How an Indian Immigrant with No Background Raised $25M | FurtherAI, Aman Gour

Intro

00:00I hail from a small town in central part of India. From there on went on to do computer science from IIT Bombay. It was definitely a big milestone to get into IIT. Not just for me but for my [music] entire family. Well, I remember my father celebrated it big time when he got to know I got into IITs.

00:16During IT Bombay always wanted to start something of my own because I come from a business background. My father was a businessman. The next chapter was about deciding what should I do when I'm here. It's actually pretty [music] uncomfortable to start a new company in a completely new place where you do not have a lot of people.

00:38One piece of advice that I would give to any entrepreneur is to go vertical. Pick an industry that you like. Even better [music] if it's uh an industry that is unsexy. It was a hard choice cuz we do not come from any industry. going vertical in an industry feels like a hard selection problem like how should we uh pick an industry.

00:59Looking back uh with the benefit of hindsight I feel [music] that it was a blessing in disguise. We looked at every workflow every problem from first principles point of view. The most important thing is pick [music] the right market then pick the right team and then build the right product.

01:17Hi my name is Saman. I'm co-founder CEO of Further AI. At Further AI, we're building the AI workspace for insurance to take away the busy work involved in various different workflows and we are now announcing our new series A with the and recreovitz and one of the largest uh series A rounds in insurance AI.

01:35We have crossed [music] million in revenue. We just focused on insurance despite not having any background. Go vertical. Focus on an industry rather than building a horizontal software

Do the Hard Things First

02:01as a kid. Uh have been top of the class have been that guy who sits in the front bench. My father kept actually raising the bar for me. I was in a school if I'm doing great he would move me to a school which had more competition. So more smarter people.

02:13So then I have to compete. Getting into IITs is often really hard. This it's a very competitive exam. I had this initial pressure of competing with now the best of brains [music] or like top 50 or 100 brains. Quickly realized that my strength has been always I'm the hardest worker in any room.

02:30That has really helped me in the first two years at IIT Bombay. I got like perfect grades and so on. But then realized that maybe it's about time to sort of explore other things. And that's where I got more active in sports, cultural aspects of things, in like the politics part of things as well.

02:45That was fun. That helped me learn more about myself and [music] about how the world functions. During my college years, I did internship [music] uh at Microsoft. One thing I'm really proud of building at Microsoft was a small project team that started Microsoft Community Training, which was about training and employment of [music] bluecollar workers.

03:07got a chance to build that project from grounds up with uh [music] my mentor and my manager. That was super fun. Got a chance to travel across the world to South Africa, different parts of the world as well to launch [music] that product. So during Microsoft uh there was a hackathon project that we did which was about uh matching candidates with jobs.

03:27[music] It was a fun project I think like we also won that hackathon with that project. I was young back then. So I felt that okay maybe this could be the idea that will change [music] the world and uh it was funny at that point in time every software engineer that wanted to change the world started a HR tech company.

03:44So I started an HR tech company. When I moved from Microsoft and started turbo hire I was fascinated by building something that uh can allow for search on top of large rum databases. It was my first uh journey as an entrepreneur. So building something from scratch uh with my co-founders and taking it to billion dollars in ARR.

04:06I had to [music] decide between running a company back in India or being with a person I really loved. That was the primary reason for me to move the US. I asked my wife okay what what should I do next? Should I join a big tech or join an early stage company and things like that?

04:23She mentioned that ammon you like to build you are wearing a chip on your shoulder uh and you want to build a big public company why don't you give it a try so those were the initial months of further AI where I was not sure whether I'll build my second company or not knowing what I know about building companies and how [music] hard those uh that journey could be one thing about me is like I [music] think which is I think about a lot of founders is they seek discomfort because if you do hard things early on life becomes easier That's where I think it's consistent in

04:55uh moving to um Bay Area starting in insurance and now my father is not raising the bar for my own self I am raising that bar for myself. So now every step when I feel that I've met the bar I would just raise it to the next big thing which [music] is like yet another hill to climb.

05:10The philosophy of life is simple that yeah keep doing hard things good things will happen you'll learn more [music] and at the end when you look back you'd feel that yeah you've come a long way

Go Vertical — Especially in an “Unsexy” Industry

05:27in the early days of uh further AI we started actually with a problem statement which was very comfortable to build the problem that I faced uh in my first company which was about and building AI agents for software testing applied to YC with that we got shortlisted and so on and in the early days of YC uh Sashan was having a conversation with [music] Michael Cebu we realized that this might be a tarpit idea an idea that we are not uniquely capable uh as a team to build that's where during YC we pivoted my advice to every founder doing YC do not pivot during YC but we pivoted during YC we

06:00had no idea what to do that is where Tom Bloomfield who was our YC partner said that you guys have a unique combination of building a company and AI so Sashank who is My co-founder [music] has AI experience. I had previously built a company.

06:14So he said that why don't you guys go vertical. [music] Pick an industry partner with it and it was a hard choice at that point in time because we do do not come from any industry. So we created actually some rules. We created three roles. Industries where there is a lot like lot of unstructured data could be good industries because now LLMs can process that faster.

06:32Industries which has labor shortage and shrinking margins. The first one allows for uh why now in terms of technology but the the later two allows for why now in terms of business. So whatever we build will get [music] adopted faster. So we shortlisted three industries mortgage legal and insurance.

06:53I remember like we drove drove around the Bay Area with a box of donuts [music] going from one insurance agent to the other learning about their workflows uh talking about what problems they face. It was a scary experience to say the least.

07:05But uh we learned a lot in that process. Also we got over our initial fear of unknown as well. And then that gave us initial insights into different workflows that currently exist in insurance. We started we took that knowledge that we gathered in these site visits.

07:21Looking back uh with the benefit of hindsight I feel that it was a blessing in disguise. We looked at every workflow, every problem from first principles point of view without making assumptions that that's how things should be. I remember this one workflow where underwriting teams or carriers requested brokers to fill the forms on their website.

07:43So everybody was building these web portals [music] and I felt that that is possibly not the best way because brokers did not like filling data over portals and nobody likes filling data over portals. [music] what everybody wanted is can I just send this email to you uh whereas a lot of teams were actually spending money and time and energy in building these portals so we question that okay why don't you accept a submission over an email [music] and then let AI fill this data in your internal portals rather than making human team members do that which they don't like doing this way you can

08:17increase the sub to code ratio the code tobind ratio and so on so forth it's good for business and good for customer experience uh and so on. So by thinking of things from first principles point of view allowed us to really build something which I think that if I was from the industry I might not have because I would have felt that this is how things have been.

Build Trust at the Dinner Table

08:46Insurance usually is labeled as slow to adopt technology but on the ground what we were seeing was people really wanted to automate the workflows that were manual and repetitive. One thing I've learned is the best sales tool today is a dinner table like you should meet people in person try to have a conversation try to understand problem and then equally about they buying the product but it's also about they buying like you in some sense and form that hey I want to work with you.

09:12So that's one big learning that uh has happened that people work with people. Apart from that other things about sales that we learned is like outbound works. Yes. But [music] one big trick that worked in the early days is called show me you know me.

09:27Try to actually do things that don't scale like why says. So we wrote a lot of emails which were like extremely personalized to people. That really helps in getting a response because then the other person knows that you've really written that email just for them and not massmailing mailing it to them and takes a lot of effort to write such emails but it really works as well.

09:48So putting myself in the shoes of uh the buyer really helps. Let's say if I'm buying a technology software for 100k I don't want to log get logged into a contract for a year before I give [music] it a spin. So we added things like two month opt out and so on.

10:04All of these are now uh very fairly standard practices. [music] Even YC recommends all of these things. It was interesting to learn all of these things. The first time around uh when we were building this enterprise sales motion,

What’s Next for Further?

10:23there are two goals that I have in mind with further AI. The first one is to build a public company. But the second one which is also way core to me is to build a launchpad uh of success for people who come in contact with further AI. It could be our customers, it could be our team members.

10:37And that's where like when we hired people or people joined us, [music] it's been a lot about like high agency and low drama. Uh that's the kind of people I work really well with. I think there's a saying right like you attract your uh tribe and I think for me I'm that person who likes to solve hard problem run through the walls if I have to uh and so on and interestingly [music] the team that joined further AI had the same DNA people who like to work on hard problems they don't mind grinding 12 hours a day if it if that's [music] what it takes to solve a problem or get something done

11:13and so on so AI is changing fast right we all know that the good thing is that we are all learning as the ecosystem system evolves, we want to be at the forefront of it from the insurance perspective and be that trusted partner for uh our customers to bring in the latest efficiencies [music] that AI is bringing in.

11:30So we have positioned ourselves at an intersection of AI and insurance and then working backwards from the principle that the goal is to drive business metrics rather than to just build technology for the sake of it. So a lot has changed since the early college days to Microsoft to building the first company to now building the second company.

11:51The funny thing about being a second time founder is that the lows are lows but the highs are not that high because you know there is more to build. But uh having said that I think as a person I have become more patient. have become more people first and my narrative shifted from me me to VVV [music] and that is more satisfying uh as a human being and we're building towards [music] being the best company in insurance and AI.

12:17I was discussing with uh somebody the title of my biography half monk half machine and [music] it's interesting I think that describes me really well as a person because when I'm like wired in or logged in I am like a machine [music] like clocking uh work on a personal side on uh personal side I'm more like a monk I'm very patient I look at positive in people I'm a glass half full guy I try to moderate a lot one of the things that I say very often and people who know me would possibly roll their eyes [music] after listening to this is everything is good in moderation.

12:50Even moderation that's the monk side uh of me. So yeah, hopefully someday the book title would be half monk, half machine.