making you more efficient.

No Safety Net in Startups, Just Move

13:07So the biggest thing that is different of course being in a startup is that you don't have any safety net like any other job I've had there's always somebody who I could go to for help but ultimately the responsibility lies with me. Meaning the buck stops with me which is a huge change when it comes to it.

13:23That took a little bit of time to adjust, but the nice thing about being in a startup like this is you don't have any time to sit and think. You just have to deal with it and keep rolling, right? So that's a good thing because you don't have the time to freak out.

13:35Uh I would say the biggest thing I'll do differently is to make sure that people who come to the company understand the fact that there's no safety net. And we've had our fair share of turnovers. And even people who were in the early early teams, we've had to let go.

13:51Partly because they may be perfect candidates, perfect employees in a large company, perfect candidates or outstanding candidates in a medium company, but a terrible misfit in a small company. And the reason for that is you really need to have a hustle that goes way beyond anything you've seen in life.

14:08Like I'll tell you a general conversation that would usually go. We ask for say going and meeting with a customer or something. we are expecting a week goes by you go ask them hey did this get done and they'll say no I sent an email we are still waiting for a response now in a large company that's a perfectly fair statement to make no problem you'll get a response and typically say you're an Amazon or you're in Google or Microsoft you send a response people respond back the same people if you're sending an email from a startup they don't respond most of the

14:35time they don't have time to do that but second we don't have the time to wait we send an email then call the person then text the person and text their wife if we have to to make sure we get a response. There have been cases where we would say, "Look, do you want me to go pick up your kids so that I can actually get 15 minutes with you?"

14:50It's that kind of hustle that you rarely almost ever need in any other job, but you need it here. And for that, you also need humility because normally you would say, "Well, I am the CEO. I can't be going and doing something." It's exactly the opposite.

15:07In fact, you have to do everything. Meaning, I can work 18 hours a day. I can work 7 days a week. I would still not get to even 30% of my tasks. If you're in an early stage startup, there is no such thing called work life balance. Don't kid yourself.

15:19There is work, there is life, it's the same thing. It's what it is. It's just that the people's mindset has to be very different. I don't think twice before clearing out all the coffee cups in the office. If that's what I have to do, if I see something and I have the time, I no problem doing it.

15:36If I have to be the one going and talking to the the biggest investor out there raising money, I will do that too. So there's no such thing called a job is beneath you and there's also no such thing called you can just delegate and walk away.

15:48You cannot delegate responsibility. Some of the people have asked me a question like have you always wanted to start a startup? Answer is no. I was happy being a researcher. I trained to be a researcher and I ended up becoming one. I was more than happy.

16:00The business side was entirely accidental. I didn't go to business school. Everything I learned about business is what I learned in the job. For me, it's a kid in a candy store moment all over again because we're solving problems that very few people would solve.

16:13Why is democratization of technology important for me? Partly because it's a universal equalizer. And the reason for that is think about science and math and even say philosophy in general is universal. It's deeply liberating. There is no inequality respect of where they are.

16:31And if you actually allow people to use that more easily that's the most equitable thing you can do back to the society and uh that's really what's been driving and also if you look at it that also comes from how I grew up like I grew up in a world where things were not easily available like there was no cable TV when I was growing up until I was in high school there was no internet and as crazy as it seems to think about it today going from there to sitting in any coffee shop accessing anything in the world happened in less than a lifetime, right?

17:04The unlock it gives is massive. Think of the child who may not necessarily have the resources, may not have the backing being able to actually improve their life because of this. That's really what drives us. And the reason why I like the word democratization is it's the most equitable thing you can do.

17:20You are enabling people to pick themselves up from whatever situation they find themselves in. Some of us have been super fortunate to to have had education to have had to be in places where we could actually see these things and learn from that.

17:34A lot of the people are not as fortunate. By the 10 years, we would have become the platform of choice for domain specific applications anywhere in the world in any domain you have. And that's really the mission that we're after. And to become the platform of choice, we also have to be giving disproportionate value back to all of those outcomes.

17:51Right? That's the one thing. And the way we would have changed the world really is to make sure that we enable every single person working in every single company to have their own digital twins multiple times a day and be able to make meaningful outcomes for themselves as well as their company.

18:08Meta announced in their super intelligence lab they're doing that's what they announced that they're going to do for personal life for people outside. We're saying we'll do that for the enterprise. Nine out of 10 startups fail. And even the 1% one startup that succeeds doesn't become a Meta or a Google.

18:23But the pain you endure is so massive that you really need to have an inner guiding principle to actually get you past that. It is, I guess, rooted on the belief that we can actually make a small difference. Not because we think we're smarter than anybody else.

18:38It's because we have perseverance. So what I keep telling my team and I keep telling myself as well is we can lose but we can't be beat. Well, I would say my greatest source of strength has been my wife. She's somebody who's bought balance in my life because I'm a deeply I would say imbalanced person.

18:57Meaning if I get passionate about something, I'll forget everything and just dive in. And so bringing a semblance of balance is something that she taught me. And it's also something where I've been enabled by a lot of people, but I don't think I've been enabled as much by anybody else other than her.