Mahesh Ram, serial entrepreneur and former Head of AI at Zoom, shares his journey from building pioneering companies in education and AI to helping launch FUNDA, a vibrant founder-to-founder community. He discusses the evolution of AI-first startups, lessons from working closely with Zoom founder Eric Yuan, and what it takes to build enduring tech companies today. Mahesh offers real-world advice on how founders can navigate the rapidly changing startup landscape, with a deep focus on customer obsession, rapid product iteration, and embedding technology into core workflows.
Mahesh Ram, serial entrepreneur and former Head of AI at Zoom, shares his journey from building pioneering companies in education and AI to helping launch FUNDA, a vibrant founder-to-founder community. He discusses the evolution of AI-first startups, lessons from working closely with Zoom founder Eric Yuan, and what it takes to build enduring tech companies today. Mahesh offers real-world advice on how founders can navigate the rapidly changing startup landscape, with a deep focus on customer obsession, rapid product iteration, and embedding technology into core workflows.
##In this episode, you’ll learn:
[01:50] How Mahesh went from immigrant kid in New York to serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley
[06:50] Why Mahesh believes frustration often leads to the best startup ideas
[10:55] Inside Zoom’s AI journey—and how Mahesh helped launch AI Companion at record speed
[13:14] Lessons on leadership from Eric Yuan: customer obsession and quality over cost
[20:41] Mahesh’s advice to AI-first founders: ship fast, sell faster, and validate deeply
[24:23] What separates point solutions from workflow-embedded companies
[27:03] Mahesh’s nuanced take on AI’s societal risks—and why we’re not ready
[31:25] What is Funda? Why a grassroots founder community is booming
The nonprofit organization that Mahesh supports: UStrive
Mahesh Ram is a serial entrepreneur and expert in artificial intelligence, most recently serving as Head of AI at Zoom. He was co-founder and CEO of Solvvy, a pioneering AI startup in customer experience, acquired by Zoom. Prior to that, he led GlobalEnglish, a business English learning platform used by millions worldwide. Mahesh advises founders, invests in early-stage startups, and is a founding member of FUNDA, a growing grassroots community of founders of Indian origin. He is deeply passionate about education, technology, and building systems that simplify complex problems.
Funda is a pay-it-forward community for founders of Indian origin, designed to support early-stage entrepreneurs through collaboration, connection, and shared experience. Built by founders for founders, Funda now includes over 1,250 members across Silicon Valley, Texas, and India. The community offers peer support, curated events, and access to a trusted network—entirely volunteer-driven and mission-focused.
Mahesh actively volunteers with UStrive, a nonprofit providing free virtual mentoring for high school and college students with financial need. The platform matches students with mentors to help navigate college admissions and financial aid processes—removing barriers to higher education for underserved youth.
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In this era, speed is everything. Like if you can't get your V1, you gotta, you know, very fast and get paying customers and you know, how fast are you acquiring customers and how fast are you shipping features? Generally speaking, that overcomes a lot of other mistakes.
[00:00:20] Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur - a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors, and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision.
Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Gopi Rangan. I have a special guest today, Mahesh Ram. He's a good friend of mine. Mahesh is a successful serial entrepreneur. He's also a pioneer in AI. He was recently head of AI at Zoom. He is a very sought after advisor by many founders of startups. We're gonna talk to him about all of these topics and also we'll have saved some time to talk about his, uh, new initiative that he and I are collaborating on with a few other people called FUNDA, a community for founders to help each other.
But let's welcome Mahesh first to the podcast. Mahesh, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
[00:01:23] Mahesh Ram: It is wonderful to be here, Gopi. So excited to do it. I have listened to your podcast and I'm a big fan, so to be on it is a fan boy moment for me.
[00:01:32] Gopi Rangan: You're very kind. I am delighted to have you on the podcast and talk about so many interesting topics.
But let's start with you. You are from India in Coimbatore. That's where you were born, and over the years, you've made your way and made a home in Silicon Valley. Can we go through that journey? I want to understand who you are.
[00:01:50] Mahesh Ram: Yeah, like to say that I'm one of a rare breed. I call it the 1.5 generation immigrant.
I was born in Coimbatore India in the south of India, in the state of Tamil Nadu. Uh, my parents are originally from the south of India, and, and my dad made a very courageous decision when I was about seven years old to come to the US to do his MBA, leaving my mom, myself, and my newborn baby sister there until he could bring us over.
It was a pretty courageous decision for him. He had a great job in India at the time. So we immigrated here when I was about nine years old and to New York City. So really, I've grown up in New York City, a product of the public school system in New York City.
So I feel at home in both places, in both cultures, and obviously moved to New York, became a New Yorker, and did my studies and so on there. And that really, I, I think, has shaped a lot of the way I look at the world is it's, you know, I have very different perspectives than either first generation immigrants or people who've never, you know, been back to their homelands.
[00:02:49] Gopi Rangan: Coimbatore is a very industrial city. I have fond memories of living in Coimbatore when I went to college. It's great to see that you made New York your home and then you went, you switched your loyalty to the West Coast and you are now in Silicon Valley. You've been living here for a long time. What attracted you to Silicon Valley?
[00:03:07] Mahesh Ram: Let's take a step back. I think all of us, we are the product of those that came before us and the, inspirations and the influences that we had. What's interesting is in my family going back centuries, uh, 'cause we have a lot of his family history, our forefathers, we know the antecedents, there's no history of entrepreneurship in my family whatsoever. I am the first entrepreneur in my family. I'm the first entrepreneur, CEO in my family, I think among, and I'm talking about cousins, nephews, nieces, grandparents, et cetera. And I think that, that, is purely a function of immigrating to the US and seeing what this country gives us the opportunity to do.
And that's what led me to Silicon Valley. I had started a company in the east coast and had been acquired. And I came out here about 25 years ago on a visit to visit a very successful entrepreneur for a weekend. And I just remember driving down 280 towards Sandhill Road and the sun was setting, it was about 6:30 PM. The sun was setting behind me.
You know, the beautiful mountains were on the right side. You know, it was green, it was December, so it was actually cold, uh, everywhere else in the us. And I was going to meet these amazing entrepreneurs who had built amazing products at Apple. And I just remember thinking, "my God, I need to be here. This is where everything is happening." The internet and, you know, everything was happening in the consumer internet and the browser and TCP/IP. And I said, "if I'm not here then you know, I am missing out." And so that was the moment, the FOMO moment that led me to say, "we've got to move here."
[00:04:38] Gopi Rangan: You got excited by TCP/IP. Total nerd. I can see a nerd moment happening right here, right now. What timeframe was this and where were you living at that time?
[00:04:48] Mahesh Ram: So this is about 25 years back. I had, the business I had done in the East coast was an expert system for legal and tax professionals. So I had some experience in software development and building products and companies. But in that 2000 timeframe, when I moved out here, it was actually to meet with some investors who were thinking about starting a company in the learning space. And so that's what actually got me out here. The company was focused on a problem that I had no idea about, and I had no business being in that business, to be very honest.
It was a company focused on teaching English, in a business context, to employees of global companies or to any consumer anywhere in the world who wanted to learn English. This is in the days when the internet was very new, connectivity was very poor, and yet you had a world where one and a half billion people at the time, and it's grown since then, were learning English every day to do their jobs and to actually advance their lives, their careers, to actually have a future. The globalization trend had happened. And so I got intrigued by that idea that there was some secular drivers to building something great. And here was a team of investors who had done some amazing companies, including the learning company, who were thinking about this. And they actually wanted to talk to me because they thought I could help and get involved early on.
So that's what got me here. It's really the, yes, that beautiful sunset in December certainly it didn't hurt things, but it was more about the unbelievable amount of intellectual curiosity that was going on here. The learning and the spirit of collaboration that exemplifies Silicon Valley, something you've talked about a lot, which I, I completely concur with you. There's nothing like the spirit of collaboration we have here, and that's what drew me here, the curiosity and the collaboration.
[00:06:25] Gopi Rangan: It's a very special place in the world, and learning English is a ticket to prosperity even today in many parts of the world. Eventually you became the CEO of Global English. Later you started one of the pioneering AI companies called Solvvy.
What about entrepreneurship excites you? Why are you the first entrepreneur in your family, to be the black sheep and go a totally different route compared to everybody else in your family?
[00:06:50] Mahesh Ram: I'm not sure that anybody ever forgave me for not becoming a doctor, lawyer, engineer, but, so I may never overcome that stigma. But I think for me the thing that I just love creating solutions that take complexity and simplify processes. So the expert system that I built in the legal profession took a corporate filing that used to take weeks and months and multiple people down to hours and minutes by having an expert system in front of a paralegal or a lawyer. The ability to learn English on your own pace, 10 minutes at a time, 15 minutes at a time, and decompose what is a lifetime experience of really mastering a language, but being able to do it at your own pace, anywhere in the world. I think for us, the powerful concept was you have a billion and a half people who wanna learn English, but there isn't English teachers sufficient to meet that demand, right? If you're in rural Brazil, you don't have access to a native English speaker. So are we going to leave those people out?
Are we going to disenfranchise them from being part of the global economy? No. Let's build technology that takes that very complex task of learning language and actually uses powerful technology to simplify it and make it accessible.
That was a successful business. We ended up with about 450 of the global 2000 companies as customers of global English on a global basis, offices in 23 countries, tens of millions of learners that were successful and got promotions and built their careers by improving their business English skills. Eventually that company was acquired by a public company, Pearson.
And when I was thinking about what my next initiative was, I, I was meeting and advising some founders and startups and I met a couple of PhDs who had just come outta Carnegie Mellon, Justin Betteridge and Mehdi Samadi, and they had been working on this very new concept of AI and machine learning and deep learning applied to this concept of question answering. So being able to ask a question and for be able to look at large amount of unstructured data and actually extract the answer from it. At the time, Google wasn't even doing this. And so this technology existed. It came out CMU, and I knew some of the early investors who were thinking about putting money in. Got engaged with them as an advisor, started talking to customers about a potential use case, which was around customer care and customer experience. I just got so excited at the raw power of the technology and what it could be used for. And at the time we, nobody was talking about AI or machine learning. This was 2016. And so we set about building the first models, building an application, and eventually going to market in 2016 and 2017 with a product that essentially dramatically improved the customer experience for anyone who is interacting with these global brands to get answers to questions like, how do I make this microphone work with my USB port?
You know, it's like, why would you need to read the entire instruction book? You just want to get right to the point where the answer is. So that's what led to that, and I was highly motivated that because I had always been frustrated. And I think frustration always leads to the best entrepreneurship journeys. Because I had been always frustrated as a CEO that customers were asking the same questions, and I knew the answer was there. I would almost be saying, "why can't I just take them by the hand and take them to the answer so they don't have to bother my people?" And the answer was that you needed AI or machine learning to actually be able to do that because it needed to understand the input and comb through a lot of information and pull the right answer in front of them.
And so that frustration led to opportunity, which was to create Solvvy, and that's how we got started off on our journey with some great backers and investors of course.
[00:10:10] Gopi Rangan: Yeah. Through the nineties and the early two thousands, there was a big shift in how people thought about business. And there was the new way of doing business, which is technology first.
Then around when the smartphone became ubiquitous, mobile first was the way to think about building a new business. And now, in fact, I would say only now, it has become clear that AI first and AI native approach to building a business is become a well understood concept. You were very early in that journey, and when you sold Solvvy to Zoom, Zoom was going in that direction: how to think AI first. How was that experience for you and how did you bring that AI mindset into Zoom?
[00:10:55] Mahesh Ram: I'm very grateful I've had this unique opportunity to be one of the OGs of AI and build a company in the pre-chat GPT era. I remember at the time when Google Bard came out with a hundred million parameters, you know, my co-founder and I looked at each other and said, "oh my God, nobody's ever going to top this."
And today, of course, we're talking about trillion parameters and so on models. And so it was very, very difficult at the time to actually build an AI company. There was no tooling, there was no infrastructure. We had to do a lot of these things by trial and error and so on.
So when we joined Zoom, I had the incredible good fortune to work closely with Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom, who is one of the most inspiring people you could imagine. And Eric asked me to head up the AI initiative. Zoom had a little bit of machine learning and AI.
They had the virtual background, which most people know from Zoom. They also had a product that was doing some summarization around sales calls and so on that had just been introduced called Zoom IQ. But realistically ChatGPT had hit and everything was changing in late 2022.
So in early 2023, Eric asked me to basically galvanize the teams and the company to build a suite of offerings to make Zoom AI first, and that really involved communicating with everybody in the company as to what those goals were, you know, following his lead. He took some very daring and bold decisions that I probably would not have taken, and, and it was great learning for me. He just gave me and many others, the carte blanche to really move fast, break things, try things and iterate very rapidly, such that we started in Q1 of 2023 and we actually released AI Companion on a global basis in September, September 5th, 2023, and that speed at the company, a public company that size, with that kind of a reputation audience, global footprint, it's I think, almost impossible to believe.
That was an amazing experience to build a truly modern generative AI application, having built one in the first generation, now, having had the chance to build something on a bigger scale in the second generation was a lifetime experience. It's just a beautiful opportunity.
[00:12:59] Gopi Rangan: I wanna ask you more about AI and startups, but I'm very eager to learn more about what you learned from Eric Yuan and the experience of collaborating with him, his leadership style and management style. How was that experience? Can you share a few examples?
I
[00:13:14] Mahesh Ram: think Eric is the living embodiment of customer obsession, and I know it's a cliche; everybody talks about founders should be customer obsessed.
Until you work with somebody like Eric, you don't actually understand what that means. I don't even think I understood what it meant, and I've done this before. Eric takes every customer's experience with Zoom personally. He wants everybody's experience to be A++. He gets frustrated when the product doesn't deliver that for the user, when complexity masks the ability to just get your job done.
I think the beauty of Zoom is people always said it, it just works. His ethos to that is literally down to, you know, he's spending weekends trying new products out himself and asking questions like, why is this functioning like this? Who thought of this? Have you thought about the user?
And he would consistently say one thing, "put yourself in the shoes of the user." And he really meant it. He would say, "look at this from a user perspective. Would you know how to do something if you were sitting there as the user, as the administrator, whatever it might be?"
So one of the things you learn from Eric is repetition. You say the key things that you believe in, the value propositions, again and again because people do not get them the first time, the second time, the third time. You have to repeat it. So one of them is it has to be simple and easy to use. It has to mask the complexity. The second thing he would say, he said to me early on, the cost model around AI was very expensive when we were building AI Companion. We were thinking the tokens for this many tokens at the scale we were delivering, it would, you know, blow the financial model out of the water.
And I said this to Eric at a meeting and Eric looked at me and he said, "I don't care. I will take care of the cost for you. Focus on quality over cost, and we will always win." He said, "the cost will take care of itself, but if the quality is not good, we won't get a second chance." So that's really, really important. He focused on quality and he had measures for quality that he wanted you to make sure that you had in place and that you could report on.
So that's number two. And with that comes this idea that, and I think we all have this in our daily lives as well as our, you know, whether our businesses, is that there is a certain level of willingness to ship, but not ship in such a way that you are looking for perfection.
Perfection can be an impediment to success. So high quality doesn't mean perfect. What Eric would say is "get it right enough so that people are delighted and excited and still find flaws, but then be prepared to rapidly iterate and fix." So when we got AI Companion out on September 5th, 2023, it had many flaws but it did something really, really well, summarizing meetings. And it was better than anything else. And today the summaries are much, much better than they were then. So he would say, "fix it, get it better, get it better, but don't not ship it in this quest of perfection." So I think you learn the lessons about that.
And I think I've learned a lot about that because when I advise founders today, I find that, that the best ones have somehow imbibed this, and the ones that maybe haven't gotten the message yet spend too much time obsessing about perfection to actually get the learning that they need to get from the audience.
[00:16:21] Gopi Rangan: Customer obsession, focus on quality, not just on revenue and ship fast. The pace at which you innovate and get products out through the door matters. Don't wait for perfection. I'm a good example of a fan of zoom.. Zoom saved so much of my effort. I remember pre Zoom, I would blame Bill Gates for everything because the first 15 minutes of any meeting, connecting slides going up, uh, know, projecting it, know, not having the right wires, combinations, getting remote people dialed into a conference room and everybody being able to hear each other. It was a nightmare. The standard at the time was if you have a one hour meeting plan to spend 15, 20 minutes doing all this connectivity work to get the meeting started. So don't anticipate that you'll be able to use all the, uh, all the time available for productive discussion. You'll waste a lot of time doing all this stuff, but that has revolutionized as a result of the work that Zoom has done.
[00:17:19] Mahesh Ram: Gopi, I'll add one more thing that I should have said. Eric made two very bold decisions about AI Companion that I disagreed with at the time that turned out to be...
so what were they?
...very presion. So one of them was in August of 2023. He said, "I made a decision we're not gonna use any customer data to train any of our models." And at the time, everybody was using customer data to train models. It was the norm. And we all looked at Eric and said, "please, Eric, don't do that. You know, it'll really hamper our ability to build this thing." And he said, "no, the customers' data is sacrosanct. You know, it's the most important thing. We don't want them to feel that we're taking advantage of it." And we said, "please think about it, Eric." He said, "yeah, I'll think about it."
And the next morning he posted on LinkedIn "we will never use customer data to train our models." And so that decision was made. The second decision he made was, you know, we were imagining that we would be charging, you know, Microsoft ended up charging $30 a month for copilot per user, and Eric said, "we're going to include it at no additional cost with the paid Zoom license."
And again, we were thinking, "oh my gosh! The top line revenue we could have gotten outta this." And Eric said, "No. You will see that I am right about this." And it turns out that when we ended up talking to a lot of the CIOs and the customers of Zoom, six, eight months, 12 months later, they were thinking, "Hey, wait, if AI is really a superpower, why would I give it to Gopi and not give it to Mahesh? If four people on a team have it. Am I supposed to make a decision of who gets the $30 a month and who doesn't? I can't afford to give it to everybody. And so if we really wanna live in an AI first culture, shouldn't it be just baked in and part of what the product is?" And so Eric was once again, right.
So that part is I don't know that that's a learning that's easy that think he's, he just has the ability to think, you know, chest move, two steps ahead. But it is worth thinking about, you know, that sometimes the orthogonal decisions are superior to linear thinking.
[00:19:00] Gopi Rangan: Delight the customer, earn the trust of customer and keep the trust of customer, and that will maintain far higher level of loyalty; people coming back to use. I can see the rigor in his approach and he's a very astute innovator who can really think in that direction. Zoom when it started was probably not the most advanced technology in video communication at the time. There were many other solutions. The major differentiator for Zoom was the ability to use the product seamlessly. It always works. It always works, and that made it, uh, fantastic for me to use. Now pretty much all my meetings are on Zoom. I.
[00:19:40] Mahesh Ram: Well, I, I think really there were three innovations. I, I don't wanna make this about the Zoom founding story, but you know, Eric, Eric was entering a market. He had helped build WebEx, so he knew the market and there were many, many providers.
So he, he went up and down Sand Hill Road. Many investors said, no, why do we need another meeting company? But I think his innovation was threefold, right? One was, one was a pricing model, WebEx, and others used to charge it by the minute. He said, that's obsolete. So he disrupted the pricing. And the other was the ease of use, as you've talked about.
And the third was the infrastructure to be able to deliver the highest quality communications solution around the world, so that it not only just worked, but it, but it had worked with extreme high fidelity. So like most things, you know, it's a combination of things, but you have to get them all right.
[00:20:21] Gopi Rangan: Yeah.
And he did, and he did more of a B2C approach to it than the other companies that did the B2B model. I want to come back to startups. When you started companies, the world was different. And in today's world, starting companies is very different. It's a very different scenario. What's your advice to founders today?
How can they be successful in today's environment?
[00:20:41] Mahesh Ram: So, you know, I'm fortunate enough to be able to talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, see quite a number of pitches. In this new generation of AI first companies in late 2024, early 2025. And I think it's easier than ever to get to your V one and MVP than it's ever been. In fact, it's so easy that the demos are almost just too good to be true in many cases 'cause it just work. And you know, you can put a wrapper around these very powerful foundation models.
I've found that that it's very difficult to figure out who's going to endure and last. I think even investors are struggling with this now in these early days, but they know they're going to be some very big winners. But I think the characteristics of the founders that I think can guide us even in this very complicated era, I think one of them is the thing we talked about ship fast, ship often.
You know, if I'm not seeing them shipping. I met with a founder the other day who had a really good demo and they've been in a program and they still have a demo. And I'm thinking, that's not gonna fly. You know, like, get your demo out, put it out there. Get three validation customers. Get them to say they're willing to pay for it. Find out why it's broken. If it's not gonna work, pivot fast. Build new features.
If you're not shipping fast, I mean, companies like Zoom are shipping biweekly, weekly. If you're as a startup, can't ship that fast, you know, once you've got some idea of what you're building for, then something is wrong. So I think I really evaluate shipping velocity.
The second thing is customer acquisition. Listen, if you can't get 3, 4, 5 customers, I'm not, I'm not saying you need to get 50 customers. I'm saying if you can't get your first three to five customers through every means possible through hustle and your idea, then your, either your ideas flawed or you need to figure out how you can be a better person to evangelize the problem and, and the solution you have.
And I think that a lot of founders really lack the skill of being able to go and do validation first, and really listen and then come back very rapidly with a potential solution to those same people that they validated with and say, "I think I may have solved your problem. Would you be willing to try it?" It's actually a skill. It's a technique and I think most founders don't do that well. But if you have those two things, that's a beginning.
The third thing is either a deep passion for the problem you're solving or a deep understanding of the domain space where you see something that others don't. When you think about Shopify, for example, and Tobias and his co-founders, you know, they started with a snowboarding business and got so frustrated with what it was like to market this that they ended up building a platform to do it, and it became the world's biggest platform for e-commerce manufacturers.
It wasn't that he knew anything about e-commerce. He knew what his problem was as a merchant and he was a technologist, and so he could put together something that worked for him. And so he knew that it would work for many others. I think that level of understanding and that sort of extreme passion, almost an obsession, again, for solving this problem has to be there.
But I think in this era, speed is everything. Like if you can't get to your V one very fast and get paying customers and, you know. How fast are you acquiring customers and how fast are you shipping features? Generally speaking, that overcomes a lot of other mistakes (done ethically, of course).
[00:23:44] Gopi Rangan: That's important. 20 years ago, the barrier to start a company was much higher than what it is today. It's very easy to start a company, very easy to create version one. But the flip side of that is as a result of a lower barrier, there are many, many different types of founders in the market. There's a far greater diversity than we've ever seen. And the main reason is that it's easy to start a company these days. The main differentiator now becomes speed and how passionate you are and how you're gonna stick through the ups and downs. Can you actually get customers to validate that it actually works? And that is a very different world today compared to how it was you 15 years ago, 20 years ago.
[00:24:23] Mahesh Ram: I think those two things are absolutely critical, but I think most of the AI applications I see aren't truly embedded into the larger workflow that the domain user actually does to get the job done. You know, if I go back to that legal software expert software that we did, you know, we decomposed why did it take three weeks for many law firms to have to incorporate a company and qualify it to do business?
You had to go to the state office, you had to have somebody file in paper, you had to print out things on printers and take them to the state office. When you understood that the present workflow deeply then you're able to say, "how can I use software to do that?"
And I think, a lot of the founders I see say, "oh yeah, I know something about go to market. I think I can build an AI SDR." I'll use an example of an overcrowded market. And sure they do that, but they don't actually understand what the revenue leader cares about, what the pain points are, how does an SDR fit into the larger scheme of customer acquisition. And so they're gonna end up building a point solution that might get to one three 5 million ARR if they do everything well, but it doesn't actually scale into a workflow.
So that's number one. And number two is the usability. So, does it seamlessly flow into the user's workday? And I found some research that was done a while back that said the number one quality of the successful companies in the startup world is asking one question of the users "If I took this away, how would you rate your disappointment level?" And if that number is not 40% or so, saying, "I'd be very, very disappointed", you are probably not doing a good enough job. And so if you think about that, it's gotta be like improving your current life, your workflow so well, you know, Canva is probably doing that today. You know, you think about the companies that are truly, like, deeply embedded where, you know, the Bloomberg terminal example for back in the eighties and nineties. There are not that many of those, but the ones that have it are really understood the workflow of the user and how they can improve it. And I don't see enough of that.
[00:26:14] Gopi Rangan: This is fascinating. You're giving a lot of real-life examples on what's happening in the world today based on your experiences dealing with customers and building AI solutions and working with many founders in the past year or two.
This is fascinating. This is fantastic. Thank you very much. I wanna ask you a more philosophical question about AI and technology. What's a point of view that you hold that is different from status quo today? There seem to be two camps of people. On one camp, people are very optimistic about AI. AI is good and on the other side people worry about AI, the impacts of AI. Sometimes I see them a lot more optimistic about how advanced AI can be and they are terrified about the negative consequences. Where do you stand in this spectrum, and what's your point of view?
[00:27:03] Mahesh Ram: I think one of the things about being a good founder, I think, is that you can hold two seemingly opposing views in your mind at the same time. All
[00:27:11] Gopi Rangan: right. This is getting interesting.
[00:27:13] Mahesh Ram: So one is that I believe that many of the big funders and promoters of AI are overestimating how long, how fast the impact will happen on the broad scale economic environment. They have live in a Silicon Valley bubble and they do that deliberately because they have to keep the pump going for the money and the funding and so on. So I think we should not over index on, you know, breathless pronouncements about AGI that come from people with very vested interest. We have to be very careful about that.
At the same time, at Zoom we did meet with government regulatory bodies and other people that were thinking about how to regulate the AI phenomenon, and what you realize is that they didn't even know that they were struggling to even know which questions to ask. And that's not a criticism, it's just a really hard thing.
I am worried as a society of how will we prepare our children for a world in which AI will be able to do many jobs that today require expert knowledge. What if AI can synthesize a research paper in physics with novel concepts in a way that makes the PhD in physics less attractive, less important?
You know, does that mean that being a plumber is going to be much more valuable than being a PhD in physics? Should we be training our people to be doing some of these tasks that AI may take longer to replace? Not that AI couldn't replace the plumber. Maybe it will, but it'll probably take longer. So I think these are very existential issues that I think society as a whole is not confronting. Within the next four to five years, I think you're going to have a crisis moment where the political populism trends that we all see around us are going to intersect with AI doing serious damage to knowledge worker jobs, or at least starting to make real impact there. And society is going to be unprepared. And I think I worry about how we will react to that. And will it be a situation where we band together and figure out a new path forward or do we end up being even more divisive and to end of the spectrum. But I see this coming, I think it's, it's still further away than, than some people would predict, but I think within the next five to 10 years, let's say, there's going to be a reckoning.
[00:29:23] Gopi Rangan: What are you doing about it?
Are there sources of information or news items or podcasts or blogs, newsletters that you read that to stay on top of this?
[00:29:33] Mahesh Ram: I mean, I read Azeem Azhar. I read, of course, Stratechery. I read all the things that most people probably read to be apprised of what it is. I do work with a smaller group of founders who are particularly interested in AI safety, and I try to learn from them because they know far more about this topic than I do, and I'm trying to learn about it rather than trying to pointificate about something I don't understand yet. And what I'm learning from them is that the amount of resources being devoted to AI safety is very, very, very inconsequential relative to the amount being invested in AI innovation.
So when you think about that disparity, what I would hope to do is define founders who are working in that space and help them along in that area. And I don't mean AI guard railing around, you know, making sure your app doesn't hallucinate. That's part of it. I'm talking about true AI safety, where it's not producing harmful effects and it's being actually preemptively stopping it from doing things that could be detrimental to society or to human beings.
There are gray lines too. You could argue that having AI do a particular job better than a human is not malicious, that it's natural progress. I don't hold a point of view on that. It's too complex an issue. But if we can regulate nuclear weapons, we ought to be able to regulate AI.
[00:30:47] Gopi Rangan: I'm very curious about these topics as well, and I am eager to learn. The world is evolving at a very fast pace on these topics, and everybody I think needs to understand at some level to be able to contribute to the society and be prepared for the future. I want to come back to a conversation about startups and FUNDA.
You have played a very important role over the past couple of years when FUNDA got started and it's become a thriving community of 500 plus founders.
1,250 over, we counted yesterday
1,250. Uh, before we go into a lot of details, what is FUNDA? So
[00:31:25] Mahesh Ram: FUNDA, first of all, it's a complete paid forward initiative. A group of us who have been serial founders including yourself and investors and people who are passionate about helping founders succeed, have come together to basically create an environment where founders of Indian origin, some of whom may never even actually been to India, but but of maybe have grown up here, born here, some of whom have immigrated from India, could come together with nothing but founder interests at the center.
So to help founders succeed, thrive, network, do deals together, you know, find their co-founder, find an investor with other members of the community, of the larger communities surrounding them to help. Whether that could be potential venture investors or firms, banks, law firms, whatever infrastructure they need to be successful.
But what has been the most gratifying piece of this is: (a) we are completely only in it for founders and only in it for them to succeed. There's no vested interest, and I think that has been very liberating to see why that has take, why that has helped us take off, and I think it's serving a massively underserved need within the founders of Indian origin community. The second thing is that what we're finding is that you have some of the smartest people in the world in this community, and they're sharing common problems. The problems might range from how do I set up my cap table for success to what do I do with MCP and what are you doing about it and what can you do? And so you're seeing these breakout groups on go to market, on AI infrastructure, on company formation that are naturally evolving, where people are sharing so generously and without any worry that somebody's, you know, vested interest is in the middle. I think it's been incredibly gratifying.
I think it's going to grow by leaps and bounds. We have a lot plans on how to organize it better, professionalize it more. We have events that are overflowing, we have to turn people away. We hope that, that we can grow to accommodate everyone. There's now a chapter in Texas. There are founders all over the world.
I'm very excited about it, as you can probably tell by the tone of my voice. But we have much work to do to really allow this community to thrive. And it ranges from very early pre-seed founders who are just coming up with an idea all the way to highly scaled founders who have businesses that are in nine figure ARR. That means there's a lot of cross pollination and a lot of learning that can happen between community members.
[00:33:47] Gopi Rangan: It's a very unique grassroots level organization that is supporting the community. The kind of conversations, the quality of engagement, and how supportive people are in this community is very unique to see.
I'm glad that we. created this as a small community to begin with, but it is grown like wildfire, not only in Silicon Valley where we started, but we have chapters in Texas, an active community in Bangalore and growing in Chennai and a few other places as well. And I'm really looking forward to the next phase of FUNDA.
What are some ideas you have for the next phase of FUNDA?
[00:34:25] Mahesh Ram: I think there are lessons we can take from successful organizations, even though they may be for-profit whereas we want to be in a more of a nonprofit mode. I think what Y Combinator does, for example, with its community is really powerful. They bring in all aspects of their network. So they bring in their alumni, they bring in companies where their alumni may be leaders to help their founders succeed. They bring in mentors and advisors to help their founders succeed. Obviously they're a closed garden, you know, they, in the sense that they are only helping their own YC community, but they have a lot of technology tools that makes it easy for that type of collaboration to happen.
So I think improving our technology platform for fund and having a really strong database, a community platform that's not WhatsApp. Doing that is important. I think outreach to a wider range of sponsors so we can bring more benefits to the founders can be very powerful. I think sharing more stories, more inspiration, but also support. You know, there was a great discussion in FUNDA the other day about imposter syndrome and founder fear and, and what do you do about it and how do you manage that and the need to feel that you are winning all the time and to promote yourself as winning all at all times, even though you may not feel that way.
So we have a role to play in making sure that there's strong mental health, strong financial health, strong mentorship and support so that these startups and founders can make their own personal journey very rewarding and just feel that support. I think that feeling of support has to be there, and so the more infrastructure we can do to make that scalable.
So it's not about Gopi or Mahesh or Shreesha or, somebody else. It's about the organization long outliving us. I think that's the goal. So there's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of volunteers and we are always looking for more smart people. We have no shortage of smart people that we just have to get them to help us.
[00:36:07] Gopi Rangan: I'm very excited to collaborate with you on future plans for FUNDA. Mahesh, we're coming towards the end of our conversation, and I want to ask you about your community involvement. In addition to your engagement with FUNDA, is there a nonprofit organization you are passionate about? Which
[00:36:23] Mahesh Ram: one?
Absolutely. You know, given my longstanding passion for education, one of the organizations that I've been volunteering with for many years is a organization called UStrive. That's the letter U and the word Strive. UStrive connects students with financial need with free one-on-one mentoring to help them navigate college and financial aid application process.
So this can be students who are already in college who need a mentor for support for graduation and career, and can also be students who are in high school. It's all done virtually through an online platform. You get to interact with students during a very hectic and stressful time for them and help them with their essays, their applications.
Many people don't think they can even afford it or they don't belong in college. UStrive actually helps them break down that barrier and actually gets them into very successful and thriving futures. So it's one I'm particularly passionate about.
[00:37:17] Gopi Rangan: Mahesh, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for sharing candid stories, real-life examples based on your career and the fascinating changes you've made over the years and especially your focus on AI. I'm very eager to share your nuggets of wisdom with the world.
[00:37:33] Mahesh Ram: I. Very, very much my pleasure, Gopi. I really have been looking forward to this and, uh, know, look forward to many more of your podcasts. And I hope that it's been helpful at least some of your audience to hear some of my thoughts.
Thank you very much, Mahesh.
[00:37:46] Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real-life stories about early believers supporting ambitious entrepreneurs.
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