00:09:39 · Surojit Chatterjee
The next three years at Google, when I ran shopping, Google was becoming a place which was not very enjoyable to work anymore. Google had actually, as a company, changed dramatically from cultural perspective. Some of the things that were very positive about Google had degenerated into being very negative. So Google was a place where people would always express their opinion very freely. People could discuss anything. But you can take that to an extreme and then discuss anything and everything that is outside the scope of Google's main mission or the business, and everybody is distracted. So I felt actually very fortunate to leave Google, have done something else, have seen something different. At every stage of growth, there is a risk that your culture will degenerate because you are hiring new people. You have to learn how to work in a different setting and so on. So you have to be very aware and very deliberate, very intentional to maintain culture. In fact, you have to take a stance that this is our culture. If you as an individual don't align with our culture, there are other opportunities out there, other options out there. Yes, it's possible to maintain the culture, but you have to be ready to be unpopular, make hard calls, and be very intentional about maintaining the culture. Look, I have run very large teams, grown teams in companies like Google, Coinbase, Flipkart, some of the best companies in the world. And one thing that always bothered me, we hired really talented people, but then a large percentage of their time was still spent in repetitive work. So the idea behind Ema is, can we automate most of the mundane tasks people have to do in enterprises and free them up to do more value added, more creative tasks? In our journey, first thing is we walked very closely with customers very, very early on. We built the product actually working with multiple customers as design partners. So from the get go, we knew there is a need. We knew if you build it, at least there are a few customers. And I think the trick is to figure out, okay, are these the only customers who will use it or there is a broader demand? So you have to talk to enough customers to recognize patterns and make sure, okay, whatever you are building is not too custom for this given customer.
00:12:18 · Surojit Chatterjee
You may have to do some custom work for your early customer, but you have to be very clear eyed on which part of your product is a platform that can be reused and which part is maybe you are customizing a little bit for some of your early customers. The other advice I'll give to any startup founder or particularly AI founder, focus on building. Nothing matters. We kept the company in stealth for a year. We did not announce our fundraise. We didn't announce an incorporation. So funny story, some of our employees in in India will complain that, what do I tell my parents? Why do I work? It just says stealth and there is no website. We kept it under radar and stealth just so we can focus and not get distracted by by everything that's happening. You know, there's too much noise out there. You can spend your entire day on Twitter and talking to many people and getting too much wisdom. You, of course, want to absorb that and and look at what's happening in the world, but you have to have your own conviction, and you have to block it out and focus. That's so important because when you build a great product, everything else will fall into place. See, our long term vision is, will be a conversational operating system for every enterprise out there. I think there'll be a future where in every company, a team of human employees will work with a team of AI employees. That's the world we envision where companies with very few people actually being able to create enormous impact. A 100 people company making a billion dollar revenue. How about a 10 people company making a billion dollar revenue? Or even a one person company making a billion dollars in revenue or more. I think we will be able to enable that in the future where a few human employees will work with a group of AI agents and AI employees like Ema to build really large companies.