In 2014, Naveen Rao left his researcher job at Qualcomm to co-found machine intelligence platform Nervana. About two and a half years later, Nervana sold to Intel for more than $400 million.

After a few years at Intel, Naveen became CEO and co-founder of open source startup MosaicML, which helped companies build and train large AI models more efficiently and affordably.

Approximately two and a half years later, Databricks acquired that company for $1.3 billion and made him VP of Generative AI.

Naveen is a neuroscientist with multiple exits, so we spoke at length about shifting from engineering into entrepreneurship. If you have a technical role and are considering starting up, he shares his perspective on balancing day-to-day responsibilities while validating your idea, the importance of challenging industry assumptions, and finding your market niche.

We also talked about who should — and should not — startup in stealth and addressed some of the current challenges facing the generative AI startup ecosystem, such as the rapid failure rates of companies due to high GPU costs and overinvestment in 2021-2022.

Runtime: 51:16 EPISODE BREAKDOWN

(2:54) “Evidence is always less than you want. At some point you kind of have to take a leap.”

(5:37) “My journey with Nervana was, it was immediately clear to me that the world needed this.”

(11:52) “Get in the head of someone who's going to exchange money for your services and products.”

(14:54) Why he’s not a big fan of remote work.

(18:35) “It is on you as an adult to find balance that you can work with. It is not the company's duty to do this.”

(20:31) Why product companies should “probably not” startup in stealth.

(23:11) “It wasn't the right time to sell. I didn't look at it like that at all.”

(26:32) Hiring and retaining generative AI talent is “a hard problem right now.”

(30:16) “Companies are failing pretty fast because the GPU spends are so big.”

(35:04) Interacting with Databricks’ developer community.

(43:11) Naveen on accelerators: “I think there are actually faster ways to learn.”

(45:05) When it comes to angel investing, “I'm looking for creativity, honestly.”

(47:34) If you were interviewing for a job with an early-stage startup, what's one question you'd have to ask the CEO?

LINKS

Subscribe to Fund/Build/Scale on Substack: fundbuildscale.substack.com

From tech worker to tech founder: Lessons from Naveen Rao of Databricks