
15 segments available
Varun Vummadi is the co-founder of Giga, which builds AI agents for customer support for some of the biggest companies in the world, including DoorDash, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the US, and a top-three global telecom provider. At Startup School India, Varun sat down YC General Partner Ankit Gupta to talk about why he turned down a high-paying quant job to start a company, the multiple pivots it took to find the right problem, and how their small team of eight beat a 400-person competitor to land a contract with DoorDash. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:00 — Intro 01:33 — Early Days & Origin Story 03:37 — The YC Interview Disaster 06:28 — Pivoting Away From Ed Tech 07:25 — Finding the Real Idea 08:39 — Beating a Well-Funded Competitor 10:00 — Winning DoorDash at 8 People 11:09 — What GigaML Looks Like Now 12:40 — Advice for College Students 15:51 — Why Charge Early? 17:33 — The Next Big Bet 18:43 — Running the Company on AI 20:19 — How They Hire Engineers 22:04 — Product Over Sales 23:37 — Burn the Boats + Outro
"I was just panicked because I never prepared for anything. I mean I prepped so much for the interview that I chatted with a lot of XYZ interview founders etc. They all told me what's your idea what's ..."
">> Yeah. >> And why don't we start by rewinding the clock a little bit and hearing about the very early days of your company. So maybe even before you started a company why don't you just tell us a li..."
"can just apply and always see right. And it's so dramatical because I was supposed to join. We were supposed to like join in like 3 days. That's finally when we got in and the interview was also like ..."
"shot. >> Yeah, it's Hajj did a pretty great job. What he did was he made a shot with Corsera COO and a bunch of people who have like some of the most successful ed techs. All of them told it's a bad i..."
">> So okay, so you did YC then you end up raising your seed round. You're you're working on this finetuning idea. That doesn't sound anything like customer service AI system. So how did that first thi..."
">> So okay, I mean this is where I think things can be very counterintuitive, right? like when you chose to switch into customer service, there existed at least one or two other companies, some of whi..."
">> So okay so that's kind of crazy right? You you won Door Dash's contract. you were only a team of eight people when you did that. Why was it that Door Dash, which is a huge company, was willing to t..."
">> Yeah, last few years uh I would say we as I mentioned we work with the biggest crypto exchange in US and after getting like a customer at that scale we uh we are working with a lot of fortune 500s ..."
">> Yeah, I mean like a lot of people thought I was stupid when I rejected the job offer. I mean, like it was so insane because um >> they were like, "You're turning down this great offer from a quant ..."
">> And why is it that you know charging for a product so early is useful. You know, I think a lot of people in the audience might think, "Oh, I'm just a college student. No one's ever going to pay me ..."
">> Yeah, I think I think we're I'm very confident that we are moving in a great direction. The biggest bottleneck of every single enterprise a deployment regardless of support or any automation that t..."
"because we have a one of our values is automate, automate, automate. So we force people to like use as much automation as possible and the in general the boral mission of the company is to automate al..."
">> So given that I imagine the kinds of people you look to hire on your team also are very different from the average SAS company 10 years ago or at least in some ways different. I'm curious how you w..."
">> I mean there are a lot of people who will buy your product without business background. You just got to find the right buyer. I mean like Zipa is one of those companies they didn't care. You have l..."
">> Yeah, the biggest thing is just getting started and trying to sell the thing is just getting started and jumping the thing and burning the boards is a good thing to start. it it is only like really..."