Building A Global AI Startup From India

15:59Madhav Jha:now, right, in the industry that, hey, is, you know, like Anthropic going to eat everybody up? Yeah, I mean, our view is that I think the coding aspect is only 20 % of the job, right? I think, like, taking an app to production is, like, really, really hard. And I think what matters is how closely are you working with the user? How well do you understand their needs? And I think as the models are going to get more and more, sort of, capable, I think the human design is also continuously growing at the same rate. So, I think people are going to want to build more complex apps on the platform. The other thing is that at least with our harness we're able to extract 20-30 % more on top of these models.

16:32Madhav Jha:And essentially, we can use multiple foundation models together to sort of extract more. And I think we'll have to keep continuing delivering more and more things to our users. For example, now we're thinking about a lot of our users who have built the app now want to help with distribution, now want help with growth, now want help with how do you manage users and things like that. And I think for us, the spectrum sort of keeps growing on that side. I agree with it.

16:55Mukund Jha:I mean, there's another graph that I shared recently. It's just like the number of software engineering positions available is actually going up, right? And I feel like at least internally at YC, you're experiencing this. It's like the more powerful the tools get, the more ideas you get, and the more work you want to do. And it just feels like everyone here is working like more hours, doing more stuff. And it's just like the rate of like software that you're expected to ship per week just keeps going up and up and up.

17:20Madhav Jha:It's a hedonistic adaptation to, you know, like, hey, oh, this is more powerful. Now I can do more work.

17:24Mukund Jha:yeah it is really at javan's paradox at play and i think there's a lot of concerns like oh the software engineering jobs will be gone i don't think that's the case i mean based on everything that you're telling us and what we're experiencing i mean i think we're in an expanding market right

17:39Madhav Jha:like we are like letting non-developers not be developers right i think you know that market is expanding we also are internally seeing like the roles sort of combining so like a pm a designer engineer like a single person is doing you know like work of all three together right so like we We have a PM who's white coding internally things. And recently, like we, so we are seeing this internally right now where a lot of the work that was done by like five, six people can now be just done by like a single engineer or a single PM. YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com slash apply.

18:15Madhav Jha:It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video.

18:21Mukund Jha:Could we see a demo of a merchant?

18:22Madhav Jha:Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, so this is what Immersion Interface looks like. And I'm going to put a prompt where because we were coming for this podcast, I thought there should be an app which lets you practice podcast questions or maybe you're going to a job interview and you want to practice questions, right? So you can build a full stack app on Immersion. You can build a mobile app. Our prompt engine is smart enough that once you give it a prompt, it will figure out that this is talking about a mobile app. So it'll figure out like, hey, the right agent to use is a mobile app builder, right?

18:49Mukund Jha:So even though you selected the wrong tab, it's just like, Yeah, yeah. The behind the scenes auto.

18:55Madhav Jha:Yeah, I got you. Right. So while this is running, let me quickly also show you a few user apps. So this is by somebody based out of Illinois. He's sort of has a business of audio video setup that they do as manually. Right. So basically whatever this kind of like intake form they would have taken through spreadsheet and other calls, they basically build this out without any coding background knowledge. Right. Like, hey, this is the kind of AV setup I want. So you go and you build your room and then you get, it's a lead gen sort of a form. But this is a fairly full stack app.

19:28Mukund Jha:One thing I noticed about that is like the design is really good. Like the icons, like it just like, it looks like a well-designed app.

19:34Madhav Jha:So we have actually spent a lot of time on making sure design is actually good. Yeah. Like so earlier there used to be a big trade-off between design and functionality. Like if you're optimizing for design, like your functionality would not be that strong. And so we had to figure out like how do we sort of, you know, share the context in a way where design also gets better. There's another sort of person based out of Norway. He sold his previous business to a PE and realized how much lawyers have to struggle with spreadsheets and other things. So he built a CRM for lawyers. He describes himself as like business developer.

20:02Madhav Jha:I like the word he used, like I'm a business developer. He doesn't have a programming background. So a lot of CRM related apps, we are seeing small businesses. It's your second monetization avenue, right? And so like one of the unique things for Emergent is that before agent goes off to build things, it asks you for some clarification because agent wants to make sure that it understood your requirements properly. And another thing is that non-technical users probably don't know the concept of API key. How do I get an open AI API key? So in this particular case, I can just say, hey, use emergent LLM key.

20:32Madhav Jha:So you don't have to worry about getting API key from third party.

20:36Mukund Jha:This feels like a good example of what you were saying. Because this is sort of like the ask user question skill include code, but you just like abscrap that away. But you just like built into the experience for someone who had no idea about.

20:46Madhav Jha:Absolutely. I can be very like casual here. I can say, hey, for the first one, use emergent API key, rest, assume good defaults, and then go. This is the first time I hand off the agent. And like at this point, I can just like close my laptop. We also have a mobile app. So you can like on the go, keep trying to prompt agent if agent requires an additional thing. Once it's done, you see a preview of your app. So here, for example, in this case, I can practice what is my origin story. I can record what my origin story is and I can keep going to, you know, know, various questions. Eventually, this is a podcast preparation app.

21:20Yeah.

21:21Madhav Jha:And then you can go ahead and revisit what answers you gave to your app. And so what we have noticed is that a lot of personal apps people use people build mobile apps, but a lot of business apps, they would go and build a web app, right? So that's generally the trend we are seeing. The only other thing I wanted to show was this is this is an actual Asana clone that our team built, like one of our QA engineers built internally and so this is actual real emergent data i'm curious what prompted that like was there

21:51Mukund Jha:some was there some feature that asana was lacking or something it wasn't doing that made them say

21:57Madhav Jha:hey we should just build our own yeah it kind of like started off as a qa uh engineer's curiosity he he like his first prompt i looked at his all jobs the first prompt was clone jira okay and then like he just kept going with that and uh and i think the other thing is we do do things a little bit differently. So for example, we ship like three times a day, morning, evening, night. So we kind of like built it very customized to the way we do things. Like we have a QA involvement in many, many ways. And definitely like when we were using Asana, it was very, like even to customize it to make it to your work style was not easy.

22:31Madhav Jha:And we are also saving like, you know, like$3 ,000,$4 ,000 a month in subscription. This is a world of personal software. Yeah.

22:38Mukund Jha:Has anybody actually edited the code for this or is just 100 % built with Emergent?

22:43Madhav Jha:100 % built with Emergent. And the good thing is that if I want to add a feature, I have to just go to that project and just add a feature and it just starts building.

22:51Mukund Jha:It's probably useful for you guys to dog boot the platform this way because this is probably at the edge of the most complex apps people have built with Emergent. So it allows you to test what happens when people get to a very complex app like this.

23:02Madhav Jha:In fact, a lot of the teams internally are now building apps using Emergent internally. So we have like a marketing team built out of complete CRM, completely built on emergent. We are now like our customer support team is building customer support software, completely built on emergent. And the power is that these are people who are closest to the problem, like who, you know, who understand the problem really, really well and are able to now build these apps. And the speed at which we are able to ship, you know, these internal apps is like crazy.

23:27Mukund Jha:How far down does it go, though? I'm curious, even within the company, do you have people who want their like separate versions of like your internal Asana?

23:34Madhav Jha:So currently, everybody in the company is using this one tool right now. And it is being built collaboratively. So a PM can give a feature, a QA can give a feature, somebody from our HR team can give a feature to build that out right now.

23:48Mukund Jha:How do you think this version control and feature flagging, all this stuff develops in a world where anyone could just write a couple of sentences to update the software they're using?

23:59Madhav Jha:Yeah, so there is a testing phase, there's a deployment phase. So we have different versions maintained. and there is a primary owner of the software who actually manages this right now and so it evolves like somebody will make a feature request somebody will sort of build that out, the agent will build that out and then once it's accepted then it'll go to the release.

24:19Mukund Jha:It's not managed through Git though, it's like your own workflow thing

24:22Madhav Jha:So you can connect GitHub if you want to we internally connect GitHub for our projects and like non-technical developers outside of emergent they actually call GitHub GitHub right so they they have very uh like limited uh knowledge of github and so they we take care of like versioning on our site even if they don't connect github to talk about how you run your

24:41Mukund Jha:team the way you hire must be very different i mean you're a very lean and small team how do you

24:47Madhav Jha:hire for engineering yeah so we we actually from from day one have been very conscious of the kind of team that we want to build and essentially like we index on two things one is problem solving like how good are you at problem solving uh and second is ownership like we think that people who can like really really take ownership uh you know like we index on that and a lot of early sort of hires were people like you know we were really obsessed with like top 100 it rankers so we had this like program going on where like i told you know our team that hey we must hire like top 100 it rankers uh right now i think we have like it rank 1 it rank 12 uh all of those people working with us and a lot of the initials that also came from dunzo so i because i was able to build like a really really good team we were able to get some some initial folks from that the focus that that we have is essentially like one or two people doing work of what a company would be doing.

25:34Madhav Jha:For example, our deployment, which almost mirrors what our cell would look like, is done by two people. Like our memory, like where you have like multiple startups solving for memory, is just built by one person. So I think like we give way more responsibility to people. And I think people are generally attracted towards harder problems that they want to solve.

25:50Mukund Jha:Where is your team located?

25:51Madhav Jha:So most of the team right now is in Bangalore, an India office. We have a very small office in SF, like three to five people here.

25:57Mukund Jha:And you guys yourselves, you're kind of like split across both countries. Can you maybe just explain how the setup works?

26:05Madhav Jha:Yeah. So, I mean, I live here in SF. I've been in like, you know, Bay Area for like last 10 years. I split half my time in SF, half my time in Bangalore, constantly jet lagged.

26:13Mukund Jha:I think you guys are probably the most successful AI company. It's not fair that you came from like, it's an Indian company, but that's got like significant presence in India. Why is that?

26:24Madhav Jha:I mean, I think it's like when I went back to India, you know, after Google, and I always had this thought that why is there no Google or Facebook from India, right? So like from day zero, I was thinking, you know, even though I started Anzo, it was an India focused company at that time. And when I was starting the second company, I always thought like, hey, there has to be, you know, like, we have so much talent, we have, you know, a lot of capital available, everything's available in India, like, why are people not building truly global tech first companies from India? And, and that was the ambition that we started with.

26:51Madhav Jha:And in my opinion, I think a lot of it is with, you know, like just your ambition. Like if you just dream big, if you're able to sort of really, really think global from day zero. I think now because the internet is sort of fully penetrated, people can actually get understanding knowledge from everywhere. I think every single country has an opportunity to build for a global audience. And if you have that sort of mindset, that ambition, I think we'll see a lot more companies coming out of India doing the same.

27:15Mukund Jha:I'm curious to hear what it's actually like sort of on the ground running this sort of like split country company where the team is mostly in India, but the product is overwhelmingly used in the US and Western Europe. It's not probably for the Indian market at all. What is it like running this company? How would it be different if you had built a normal Silicon Valley style company that was all based here?

27:39Madhav Jha:Internally, we have like really, really set really high standards, like as a global sort of product. I mean, both in hiring, both in like the way we sort of develop product. And I think us spending sort of time here also helps. Like one of the things that we do really religiously is everybody talks to a customer once a week, twice a week. Like everyone in the entire company. Everyone in the company, right? They talk to a customer. Everybody does customer support. So like we were like a really, really small engineering team, like 12 people team. And one person was always on call for customer support.

28:05Madhav Jha:It was really hard to do for us because, you know, you're a really small team. You need to ship really fast and then move like one of your best engineers out to do customer support was really hard. but I think that really, really helped us build the customer empathy from day zero. And I think given that a lot of our distribution happens online, the teams are able to learn from digital things and build for it. But I think us building that customer empathy from day zero, talking to our users, really, really helped us bridge the gap in terms of what our users want today. And it's funny because when we launched my first five days, I was just glued to a desk doing customer support only.

28:39Madhav Jha:And most of the customer requests were coming in a different language, like French, German, because a lot of these are global. And thanks to AI, we were able to understand that, reply to that. And I think that is also helping us bridge the gap there. And we are hiring here in SF. So if anybody's interested in joining in various positions, like research across the board, like backend engineers, threatened engineers, we are hiring here in SF and in Bangalore.

29:04Mukund Jha:I'd love to go back to what we were talking about regarding personalized software. And what do you think the implications are for SaaS in general? yeah like the provocative question is that's dead now i mean you guys essentially killed asana for yourselves yeah like is that bad for asana and other sas companies i mean i definitely

29:20Madhav Jha:think that like the current um way the sas is existing today needs to change right i think like i feel there are two like sort of massive headwinds one is more and more of these sas workflows are going to get consumed by an agent right like so like um you know unless your sas company pivots into like an agent first company uh you know i think uh that's going to be hard to sort of survive. And second headwind is obviously like, you know, like people would want more and more customized software, like which they can build on Emergent, just like we built, you know, our own Do It project management tool.

29:51Madhav Jha:And we are seeing a lot of these people, you know, building these internal tools, these software on a platform like ours. And like, I feel the nature of software itself is changing. I think a lot more software will become agentic in nature. A lot of people are building on Emergent today, like roughly 20 % of them are actually agentic apps. So people are actually embedding our own emergent agent inside those apps to sort of power a bunch of the workflows.

30:15Mukund Jha:Do you have some interesting, that sounds really cool, an interesting example that people do?

30:18Madhav Jha:Yeah, I mean, like the app that Manny was just showing, the CRM for lawyers, that is an agentic app where an agent can take a workflow and run through the process. The software itself is now morphing into agentic. A lot of people would just want to build agents that can actually just do a lot more of the work on its own.

30:37Mukund Jha:Where do you think this goes as agents' horizon for tasks gets longer and longer? I mean, the meter chart is one of the ones that was very shocking recently.

30:47Madhav Jha:Yeah, I think that's the chart of the year, I would say, right? Like the meter's exponential growth. And like 4.5 was at like, I think, 4 hours and 4.6 is at 10 hours. And we are internally sort of now like, you know, experimenting with agent swarms where agents can actually like work for a much longer horizon. and multiple agents can sort of coordinate on a single task. Early users are like pretty, pretty exciting. You know, we'll see. I think by the end of the year, you'll have, you know, agents which are running away for hours and like maybe hundreds of agents collaborating on just single task.

31:19Madhav Jha:And that's where we sort of see the future going right now. How are you building for that? People's admissions are increasing, right? Like, and so like we want to like give agents more autonomy, right? And so like the main thing is to make sure that the trajectory doesn't get derailed. So you always want to have like an overseeing agent, right? So it's like, let's say a few agents are collaborating and there is an overseeing agent as well, which is like parallelly monitoring the overall task. So we are experimenting with many different architectures. Something even as simple as just, you would have heard of this Ralph Wiggum loop kind of a phenomenon, right?

31:51Madhav Jha:So the idea that, hey, just keep poking the agent, hey, continue until it's done. And all of that is only possible if there is a good verification loop, right? So it comes back to, hey, are you able to give autonomous verification feedback to the agent? Like, was the job done? So a lot of our work internally right now is, in fact, still going on building best verifiers. There we are actually doing some custom fine-tuning as well. So we are very careful about not directly competing with the models in the sense that we don't want to build an Opus 4.5 alternative right away. But we do want to augment it through our custom fine-tuned verification layers.

32:25Madhav Jha:So some of the fun stuff on the research side we are doing is on that side.

32:29Mukund Jha:How do you think about some movement in the opposite direction? I mean, we talked about sort of like the models themselves, maybe getting more powerful. And what does that mean for everyone building on top of them? But how about at least some of the model companies are explicitly trying to build applications and own the application layer themselves. If one of those companies decides like, you know, clawed code for non-technical users is a really valuable application to build. What implications does that have for you?

32:53Madhav Jha:I mean, I think eventually I think like, do you understand your customers' requirement really, really well? Are you building closer to them? I think all of those fundamentals of startup building are the same. And I think for us, as long as we are focused on really, really understanding our users' need really, really best, I think we'll compete on the process.

33:09Mukund Jha:Do you think about all the model companies as the same or the differences between them?

33:14Madhav Jha:If you look at the models themselves, they're very different. For example, Opus is obviously a workhorse. Codex is really good in backend debugging. Gemini is really good in frontend. So I think all of these models have their own behaviors. and a good thing for us is that we can actually utilize these spikes that model have to provide the best experience to the user. And I think eventually, at least my worldview is that most of these models are going to get really, really commoditized, where all of these models will have similar behaviors. They'll have price competitiveness between them. And you can already see OpenSource is maybe three to six months behind.

33:51Madhav Jha:And there's enough optionality for us to really, really build the layer on top where we really meet the user where they are. and sort of support them in sort of their journey. Who understands the customer needs really, really well and is able to build for that is going to sort of win the space.

34:04Mukund Jha:You just built 7 million apps with Emergent. What are all these apps? Who are the users and what surprised you seeing what people do with it?

34:11Madhav Jha:The users who are coming to platform for us are generally people who want to build a serious app, people who like really, really have a business use case that they want to automate or they have a business idea that they want to launch. Primary users who are coming to us are small, medium business owners. They're running their business today on email, whatsapp spreadsheet uh and would have gone to a dev shop to sort of build a custom software um to run automate their business they're coming to us and if you look at the price point that you know we are bringing down it would have costed you like five hundred thousand dollars to build the software now you can build it for five thousand dollars completely on your own um and that is the kind of you know like unlock that we are sort of bringing to the world right now uh second for example this morning i was talking to user christy she's based out of alaska and she built this, she's a clinical psychologist.

34:55Madhav Jha:She's also a sports coach for equestrian, the horse riding. And she wanted to marry these two fields like that. She has a lot of insights on psychology side. She has a lot of insight on horse riding side. And she said she looked around everywhere to find an app that does that. She couldn't find one. She wanted to build one. She actually went to a dev shop. Definitely the intersection of money she is. And she went to a dev shop in Nova Scotia and tried to find somebody who can build it. they were charging her a bomb so she you know discovered emergent started building uh out and she just launched her app like a couple weeks back it's called equimine on an app store uh and it actually marries you know like her insights in psychology and and and uh into this this uh sports coaching um she has like hundreds of users right now using the using platform i think that is a lot that we're trying to build like you know people who would have been um who have had an idea for a long time people who are like really a domain expert very close to a problem uh can now go and build things up.

35:49Madhav Jha:We also have like a lot of solopreneurs building on platform like who would have had to go and hire a technical CTO to build these apps. And the success that we are seeing on the platform is like recently somebody pinged me that hey like this company has raised like$4 million on an ad that was built on Immersion. Really? Yeah, yeah. And I need to get their permission to share more. But yeah. And so I think now we are just truly seeing this unlock where people who were like really close to problem domain expert and but have been blocked by, you know, technology barrier to sort of really express themselves are, you know, like using immersion to sort of build these things out.

36:23Madhav Jha:And also like one thing these people tell us that like, it's not just about money, like, hey, I can give money to the dev shop, but a lot of lot get lost in the translation when you're trying to express your idea to the through a developer. And they say, hey, I know what I want to build. If I could just say out loud myself, I would I would do a better job. And so the Norwegian person I was talking about, like he said that, hey, in my team, I am the only builder. I don't even bring in anybody else because I know exactly what to build and like others focus on the business aspects of it. So this like single solo printer sort of attitude of like, I'm going to do it myself.

36:54Madhav Jha:I have the domain expertise. Nothing is lost in translation. That kind of agency is what people are looking forward to with these kinds of platforms.

37:01Mukund Jha:Yeah. I think it's a really important story that doesn't get told enough actually, is like what you're building is really necessary for society. There's just so much focus on AI is going to replace jobs, knowledge work is going away. Like what's that going to mean for employment and civil unrest, but no one's really talking about the fact that actually if you have some agency of interest and you want to start your own business and have autonomy over your life, you are empowering that at scale. It's so cool the amount of human creativity that you're unlocking. Who would have thought that the thing that the world needs is an app that marries clinical psychology with horse riding?

37:35Mukund Jha:And in a world of limited software, that app would never have been built. But in a world of unlimited software, you can build that and 7 million other apps that like nobody would have ever gotten to build before we're getting to the niche of niches yeah i mean so pete this is like just an extension of the trend pg wrote about a while ago right and so like maybe coming out of the second world war you had sort of like a few big companies and people like built whole careers hopefully staying at like ibm or whatever for a couple of decades and then retire then the startup wave came along and suddenly the world becomes higher resolution people like oh maybe i should start my own company or at least join a smaller company and work at multiple companies or found multiple companies and like the next extension of that is just everybody like runs their own like business that's at the intersection of like clinical psychology and horse riding and finds an audience and and life uh livelihood that way

38:26Madhav Jha:yeah i mean we are excited about so many ideas coming to life like we really want to like reduce this gap between idea and reality and and you know truly enable people uh to express themselves and and really, really, like, have this Cameron explosion of ideas, like, which is great for YC.

38:41Mukund Jha:I would argue it doesn't have to be, actually. Like, the whole, like, I think it's really interesting, the whole, like, explosion of being able to start businesses that aren't, like, venture-funded, that aren't trying to raise lots of capital, that it's just, like, one person, like, following their passions and, like, having control over their life. I think it's, like, a really uplifting message.

38:58Madhav Jha:And I think we're just in the early innings of this right now. Like, I think this explanation is going to grow and we'll see larger and larger, you know, projects being built on emergent. Yes.

39:08Mukund Jha:Okay, well, that's all we have time for today. Mukandam Adav, thank you so much for joining us. It was a really fascinating conversation and congratulations on all the growth and we're excited to see where things go from here.

39:18Madhav Jha:Thank you. Thank you so much for having us.