Rohini Chakravarthy, Managing Partner at NewBuild Venture Capital, shares her journey from engineering in Silicon Valley to more than two decades of venture investing at Intel Capital, NEA and NGP Capital. She explains why she and her partners created NewBuild around the transformation of the physical enterprise—from procurement and manufacturing to logistics and delivery. Rohini also explains what NewBuild looks for at the earliest stages, expounding on the difference between proof of value and proof of market.
Rohini Chakravarthy, Managing Partner at NewBuild Venture Capital, shares her journey from engineering in Silicon Valley to more than two decades of venture investing at Intel Capital, NEA and NGP Capital. She explains why she and her partners created NewBuild around the transformation of the physical enterprise—from procurement and manufacturing to logistics and delivery. Rohini also explains what NewBuild looks for at the earliest stages, expounding on the difference between proof of value and proof of market.
In this episode, you'll learn:
[01:43] How Rohini went from engineering in Bangalore and Silicon Valley to venture capital, including her experience at Intel Capital, NEA and NGP Capital.
[07:06] Building NewBuild around the transformation of the physical enterprise and supply chain.
[13:18] What "proof of value" means at the earliest stages—and why NewBuild wants to see evidence of customer utility before significant revenue.
[15:48] Three pieces of advice for founders: start with a burning problem, examine founder-market fit and deliberately de-risk the company one stage at a time.
[20:50] How investors actually build conviction through conversations, research, validation and back-and-forth with founders.
[25:48] Why investors and founders need the right network of partners and experts
[27:16] The opportunities and challenges Rohini sees in the US-India startup ecosystem.
[31:01] Why Rohini believes computer science remains valuable in the AI era—and why combining computer science with another domain could be especially useful.
The nonprofit organizations Rohini is passionate about: IIT Madras Foundation, Neythri
About Rohini Chakravarthy
Rohini Chakravarthy is the Managing Partner of NewBuild Venture Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies focused on supply chain and the physical enterprise. She has more than 20 years of venture investing experience, including roles at NGP Capital, NEA and Intel Capital. Before entering venture capital, she worked as a hardware design engineer at Bay Networks.
Rohini holds a B.Tech from IIT Madras, an MS in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
About NewBuild Venture Capital
NewBuild Venture Capital is an early-stage venture firm focused on supply-chain application and infrastructure, physical enterprise and agentic AI. The firm's thesis centers on the transformation of the physical enterprise through technologies including cloud, data, AI and robotics. Portfolio companies include: Lyric, Freehand, Drumkit, Precursory, Manifold Freight, Cognichip, Pull Logic and others.
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[00:00:00] Rohini Chakravarthy: My dad sometimes, his coaching was, "Just because you know how to solve a problem doesn't mean you are the right person to solve it." Right? So also additionally, like, apply that test on, is this the right founder-market fit, right? Are you the right person to solve this problem? Or otherwise, now how do you expand that team to also bring in the expertise you need to go solve that problem?
[00:00:24] So I think it really go- it does start with the first set of people, the founders, and them choosing this market.
[00:00:37] 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 [00:01:00] Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Gopi Rangan. My guest today for this episode is Rohini Chakravarthy.
[00:01:06] Rohini is the managing partner at NewBuild Venture Capital. NewBuild is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage founders transforming the physical enterprise. So we're gonna learn more about what physical enterprise includes, what does it constitute of, what kind of startups does she like to invest in, what's a good stage, and what is a good topic for a founder that would be interesting and in the zone for NewBuild.
[00:01:34] We're gonna learn more about Rohini and talk more about her investments. Rohini, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
[00:01:41] Rohini Chakravarthy: Thank you, Gopi. Pleasure to be here.
[00:01:43] Gopi Rangan: So you live in Silicon Valley. You've lived here for a long time, but you're originally from India. You grew up in Bangalore, and you studied in India, and later you came to the US.
[00:01:54] You were an engineer early part of your career and later switched to venture capital. Can you talk [00:02:00] a little bit about that journey?
[00:02:01] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yeah, happy to. Very much the immigrant journey into the US and to venture capital. So I grew up in Bangalore, South Bangalore, so went to kind of local schools in Bangalore, Sudarshana Vidya Mandir, Vidya High School, National College, for people who might know South Bangalore institutions.
[00:02:19] And I went to IIT Madras, so that's how I got to Chennai. I did my bachelor's in electrical engineering and then came to the US as a grad student. So I did a master's in electrical engineering and worked as an engineer here in Silicon Valley in the '90s. I worked on chip design, board design, so hardware stuff.
[00:02:37] And at that time, actually, in the '90s, hardware was still hot. Networking was the AI of the '90s. So really had an opportunity to see startup activity, although from a very kind of an engineering perspective. And I worked at Bay Networks. We did Ethernet systems at that time. So just to give you a sense of how far we have come, the first product I worked on was [00:03:00] 100 megabit fiber optical board, and both the fiber and the 100 megabit that was hot technology at that time.
[00:03:06] So I did get to work on some cutting-edge stuff at that time. But I decided to go to business school fairly early on in my career, so I had this idea of wanting to see a little bit more of the business and, I had decided that at that time this would give me a really good grounding as well as a network that was different and unique.
[00:03:26] So I had the opportunity to go to MIT Sloan, and I graduated from MIT in '99. I almost directly went into venture. So I did a few things along the way at MIT and happy to share if that's of interest. But initially, my entry into venture capital was through corporate. So I was at Intel Capital for seven years, and really what drew me to Intel was this opportunity to apply both the tech side as well as learning the venture business, if you will.
[00:03:56] That's where I started. Invested in networking in [00:04:00] the beginning And then Wi-Fi, WiMAX, so a lot of the, the technology's there. And that's where I learned really how to invest. So over seven years, I got to invest in everything from chips to subsystems to software, spectrum, service providers, and really see kind of the business model aspect of it.
[00:04:21] And that's where I really learned the business. And then, after Intel, I went to NEA, which is a very large institutional venture firm where I, again, got to invest in the full stack, right? So everything from chips and photonics all the way to application software across three funds. And I've been in the venture world for 20-plus years now. So that's been a really fun ride to see the evolution of venture.
[00:04:47] Gopi Rangan: You've seen a lot over the years, how Silicon Valley evolved, how the tech ecosystem has evolved. We share some portfolio companies from long time ago.
[00:04:56] We are co-investors in Luxterra. Mm-hmm. And more recently [00:05:00] now, we are co-investors in Precursory. Mm-hmm. So exciting to see multiple connections here. I want to ask you, like, what do you like about being a VC?
[00:05:10] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yeah, I think you stay in this industry for a little while, you start to see patterns but there's always something new.
[00:05:17] And I think the best part of venture for me is, you get to work with entrepreneurs who have really thought about a space for a while, right? Usually we talk to people, w- I'm sure you do as well, where they've spent five, six, 10 years thinking about a problem.
[00:05:32] Even when in a new area like AI where you think, "Oh my God, everything has happened post ChatGPT," that's not the case. Usually the entrepreneurs have thought about a problem, and now this new technology tool can solve it in some interesting way. So there's always this freshness and this insight or looking around the corner, which is very interesting.
[00:05:53] So you regularly get surprised by good ideas, right? And sometimes wacky ideas, people who might think a [00:06:00] little too far, right? But it's also interesting to play along, like okay, let's figure out what you're thinking about. How can you make that happen?
[00:06:07] Like, what needs to go your way to make that happen? So having that early conversation, especially at the earliest stages of a company where the world is full of potential, you have multiple ways to go, and you have to make some risk buys on like, we'll go in this direction or, what options do I want to hold onto?
[00:06:27] What options do I wanna maybe close off at this time? All of those things are very interesting. The kind of the entrepreneurial thinking in bets I think is a very interesting part of the business.
[00:06:38] Gopi Rangan: Yeah, founders have deep analysis and deep conviction in what they are going to build- Mm-hmm... and how the world should be, and it's really fun to sit down with them and hear that story. And it's n- never easy. Starting any business is difficult, and starting something that has potential for high growth is extremely challenging. Mm-hmm. You can see difficult decisions [00:07:00] being made on a weekly, monthly basis, and you get to support them in that journey. It's incredibly satisfying.
[00:07:06] Rohini Chakravarthy: It is, yeah. And I think in my biography, I left it off as where I got started and the NEA portion, but eventually, like, the start of New Build Venture Capital was exactly that, right? Which is we saw this opportunity. I was at NGP, which was Nokia's venture arm at that time, and where we had been investing in sort of the industrial world around 5G.
[00:07:31] And we had this insight just talking to a lot of software entrepreneurs at that time that a lot of the, the tools and technologies that had transformed the front of the enterprise. So if you think about marketing or sales, where you had a Salesforce happen or a ServiceNow happen, that hadn't quite happened in the back half of enterprise.
[00:07:49] So when you think about physical enterprise, it's really the entire enterprise supply chain. So if you're making things, anything from procuring materials to [00:08:00] manufacturing, to warehousing, logistics, final delivery, like that whole part of the enterprise, it runs on fairly old software still. You know, it runs on SAP, JDA, Manugistics, and some of that software is really good. It was written, 30, 40 years ago, and a lot has changed since then. So our observation was, if you have that same type of thinking, the pattern matching of adopt cloud, adopt new data, the transparent data APIs, or you use AI natively, or you use increasingly mobile devices and robotics, what can you do differently in the back half of the enterprise?
[00:08:39] So that was the thinking process, and we kinda decided that maybe this would be fun to actually start a new firm thematically focused on that. And so we ourselves are on an entrepreneurial journey, and that helps with many entrepreneurs because they see that we're also building something interesting and unique and we can be really good [00:09:00] partners, both culturally as well as thematically with many of them.
[00:09:04] Gopi Rangan: Well, congratulations on launching a new firm. It's not an easy endeavor. It's great to see that the firm is off, and you have made a handful of investments already. Mm-hmm. I see that the genesis for the idea, like what kind of firm is necessary for the world, what would be useful for founders- Yeah where the technology trends are going. Those questions were already in your mind while you were at your previous firms like NEA and NGP, and eventually you launched NewBuild.
[00:09:31] Rohini Chakravarthy: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:32] Gopi Rangan: What's your focus at NewBuild? What teams, sectors do you prefer? Mm-hmm ... what stage do you invest in?
[00:09:39] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yeah. So our fund one is a $30 million fund one. We do very early-stage investing, so anything from $500,000 to $2 million initial checks. And, we have 15 companies in our portfolio right now. So the fund is off to a really good start. So what we've done is [00:10:00] essentially done that map that I just mentioned.
[00:10:02] So if you look at the physical enterprise, the back half, operations cost center, whatever the terminology is not quite IT, but basically where you're making things and/or managing a supply chain for yourselves. We've done a map of that and to say anything from materials procurement all the way to final delivery of goods, but also the infrastructure layer.
[00:10:24] So, think about cloud and data and AI and robotics. Like, how do these rails, if you think of them in the innovation rails context, where these are technologies and business models that are available to entrepreneurs to apply in different fields. How do you apply that into this physical enterprise context?
[00:10:45] That's sort of the thematic approach that we've taken. And then we spend time understanding, the market trends within that. So we've invested in supply chain planning with a company called Lyric. They're taking a very interesting approach and the core of that [00:11:00] technology is this idea that you now have enough compute to actually combine a lot of planning and execution systems.
[00:11:08] Historically, that's been two separate areas. Like, the software you use to plan typically in the supply chain world has been very different from the software you use to execute. Now, if you can actually bring in the data and the compute power into one platform where you can now plan with better efficacy, right?
[00:11:28] You can actually have your machine learning algorithms as well as your LLMs available in one spot. It just makes for a very powerful approach to supply chain planning, and it's a very unique take on it. So planning is one area. We've also invested in things like procurement. So we invested in a company called Freehand, very interesting entrepreneurs and very amazing journey, which I'm happy to talk about a little bit further. We've also invested in Precursory, which you mentioned, which is more in the logistics [00:12:00] space, where they have a unique take on risk intelligence, so it's a different data set within the supply chain area.
[00:12:06] And we've made some, actually three or four investments in the logistics space, which is obviously a big part of supply chain, so companies like Drumkit Manifold, OnRamp, and then also Freehand has a little bit of a freight kind of approach to it. And then, yeah, just to finish kind of the thought of how else do we look at it, we play around with this idea of the supply chain.
[00:12:28] So another way to think about it is to look at it from kind of an industry vertical perspective. So we've made two investments in data center supply chain, which is of course a big area of interest right now. The-- most of the build-out is happening in data centers. We've made two investments in that area, and the physical AI part of it has been an interesting deep dive as well.
[00:12:51] So we're starting to make some investments in there Yeah. So we're playing both with the functionality as well as, like, the tech [00:13:00] stack that enables that functionality. But what we want to see is something net new. Like, what are you doing with, let's say, it's computer vision? Like, how does computer vision change how you solve a problem in this interesting space, right?
[00:13:14] And we pull on that thread. Yeah, that's the current approach of the fund.
[00:13:18] Gopi Rangan: I see that you have a methodical approach going sector after sector and everything related to supply chain and the physical enterprise space. How early is too early, and how late is too late? You mentioned you do half a million dollars to two million dollar investments.
[00:13:32] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yeah.
[00:13:32] Gopi Rangan: What's the sweet spot?
[00:13:34] Rohini Chakravarthy: For the most part, what we are looking for is people who have actually a little bit more than an idea. So we wanna make sure that we are working with entrepreneurs. We think of it as taking companies from proof of value to proof of market, right? So that proof of value is not... so much a revenue measure as it's more about how have you tested this with customers, and you have you unearthed some new [00:14:00] utility for this, right? And if you've certainly, if you've built a product and put it in somebody's hands and there are two or three design partners, that kind of makes it easy for us to see the proof of value or repeatability if there is a little bit of repeatability.
[00:14:13] But we don't expect it to be an engine that's already built out. So we would like to see a very clear product idea, a clear narrative on what new technology has unlocked that you couldn't have done in the past, and then have you tested this with customers? So that's the early stage. What's too late is, I think pretty much if you've gone to the point where you're getting measured on revenue metrics, that's probably already too late for us because, we are an early-stage fund and there is tremendous innovation happening.
[00:14:49] So we wanna keep our focus on the early stage. We certainly do see some excellent companies coming out in this space. And even from when we got started to now, I [00:15:00] think there's been a lot of attention. It's now a known thing that you have to invest in the supply chain.
[00:15:06] There is a lot of geopolitics. There is a lot of changing tariffs. You've got security risks. So there are a lot of reasons for capital to come into this space. So, once later stage capital has discovered a company, typically it gets to be a little too late for us to enter at least.
[00:15:23] But hopefully we'll have some of our companies tracking to get there, and we'll follow along where it makes sense.
[00:15:29] Gopi Rangan: It's hard to build a startup. In some ways, it feels like it's easy to raise money. There are lots of different types of investors available, but it is still very hard to build a successful startup.
[00:15:39] Rohini Chakravarthy: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:39] Gopi Rangan: What's your advice to founders today building in your space? Yeah. Like, what are some tips that you would like to share with founders that are specifically in your space?
[00:15:48] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yeah. I would say that I'm still a fairly traditional technical product market investor, right? I think there is a lot of financial engineering that has come into the venture space and, we can talk about [00:16:00] sort of what has changed in the twenty years that I've been investing.
[00:16:04] I think, for me, it really does start with a core problem, a burning problem that the entrepreneur just can't stop thinking about. Like, so what is that burning problem that you feel like, you have some insight here that you must solve, right? And then, it's also like, my dad sometimes, his coaching was just because you know how to solve a problem doesn't mean you are the right person to solve it , right?
[00:16:28] So also additionally, like, apply that test on, is this the right founder market fit, right? Are you the right person to solve this problem? Or otherwise, now how do you expand that team to also bring in the expertise you need to go solve that problem? So I think it really g- it does start with the first set of people, the founders, and them choosing this market.
[00:16:52] So we do see both types of founders. We see people who have a great technical insight and say, "Hey, this is something that should be of [00:17:00] value. Can we go match it to a market where this would make sense?" Right? And we'll see some number of those types of founders where they have an intuition that they should probably go sell into this space.
[00:17:14] And then we also see a lot of industry people who have had some burning problems on, hey, this is an unresolved thing in supply chain. We talk to a lot of supply chain officers. We talk to people who have worked in this industry for many years, and there are problems, like asset tracking is a constant problem.
[00:17:33] People have tried various technologies to figure out how do you manage assets better. It's kind of the gift that keeps on giving. There will be companies that'll do quite well, but it's not obvious that the person who has the problem knows how to solve it. So many times, you do need to be that matching factor where you either bring in entrepreneurs who have this technical insight, can build the product, and expose them to these market opportunities where they can go [00:18:00] fine-tune their intuition on which problem to solve.
[00:18:03] Or it could be the other way around, where there is a person who's been in the market and industry executive who understands, what the industry structure looks like, what can change if you apply new technology, and then you match that with somebody who we respect. So we do end up actually doing quite a bit of very early-stage work on that founder market fit or team building.
[00:18:24] So that's my second piece of advice, which is if you're building, have that problem that you're working on, but at least in the very early stages, sort of be open to thinking about this as a team effort, right? It's okay for you to have half the answer. Can you bring on people can help you build that?
[00:18:41] And then the third piece of advice is to sort of be a little bit methodical, as you mentioned, on what are the risks that you wanna take, and at each stage, what do you wanna de-risk at each stage. So at the very earliest stages, typically in this fund, we are not taking a lot of technology risk, right?
[00:18:59] [00:19:00] Most of it is we are taking kind of derivative. We are looking at market trends to say what is ready in terms of the, the technology, but we can take some technology risk. Like for example, in the case of Cognichip, which is in the semiconductor manufacturing space, it's an artificial chip intelligence (ACI).
[00:19:16] They call it just like a bespoke model for chip design, designed for manufacturing. There we are taking a little bit of technology risk because that model was in development when we first invested in the company. But typically, you want to make sure that you have a very good idea of what this round is for, right?
[00:19:35] Like, how much do you need to solve to take that risk off the table? And we can be helpful in trying to sort of stage this out, where as you get from technology to product risk to, market insertion or integration risk and pricing risk or business model risk, and then eventually how do you scale and so on.
[00:19:55] So we usually are very helpful in that product market, like [00:20:00] that proof of value to proof of market, and then also helping you sort of fundraise your way to that next round to get you to, like, scaling risk and, things like that.
[00:20:09] So yeah, I think for entrepreneurs trying to partner up with people who can actually be a good partner for the stage you are at. And you should probably have, different types of advisors and different types of investors around so that you know who to ask what question. So we try to spend some time trying to clarify what are we good at, how can we be helpful to you, and really bring that value to the entrepreneurs, just because then they know who to call when they have that particular issue.
[00:20:38] Gopi Rangan: A lot of what you said is subjective. These are not things that you look at a spreadsheet and the numbers, okay, the numbers are, above the threshold, below the threshold. That's not the way the decisions are made.
[00:20:50] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yeah.
[00:20:51] Gopi Rangan: What questions do you ask founders? Like, can you take an example of a meeting with a founder?
[00:20:56] Yeah. How did you assess them on the few things that you [00:21:00] mentioned, the three topics or other things as well? Yeah. How did you find that proof of value in that conversation?
[00:21:06] Rohini Chakravarthy: I mean, they've all been sort of unique journeys, I'll give you a couple of examples, and they're not... I cleaned it up for you on what the journey looks like, but it's a recursive issue, right? Great.
[00:21:16] Gopi Rangan: This is getting very interesting.
[00:21:17] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yeah. So, like, with Freehand and the way I got to know Freehand was Nitin Jayakrishnan, who's the co-founder, and CEO of the company. He had started a company called Pando, which is based in India, and they built a transportation management system.
[00:21:33] He actually reached out to me saying, "Hey, we've taken a decision to pick up and move to the US, and because we wanna solve..." This was post-ChatGPT. "We have this whole area of AI opening up, and we have a lot of knowledge about freight and logistics and so on, and we are trying to figure this out, and can you help me do some evals or, like, just trying to figure out, like, validate this idea?"
[00:21:57] Right? I think I had met Nitin [00:22:00] before that, but this is the time that I really remember because I was moderating a panel at the MIT AI Conference here in Silicon Valley and he reached out to me and said, "Hey you're speaking. Maybe you have a ticket. Can I come attend the conference?"
[00:22:12] And I was like... I mean, I didn't really know him that well, but I really liked the spunk, and I said, "Okay." "This is a ticket." I had a ticket, and I said, you can have the ticket." He did come to the conference. He was actually in Chicago. I think he was here for that weekend. Came to the conference, met a bunch of people, and then, some of my companies spoke at the event and so on.
[00:22:30] And what I realized from talking to Nitin after that was they had essentially, like, had a fantastic journey up to that point, and they were at a very crucial decision point, right? So with Pando, they felt like they had run this experiment which said, "Hey, if I build a low-cost transportation management system and I can sell tier one customers in India, then maybe I can go and sell to the same tier one customers globally," right?
[00:22:56] So they did the first part of it, right? So they built a [00:23:00] very good transportation management system, and they sold it to the likes of P&G and Hindustan Lever and so on in India. But that second part on just because, Hindustan Lever bought something, would Unilever buy it worldwide? Right.
[00:23:13] That second part they felt was not translating as fast. It was a SaaS play, right? You were essentially building a transportation management, and now it was turning into an AI world. So most of my conversations with Nitin, I didn't have any intention of investing.
[00:23:28] I was just curious about how his business ran and what was he worried about. And what he was worried about was like, "Well, if I could just say, look, I want to build a different product for the US market, but I have all this knowledge and learning from what we've done in India. How do we go about applying it?"
[00:23:47] And to his credit, he was able to essentially go from ideating to building a product and to selling some phenomenal customers J&J, Unilever, Pfizer, [00:24:00] within a year and a half.
[00:24:01] Gopi Rangan: That's the proof of value.
[00:24:03] Rohini Chakravarthy: That's the proof of value, right? And what they did was essentially a invoice audit. So it was still in the freight world, but you have a contract that says "This is my contract," and then all these actions happen.
[00:24:15] Could you use agentic AI to essentially validate that the invoices were correct compared to the contract? And this was a great use case for agents compared to humans, because it's not like humans want to do this job, and it's very expensive to do it with human beings. So I think they found an agentic use case very vertically focused, and they had learnings from the Pando experience.
[00:24:42] They translated, but it was the product wasn't the same at all, right? So I saw this proof of value. I was like, "Hey, I need to go invest in your company, but I only want to invest in the US business. Can we do that?" And that's how it followed.
[00:24:55] So I would say, like, you can find that proof of value. It may not arrive very [00:25:00] cleanly, but a lot of times it is by talking to the entrepreneur, understanding their motivations. Then you figure out, "okay how can I help you from here onwards?" And that's what we did with Freehand.
[00:25:12] Gopi Rangan: This is not a 20-minute conversation where they give you all the answers, and then you digest and form an opinion.
[00:25:19] Yeah. I can see when you started the answer, you said there's a lot of back and forth, and you're gonna clean it up and there's a lot of discovery, there's a lot of research, a lot of intuition, some postulations, and to go mix validate some assumptions...
[00:25:35] Rohini Chakravarthy: yeah ...
[00:25:35] Gopi Rangan: ask people questions, come back and continue the conversation.
[00:25:39] It's a process, and It is ... through that process, you form opinions. But the entrepreneur also comes out with a whole new perspective that they hadn't thought about.
[00:25:48] Rohini Chakravarthy: Exactly. And they also try to figure out if we are the right partners for them as well. I mean, you really do need to have that working relationship and chemistry with the entrepreneur.
[00:25:57] And, you saw this with Precursory, with Mohan as [00:26:00] well. We had a lot of back and forth on this. And he really knows the space very well and we sought you out actually to join this syndicate because one of the hypotheses we have is that, maybe the right business model here is that this should be an insurance business, right?
[00:26:17] So it could be a risk intelligence software business, but there is some chance that this is going to be an insurance business. So in which case, I'm not, probably not the right partner or, my partner Chad is not the most experienced. We have looked at insurance businesses, and we've had some experience with it.
[00:26:34] But finding a partner who's deep on that space and who can give you what worked, what didn't work, and then you can let the entrepreneur sort of make their own decisions. But having that sort of menu of advisors, right, where you can consult people with knowledge of the space, and really that kind of brings it to a much better decision if you have consulted with experts.
[00:26:57] And for the entrepreneur, having them as [00:27:00] investors is actually one of the best ways to... you didn't have to pay for consulting. Like you got Gopi's knowledge, and he gave you money. Yeah. So yeah.
[00:27:08] Gopi Rangan: I see that you take a very thoughtful approach to the whole process: asking questions, finding the right people, and how you can support founders.
[00:27:16] I also see a theme here where you've invested in a few Indian-American entrepreneurs from India moving to the US. We talked about how you're spending more time in that ecosystem. What's happening?
[00:27:27] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yeah, I think it's been quite interesting. So I've actually been an investor in the Indian ecosystem pretty much even during my Intel capital days, and I was very active as part of the India Investment Committee at NEA.
[00:27:40] We had a full team on the ground in India, as well as partnerships with companies like Kalari and so on. And, with this fund, certainly our focus is very much the US market, right? And so we've also had to sort of clarify where we sit in this Indian-American cross-border [00:28:00] ecosystem, right?
[00:28:00] So there are a few things that are pretty clear. So there is, like, a supply chain reordering. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening. So for example, 70% of Apple 17s are made in India now, right? So there is a Make in India push to the extent there is an integrated supply chain.
[00:28:17] There is actually a growing supply chain, cross-border US-India supply chain where, we could be very helpful to entrepreneurs to cross that. The other thing that's happening is that, if you think of the, the new areas, so data centers, space, maybe even defense, but not so much in defense, but a lot of the physical AI things that you would think about were robotics and e-commerce, ware-warehousing, all of these things are very translatable, but they also have certain geographical bound-boundaries. So when entrepreneurs in India especially are thinking about, "Hey, I want to go to the go-to market in the US, and I want to sell in India," like, so that dual market approach, it can be very good in the long run, but in the [00:29:00] short run, it can actually be very distracting for the companies because you may have to pick one, and which one do you pick? So we feel like there are market trends that make it very interesting for entrepreneurs to do this cross-border thing. What we are trying to do is to try and figure out how to be part of this ecosystem. Probably, in India at least, it's not gonna be directly at the earliest stages.
[00:29:21] At least have not done that as much so far. We've invested in one company called Dodge AI, which started in India. They raised from Antler in India, and then Accel came in, and so we invested in one of their early rounds. And there the market definition was very clear.
[00:29:38] It was all US go-to market. So we knew how to help the entrepreneur there. So we are starting to work with a lot of local pre-seed investors and expressing an interest in the supply chain area. Those are the things that are quite interesting. The inverse is also true in a lot of my entrepreneurs, like you observed.
[00:29:56] Many of them have extensive operations. The Lyric, I think, has a lot of [00:30:00] people in Pune and in Chennai and Bangalore. And Pull Logic, which is one of our companies based in Atlanta, has a pretty big presence in Gurgaon and in Bangalore. And actually, at IIT Madras, they have a supply chain center of excellence.
[00:30:15] So yeah definitely, both ways. So in terms of having entrepreneurs here who are using Indian talent, and there is a ton of supply chain talent, by the way, in India. Like, if you think about the last generation of the supply chain build, a lot of that happened. You think of Accenture or think of SAP consultants at HCL and Infosys and Wipro and so on.
[00:30:36] A lot of supply chain talent is in India, actually. So we are trying to be present in that ecosystem, but still very much focused on US go-to market, at least for the near term. But yeah, so if there are entrepreneurs in your network who are thinking about these spaces, we try to put out what we're interested in widely so that they can come find us.
[00:30:58] We're very bespoke in [00:31:00] that way. Yeah.
[00:31:01] Gopi Rangan: I've invested in the topic of supply chain a few times, and I hope to find more opportunities for us to collaborate. I have to talk about AI. Mm-hmm. We cannot conclude- Of course ... a conversation in today's time without talking about AI. For the next generation of entrepreneurs or the next generation of talent, does it make sense to study computer science?
[00:31:18] Rohini Chakravarthy: Absolutely. So I, this is this is a question that I love to..
[00:31:22] Gopi Rangan: That's a controversial take.
[00:31:24] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yes. So I would say, look, I think obviously we are going through a time when CS enrollments have peaked, right? And people are worried about are CS majors gonna find jobs. I can give you a few things that, like few ways to think about why the age of AI is an amazing time for computer science students.
[00:31:44] One is just the types of problems that are coming up are just so amazing. If you're a true computer scientist, somebody who's interested in the art of computer science, I guess, or even performance, scaling, security, like [00:32:00] every aspect of it, outside of even if, Let's assume we're not all gonna die because of recursive self-improvement. So just leave that out for a second.
[00:32:08] I would say that the types of problems you get to work on are just amazing. Like, this is, like, for someone who is intellectually motivated to work on interesting problems in computer science, you should absolutely study computer science.
[00:32:21] People who were going to be just, coders, AI is gonna do a lot of the coding. But I think for people who wanna work on true problems and use it in interesting ways, it's a great time to actually build up that knowledge. The other thing which is also sort of an interesting observation which, I came out of this session.
[00:32:40] So Lyric had a user conference in Chicago four weeks ago, and I was there, and I was listening to, like, some of the customers giving these talks. It's a beauty company called Elf Beauty, they gave this talk, and they said, now we're hiring for supply chain engineers." It's sort of become like a K-shaped [00:33:00] economy for tasks, right?
[00:33:01] So on the one hand, with AI, if you're a business user, you can actually self-serve a lot of things. Like, you don't have to go ask IT to run you an analytics report. You just ask your AI, and it'll do it for you. So it's actually empowering a lot of business users to do a lot of interesting things, right?
[00:33:19] But it's also creating a need for computer scientists to work in areas that they didn't work in before. So let's say there's a job which is, like, a logistics manager. You might have run some scripts. This is sort of like in the old days.
[00:33:33] If you had an IT person, they would run scripts. They were not necessarily computer scientists.
[00:33:58] Over time, that job goes in two ways. Like, so either you can be a business user who understands the need for this thing, and you, you completely use AI to write your own little apps to, to do certain things, or it becomes heavily computer science job. So you al-already see, you know, SREs, for example, (site reliability engineers) used to run shell scripts. Today, they run full-fledged computer science engineers trying to figure out how do you, you know, keep massive systems running, right? You need a computer scientist to be an SRE. Uh, you didn't need a computer scientist for that. So similarly, in supply chain, I think you'll just see a lot of people who are solving problems in very computer science-y ways. I'm sure the same is true of fintech. Like, everybody knows that, you know, in finance, that has been a big industry for, you know, computer science innovation, including networking innovation. Like, how, how you, how do you get your, your trading systems as close to the exchange as possible for high qu-- You know, there have been all kinds of innovations that have come about because of customer need, and I think AI is just gonna bolster that, you know, enormously. So what we will see is that
[00:34:53] there will be new opportunities for computer science majors. The only thing I would say is make [00:35:00] sure you have an interest computer science plus something right? It could be robotics, it could be supply chain, it could be civil engineering, it could be architecture, it could be music, it could be so...
[00:35:12] I think AI is gonna, it'll permeate all these different fields. So if you do computer science plus something else, I think that'll make you a very attractive employee for many of these new companies.
[00:35:25] Gopi Rangan: That's a strong dose of optimism. We're coming towards the end of our conversation and I want to ask you about your community involvement.
[00:35:31] Mm-hmm. Is there a nonprofit organization you are passionate about? Which one?
[00:35:35] Rohini Chakravarthy: Yeah. So I've actually been very active with a lot of the alumni groups. So I was on the IIT Madras Foundation for six years. I was on the board there for six years. On the MIT Club of Northern California's board, and we do a lot of activities.
[00:35:52] We do about 130 events a year believe it or not. Like, so it's a very active club. And have been sort of involved with [00:36:00] groups like Neythri, which is a group for South Asian American professional women and in diaspora, so I've been quite active with these groups. I would say sort of personally, like outside of this, some of the groups that I am engaged with is a group called Mercy For Animals, which is really looking at the problem of factory farms.
[00:36:20] They're quite active in essentially advocating for animals that live in pretty atrocious conditions. And outside of my optimism about AI, I do feel like AI can be a tool where the powerful can control the weak, and animals are amongst the most weak. So I think there are things that we probably should be doing.
[00:36:39] So that's an area where I'm quite passionate about.
[00:36:43] Gopi Rangan: That. Rohini, thank you very much for spending time with me. Thank you for sharing candid stories. It's refreshing to see specific examples of companies like Lyric and Precursory and a few others, that you share the real-life examples of how those conversations went, how you [00:37:00] made decisions, what do you look for, what does proof of value really mean that really gets the trigger for you to start thinking about an investment.
[00:37:09] It's fantastic to hear those examples. It's a treasure trove of wisdom. I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world.
[00:37:15] Rohini Chakravarthy: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
[00:37:19] 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.
[00:37:28] Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look forward to catching you at the next episode