Sudheesh Nair, CEO of TinyFish, discusses raising $47M to develop AI-powered digital agents. The discussion includes insights on startup growth, effective.
Sudheesh Nair, CEO of TinyFish, discusses raising $47M to develop AI-powered digital agents. The discussion includes insights on startup growth, effective communication as a CEO, and navigating the tech landscape.
When you search means you're lost. Browsing means you don't know what you want. You're just wandering. What if you have an intentful, goal-driven group of agents that is going and getting you exactly that? All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we have an amazing amazing guest. you know, I guess that has seen, you know, quite a bit, you know, when it comes to uh the startup world and you know, we've actually had a bunch of um people that have been in some of the uh companies that he has also been involved with, but now he's at it, you know, he's really doing it, you know, with his own company. We're going to be talking about the building, the scaling, the financing also, you know, whether there is hype or not in this AI, you know, world right now. We're going to be digging into that as well as how to uh be calibrated by VCs. Uh also how to listen or how
not to listen, you know, for the right advice and many other things that I think are going to make the episode right now super exciting. So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Sudesh Na. Welcome to the show. >> Hello, Hando. Thank you so much. I love your radio voice. You were we were speaking normal voice and then the recording stopped and started and suddenly the radio voice comes out. >> There we go. There we go. Ready for action. So, Sudesh in your case, you know, give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up there in India? >> It was good. Look, I think uh sometimes we overestimate what it takes to be happy. I kind of feel like we are all uh the water level keep raising and what it takes to make us happy keeps going up. But I grew up in a very normal lower middle-class family. Didn't have a lot of money or resources but a very stable
family, loving parents, a brother that sometimes I loved, sometimes we used to fight. Uh phenomenal uh friends and uh good education. Uh no real adversity. Uh obviously you know growing up in 80s and 90s in India it's nothing like the India of today. um TVs and all of those things the resources luxury social media none of those existed US was uh honestly US was nothing but uh I think it was probably Miami wise and uh soon after that maybe Baywatch that's all I knew about US happy times >> now in your case Sudish it sounds like serendipity has been a a big one uh and when you were there in India there was one of the teachers that that you really had a a connection with and and eventually a recommendation to take an interview changed the course of everything. So tell us about this. >> Yeah, Alejandro, I think uh sometimes you know we overestimate the power of planning and
analysis and then miss out like really the opportunity that's in front of us. My life um has always been about taking the choice right in front of us. If there is an AB fork, I'm really good at taking on the fork that I think is the best with the given data that I have. Then the only thing that comes out part of the package is that you have to make sure that you don't regret the fork you took. And also make sure that if it is a wrong fork, you don't spend too much time thinking about why it was wrong, but spend just enough time to figure out what went wrong and then correct it. So going back to the story uh when I was uh in college you know there was a campus interview happening that was not for the the the sessions that I was taking but there was a teacher who said you should go talk to this uh company and uh she missed me by let's say five minutes I would not have taken that road and
that road led me to the US and I can tell you so many stories where the ability to sort of make quick decisions with The most amount of analysis that you can do with given data has helped me and I to date when it comes to company building whether it is product or engineering or go to market I often prefer decisions made with the uh the data that is present versus waiting too long for all the pieces to come together and today with AI it has become a necessity as well >> a thousand%. So tell us about coming to the US because obviously the US you know has been pivotal in your career. Yeah, I think um I don't know for me I've traveled a lot Alejandro as part of u you know both nutanics and thoughtpot growth worldwide growth and one of the best thing that happened for me is the opportunity to travel to pretty much all continents and a lot of countries I would say still maybe 100
countries I haven't visited but uh probably cover most of the others and sometimes people ask um which country is best and I honestly don't have an answer. Every country has something unique that is beautiful about them. At the core of it, I found that every people are same. They're all looking for safety, love and belonging. US particularly Bay Area and I've spent most of my adult life in the Bay Area. So, it is a bubble. I'm very aware of it. within the bubble of Bay Area I found home because it is one of those places where um two things that I value were cherished. First is this is a place where people not just appreciate but value failures like I can't imagine any other place where u people would say oh you failed fantastic come talk to me more let's do more of it. Uh second is uh pretty much everyone belongs in the Bay Area. Now when I say that often sometimes feel like oh I had
this experience or this happened to me and that is all true. In fact uh if you look carefully if I were to spend time looking at all the things happened in my life I would also find a lot of places and times where things did not go well for me or I was not in the most advantageous position. But somehow when I look back in life, I've been nothing but grateful for being in Bay Area where you can fail, you can try again. Everyone sort of gives you the shot. It doesn't matter, you know, which school you went to, what accent you have, how tall you are. That's been my experience. Maybe I choose to only see that, but that has served me well because when I go anywhere in the world, I feel the same way. But when I take that San Francisco airport and land after a long trip and take 280 down south, I feel like, okay, I'm driving home. >> So in your case, um you know, again, serendipity coming
across and connecting with the one of the co-founders of Nutanix was uh was a big one for you because obviously from their nutanics, then spot. So I mean it's it's been kind of like in the part of the nutanics, you know, let's say mafia. Um, so I guess in your case, how did you guys connect and and also walk us through through the sequence of events that needed to happen for you to be part of that early team uh of what it is today a $20 billion company. >> Yeah. So DJ Pande, Mohit Aaron and Ajit, they were u the founders of Nutanix and uh I was one of the first guys after that. uh Dhiraj uh ran the company for uh most of its existence until uh I think close to 2020. Uh Ajit and Mohit left after the first year or so. Uh so when you think of it, I met Moit and Ajit in in the early years of my US experience in a early stage startup. uh we all went different directions and then the way
it worked was Dj reached out to me when I was uh uh I think in a parking lot trying to chase a deal for another company that I was working at [snorts] and uh he said we're going to start something and I said uh for me it's always been about people and I always found u you know Mohitander I knew very well I didn't know Ajit at that time and I knew that you know between them uh there is a peace that I could add that they didn't have and they could do things that I couldn't do. So it was all about team so came together. We were also very young and uh we didn't know what we were doing. And in a sense that was one of the best thing that happened because uh when you don't know what you're doing, you are willing to try. You're not ashamed if any fail. Uh you are swinging at every ball that is coming to your way. And Nutanix was competing against VMware. At that time we are married is like this
behemoth and we just went with like extreme courage and we never held nothing back and that is a lesson that sort of stuck with me that if you fight like you have a lot to lose you will lose and nutanics was an example of building out of nothing. We took the company public in 2016 and that was another example. 2016 was not a great year to take company public was I don't know if you remember this is uh the times were pretty bad for IPOs. In fact, Nutanics was I think one of the first tech IPOs of that year. uh even that uh you know it was a questionable decision uh whether to take the company public at that time or not but I was running the go to market and it was clear that customers wanted to see a separation from private companies and public company to invest for larger scale and uh you know the I we were not the kind of people who overanalyze things as well it is the right thing to do
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