Underdog Founders - Nishit from Sybill
Can AI and machine vision decode human interaction?
How hard is it to turn the gut feeling of a good call into data?
Nishit was born in a small town in India and made it to a respected university where he studied computer science.
The year was 2014, deep learning was just getting started.
Nishit learned about AI on Coursera and got hooked into the field.
He applied to Stanford and voilà - suddenly he was moving there.
On his very first flight to SF, he meets Gorish, who would later become one of his co-founders.
As he and Gorish hangout off work hours, their mutual dreams and love for the show Silicon Valley made it easy to think about working together.
Queue Soumyarka and Mahek. Sou had finished his masters in CS from San Diego, Mahek was still in college wrapping up.
(All Sybill co-founders from left to right: Nishit, Soumyarka, Gorish and Mahek)
They go all-in, becoming housemates and co-founders on the hunt for a problem to solve.
During that time, Gorish was teaching online, and struggling to know how engaged his students really were over the screen:
“Dude it’s really hard to teach a virtual class. I can’t read the faces of the students as well, I don’t know if I’m doing a good job and where to improve”.
Teachers weren't alone.
Doctors, lawyers, but one role in particular was the perfect fit:
Sales dudes and dudettes.
The team loved psychology and communication, so they were looking at a big problem they loved:
”Can we use AI and machine vision to decode our gut feeling after a meeting?
- Can we map out all the non-verbal tells?
- Are these reliable enough across gender and culture?”
Sybill was born.
(If you want to lead better meetings, use this link and take Sybill for a spin. )
The vision was clear, the market needs it - what could go wrong?
Well, they were fresh-out-of-college founders, building, recruiting and managing people for the 1st time.
Their fav feature, Highlights, was an AI-generated clip for sales people to identify best and worst moments.
Nobody watched it.
Then 2022 crushed optimism in tech. They had to downsize.
A few loyal users were passionate about the product, which gave them a thin thread of hope to hang on to.
They went back to the Highlights feature.
Decided to tell users directly what happened, instead of giving them a clip for them to see it.
Value become clearer - traction started improving.
Then a little bot called chatGPT launched.
Their early focus on AI made them trendy overnight: they already had LLM capabilities in the product.
In a final stab at PMF, they sprint to roll out email, Gong and Slack integrations.
Inbound continued to grow.
During Xmas break, they land a new lead investor and everyone can breathe during their time with family.
2023 has been kinder - the team 3X’d their revenue in Q1.
Because fresh grads got together to work on a problem they were all passionate about, and didn’t give up when optimism walked out the door.
If you’re a ML engineer and love generative AI and NLP, the crew would love to meet you.
If you want to lead better meetings, use this link and take Sybill for a spin!
Underdog Founders 12 - Nishit Asnani, Gorish Aggarwal, Mehak Aggarwal, Soumyarka Mondal.
#hiring #sales #machinelearning