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Welcome back to our podcast: Tales from the Trenches. In this episode, Krishna speaks with RadiantGraph and Ginger founder Anmol Madan about disrupting the healthcare industry, moving with conviction, and resilience as a serial founder.

Click play above to listen, or read the transcript below.

Krishna: Hi everyone, we’re back for another episode of Tales from the Trenches, and today I have one of my nearest and dearest friends and oldest friends: Anmol Madan. Anmol and I had the pleasure of working together at his first startup, when we were the first investor in Ginger, and now we have the pleasure of working with him on his next startup, or startups, I should say. And that’s RadiantGraph and something special we’re working on. 

And so I’m looking forward to talking about Anmol’s journey, and maybe some of that will mix in our journey together. And so welcome, Anmol, and great to have you here. 

Anmol: It’s so much fun to do this, Krishna. Thanks for inviting me, and I’m sorry it took so long. 

Krishna: No, absolutely, you’re a busy man. So tell me, first, man, you were in Rome recently from what you tell me, which as everyone knows is a great inspiration to me. Did you get any inspiration from Rome?

Anmol: Yeah, I think we just did a few days in Rome and then in Tuscany, just coming back from holiday. And it was mostly downtime. And I don’t know how you operate, Krishna, but I feel like if I take a few days off and am not on my emails and am not jumping into meetings and checking Slack, it sort of activates this second-order part of my brain. And so I start thinking about, you know, you take time to digest the events of the last six months or the last year, you start drawing things you need to work on strategically, areas to invest in. So I highly recommend everyone take like, a week every six months — it doesn’t have to be a lot of time — but thoroughly disconnect from work as much as possible, clear your brain. Because you work hard and you start looking at your business, your time, your team with a fresh lens, a fresh perspective. And it’s so crucial to get out of the day-to-day running of things and kind of have that bigger view. 

Krishna: I agree with that cadence. I try to take a week in the summer and a week in the winter. It hasn’t worked out very well for me the last couple years — calls have punctured my peace. But I am glad that you got some time. 

So Anmol, you know, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is that I’ve been thinking about Anmol the human and Anmol the entrepreneur. But I don’t know if you and I have ever really gotten into what were the sparks that set you off onto your entrepreneurial journey. I know that you’re from Pune, which is a city I’ve actually been to, and I know that you at some point came to the US, but my guess is that there’s some story here that predates, by a lot, the time when you and I met. And so I’d love to understand: what makes Anmol the entrepreneur the first time around?

Anmol: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’ve never thought of it that way. It’s almost like if you’re on the inside you can’t see it, you just kind of gravitate toward it. In the spirit of being vulnerable, I’ll share a little bit about my childhood and background.

So I grew up in Pune. I lost my mom pretty early, so I basically grew up with my dad. And so a lot of it was seeing the workplace, seeing the professional environment. I’d be sitting in his office before and after school and doing my little thing there. And so I kind of grew around…and he’s an entrepreneur, so I grew around people building companies, I grew around the life of industry. And I loved my research. I loved building new stuff whether through undergrad and then through grad school at MIT through the PhD program, but I also always sort of had this inclination that I wasn’t going to be a professor. I wasn’t going to be a research scientist. I was going to go start something and build a company. For some reason, and I joke about this with my wife, I fall backwards and start a company as a sort of default state of what gets me going. 

So at MIT, for example, I was doing the 50K and the 100K, and this and that, and our paths crossed. 

Krishna: And we were the 40K. 

Anmol: That’s right, you were the 40K, I remember that, yeah. And so the inside joke here for people listening is that Krishna’s check into Ginger, which at that time was called Ginger.io…

Krishna: It was called Gingered, Anmol. 

Anmol: I’ve blacked out that part. That lasted about a couple of weeks, I think, and then it became Ginger.io. 

But yeah, Krishna was the first check in for $40K. And we joke about it, but for me that was like, great, I can run this company for a year. This is what valuations were in seed rounds then. 

So to come back to your question: I think it comes from an innate desire where I like building new technology, I like creating the future, but I also want to solve problems in a way that are going to have an impact on society. And the research papers are important, because they show robustness, they show critical thinking, you want to be doing things that are academically sound. But at the end of the day, it has to hit the market. People have to use it, people have to find value in it. So that’s what I enjoy about building companies. I find it to be extremely satisfying, whether it’s early on as a founder, back again as a founder, and then in between as an investor and occasional board member. In different formats, there’s nothing as thrilling as seeing a team, seeing an idea take shape. And basically it becomes a default standard for the industry. 

So I think that’s sort of the innate thing that I can’t turn off no matter how hard I try. 

Krishna: What kind of company did your dad build? 

Anmol: So he’s in old-school engineering for manufacturing, for capital equipment, at the time it used to be oil and gas. There’s something fun about going off and running deep…I wouldn’t call it “deep” in today’s world, but at the time in the context it was a deep technology, so there’s something exciting about that. And he’s 78, and he’s still running it. 

Krishna: That’s amazing. And I can empathize. I grew up with — my father ran a consulting company, which was doing quality control, Six Sigma, and he left Motorola when they started doing that. So I got my entrepreneurial itch by going to his office on the weekend and watching him deal with personnel issues and the ups and downs of running a small business. And yeah, that plays a major role, I’ve found: how entrepreneurs grew up, what they prioritize, how they think about the world. 

Speaking of hard tech: the day I spent in Pune, the person I visited was Baba Kalyani. I don’t know if you know Baba Kalynani, but he started this company in Pune called Bharat Forge. 

Anmol: Yeah, I know Bharat Forge. 

Krishna: Yeah, and he’s an MIT alumn. And so I was 21 years old and it was fascinating for me to see an Indian entrepreneur trying to build world-class manufacturing out of India. And obviously now it’s much more prevalent. So awesome, very interesting. 

Anmol: I want to say one thing on this, Krishna, and sorry, this is why I think it’s ambitious that we’ll be able to do this in 30 minutes. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I think there is something — and I can speak about this in the Indian context for sure, maybe it generalizes across different cultures, too — but there’s something about growing up in a family where people are used to talking about businesses, used to talking about scaling companies. Because all these things that people learn later in life in, say, business school: cost of acquisition, LTV, unit economics. If you’re growing up and learning a business as a conversation around the dinner table as a teenager or a young kid, you get exposed to it and it becomes second nature. And these things don’t then intimidate you; you kind of understand that they’re just different formulations. 

I’ve had this discussion with a few of my friends who are my age, and we talk about what made us who we are. And a lot of it is this being exposed to a culture where this is acceptable. Where you hear: this is what we have to do, and this person’s not working out, and da da da. And you build that muscle as a child, then you carry that, hopefully, for the rest of your career. 

Krishna: 100%. I mean I think it’s so cultural, it’s so sub-cultural in India, and anywhere. You know I’ll finish this segment with a little joke. When I think about the girl I want to marry, I often ask girls what their fathers do, and my perfect answer is they run a small business — not a big business, a small business — and they’ve seen the ups and downs of what an entrepreneur’s life is. Because I have no clue who else would put up with me otherwise. 

Anmol: So my wife does not come from the entrepreneurial world. 

Krishan: And so you must drive her nuts. 

Anmol: No, but I think it’s a good balance actually. 

Krishna: That’s true. 

Anmol: The counter point is the entrepreneurial risk-taker side can dominate. And you know, people should find the partner for them. But for us what works well is you know, she is a clear professional, both her parents are clear professionals. You know, I joke about the North India/South India contrast here: everybody is highly educated in her family. But there’s something about the stability that that kind of person brings, where I’m like, let’s swing for the fences, and she’s like, well…you know, let’s get a handle on this one. So it’s a good balance to have. 

Krishna: Agreed. So I think from that, when we talk about balance and complementarities in partnerships, the same is true about business partnerships. You and I have both lived through some interesting business partnerships: ups and downs, and I think we have both come out learning a lot from them. Do you take a similar lens when you think about business partnerships? And how has that view evolved over your time as an entrepreneur? 

Anmol: I think each experience teaches me about myself. I learn who I am by each experience. So that’s really powerful. So when I think about…I’ve had some great experiences. I’ve had some incredible experiences. Incredible people I’ve worked with: obviously you, but across every job, whether at Ginger, Livongo, Teladoc, the MIT Media Lab — incredible people. But there are also people where I haven’t worked well [with them] or it wasn’t a productive relationship. 

And I think what it has taught me is it’s almost always inevitably we’re optimizing for different things, or we’re seeking different things, or we have a different value system. So an example is what I value is building teams where people are excited, they’re empowered, they’re having an impact, they’re driving things forward. And that takes time, that takes effort, that takes a lot of sort of hand-crafted, artisanal people management skills. And I think it’s easy for folks to sort of not want to do that. They can say that’s too much work, I want to do this or that and make this decision or that decision. So there’s often whiplash in the investor community in particular. So I think it teaches me that my values are unique. 

So at this stage of my career, you have the privilege of being able to choose whom you work with, and you pick the ones…you know, everybody’s smart, everybody’s successful. But you pick the ones who you know you can work through ups and downs with them, and they will optimize for the same things that you do. 

Or in places I’ve had conflict, it’s because we’re optimizing for different things. The other person’s optimizing for how the world sees them, or how the world perceives them. And I think to me, that’s not what drives me as much. What drives me is: do the right thing, show real results, build something that is objectively a new category of product or company, and so then when I see people I’m working with today, within the first hour or the first day of us working together and I get the sense that this isn’t gonna work well, I’m much more decisive about calling it. And the difference between Anmol today and Anmol, say, 15 years ago is I will still have the same kind of interaction or gut feel about, like, hey, this isn’t the right fit for what we’re going after — because inside a company you have to protect the culture. You have to curate the culture. The thing that we talk about every single time is the way we work together, the culture we have, the way we operate. And so that’s really apparent when someone has a different view of the world. And I’ve been in situations where I started working with someone and I knew in, like, an hour this isn’t going to work out. And I’d say, hey, this isn’t the right place for you. 

And five years ago or 15 years ago when I had that experience, I was like, oh, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’ll give them a month, maybe I’ll give them three months. But time just makes you more decisive, experience makes you more decisive. I think getting to know who you are and how you work with people and what you value in people is really crucial. 

So I’d say that’s the biggest lesson that I take. You’re just better at making those people decisions today with a decade or two of experience. And what’s funny is that for entrepreneurs, and even for people like you, I’m sure — you always had the gut instinct. You always knew that this thing is off, this relationship is off, this person’s not the right finance person, this person’s not the right product person, whatever you felt. It’s just that you were maybe questioning your ability to make that decision because you were still early in your career. 

Krishna: That’s a great observation. I think you’re right. For me, I think the inklings have been there, but the ability to have conviction in that intuition and act on that intuition in some way took a lot longer than it should have or would if I were to be in the same situation today. 

So getting to that — one of the most interesting decisions you made over the last year, year and a half was to start a new company. 

Anmol: Yes. 

Krishna: And I remember you and I were chatting about this desire of yours for probably a year before that. You were sort of in this mode of, hey, at some point I want to start something new. But then it all came together at once, and I felt like it was a very quick decision. 

I remember sitting down at this coffee shop, which is the one we usually go to, and it was right after JP Morgan healthcare conference, and you were just like ok, you know what, I’m going to go for it. 

I admired that moment, and it sticks in my mind because it was just the culmination of lots of conversations and lots of thought, but it was very clear. It was a moment of clarity. 

And so how did that happen? What brought you that clarity? Just walk me through the personal journey through Anmol the entrepreneur who sort of ended his journey with Ginger and Anmol the entrepreneur who started RadiantGraph. 

Anmol: Look, I’ll start here. After my PhD I spun out Ginger.io, which became Ginger, from the work I was doing for my PhD thesis. And I was the founder/CEO there for about 7.5, 8 years. Grew that business through different chapters and a number of lessons learned and had a great run doing that. 

And after that, Krishna, I was thinking about what do I do after Ginger. And I got really excited about joining a company called Livongo. And the reason I went to Livongo is I had been running my own company, little startup, 100-odd people or whatever it was at the time, for 7-8 years, and Livongo was an incredible team where I would get to be part of the executive team, which was run by some incredibly talented people, and so Glen Tullman and Lee Shapiro had taken a couple of companies public. They were CEO, Lee is also a friend. We had some incredibly talented people from very successful companies in healthcare and outside. 

And I looked at the caliber of people in every area, and it was like, this is a group of people I can learn from. I think of it as kind of my graduate school education in company-building. 

And Livongo very quickly went public, which was awesome to be part of that journey. After that, Livongo was acquired by a company called Teladoc. And Teladoc, in case you haven’t heard, was the largest player in the space at the time. And as part of the acquisition, I had the opportunity to be the Chief Data AI Officer of this global company, of this $2.5B company, which had presence in 30 countries and supported 80M consumers across nine different product lines: everything from primary care all the way to chronic conditions, mental health, other use cases. 

So it was an incredible chance, one, to be part of a multi-billion-dollar revenue business in a leadership role, which I hadn’t done before. And you know when you think that Teladoc at the time was growing 10-15% year-on-year, but 10-15% year-on-year is still, like $200M, $300M in new ARR every year. I think any one of us at smaller companies would take that in a heartbeat. And so how do companies work at that scale, how do you build commercial functions, how do you build the business to run that way was a great kind of graduate school education for me. 

I also got to play a leadership role in my area. So what I got between Livongo and Teladoc: by the time I left, I’d built out a team of a couple hundred folks, 100+ PhDs in machine learning and data science and AI and statistics, another 100 in data engineering and ML ops and things. But about 40% of my team was women across the stack. About half of my leaders were women. I built out the director layer, the VP layer, the different levels of management. 

And it was fun because we were essentially learning everything, from a lot of the core data systems all the way down to all the machine learning/AI personalization capabilities, including some new research projects at the time inside Teladoc across all the products. So that was a fun, exciting journey. 

I think when I knew it was time was there was a period in December of 2022, right before JPM, when I spent a fair amount of time doing things like strategy planning and these things you have to do in these larger public companies. And I was looking at my time spent for that period, and I was basically filling out spreadsheets: managing people and filling out spreadsheets. 

And it was an: I know I love building companies, I know I love building products, and I think it’s important to spend 3-4 years to really understand things. And if you’re going to do something, it’s worth committing to it for a while, that’s how great things are done. I felt like I’d done that. I’d learned a fair amount. I’d built some great relationships. I needed to take that experience and translate that into doing something earlier stage and go back to the early-stage piece. 

So a lot of this is timing. The same person, all of us across the years, go through different journeys. I do think it’s important for people to reinvent themselves every 4-5 years. And what I mean by that is, you don’t have to go off and become an artist, but ask yourself: are you doing the right thing? Are you in the right job? Are you in the right stage of business?

Krishna: Have you ever thought about being an artist? 

Anmol: No. I would be a terrible artist. I’d be the most goal-oriented artist ever. The exact opposite. Our goal is to maximize art sales this quarter! The artist community would banish me. 

Krishna: It’s true. You are a strong J, as they would say in Myers-Briggs. 

Anmol: Yeah. But I think it’s harder to do that as a VC, because you’re running 10, 20 year fund cycles. But if you can…I mean, I’m still passionate about the same problems. The problems I’m working on today are, in many ways, the same problems I was working on across different jobs the last 15 years. Is this the way you do it? The venue you do it? The scale at which you’re operating? The role you’re playing inside the organization? I think it’s worth asking yourself, every four or five years, is this where I’m learning the most? 

And I’ll say one last thing on this, and you may have heard me say this before. But I did the math once, and I was like, 25 or 30 or something. I did the math that I have 10,000 days in my professional career. Every day where you’re not learning, you’re not working on something interesting, or you’re not pushing yourself is a day that’s not coming back. So I think you have to ask yourself as a leader or a person starting companies or a person investing in companies, as a person in research, whatever your path is: am I spending this time, am I spending this effort in light of that? 

And so I think that urgency, that kind of drive — and look, I learned a lot of fun stuff being in different businesses, and it’s very interesting to see how companies scale, but it was time to take those lessons, apply those back to early stage companies, and go start something new. And that was the genesis behind RadiantGraph. 

Krishna: What excites you most about RadiantGraph? And what do you think excites customers most about RadiantGraph? 

Anmol: So, I’ve had three different experiences, Krishna, first in mental health, then in chronic conditions, then again in primary career and all the other disease areas across different jobs, where we created a category-defining product or company in healthcare. And you look at those experiences and you’re like, Anmol, you’ve been successful! And I’m like, actually, we haven’t. For all its success, Livongo helped 400-500K people with diabetes when I was there. There’s 30M people in diabetes in our society. For all the innovations we’ve seen in mental health, the vast majority of people aren’t using these digital products — they’re going straight to SSRI, psychiatry, and other things. For all the innovations you’ve seen in MSK and back pain, the number of people who are actually going and getting back surgeries is still really high, and the percentage of the population that’s actually managing with physical therapy and preventative interventions is really low. 

So what I’ve seen again and again is these really cool technologies and machine learning engagement and all these things, but a sliver of healthcare consumers engage with them, because they’re being shared through one company or one product. 

And the insight for me was: if I want to take the success we’ve had across these three different companies and make that happen for the bulk of the US healthcare system — for the $4.6T of spend in the US healthcare system, for the millions or hundreds of millions of Americans who are not using existing products, you have to create a platform. So that’s the thesis behind RadiantGraph. 

I think there is a huge opportunity with the new generation of AI, machine learning systems, bringing those inside larger healthcare organizations, health plans, large healthcare organizations, and helping engage consumers more effectively, helping drive better care, helping consequently drive better outcomes downstream, and I think it’s a problem you can look at from multiple lenses, and it’s pretty broken today. 

So, 2.4% of all healthcare premiums are spent on member engagement and outreach. And arguably, we’re not seeing the biggest bang for the buck. On the digital health side, the average utilization of a digital health company inside a health plan is 2, 3, 4, 5%. So you’ve got all these clinical interventions. You know, I will take partial credit for starting the early digital health companies. And we’re sitting here on the other side, we’ve built companies across all these different disease areas, but the adoption of these products is very low. And then on the plan side, it’s not like they don’t want these companies to be successful — they do! They do want better member experiences, they do want people to discover the right support at the right time. But the data is messy, the AI systems are hard to put into work, there’s clinical complexity, there’s how do you design this for healthcare, how does it work for value-based outcomes. All these things are really hard. 

And so what I kind of walked out realizing after JPM in the month of Feb last year, wow, which feels like forever, but it’s only Feb last year, is saying there’s a need for a platform, and I think there’s a company here as big as a Salesforce or an Adobe, specifically for healthcare, that’s going off and building systems that help these large, behemoth, single-digit margin healthcare companies build better experiences for their consumers. Put AI and machine learning to work. I put together the team that had worked with me in my last couple of jobs, so a bunch of our folks — RJ and me, Dan, all came with me in my previous two jobs, came with me. And we went off and built a product that we wished we had when we were off spending $15-20M/year building these capabilities in-house in our last roles. 

And so that became the genesis for RadiantGraph. RadiantGraph has been on a rapid, busy trajectory. We took money last year, as you know, and we had initial goals for what we wanted to achieve in the seed. And I just looked at the data for April: we’re now supporting…we’ve grown 400% in the last six months from what our target was. 

Krishna: Amazing. 

Anmol: So what I think is being apparent is there’s a need for this kind of platform. And I think every health plan, every large health organization is like, what are we doing with ChatGPT? And whatever, and I think we all know that deploying these technologies in healthcare in a way that translates into better engagement, better outcomes, that translates into business impact, that translates into clinically relevant support, is hard, and I think that’s the platform company we’ll create. 

Krishna: How do you avoid having these customers that are just running toward: hey, we want the latest and greatest cool AI thing that we’re hearing about? How do you differentiate that from: hey, let’s make sure we’re providing you a real, tangible valuable proposition? 

Anmol: Do you want a dirty secret? 

Krishna: Yeah. 

Anmol: I don’t think healthcare is as ready for these crazy AI things as everybody else thinks they are. I’m talking about the front office, I’m talking about the member experience — I’m not talking about a clinical note-taking software or other things for the back office. But in the space that we are: we are pitching our clients, you know, we can do generative AI content, and we can do billions of unique journeys inside your population, and we can do all these things. And most of them are like, hey, can you just help me look at my claims and send marketing campaigns to different segments? 

And I hate to say this, but healthcare is so far behind. And these organizations, I think what happens inside these organizations is there’s some incredibly talented people, incredibly passionate people, but I think the complexity of applying machine learning and AI to healthcare use cases is quite high, and so there’s this tension where on one side the board member or maybe an executive or an innovation person is out there saying, at JPM, “We’re going to use AI!” And then there’s the team that’s actual leading product or marketing or clinical on the ground, and they’re like, “hey, we can’t even identify or better understand our members using these different data sources and say, let’s put them in different marketing campaigns or marketing segments or connect them to product experiences or benefit design.” So there’s a disconnect, often, between the public positioning and the guts of these organizations. And I think that’s where we see organizations kind of like…where we’ve seen some attraction is that our thesis has been: let’s meet healthcare organizations where they are, and I fundamentally believe that you’re going to see a hype around these AI point solutions in healthcare, and I think some of that is going to fade, and I think the company that wins is going to be the one that actually builds a comprehensive platform that is the default way that product managers or growth marketers or clinical leaders inside these organizations come in and do their job every Monday. 

And the AI capabilities will get better, but you have to be the tool that they’re running their business on. That’s where you’re really helping them be successful in adding value to their jobs. 

Krishna: Kind of building the picks and shovels, or the infrastructure for people to be able to unlock the value of some of what’s happening over time. 

Anmol: Healthcare cannot adopt AI in the space we’re in without a platform approach, without the picks and shovels built in. 

Krishna: Right. 

Anmol: If you just show up and you’re like, I’ve got this real cool model, and why don’t we just use this, they’re like: how do I land you in my stack? I’m outsourcing my data claims warehouse. I’m outsourcing this part, and this part is something we built in 1985. So you have to solve the whole thing. 

And by the way, there are very similar parallels to the mental health space with Ginger. This is very reminiscent of 2013, 2014 in that space, where we were really cool technology, but to be successful we had to go solve the entire problem. 

Because I think healthcare’s usually a service business. Not a lot of it is investment in the technology function, unlike a typical tech company. So if you’re going to fix this, you have to fix the whole thing. And that’s also what makes it an interesting business, and the dam’s really big, the market size is really big, but it also means you’re building a really broad product — and you can hopefully charge a significant amount for it. 

Krishna: Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, you’ve been doing machine learning from the time I met you. I mean, I remember reading your machine learning papers back in ’09, ’10. It’s kind of wild to imagine, because at that point you would say machine learning to someone, and they would look at you like, what the hell are you talking about. So it’s been interesting to watch. 

Anmol: The number of times at dinner parties where I said I do machine learning for healthcare and people have quietly walked away to the next table. 

Krishna: Yeah, I’m sure. Let’s double click for a second on the Ginger journey. We like to talk on this podcast about being in the trenches. I’m curious about how you think about the trenches going forward. But in Ginger, can you give us an example of a time when you really felt like you were in the trenches, in the middle of war — you really were at the end of your rope, didn’t know what was going to happen. How were you responding? What were you doing to cope in that situation? Give us a little snapshot. 

Anmol: Yeah, it’s a great question. Trying to think of examples of when that happened. 

Krishna: Maybe to jog your memory a little: I think there was probably some sort of existential moment when you went from B2C to B2B? 

Anmol: Yeah, that’s a great one. 

Krishna: Because I remember a time I walked into the Ginger office and you guys were really excited about trying out the B2C use case. And my guess is it didn’t work. And somewhere along that journey, there was some kind of existential moment. 

Anmol: Yeah, there’s some nuance to that one. And so look, I think what we had working for us at Ginger — and this is the naivete of coming in as a technologist in healthcare — we were early tech. We were the first to use machine learning for behavioral health. I think that’s what got you excited in the early days. Incredible technical DNA, we built a great product. And what was kind of counter was, if you look at healthcare being a fee-for-service system, which at the time 80, 90% of behavioral health was fee-for-service, if not greater, and I think it’s still a significant part of behavioral health that’s fee-for-service. If you come in with tech that automates, reduces a need for visits, helps people bend the cost curve, you actually go counter against the incentives of a fee-for-service system. And so part of it was realizing that. We were deployed with 8 of the top 10 academic medical centers, we were doing some really interesting work with these large hospital systems and things. And they do all these research projects, but we couldn’t convert them to commercial contracts. So learning was trying to understand the incentive structure. 

And the unfortunate truth about healthcare is that most technology companies die in healthcare because they don’t quite understand the complex incentive structure. Even inside a health plan: the line of business, medicare vs. commercial — different incentive structure. There’s very different ways in which business decisions can be made because of what the goals are and how revenues cross different lines. 

And so I just didn’t know that. And we as an organization were naive in that regard. So there was a really interesting board meeting where at some point I was like look, we’re not going to be successful selling this tech to healthcare providers. We have to build the whole car. And the example I used was, we’re selling this incredibly effective electric motor, but in order to sell it, we have to sell the whole car. Because if you’re selling the electric motor, there’s only three companies that can buy it. And it’s in their interest to not buy it sometimes, because they’re doing fine. 

Krishna: That’s right. 

Anmol: But if you’re selling the whole car, you suddenly have millions of people that can buy. I remember going into our board and saying hey, we just raised $20M for a Series B on the technology play. And I said, we have to go build a whole clinical service arm. So let’s hire the therapists, let’s hire the psychiatrists, let’s hire the coaches. Let’s put it all together. And everybody thought I was insane. 

Krishna: Of course. It was a radical departure from what you guys had been talking about before. 

Anmol: It was unheard of. Literally the comment was: what does a person from MIT know about running a healthcare services business? Psychiatry, for example, is really hard. We’ve been doing it for this many years, this and that. And I was like, you’re right! But like everything else, we look at this with first principles. We’ll figure this out. We’ll build the clinical team. And so we pioneered — we were the first to do tele-psychiatry in 45 states. Even Teladoc didn’t have tele-psychiatry at the time. 

And then the other powerful insight was, the industry looked at all these things as different. They were like, this is the AP, this person’s a therapist, this person’s a psychiatrist, this person’s coaching, they’re all different. I’m like: they’re different to you as a clinician. But they’re not different to a consumer. I as a consumer have the same need: I’m stressed out, anxious, down, depressed, whatever. And different consumers will move along differently on that journey. There will be some consumers who will just meditate and sleep and work better and manage their health that way. There will be other consumers where they do need to be on SSRI, they do need to be on prescription meds. There are going to be some who go to therapists. 

Each person is on their own unique journey, and this is different kind of configurations of this system that should be built around them. Or there is an area that got a lot of pushback, which is that we should just have 24/7 care. Offices are open from 8-5; how can we serve care after 5:00? I’m like: the person’s super busy. When are they stressed out? 8pm on a Saturday, 10pm on a Saturday. They had a fight with their spouse. They’re opening up the bottle of wine. Whatever else they’re doing — that’s when they need help. 

So why not design a system that meets people where they are, on their terms. And at the time we had 60-second response time. These were human coaches, not AI coaches, so it was a big deal. So there were a lot of these pioneering, first-in-the industry things that we did and that ultimately became the standard of the industry. 

So you look at all these companies: they’re all following this idea that you could package these different things in one consumer experience, create a comprehensive experience fro consumers, was essentially a new way of thinking about this entire space. And I’ve seen that travel across a number of different digital healths, not just mental health. Livongo and diabetes was doing a similar journey. I think I see that in many other digital health companies today. So I think in many ways, we became the playbook for how these things come together. 

And it’s kind of interesting to be, you know, I was sitting in these meetings, and there were all these people, and I said this should all be one thing. I remember having that whiteboard discussion. And you know, it takes time. 

But I think this is why when you’re doing things that are transformative in an industry, it’s hard to see them in the moment, because people think you’re insane. They think this person is nuts! There are even times at RadiantGraph where I’ll say things and I’ll have very seasoned experts in healthcare, investors in healthcare, say, how could you! That’s now how it works? And I’ll say: that’s not how it works today. 

Krishna: Right. 

Anmol: But what if we are right? What if we are successful? What if this is the future? What if five years from now, everyone who’s running a healthcare company is like, hey, what’s your personalization stack? Are you using RadiantGraph? Are you using something else? 

Krishna: Is that the healthcare trend you’re most excited about? Personalization? 

Anmol: Yeah, I mean I think I use the word personalization because it’s easy to relate for all of us. I think we all intuitively know what that means from our experiences in social media or content or news or whatever else. But I think the idea that frustrates me about healthcare is that one size fits all marketing, one size fits all experiences, one size fits all engagement. And everyone gets the same direct mail thing in their mail that says, you’re turning 65 — welcome to this new health plan. There’s no insight there that says, hey, Krishna, you’ve had a history of these needs, why don’t we help you here? Anmol, you have these other needs — why don’t we call up a member support line? Why doesn’t every individual have a unique experience with their member support line? Why is there just one call center that answers these things? 

I think we deserve to live in a better world as healthcare consumers. I think again and again you see that the limiting factor is can you get people to adopt and engage and use these healthcare products and services? When I look at the $4.6T in spend this year, rising at 7% YoY, 8% YoY here in CA, and when I look at what’s going to bend the cost curve, it’s getting people to adopt these technologies, getting people to change. That’s going to bend the cost curve. And that’s why you need a platform company that can do it for the 97, 98% of healthcare that’s got a higher AI scientist like me in my last job. So that’s the thesis behind RadiantGraph. 

And you look at the spend, how much is the spend? It’s a massive, massive market. But also, I think it’s the only way to actually fix the healthcare system in our society. I don’t think launching 1100 primary care companies is going to solve the problem. 

Krishna: Last question here, Anmol. So, you’re a second-time founder, you’ve been through lots of journeys. I think one of the things that defined your journey at Ginger was this resilience, sticking through it. It was a tough journey: lots of pivots, lots of learnings to get to where you needed to get to. How do you think about that at your next chapter? Do you feel like you can be equally resilient? You’re at a different time in your life. You’re obviously successful. You have a family. How should we think about that concept of resilience and being in the trenches in your second act? 

Anmol: I think it’s actually easier to be resilient…well, we’ll find out, we’ll see how this goes. I think on the surface, it’s easier to be resilient in your second act, or your third act, or your fourth act. I think for a couple reasons. 

The decisiveness. If you’ve had good experiences, if you’ve learned what good looks like, which I think I have had some exposure to that, you can make decisions faster. You’re more decisive. You understand, you appreciate your blind spots. You understand where you need complementary skills.

For example: I know I love building technology, but I also know that I want to bring in a really strong commercial team. And so we brought in Kirk and Kim very early on in the company, because I knew where the team would need more help. Versus, if I had brought on a super star CTO, there might not have been as much for them to do, because you have some really senior engineers and it’s a high-performing team. So I think you have that. 

I think it’s interesting you ask this question, and I again, in the spirit of being vulnerable, I have a kid. I have a family. I’m not sleeping in the office like I used to. Even if I wanted to, it’s hard to do right now, because my daughter’s up at like, 7am. Not that I can not sleep through the night and function as effectively as I could in my 20s. 

But what that also does is…you value every 30 minutes or every hour of time a lot more. So if I sit in a meeting — and this was true even before starting a company again. If I’m running a large organization of a few hundred people and you show up and you’re not prepared, and you used up 30 minutes of my time, you don’t have a plan, you don’t have a clear strategy, you know, that’s rough. 

Before having a family or having a child, you’re more forgiving. But now I’m like, that’s 30 minutes that’s not coming back. So let’s make this count, let’s move fast. 

So I think it’s a different flavor of resiliency or grit, and the nice thing of having had a couple of good runs is you sort of naturally gravitate toward taking a bigger swing. So I think when we started working together on RadiantGraph, I said, look, for me this is only worth it if it’s a really big swing. I’m walking away from the Chief Scientist job of the largest public company in our industry. So if I’m going to go spend five years, seven years, eight years at my next company, it’s because we’re going after a big swing. And that changes how we think of hiring, or capital, or efficiency. 

And I think we should talk about AI and capital in a minute, but you’re building for the long term, and that’s what I need to do. Because there’s nothing else that I’m super excited about doing. I’m not going to retire. I thought for a brief moment, maybe there’s a fund, but that’s not exciting for me. What I love is building and starting companies. And so, that’s what we’re doing. 

Each person is unique. I’m not sure every person in my age group or my stage of life is thinking the same way. But if you’re going to start a company, you have to be really clear that it’s going to take a lot of time, it’s going to be hard — especially in healthcare, it’s going to be really hard, but that’s how great things are done. 

Krishna: Agreed. I think you pointed to some last comments on AI. What are your thoughts on AI in the industry, or how it works in this capital environment? Are people spending too much money, too much time on the wrong things? 

Anmol: I think we’re sitting here, it’s 1999, the internet is just getting invented, and everybody is investing like it’s 2007 and they don’t know what Facebook is. 

These models have been around for a year. Yes, they’re great at some things, as far as language models go, they’re significantly superior to the status quo. There is something about how these models work that makes it feel more human-like in conversation, and I think we as a society have gotten really excited about that. Silicon Valley and investors are really excited about that. 

And I think that is transformational, I don’t want to take that away. I think it’s transformational in the broad, horizontal phase, it’s also transformational for health care in many different use cases. But I think the place where you’ve heard me say this is just because the technology is better, doesn’t mean that the business friction, the buying motion, the complexity of technology adoption, the selling cycle — all these things have suddenly changed. Healthcare has had a chance to adopt technology for like, three, four, five decades. We saw what happened with past technologies and how long they took. We saw what happened with the previous generation of machine learning use cases. We’re dealing with a very complex industry, and rightly so: we’re talking about human lives, we’re talking about a very secure workforce of doctors and nurses. There are so many things here.

So I’m in the camp of — and I may sound like a dinosaur — but I do think it’s like, take your time, be thoughtful. The companies that win are the ones that actually want to survive. You don’t want to be the Netscape of 1999, where you’re the star and then two years later, you’re gone. And so I think how you think of that, how do you adapt, how do you manage your burn, how do you manage your capital structure, how do you build a business that has revenue associated with it — those are all things that I value at this stage. Again, and not saying the other folks making investments are wrong. This is my criteria. I could say that a large fund might decide to go spend $1B a year on some company that has some really foundational chip technology or fine-tuning tech that they think will be the industry standard. I can see why they would make that bet, but that’s not the bet that I want to make. I want to make the bets to build a lasting company. And that takes time, that takes patience, that also takes enough time to understand the selling motion, the case studies, the proof points, all that stuff.

So I think if you have a big ambition, you do have to be cognizant of just throwing more money at the problem, because it won’t always make you grow faster. At least in healthcare. At least not in my experience in the past. 

So that’s kind of my broader view. But do I think the tech is interesting? For sure. Do I think the sub-clinical use cases like the ones we’re going after, or like the ones you’re seeing in the back office that are like, prime-time, ready today? Healthcare companies are still learning how to adopt them and when to adopt them. So that’s probably a whole other podcast we should do. And then there’s the other side of it, which is there is clinical triage, decision-making, the actual treatment decisions. Those things are going to take some time, because the bar is a lot higher. The complexity is a lot higher. There’s some kind of thoughtfulness there that we have to kind of work through. 

I think it’s going to be interesting. And I had a time axis prediction about a year ago. I have thrown my time axis prediction out the window, because it seems every week I’m surprised. So I think at this point, I’m holding off on when machines are making triage decisions and treatment decisions. But I think a lot of what I call coaching, subclinical, product and marketing engagement, back office note-taking — that kind of stuff, that definitely feels ready for prime time. 

Krishna: Awesome. Well, this has been a lot of fun. Anmol, thank you for making the 49 minutes and 35 seconds that will not come back in your day. 

Anmol: No, this is fun. This high value. 

Krishna: This is a lot of fun. Thanks so much, and looking forward to the next time we chat. 

Anmol: Awesome. Thank you, Krishna, for having me. 

Welcome back to our podcast: Tales from the Trenches. On today’s episode, Krishna chats with Ceres Imaging CEO Ramsey Masri about leading with empathy, staying calm under pressure, and the challenges and opportunities of running a mission-driven company.

Listen by clicking play above and/or read the transcript of the conversation.

Krishna: Great to be back, and I am very excited to have today the CEO of one of our companies: Ceres Imaging. We have Ramsey Masri on here today. I’ve gotten to know Ramsey quite well over the last couple of years since he joined our company as CEO. Ceres is a fantastic example of an interesting, vertically-applied AI business. It has built its business, its data set, its customer base in the agricultural space first and has now moved into the insurance market, which we’ll talk about later today. But as always, what we’re going to be focusing on this episode is the person and the struggle and the tales from the trenches. 

So with that: thank you for being with us, Ramsey. 

Ramsey: Krishna, thank you very much. It’s great to be on. Always nice to chat with you. 

Krishna: Well you know, one of the things I’d love to start with is you know when I first met, it was in relation to this role at Ceres. And I think we had a really great connection from the beginning. And although we didn’t immediately start working together, it eventually came around. And so I’d love to understand from your perspective: what was it that attracted you about Ceres as an opportunity? And for you to want to join as CEO? 

Ramsey: Thank you for that. And I do remember the conversations early on before I joined. And you know, what intrigued me was your description of the business itself. At that time, the company was about eight years old. It had market leadership with a keen focus on helping farmers deliver healthier foods without using as much water, chemical, and fertilizer. So I loved the mission. 

But what you also unveiled was: inside this business was this completely untapped data set that had been forced from all these different crop types and was emerging in all these different regions, and all these different scientists were working in Ceres, and all these different collaborations with names like NASA and UC Davis and these really venerable institutions all contributing. 

And I thought to myself: oh my goodness. There’s this gold mine here that is untapped around this data set. And it’s been under-monetized, under-utilized. So that was super appealing to me. 

And from my own personal history, growing up: I grew up in South America, in Peru. We had a pretty decent sized farming operation, about 70,000 hectares. We grew corn, cotton, and potatoes, and we also had some small amount of citrus and things like that growing there. 

Krishna: What brought your family to Peru and South America? 

Ramsey: That’s a great question. So you know, in the 20s and 30s in Europe, as they looked around the world, always somewhat of an expansionist mentality, Latin America was one of those great green field opportunities, right? A world unspoiled. And so my grandfather left Switzerland with my then three-year-old mother, and they moved to Peru and set up life down there. 

And even though my mom ended up going to college and marrying my dad here in the US, she inherited the properties and as such just thought it was such an amazing experience for herself that she wanted to share that with her kids as well. 

So down there we went in the late 60s and lived there through the 70s as well. And it was such an amazing time for us. And it was really my first big awakening to living and being around ag. And it wasn’t just ag itself — these were very remote places, and the family took great consideration in the overall community. The community of workers, you know, we set up facilities for schools and medicine and things like that for the community, because it was truly a community effort to farm an operation of that size. So that was instilled and inculcated into me from an early age. I’ve always loved that aspect of ag. 

Krishna: One of the reasons I invested in Ceres — when I looked at Ceres initially, I had been looking at the ag industry for quite some time. And what stood out to me about Ceres, obviously there was a proprietary technology and the data set, which was unique in the agtech industry, but what else stood out to me was the empathy for the customer. The founder, Ash, had spent a lot of time himself in Brazil and just really enjoyed spending time with farmers. And that’s not most people’s cup of tea in tech, but I actually think it’s a non-negotiable part of being successful in this industry. 

And so I saw that with you too. And as I’ve gotten to know you over the past few years, I’d say you just have a general sense of empathy for all of your business partners, etc. And it’s something I’ve appreciated on a personal level, too. 

Walk me through kind of how that has played a role in your success to date in your career, and especially during tough times. How do you stay empathetic when you’re in the trenches, when you’re facing down the barrel of complete disaster — which I’m sure you’ve seen across your career. How do you stay true and authentic to who you are? 

Ramsey: Yeah, thank you, that’s a great question — it’s a very deep question. Yeah, look, I’ve been in my career for over 30 years and enjoyed every minute, both the ups and the downs. It’s the wind and the rain which chisels the rock and puts beautiful shapes on it, right? 

One thing is true for me and just my sense of self and my friends is honesty and transparency, even when it’s hard news. And unlike fine wines, bad news typically does not age well. So the sooner you broach those things, the better. 

And I think certainly during tough times with employees or peers or investors, bringing that bad news sometimes immediately — while it might be abrupt, and you might not like the reaction — it’s ultimately the best thing to do. Not only from a transparency standpoint, but I believe in the collective power of people. I believe in the collective intellectual horsepower of people coming together as a team. So when you broach a tough problem with a good group of people, they will then start helping you solve that problem together. 

I really view business as a team sport. I grew up playing team sports, and I understand…

Krishna: Which sports did you play? 

Ramsey: Growing up in South America, it’s soccer, or football down here. And then when I moved to the US, it became American football, which I love a lot. They’re still my friends today. So there’s a great bonding you get with a team. And as part of my interview process when I hire, I make sure there’s a good team dynamic, because I know how to leverage that team dynamic for the betterment of all and certainly for my own personal support and leaning on them in those critical times. 

So how do we get through those tough things? The easy things are easy. It’s the tough things that really make the difference between success and failure, and it’s that transparency, the honesty, it’s the immediacy, and it’s the trust factor. And I really like to lead as first among equals less so than being in a very hierarchical structure. And having spent the first decade of my life at a great company where I learned a ton, at Oracle, it was very striated, there was a pecking order, certain people knew some things, others didn’t know other things, it just didn’t feel like it fit me personally. And that’s why I really enjoy these younger, more vibrant companies like the ones you start. 

Krishna: You know, every leader that I’ve met or worked with has a different style when under pressure, when “in the trenches” when there’s warfare erupting all around you. I, for example, am very — and you know this by now — if I’ve got the energy, I’m flying around, I’m screaming, I’m yelling, I’m doing whatever, I’m pumping up the troops. What I find incredible about you, and very unrelatable in some ways but very remarkable, is that you are just completely cool as a cucumber. And I’ve seen you under some very tough and stressful situations. And I take a lot of…I calm down when I talk to you about those situations, because you just don’t flinch. And I have a positive attitude, but sometimes you really just need to stay calm. 

Was that something that was part of your character from the beginning as a kid? How did that come about? Is that something you saw and observed in your parents? How has that helped you handle some very tough situations? 

Ramsey: It’s interesting — if I were to emulate my parents, I might be a little bit more emotionally reactive. So maybe I did learn from them that that’s not always the best way to do things. 

I also believe in — and first of all, thank you for the nice comments — but I also believe that level-headedness, channeling your energy into productive activity is good. This is a marathon, not a sprint: pace yourself accordingly. Things like that. Yes, as I’ve matured into my career and into my role, I’ve certainly been more conscious of my exterior behavior. Sort of like the swan on the pond: everything looks calm on the surface, but the legs are furiously moving beneath. Very much that way — because I know for myself, if there’s a sense of calmness and confidence in the room, that’s very settling — especially in these moments that can be, candidly, quite startling if you don’t handle it well. 

I’ve seen some terrifying things in my life. I used to race motorcycles, and I like good, adventurous things that will scare the bejeezus out of you, so maybe that’s helped put things in perspective for me of what’s worth getting super excited about. 

Actually, I like our dynamic, because you sort of catalyze me to take an action maybe sooner than I might have, but actually I think it’s quite a symbiotic relationship we have. 

Krishna: I agree. One of the other things I think you do to stay calm is that you are a very active cycler, I mean generally you keep up a very solid cadence of physical activity, right? Walk me through that. 

Ramsey: Yeah, I mean exercise and diet are seriously my two strongest pillars. And I know you believe that, and I think we share that a lot. We actually talked about that right up front — like, what do you do to kind of stay sane? And I have the good fortune to live by a really beautiful mountain, and I love to ride my mountain bike up and down it. And that is just a great place to crack hard problems, calm myself, free the mind, endorphins. Just a great work bench for thinking, it’s a great work bench for reconnecting my soul to the earth, which…my Berkeley education is showing there, but I definitely feel very grounded when I’m out there. And of course, managing diet. Because look: these are super stressful jobs. So really leveraging that airplane safety video — putting your mask on first before helping others. So if I’m not good, how can I be good for others? So being very conscious about making sure that I’m solid before embarking on bringing the team with me. 

I think you’re that way — actually, I know you’re that way too, because we talk about it regularly. 

Krishna: You also, I think, work with a lot of leaders directly or indirectly, maybe, as a mentor or as an investor or maybe all of the above. And so where do you find…what advice would you have for upcoming leaders and entrepreneurs? Where you have seen people struggle and fail? And to the other side — give me an example of a leader you admire deeply because of the way he or she has handled the trenches. 

Ramsey: Yeah, it’s interesting. So the biggest benefit I’ve seen is from folks who are older, so I would say look for an older mentor: someone who’s got at least a decade ahead of you. Sort of like a fore caddy in golf: someone who can look over the hill and around the corner, who can say well head this way, I know it may seem unnatural, but that’s the way to go. 

One of the biggest challenges is to get consumed with the immediate and the tactical and lose sight of the strategic. And get so wrapped up in right now that you forget about tomorrow or next week or next quarter. And before you know it, next week or next quarter are right there as well. So if you’re in constant motion of solving for the tactical, not solving for the strategic, you’ll never get out of that dog fight, and it’s exhausting and tends to lead to jinking your business left and right and not following a truer course. 

I’m not saying stay inflexible and rigid and follow a single line. But you need to find a way to keep going forward against your long-term goals — the strategic goals — while simultaneously handling the tactical. 

There are lots of good tricks about how you start your day. Do you start your day immediately on email? Or do you start your day over a cup of tea and 30 minutes of thinking or meditation and sort of planning your day? There’s that great example, what’s a more productive week: a 40-hour week, or a 39-plus-one, with that one being a very thoughtful and considerate hour of planning before you embark on something? 

Early on in my career I had the privilege of working for a couple very successful guys: Tom Siebel, Ray Lane. Early on at Oracle while I was there we had a lot of exposure to Larry Ellis himself, who’s my executive sponsor on a few deals. Jeff Henley was the CFO as well. These were super seasoned and tenured people at the time, at least from my perspective, who were anticipating things as they were coming. So rather than reacting to the thing once it arrived, they were deliberately taking actions many quarters and many months beforehand. And that just serves so well, because by the time you arrived at that moment, you’d either thought about it or planned for it or organized or hired, or you’d done something proactive to meet that moment in a super positive way of being proactive and not reactive about it. 

So I guess again the takeaway is find someone who’s definitely older than you who’s been down the road, because there are plenty of those people who are willing to come back and mentor. I think it’s a societal obligation. I take it on all the time, I love doing it. I think it’s kind of a requirement for the next generations to bring up the generations behind us. 

Krishna: Well, to be honest, I’ve learned a lot from you myself. You know, building our business, I never have had a mentor, and I’ve probably made a whole bunch of mistakes that I could have avoided if I had had one. So I seek out every opportunity I can to learn from people who have been there and done that, and certainly you’re one of those who has seen more situations and been doing this for longer than I have. 

Now, I want to come back to Tom Siebel. He’s obviously a legend. But it’s fascinating, because you talk about being proactive. He went down C3IOT and then saw AI coming before it took off. Renamed, rebranded everything to C3AI, and I think he’s reaping the benefits of that right now. 

And so that ties into my next question. You talked about leaders being proactive and finding ways to still be strategic when you’re in the heat of the battle — you’re just trying to survive sometimes. And you know, AI is one of these topics that every CEO, every leader is being bombarded with. Either you’re an AI company, or why aren’t you an AI company, and what are you doing about AI. 

What I find very interesting about us at Ceres is that we actually have been an AI company from the beginning, but our version of AI…we’ve been focused on computer vision, initially. And as this sort of wave of what I would say conversational AI and language model-driven AI — and it’s a separate debate as to whether it’s AI or not, but I won’t get into that here — but as that debate has unfolded, and you’ve heard this from me, like, “Ramsey, are we taking advantage of this wave?” And so, how have you been able to be strategic about integrating AI into the business? How do you separate — no pun intended — the wheat from the chaff? 

Ramsey: Great question. I think this is one of the first things in our first conversations a couple years ago when we first came into the business, but you were already talking to me about it. Hey, here’s this data set, it’s native-born AI, machine learning, computer vision had been built into the architecture from day one a decade ago. And having come out of other companies that have leveraged that, because obviously the technology or the concept itself has been around for over 20 years, it’s not new, it’s gaining in speed and popularity, but yes, there’s a very deliberate and overt leverage of the technology for the betterment of the farmer, for keener and more accurate insights, all of the things we know it does happen here already. As we think about and as we incorporate greater AI capacity into the platform, we think about it from the end user’s perspective. How can they engage with us more independently and faster in a native way? So we’re definitely planning for different drops of it over the next couple quarters, how to bolster our AI and ML offerings so that the end user can access it more readily. 

And also for internal tooling, how our own customer service people can run faster and more accurate queries in literally minutes versus hours or days, which is what they currently do. 

But again: a lot of the product set has already incorporated that in its offering, so it’s really adding little layers of benefit on top of the existing platform. 

But again, I think it was very thoughtfully done from day one. I can’t take any credit for that — that was all Ashwin and the team early on. 

Krishna: Yeah. You know, I think the AI revolution — this one, this wave — has been very interesting to witness. Because it comes back a little bit to what you were saying earlier. It’s a topic we often don’t like to talk about. Sort of like the age gap, right? 

So you’ve got people like yourselves who have been there and seen it and understand that this machine learning wave is not new. Even for me, the first investment we made in machine learning was in 2009. But that being said, you’ve got people who are 22 years old, well younger than both of us, saying well, this is a very different type of revolution. It’s a sort of transformational time. 

It’s been interesting to me to watch those two sides come together, because you really do need to. Because on the one side, I would say all of this is a little over-hyped, and people think they can do a lot more than they probably can. And on the other side, there are people who don’t quite grasp how revolutionary this can be, and sort of watching this come together. And I think the best way this comes together is in real-world applications, like we see at Ceres. 

I had a great time — as you know, I was in Barcelona a couple weeks ago — and I had a great time going on a walk with Leo, our friend. And actually one of the first things he told me, which was surprising to me, is that he had worked with you five times. And that to me alone was such an interesting data point, because God, you have to be doing something right if somebody chooses to work with you for five times. 

And so I was like, ok, well maybe Ramsey is indeed a good guy. And he’s clearly inspiring confidence. But the other thing that Leo…we had a wide-ranging conversation, and one of the things he told me was that one of the customers we’re talking to out in Italy has a lot of data that is highly unstructured. And the example he gave me was in the 6,000 acre piece of land — which is not a lot — there were 5,000 PDFs governing the dataset that we would intake. And so there’s a clear opportunity there to structure that data, leverage that data, make it dynamic it instead of static, leveraging some of these new and modern tools that we have at our disposal. 

And so: are you finding opportunities like that in real time and uncovering them? And then how are you saying, ok, here’s the opportunity, and here’s how I leverage the latest and greatest language models to sort of create value from that opportunity and close the loop and then go show something to my customer?

Ramsey: There was a lot in there, so let me sort of unpack that one a little bit. And by the way, I wanted to make a comment harkening back to one of your original questions. 

Learnings for me: yes, I teach a lot to some of the younger staff, but I also learn a ton from them. It’s a very bidirectional, reciprocal relationship. And part of that, I’ve had the pleasure over the past many companies, of over the past 20 years being in small growth companies, of constantly interacting with younger generations. And that keeps me attuned to their behavior and also their thought patterns and stuff like that. And a young energetic mind unbridled by too much experience can actually come up with some amazing insights and thoughts. 

Coming now to your comments about AI: yes, ag itself — this is the opportunity for the next decade, and there’s at least a decade of innovation available. This is one of the last great bastions of an all-analogue environment. It’s still pen and paper, there’s 5,000 PDFs, there’s umpteen numbers of scraps and notes scattered all over, and there’s a data fragmentation opportunity that we’re looking to help solve, there’s health and sustainability, there’s a variety of things we get to do over the next many years in ag alone. 

The thing about ag is the rate of change is not as high as, like, a consumer app, because the rate of change and the ability for the sector itself to adopt that change isn’t as high. And some of that is cultural, some of it is a seasonal thing. I’ve spent time in the mobile marketing space and mobile games, where you introduce a feature or change and within weeks you know whether it’s working or not. In ag, you have to wait a growing season to see if what you’ve implemented has a positive result. 

Now that gives us some really nice buffer of time to be very thoughtful about what aspects of AI we leverage and to what end. So we get to have a good thought process, good engagement with prospective buyers, with our prospects, partners, learned board members like yourself of what is the best way to actually leverage this technology for the total benefit of the end user customer as well as the company and its growth. Because obviously, introducing change all the time wreaks a lot of havoc on your engineering team, and you don’t have unlimited capacity or patience from them to constantly introduce change. 

Krishna: Especially while trying to deliver an enterprise-grade product. And I think that’s what a lot of people sort of forget. I saw that firsthand also at Presto. It’s one of the things we do that separates us: you have to separate building a cool consumer app that people can just play around with, with building a product that actually integrates and works in an enterprise environment. 

On that side, if you move engineers left and right, you end up getting nowhere. 

Ramsey: That’s exactly right. It kind of comes down to staying the course. And staying the course is very comforting, right? We talked before about how do you maintain calm when you’re surrounded by chaos? It’s staying true to your path. And staying dedicated to what we’re going to do from a strategic standpoint, and surfing through the whitewater sometimes is scary, but as long as you know your board’s still going straight and you’re headed toward the beach ultimately, you’re going to get there. Just stay on your board, man!

Krishna: And look, that’s what the customers want to hear too, right? They want to hear a clear value proposition. 

So let’s get to the industry for a second. So ag has been a very tough — to your point, it’s one of the last bastions of pen and paper ways of doing business and handshakes and all that kind of stuff. So how do you…and as a result, I would say, ag tech has had a very tough go of it over the last few years. At the same time, I can’t get away from the fact that it’s a massive industry, it’s a huge vertical, it ain’t going anywhere. And so how do you reconcile those two facts? And how do you look at, as the CEO of Ceres, and say look: with our direction in this industry, on the insurance side, the financial services side, but also with a basis in the ag business, why are we able to crack the code? Why does the industry look different 2-3 years from now? Why is this the inflection point for this pen and paper industry to look different over the next handful of years? 

Ramsey: Those are great questions. And look, it’s not a surprise there was a huge rush to bolster the ag sector. 

Krishna: Do we blame David Friedberg for that? 

Ramsey: (Laughter) Possibly. Certainly one who’s made…hey, you can become a billionaire if you go into a market and you’re the only one there. But he was very thoughtful about it, because he originally started his business trying to be a bank and an insurance company and then sort of deviated more into economic insight. 

But I’ve spent over 30 years in technology and I was growing grapes in California since 1999, and when I lived up in Napa because we wanted to raise our family there, it just seemed so obvious that the sector needed to be brought along. The 21st century was rushing pas them, and they were still doing things this way. So there’s no doubt there’s a need. And as a consequence, as capitalism is really good at doing, is they found a need, and technology found a need, and they came rushing in there. And I must say I’m so impressed with the founders and the leaders in all these companies that have been funded over the last 7-10 years. Absolutely amazing technology. And the leaders of these companies are some serious folks. They have doctorate degrees in chemistry and hydrology and plant biology, I mean they’re incredibly learned people who know deep science about things. And they’ve gone about bringing their very thoughtful product to market. 

Krishna: But most of them have failed. So what have they done wrong that we’re doing right? 

Ramsey: Well, I think the biggest difference is they have focused so much on the feature itself and what the feature itself does from the purity of its science, and they’ve ignored the commercial aspect…because they were never trained that way. They don’t have the same commercial DNA you and I have. And I think that’s the single biggest issue, is the fact that they’re not commercially minded. They can get up to one or two, maybe $3M in revenue because they’re passionate and they sell it to somebody, but it’s an unscalable model, because typically the founder is running it and there are a bunch of other scientists or PhDs helping along the way. They haven’t built in that commercial, scalable business. And nor do they recognize that selling up into those big scary enterprise looking things that look like banks and insurance companies…that’s not very sexy when all you care about is the farmer in the field. 

So they’ve chosen just to double down in the dirt. It’s the pressure of this environment: yet another down cycle. I think this is my fourth economic downturn. They’re ultimately very healthy. I know it’s kind of Darwinian to say, but it kind of shakes out those who have real products and real business models, and I think it’s a necessary part of capitalism to sort of get those who are soaking up the extra money out of the way and let the pure play guys lead. 

And we’re one of the few who’ve really chosen to go upstream. Go up where it’s hard, and where it takes a little bit longer to sell to. But the problem we’re solving is massive. It’s billions and billions of dollars every single year. $270B of ag loans and ag insurance gets renewed every single year, but they’re still using 20-year-old methods and procedures, and nobody’s helping them. And you can’t farm without a loan, and you can’t get a loan without insurance. And we’ve got to keep this thing going, man. We have almost 10B people to feed in the next 25-30 years, so it needs to be addressed. 

So we feel good that our mission is sound, but also our business model is sound underneath it as well. 

Krishna: You bring up mission, which I know that the foundation of Ceres has always been based on a mission. And I know Ash was very wedded to that mission. That mission has kept our company intact all these years and motivated. What role…I mean, is this the most mission-oriented company you’ve been part of? What role can mission play for leaders in the trenches? And can it be a distraction sometimes? How do you think about the pros and cons of being mission-driven as a company when you are deep in the trenches? 

Ramsey: You know, I love the mission of the company. This is not my first mission-driven company, but this is probably the mission that I have identified with most at a personal level, just because of my family background and how I grew up, and how I can apply my professional career to my own family life. And having those two come together…it’s the best job I’ve ever had, truly. 

And I do think mission galvanizes everybody toward a common thing. And again, when we talk about those times that are disruptive or it seems like we’re shifting course and going into these new markets, but if you can clarify the mission remains the same, that the woods we’e walking through now are different but the journey ahead remains the same, even though the path might be a little different, we’re still doing this. We still believe that farmers first forever is a really, really important mission statement. We still believe that helping farmers deliver those healthy and more sustainable crops, we’re staying true to that. 

And Ash was very clear when we were going through the get to know process two years ago that it meant something deeply personal to him. And I took that on board. It was like, man, you believe it, and I owe you my commitment to this cause as well. And everybody here is a true believer. And as we go through these tough times together, they’re all still here for a reason: because they believe in the mission. So I think it’s really important that that mission statement is not only clearly set and clearly defined, but also regularly invoked on all-hands meetings or whatever reference when the company gets together that this is our mission. 

And also, when you and I are talking to investors out there, we talk about that too. And I think they listen, they hear that. They’re like, oh man, these guys are invested in this. They’re not just talking about numbers and growth — they’re talking about their mission. And I think it adds not only a human side, but also a very purposeful side to the business beyond just making money. 

Krishna: As an investor, when I am pitched by companies that lean into a mission, I’ll be honest — there’s a part of me that’s skeptical. Because it’s like, well, is this basically just a cover for not being commercial? Is this going to distract people? 

Ramsey: Interesting. 

Krishna: But then there’s a handful of companies where it really for me stands out as a reinforcing…a mission that has great positive externalities. And Ceres, from day one, was one of those. I always believed in the mission. I believe that without that mission, you can’t be successful in this industry, coming back to the empathy part. And I think that’s true in a handful of industries. Not every one, but I would say agriculture is one. Probably healthcare is another. And there’s a couple more like that, where you just can’t be successful if you are not to some degree woven together with a mission that is aligned with your business. 

Ramsey: I agree, and having sold ERP, I guarantee it’s hard to really buy into the ERP mission. 

Krishna: I was going to say, I’m not sure how mission-driven Tom Siebel is across his business. 

Ramsey: It’s a different mission. 

Krishna: It’s a different mission. 

Ramsey: It’s a very, very different mission. 

Krishna: Yeah. And so, that’s great. Look, Ramsey, this has been a fantastic conversation, as every one of our conversations is. So I appreciate you making the time, and hopefully this is going to be helpful for younger leaders who can take something away from you. 

Ramsey: Absolutely and look — call me. Happy to chat anytime. And Krishna, always a pleasure man, thank you for having me on. 

Krishna: Thank you. Take care. 

Welcome back to our podcast: Tales from the Trenches, which has returned after a six-month hiatus. On today’s episode, Remus VP of Communications Molly Donovan chats with Krishna about his tenure as CEO of Presto Automation, the first Remus portfolio company to go public. Krishna shares his insights about being in the trenches as CEO, his thoughts on how his approach to investing prepared him for the role, and the lessons he learned that apply to founders and CEOs more broadly.

Listen by clicking play above and/or read the transcript of the conversation.

MD: Welcome back, listeners, to Tales from the Trenches. It’s been a while, because Krishna has literally been in the trenches. In March, he took over as CEO of Presto Automation, which is the first company in the Remus portfolio to go public. And now, about 6 months later, his tenure as CEO has ended, but he remains Chairman of the Board at Presto. So today, we’re going to chat with Krishna to get an inside perspective on the experience, what he learned, and why Remus’ building, not betting approached enabled him to do a better job when he was in the trenches as CEO. 

So hi, Krishna, and welcome to your own show.

KKG: Hey Molly, it’s great to be back. It’s great to have our show back, and I’m excited about this conversation. 

MD: Great. So let’s jump right in. It’s pretty much unheard of for a venture capitalist to become a public company CEO of one of his own portfolio companies. So, how did this happen? 

KKG: Yeah. Well, it was not something I expected. You know Raj, the founder and CEO of the company, who did a great job taking the company public, he just — unexpectedly to be honest — resigned. He was burnt out. He wanted to spend more time with his family, and I think that’s totally respectable, but it’s not something that we as a board were expecting, and not something that we had necessarily planned for. And so we had to find someone within 24 hours, and the board asked me to step in. I decided that I was going to be the best choice for shareholders, and since I’m the largest shareholder across all of our vehicles, that mattered a lot to me. And so I stepped in. And it was a whirlwind couple of days for me to do that, but I found myself as CEO of a public company, which was a new experience for me, and it was a new experience for our firm. But that’s kind of how it went down. 

MD: So what do you think are some of the advantages of having the CEO and the largest shareholder, because you are the largest shareholder across a couple entities at Presto, what do you think are some of the advantages of having those two roles be the same?

KKG: KKYou know, I think it’s actually amazing. It doesn’t happen all the time, because usually the largest shareholders are investors, as we are in this case. But it was such an amazing alignment of interests, and it was such an incredible feeling. Because everything I said and did, I could do so authentically and really mean what I was saying, whether that was to our LPs or to the board or to shareholders. The alignment across board, shareholder, and management team was nearly perfect. And that’s a CEO’s job: it’s to create value for shareholders. My fiduciary duty to our LPs is the same — it’s to create value for them. So I could be much more authentic, and I felt like as CEO I could be really impactful in terms of what I was doing. 

MD: Yeah, that makes sense. And I’m guessing it took a little while to get into that good groove. What was your reaction after immediately stepping in, and how did other people react? 

KKG: It was wild at first, right? Imagine being an investor — who, granted, is very involved in our companies — who for almost 15 years had been an investor and a board member, and always one step away from actually being able to make decisions and drive the business in certain ways. And you know, that’s a role that we’ve accepted over time. 

And so suddenly 24 hours in I held controls and I was on the management team. I was on the other side. You know, when the board would meet with us…I’m used to sort of caucusing with the board afterward, and here I was caucusing with management. It was a huge flipping of the tables in some ways, and it was a learning experience for me.

Now the other side of that coin is that now you have to answer to a board. And candidly, I haven’t answered to someone in a day to day way in that way frankly for more than a decade. And I went from being chairman and largest shareholder to suddenly answering to the board. And that wasn’t an easy transition for me, candidly. It taught me a lot for sure, and I think I’ve learned a lot about everything — how to empathize with the CEO and how to manage a board and also how to communicate with a board, but that was the other side of that coin. 

MD: In your role as an investor, you give advice to CEOs and to high-level management a lot about interacting and interfacing with the board. Would you change the advice you give to CEOs in your portfolio now that you’ve had this experience, vis a vis talking to the board and interacting with the board? 

KKG: Yeah, it’s a great question. Like I said, there’s a greater sense of empathy that I have having been CEO in a high pressure situation of a public company. 

You know, I start with the principles we have at Remus, some of our values. And I would say two of the values that continue to stand out to me are authenticity and audacity. I think it’s really important to be very authentic in how you communicate to the board. And that doesn’t just mean sharing with the board what’s going wrong, which is obviously where it starts. But also being clear about what you think is the right path to create shareholder value, which may not always be the easy path. And so I think in part because I had a pre-existing relationship with the board, which was more of a peer-level relationship, I felt compelled and more comfortable to be able to tell them, hey I think we should do this differently, or I think we need to go pursue this crazy idea. Now, my style is much more…frankly, I’m a little brash. I’m very direct.

MD: You’re kidding. 

KKG: Everyone who’s worked with me will agree with that. So I can’t say I’m the most politically savvy operator of the board, but I think authenticity is an important trait for a CEO. Because at the end of the day, what you really want to ensure is the right decisions get made, and if the CEO is not being very clear about where he or she thinks the company should go, by definition you know the right decisions almost certainly won’t be made. 

So even when boards push back…I’ve seen plenty of situations as a VC where boards have pushed the company into making bad decisions for shareholders. And the CEOs don’t agree sometimes with those decisions, and they know in their heart of hearts that that’s the wrong decision for shareholders, but they get pushed into doing that because of the board. They need to speak out in those situations in a respectful way, in a collaborative way, but they need to speak out.

The other side of that is audacity. So, I think especially on public company boards, there’s a tendency to sort of gravitate toward the path of least resistance, the path of least risk, a reversion to the mean, almost a reversion to mediocrity. I think it’s really important as CEO to be audacious in how you think about what the company should be doing. Should we think about it expanding or increasing sales faster? Could we be much more iterative or much more agile in our product development? Could we think creatively about the kinds of partnerships we can strike? One of the things that I always embrace and always tell our founders to embrace when I’m on the board as an investor, and something that I absolutely embraced as CEO, was go to the customer. Get on a plane. Go meet the customers face-to-face, and explain to them what’s going on. These are things that I think a lot of CEOs think they should be doing but don’t always do. And I think the approach I took from day one, partially because of the circumstances I found myself in where I wasn’t expecting to be CEO, was let me take an audacious approach to what we can change about this company to set it up for shareholder value accretion. 

MD: So speaking of shareholder value, I know that was something that was really front of mind for you while you were CEO. And you had a great run. When you started in the position, I think the stock price was somewhere around $1.50, and at the peak during your time as CEO, it was almost $6. So, how did that happen? What do you think factored into that success? 

Yeah. Look, I think there were a couple things. First of all, I had a great team. I stepped into a little bit of a chaotic situation, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have an incredible executive team. It’s the same executive team that’s effectively running the company today. And so that helped a lot. 

But the second thing is I believed firmly that the company was undervalued by the markets, and the simple reason for that I believe was we hadn’t framed our strategy and our company well enough for the markets, and we had not made sure that enough people were aware that we existed. It’s as simple as that. And so I spent a good amount of time when I came in thinking ok, how do we ensure that people don’t just think of as a restaurant company, when in fact I know that inside the company we think of ourselves more broadly as a labor automation play or a labor augmentation play or an AI company. And so we thought of ourselves and think of ourselves as an enterprise AI business. Making sure that we could communicate that effectively to the market was important. 

I think the other part that was important was that a lot of people just didn’t know that we existed, because we’re a very small cap company. And so ensuring that I got out on the road and met people, shook hands whether that’s virtually online or offline was important. And I think the optimism, the energy all translated to more people wanting to be shareholders in the company. And so I think the stock price was just an output of that in that sense. If you have more people who want to buy your stock or be a part of your company, the stock goes up, and it reflects enthusiasm and optimism around the company. 

And so it was a wild ride. You’re right — it nearly quadrupled in price, and I think most importantly to me, the volume nearly probably 10X’d or more. And I think that shows that there are a lot more people who are interested in what we’re doing, understand that we are a very actionable application of applied AI right now. The labor problem is real: restaurants need a lower-cost system to be able to resolve those problems, and it turns out that an intelligent automation system and an AI-enabled system will ultimately drive more revenue and more value to the customers to. And I think that was the message I was trying to get across. 

MD: Yeah, and I think you did. And to back up a little bit: when you stepped in, it was the first time you had held this position as CEO, but you had been working with Presto for over a decade. You’ve been really in the weeds with this company since its inception. So it might not have been the biggest jump, as it might have been for someone who was not as familiar with the company. So looking back, what do you think prepared you most for the role, and how do you think your approach to investing — namely, building not betting and getting so involved with the founding team and with the company from the earliest stages — how do you think that shaped what you did as CEO? 

KKG: Yeah, great question, Molly. I think building not betting is at the center of everything we do at my universe, in the Remus universe. And so I think [it was a] testament to our ability to help our companies that I was even able to step in as CEO. I think if we weren’t more hands-on, you’re right — it would not have even been a question. The board would not have asked me to step in. And so I think our involvement in companies from the beginning and understanding the evolution of companies, helping drive the evolution of companies…you know, several of the executives that we have on our team, I had been directly involved in helping Raj hire. And so I had a natural rapport or understanding with many of them that played a big role. And in fact one of them I ended up elevating with the board as my successor. 

So I think continuity, involvement, and then understanding of context. Context ends up being so important in company-building. If you understand why a company is where it’s at today, and why it’s doing certain things — whether that’s positive or negative — it dramatically increases your ability to make changes and understand the pushes and pulls. Now, that all being said, it can be very valuable to have people come in from the outside and present recommendations, etc., and in some ways that’s what the board is able to do. 

So I found myself in this interesting position where, yes, we have been very involved in companies to date, but we’re able to maintain that perspective of the insider coming in and say hey, we’re not involved in the day-to-day, and so here are the things we believe you should be doing. And then suddenly, I was able to take the role that actually allowed me to carry out some of those things. I think there’s a natural continuity there.

That all being said: I don’t really want myself or others on our team to be having to do this on a more frequent basis. I don’t think we have any aspiration of ultimately becoming CEOs of our companies. But I think it’s nice that we were able to. 

MD: Yeah, for sure. And one thing that we talk a lot about at Remus is that you’re there — you and the investing team are in the trenches with companies when it’s good during boom times, but also you’re there doubling down with them, helping them figure out how to pivot when they need to when the going gets tough, and you were definitely able to do that here. And so what do you think was one of the unexpectedly, maybe, hardest things about serving in this role? 

KKG: I think…you know, it’s hard being an operator.  And it’s not that we had any illusion that it was hard before. But I think the part that I found most challenging was the day to day, in the weeds stuff. I’m very much someone who likes to gravitate toward 80/20. And on the 20% that I think can make 80% of impact, I throw myself fully into that, into the weeds. But I have a very tough time, just as a person, spending 80% of my time on the 20% of impact stuff. But as a CEO, you don’t have a choice necessarily. Oftentimes, you get dragged into the bucket that you know is low-value and low-impact, but you have to do as CEO. 

And so it’s not that it was wholly unexpected, but you really don’t know what you’re getting into until you get into that. And that kind of minutiae was a little bit surprising to me. 

Now that all being said, like I said earlier on in this episode, you know — this all gives me a greater sense of empathy and understanding for the CEOs that we do work with. Perhaps most directly, we’ve had another company go public, Allurion, and we’ve had the founder and CEO of Allurion on this show before. And it allows me to be a greater advisor and partner to him in my role as co-chairman of Allurion, because I’ve been in his shoes as CEO, and in particular in this case, as a public company CEO before. 

So yeah, it was not easy, but it was a great learning experience. 

MD: Yeah. Speaking of Allurion and being the Chair there, you’re still Chairman of the Board at Presto. And so now you have that distinction, which I don’t know if I know of anyone else at your age who is the Chairman of two public companies, but we can talk about that more later. But I’d love to know, what are some of the differences between being the Chair of the Board and being the CEO of a public company specifically? 

Yeah I mean I would say whether it’s public or private, I think the role of the Chairman of the Board, at least the way I view it, is a) to help guide the board in holding management accountable. B) You’re stewards of shareholder value, and so it’s helpful to determine the right strategy for the company and ensure the company is pointed toward the right direction in a way that can be most accretive to shareholders. 

And then I think there’s c), which is that the board needs to protect the company and protect the shareholders as well. 

That’s very different from the CEO, which is a role where operationally you are working day to day to make sure the company operates in a way that is aligned with how the Board wants it to operate. The alignment between the Board and the CEO should be around the fact that both ultimately work, or should be working, to increase shareholder value. And so in that sense, my role as Chairman allows me to be a partner to the CEO of a company in a variety of operational matters as well. Typically I get most involved in the commercial side as well as maybe product strategy or company strategy, etc. So it allows me as Chairman to sometimes be a proxy for the company when it faces the public. 

Now again, when I’m Chairman, there’s only so much you know and there’s only so much you can do. But I think when we look at our involvement at companies across the board, across our portfolio, we end up playing that first phone call, first source of partnership or collaboration that the CEO goes to. And I think that effectively should be the role of the Chairman. 

MD: And I know you’ve talked a little bit already about how this experience changed your perspective as an investor and how it made you more empathetic to other CEOs in the portfolio. Is there anything else that it changed? In terms of your strategy, in terms of the investment thesis, in terms of just kind of how you would interact with CEOs going forward? Anything else that changed as a result of your time as CEO? 

KKG: Well, I think you know…certainly when we look at new founders that we are looking at investing in, I’m able to speak to them in a certain way and with a certain experience that I did not have before. It’s not something that I really expected when I took the role on, but when I stepped away, and now when I speak to an entrepreneur who’s building a company, let’s say an applied AI company in some vertical or the other, I’m able to speak to them much more fluently about how we can help them. Even if it’s simply perception. Their perception of us as a partner who has sat in their shoes and who can help them has changed in a meaningful way, especially since I’ve been CEO. 

I think in terms of our understanding of the sector or the space, I don’t think it’s dramatically changed in that sense. But I will add one point to that, which is interacting with customers having been the CEO of a company…I think there’s a learning there too. I’ve interacted with lots of customers on behalf of our companies over the years, many customers we’ve brought to companies. But talking CEO to CEO is definitely a little different than investor to CEO. And so there’s certain quality of conversation, there are certain learnings that I’ve picked up on how to interact with potential customers that I think will add more value to our ability to be able to do that going forward. 

MD: Like what? What have you learned? 

Well, for example, I think because I had to manage my own board, it gave me immediate empathy for the customer CEO having to manage his or her board. And it’s not that I was previously unaware that they had a board, but I viewed that relationship as, oh: there’s a board, and there’s a CEO, and the board interacts with the CEO. 

But no: the CEO oftentimes is tiptoeing to ensure that he or she is managing the board the right way, and everything that he or she communicates to the board or vice versa goes through a filter of that relationship between board and management. And so understanding that relationship and the dynamics of that relationship in a much better way allows me to navigate my conversations and I think will allow me to navigate my conversations with customer CEOs in a much better way.

MD: Yeah, I think you’re right. You were in the CEO role for a relatively short time, but I know that while you were there, there were a couple of things that you focused on culturally at the company. So how about culture? How did you focus on building a unique culture at Presto while you were CEO? 

KKG: So, I think, look, culture is everything. Everything starts and ends with culture. And I know that CEOs and boards like to talk about it, but I really believe in that. And so the day that the board officially appointed me CEO, I sat down and scribbled my three mantras into my notebook that I intended to employ across the notebook on day one. 

And those three mantras were move at lightning speed, power of positivity, and then create magic. 

And in moving at lightning speed, it was how do we up the metronome, how do we up the pace of everything we do, every single action. If we can do it today, let’s do it today. If we can do it this minute, let’s do it this minute. That sort of urgency, I think, was really valuable to us as an organization during the time that I was there. 

The power of positivity is just who I am. I believe everything should be viewed through a glass half full. And I think when you take that approach, you end up being able to find solutions to every problem in front of you, and I believe that every problem can be solved. So that was really important, and I think it helped everybody get on the same page. 

And third was create magic. You know, our name is Presto. And when we went public, I actually bought a bunch of magic wands for everyone to be part of the stage at the Nasdaq. And so I really wanted us to lean into our brand and embrace that everything we do — whether that’s how we talk about it, how we produce our product, every line of code we make — we should think about it as being magical. How can we make it so customers are delighted with the results and investors are delighted with the results? 

And so those were the three mantras. And I actually had our EA print out the three mantras, put them all over the office. Every email ended with that, and I think it made a radical difference and got my tenure as CEO off to a very good start. 

MD: I was going to say, how did people react to it? Do you think it affected how the rest of the company received you in a time when…I mean, it was a quick switch from having Raj, who had been there forever, as CEO to you. 

KKG: Yeah. And especially because everyone really admired Raj, and everyone was very sad to see him go. And so I think I came in there not knowing a very large portion of our hundreds of employees, and I remember the first town hall we did when I introduced myself, people had no clue who I was. So I had to follow up with an email to the team saying these are going to be our three mantras. 

And it definitely helped for people to appreciate that things were changing, but also that there was a playbook under which I would operate. 

And you read about this, but the best proof that a cultural change is working is when you start seeing other team members and leaders use your language. And that’s what I started hearing, right? I started hearing people say, oh, yeah, we’re moving at lightning speed, or let’s do this faster because we have to move at lightning speed. 

MD: That’s great. 

KKG: Or when we ran into a problem, you know, people would say let’s treat it with the power of positivity. And then create magic. Everyone was sort of thinking, ok, well, we can’t do this, but let’s think outside the box — how can we create magic to solve this problem? 

That made me very happy, and that started happening within the first three, four weeks. So that really set the tone for yes, a warm embrace across the company. I’m sure some people remained skeptical of my tenure as CEO, having been an investor, but for the whole I think people embraced it. And I think provided us for a good few months. 

And it’s important to note that everyone knew going in that I was going to be a temporary CEO. I was not intending to stay on forever. I had made that clear to the board, I had made that clear to the markets. My title officially was “Interim CEO.” And so the goal was during my time there, how could we make sure that we did the best we could? 

MD: That’s great. And so, you know, this was always going to be temporary, and it was — you’re no longer the CEO. But do you have a few words to say about Xavier, who is your successor? 

KKG: Yeah, I mean, look — I was involved in hiring Xavier when Raj and I were working on finding a head of product. I have always involved my conversations with Xavier, because he’s an out-of-the-box thinker who would always chat about product ideas. He became COO under me when I was CEO, he managed a very large portion of the org. He’s been a very successful founder and CEO in the past. So for me, I’m very enthusiastic about the company under his leadership, and I remain here to support him in any way I can. 

It’s been fun, and it’s a bonus that he’s French, and I’m a bit of a francophile, and so we share that as well. 

MD: Does he love Napoleon as much as you do?

KKG: You know, I don’t think so. I think he probably thinks I’m a weirdo. 

MD: Well, you know, he’s not alone. So this was perhaps a once in a lifetime opportunity for you. So at the close of it, looking back: is there anything else you would say about your experience as CEO? Is there any advice you would offer to other CEOs, especially those who are just getting started in the early stages of starting companies? 

KKG: No, you know, what I said earlier about board management, etc. really doesn’t apply to founders going zero to one. Zero to one, it just comes back to very simple things. Make sure you have product-market fit. Make sure you are building something people want and need and are willing to pay for. And so spending a lot of time with customers…I couldn’t stress that enough. It’s something I did as CEO, and it’s something I do even now. If the company needs me, I get on a plane and I fly to wherever to go meet customers. 

And so I think that’s it — it comes down to product and customers, and can you build a product for your customers. 

MD: Great. Well, thanks Krishna for taking the time to chat about this experience. It was a unique one, so hopefully people got to learn a little bit about what it was like to actually be in the trenches in this specific role. It’s a little different from what you’ve typically done. 

KKG: Yeah, no, I mean look again — as you opened the interview with, it is sort of wild for a VC to end up as CEO of a publicly traded company that’s a portfolio company. And so I hope that there were some learnings here that apply broadly to all founders and CEOs, and looking forward to having more exciting guests on next time. 

MD: Great. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time. 

KKG: Take care.

Welcome back to our new podcast: Tales from the Trenches. On today’s episode, Krishna speaks with longtime friend and colleague Shantanu Gaur, Founder and CEO of Allurion Technologies. We seeded Allurion, which recently announced its plans to go public on the NYSE, out of Harvard Medical School in 2011. In this conversation, Krishna and Shantanu discuss how the macroeconomic environment has shaped the company, why it’s critical to focus on customers, and what makes a company an outlier success.

Listen by clicking play below and/or read the transcript of Krishna and Shantanu’s conversation.

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KKG: Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Tales from the Trenches. Today, I’m excited to have a dear friend and someone I’ve worked with for over a decade as our guest: Shantanu Gaur, Founder and CEO of Allurion Technologies. Super exciting company in the weight loss space; we actually seeded it out of Harvard Medical School in 2011, and it’s a super exciting time for the company. Allurion just announced it will be going public in partnership with Compute Health, which is run by the former CEO of Medtronic, Omar Ishrak. 

But I can tell you it’s not always been so exciting, and we’re going to learn today in this episode about what it’s taken Shantanu to go from Harvard Medical School through the trenches of the recession through many rounds of funding to where he is now. Thank you for being with us, Shantanu. 

SG: Thanks for having me on, Krishna. 

KKG: So let’s start with just, if you can introduce yourself and introduce yourself from the lens of, what is the hardest thing you have had to do in your career, and how has that shaped you, how did you deal with that. 

SG: Thanks for having me on. I’m Shantanu Gaur, Founder and CEO of Allurion, and I started Allurion actually back in 2009 when I was a medical student at Harvard, learning about obesity and learning about all the things related to weight loss. And over the past 13 years, have had a lot of ups and downs at the business and building the company. 

I’d say one of the toughest times that I personally had at Allurion was during the COVID pandemic, the second quarter of 2020. I’ll never forget it. Literally overnight, our business just ground to a halt. And unlike a lot of other startups, our main source of cash flow is actually the revenue we generate from sale of our product. And to wake up one morning and realize that that cash had dried up…to also realize that the cash you have in the bank is whittling down very quickly, to the point where you may not be able to even make payroll…that is a come-to-Jesus type moment, where you realize that you have two choices. One is to either give up and just let the company die and fold. The second is to peer over the cliff and figure out a way forward. 

KKG: So let’s, for the benefit of our listeners, let’s talk just briefly about what the company does and why COVID impacted it so much. I mean I believe your main sales channel is clinics, so maybe you can touch on that a little bit. 

SG: Yeah, we started Allurion with the mission to end obesity around the world. And what we developed is a weight loss program that features a medical device that is quite revolutionary. It can be delivered in a 15-minute office visit. That’s actually turbo-charged with a digital platform and a behavior change program that’s meant to deliver and does deliver best-in-class weight loss. 

And our product is sold through physicians and through clinics. And when the pandemic happened, literally overnight these clinics shut down. The doctors that were staffing these clinics were called in to take care of all the patients that were dealing with COVID. Many of the doctors we work with are bariatric surgeons or gastroenterologists, but that didn’t matter — it was all hands on deck at the height of the pandemic. 

We’re also a global business; we’re in 60 countries around the world. And every single company was impacted by the pandemic. So all of a sudden, the single sales channel that we have — doctors and clinics — completely shut down. 

KKG: Yeah so you can imagine a business that’s theoretically very well diversified across so many different countries but then because of an exogenous threat is immediately impacted. 

But let’s actually go back a little further. So you started this in ’09. Was it ’09 or was it ’10. 

SG: Yup, ’09. 

KKG: And this was coming right out of the recession. You were at Harvard Medical School. Did the recession impact you at all? Did it shape your thinking at all in terms of how you were starting the business? 

SG: Not really. I’d say as a medical student it wasn’t really on our radar. We were mostly, my classmate and I were mostly concerned with what was on patients’ minds, what was on the mind of physicians. And obesity and weight loss just kept on coming up over and over and over again. And I’d say once place where the recession might have impacted us was this decision of whether to take this invention — our device, our balloon — into a laboratory and make it a research project, or spin out a company. And I think what we felt was going on in the world around the time of ’08 and ’09 when there was a global recession, was a second movement that was completely unrelated to the macro economy, and that was in the world of healthcare, where patients were becoming much more empowered. They were becoming consumers. They were starting to pay for things out of pocket. We were living in a world where insurance plans were becoming much more high-deductible oriented. 

So consumers were actually becoming major stakeholders in the healthcare system. And so while the macroeconomy was suffering, there was this other momentous change that was happening in consumer health. And that is actually what sort of forced us or urged us to pivot and spin out a company versus just develop something in a research laboratory. 

KKG: Yeah, I think one of the benefits of coming out of school during a recessionary time is that you have fewer distractions. So you don’t have people calling you left and right with job offers, and I think there’s an advantage to being able to be insulated from all of that while at school and just think purely about what are the needs? And those needs exist whether there’s a downturn or whether there’s an upturn. But in some ways, it’s easier to isolate those needs in a market that has more signal and less noise. 

So that makes sense. So you got started, and then you went ahead and you started trialing some of this stuff. Your first round — the one that we participated in, led — tell us a little bit about that. How did that go down? Was that hard, was that easy? How did you think about the company at that time? 

SG: It was one of the hardest parts of the journey in building Allurion was that first round. Because we literally had nothing. We had an idea, we had a concept for this balloon. Back then, we hadn’t done much thinking about the digital part of our business or the behavior change part of our business. It was really around this revolutionary device or the concept of a revolutionary device that we had created. 

So we realized very early on that this was going to be a tough road. Because every single institutional investor, family office, even some of our friends and family said no — we’re not interested in investing. You guys have to really show us that this thing actually works. You know, show us some traction. 

And here’s where I think the recession did play a big role in the journey: there just wasn’t much capital around for early-stage companies at that point. So we had to be very creative and very entrepreneurial in order to get this round done. So after the first wave of failures, we went back to the drawing board and said we need something — we need a hook. Something to actually bring this to life. And so what we did was we worked with one of our professors who did simulations for endoscopies, and we went to his home, and in the basement of his home he had a bunch of pig carcasses and cow carcasses and GI tracts that he had harvested, and he had created a simulation box if you will, where you place the GI tract of the animal in this box…

KKG: Is his name Anthony Hopkins, by any chance? 

SG: (Laughter) It wasn’t, but it had that sort of feel to it. And so you can basically film a video inside an animal stomach of your product — whatever it is — sort of coming to life. 

So the night before we did this session with this professor, I was hand-stitching our very first balloon prototype together. I had just done my surgery rotation at Harvard Medical School, so I had learned how to stitch and sew. So we took that prototype to this guy’s basement and filmed a video of our balloon actually expanding inside a pig stomach. 

It was a one-minute video. But that one-minute video brought this concept to life more than our 20-page slide deck could. And with that one-minute video, we were able to go to some of our professors at Harvard Medical School, go back to some of our friends and family who now sort of saw this thing coming to life, and we were able to raise our first small round from family and friends, and then we met you. And at that point, the round wasn’t closed yet, but we had some momentum, and we had gained the confidence, I think, to talk to an institutional investor. 

KKG: I remember I did a diligence process, and it was clear that every question I asked had not yet been asked. So you guys were learning how to sort of do diligence. And it was actually fun for me, as someone who had started my firm a couple years before that, to see the impact we could make on a company through our diligence process, because we forced you to think about things you hadn’t thought about before. So it was a nice iterative back-and-forth that I think was valuable to both sides. 

SG: Yeah, I remember one of the things that you and your team did, which you know, no one had done previously, was actually talk to some of our vendors and partners who were developing these prototypes for us…

KKG: Right, that’s right. 

SG: Because with a little bit of cash, we were able to go out of our home laboratories and actually start talking to people who were experts in polymer chemistry, experts in fabrication of medical devices, and you were the first person outside of us to talk to them. And one of your first pieces of feedback was, hey, it’s not clear to me what’s protectable here, so you guys really need to develop sort of an IP strategy. It’s not clear to me that this is very scalable. It’s not clear to me that these are the right vendors and partners for you to be using. And so through the course of that diligence…and initially you said no. 

KKG: Did I really? 

SG: Yeah, yeah yeah. Your initial view was no, not yet. And your main feedback was, you just need to tighten some of these things up a little bit and really create a cohesive strategy around this balloon. The science it’s there — it’s just is it scalable, is it protectable, is it manufacturable. That was your main feedback and your team’s main feedback. 

And we took that to heart. And we buttoned those things up, and we went back to you and your team, and then you know, you wired the money and closed the deal. 

KKG: Yeah, it’s interesting, because when we were looking at that round, the market was in a very topsy-turvy place. And to be honest, I had only started at the bottom, and so I was used to doing very detailed diligence. And to be honest, what attracted me about the company was just how much you had accomplished on so little. It showed me that this founding team and the management team was really scrappy and was really hungry to actually solve the big problem and to build a big business. 

I don’t think you guys knew where you wanted to go with this thing eventually, but I felt like you had solved some problem, you had found something that was unique and frictionless. But importantly the image that I have of that time is of Shantanu sitting in some lab, working on pigs, even though I never saw that. That’s the image that always comes to my mind. That and then some diagram of an ellipsoid, which captivated the mathematical mind in me and eventually…I remember a year later Shantanu calling me up once and being like, you know, I have some news — the ellipsoid thing doesn’t work. So I’m like, ok, great, so the entire premise on which we invested is over. 

But yeah, the recession shaped you, I think, in ways that maybe aren’t obvious to you in that they made you very scrappy and that DNA persisted all throughout the next 10 years, even when the world went in a place where capital was very cheap or the markets went nuts. But the fact that you were founded and built in this time I think shaped your entire career. 

And so I think any entrepreneurs starting off now have a similar opportunity. 

Let’s talk about when you are in trench mode. So I’ve seen you across a decade. We together have experienced some very very tough times and raises and rounds. Let’s talk a little bit about what you’re like in trench mode. What are your habits, your personal habits? How do you deal with stress, resilience, etc.?

SG: The first thing I like to have around me when I’m in that mode is my tribe. I want to have the people around me who care most about me shoulder to shoulder. And so we’ve spent a lot of nights in your living room, in your dining room, working side-by-side together through very difficult situations, difficult problems. Sometimes I’ll fly down to see my parents for the weekend. 

KKG: Yeah I’ve seen that, I’ve noticed that, yup. 

SG: And you know, there you feel like you have your tribe next to you. You also get taken care of, which is nice. But it allows you just to be focused. And it also sends me personally back to some of the younger days, when I was a lot more academic. I would literally lock myself in my room and work on problem sets, work on competition math, whatever I was working on at the time, and my parents would call me down for meals, etc., take care of me, and I would go right back up. That is sort of naturally, even in my youth, how I was in trench mode, right? 

KKG: I can relate. 

SG: And now, similarly with my wife and my kids, it’s the same way. I always want to have my tribe around me. Whether it’s close partners and collaborators like you or my family. So that’s the first thing. 

Despite that, I think there are going to be times where the stress boils over. You reach a breaking point. And you’ve seen me reach a breaking point a few times. And that’s where I just need to get away, whether it’s for a couple of hours or a couple of days. Commune with nature, go outside, take a few deep breaths, and then come back inside and go back at it. I think that’s the second thing. 

And I think the third thing, which I’m very bad at, and I think this is one place where I can mature a lot as a leader. I was reflecting on this transaction we just announced, and the sense of relief and the sense of accomplishment I felt when the transaction was announced. And I felt like a ton of energy was unlocked inside of me. 

I think a great leader feels that way in the heat of the battle. They’re able to sort of put themselves at a higher plane, where all of the stress and distraction is underneath them, and they can think with a clear head and think with the same sense of relief that they feel when the battle is over. That to me, is like Nirvana. If you can achieve that as a leader and as a general, there’s no battle you can’t win. 

KKG: I think we need to gift you a book on daoism then, and you need to embrace that philosophy, because that is the eastern way. 

You know, we just touched on the transaction, and so let’s talk about that for a second. Obviously the company is en route to going public on the NYSE, which is super exciting, I’m excited about it. But why now? Why did you choose to pursue going down this route of being public? Everyone around you told you what the hell are you doing or thinking, so why now? 

SG: I guess my question back to you is why not now? You know, there’s…

KKG: Well, there’s a recession, there’s you know, these capital markets that are choppy, it sounds like a terrible time to go public. 

SG: It’s a terrible time to raise any type of money. It’s a terrible time to do anything entrepreneurial right now if you just look at the financial conditions and macroeconomic conditions that’s all true. 

But that’s never stopped us in the past from doing what’s right for the business. And so there’s a lot of advantages for us going public at this stage. It increases our visibility as a business, it obviously brings in capital to the business, which allows us to continue to build. It gives us currency that will allow us to be more aggressive and more audacious and more bold in our mission to end obesity around the world. 

So yes, it’s difficult. Everything is difficult at this point. So why let that stop us? If this is the best thing for the business, which I believe it is, then it’s time to march forward and do it. And if anything, the fact that we were able to get this transaction announced, and when it closes, it will be a huge milestone for the entire team at Allurion, for all of the investors who have backed us, and I think it just goes to show our entire team that anything is possible. There is some value in that in and of itself. In a difficult time, a difficult environment, when nothing is getting done, for something to get done just speaks to the grit and audacity of our team and all of our collaborators. 

KKG: You know, one of the things I admire about Allurion is that, you know, the company has a very strong focus on customers and consumers rather than “patients.” For me, that was embodied in this letter that one of our LPs sent to you directly basically saying that. That was an impactful moment for me, was it the same for you? And talk to me a little bit about how that filters through the ethos of the company. 

SG: Yeah, definitely. That was a very impactful moment for many people at our business, because it encapsulated how exactly we were going to interact with and treat our customers, our consumers. In the world of healthcare, especially in the world of medical devices, patients are really treated as just another data point sometimes. They are treated as subjects in a clinical trial, they are handled in such a way where physicians almost have dominion over them. And that’s just not the way healthcare is going to work in the future. Patients have become incredibly empowered. As I mentioned earlier, they’ve become consumers. Partly because they’re wielding their own money and spending that in the healthcare system at much higher rates. But also because they have become empowered by their own data, they’ve become empowered by their own understanding and knowledge of some of the disease processes that they’re undergoing, and they’ve become much more knowledgeable about the treatments that are being offered. 

And that letter from one of your LPs spoke to us about how their complaints should be handled, whether it’s on social media or whether it’s something that we get written over email, and our stance and the stance of many healthcare companies is often to suppress those comments. And what your LP advised us was to embrace those comments. This is an upset customer. That is the most valuable feedback you can get as an entrepreneur. Because here’s someone who used a product that you think the world of and had a bad experience. 

KKG: And cared enough to tell you about it. 

SG: And cared enough to tell you about it. That is gold. That was the message of that letter. So that should be cherished and embraced — it shouldn’t be suppressed. 

And that was a sort of turning point in the way we do customer relations and the way we do marketing. We actually lean into our most unhappy consumers and learn from them. I personally every month have my team introduce me to the most unhappy consumer. The most unhappy customer. And I personally talk to them to understand what exactly went wrong and how we can fix it in the future. That’s part of our DNA now. 

KKG: That’s amazing. That’s something I might almost tell every one of my companies to do, that last part. 

So finally, let’s talk about you know, here you are, 12 years into this thing…13, 14 years, whatever it is, it’s been a long journey. You’ve seen a lot, you’ve seen other people do things — what do you think sets apart fantastic outlier outcomes from mediocre ones? And what advice would you have for entrepreneurs during this time, which is a tough time for anyone trying to build a business right now or start a company, to sort of set themselves up on that path to be an outlier success? 

SG: The simplest advice I have is never, ever give up. One of our core values at Allurion is grit. Grit is simply about remaining alive when so many other people are dying away. And that doesn’t mean you have the best technology. It doesn’t mean you have the most patents. It doesn’t even mean you have the biggest business. It just means that you are someone who will never, ever, ever let your company die and fail. And that is what, I think, sets great entrepreneurs and great companies apart from everyone else. 

Nothing is built overnight. Nothing is built in a day. And there are so many times in an entrepreneur’s journey where they will have to, as we did during COVID, peer over the cliff and say, is this the end? And if you consistently say, “I will not let this be the end,” your company will not die. 

People always think companies fail when they run out of money. No. They fail when the founders or the management team run out of energy. Or run out of enthusiasm. And without that, there is no startup, there is no company, there is no growth. 

But if you have a management team, and especially a founder CEO, who will never ever give up until that mission is fulfilled, you can get through anything. 

KKG: Fantastic. Well look, I think that’s a great note to end on. Thanks everyone for listening, thank you Shantanu for coming. And I’m excited to…maybe we’ll have to do a podcast from the floor of the NYSE next. 

SG: Absolutely, it would be my pleasure. Thank you for having me on. 

While our dependence on energy storage has rapidly increased, the Lithium-Ion battery today still runs on the same fundamental principles invented in the 1970s. Despite continuous refinement and development, technical progress has slowed. This has led companies to consider other options to continue driving down cost per kWh and increasing energy density.

Solid-state battery (SSB) technology has the potential to transform how we think about energy storage, with applications including electric vehicles (EV), mobile devices, and wearable hardware. The potential upside of effectively commercialized SSB tech has automakers making large bets in the space, most notably with the recent IPO announcement of QuantumScape, a Volkswagen-backed Stanford spinoff. Cost-related challenges, however, have kept SSB technology from becoming commercialized to date.

Despite skepticism about the efficacy and cost of solid-state relative to the traditional Lithium-Ion battery, I predict we will see SSB commercialization as soon as 2023, thanks to a variety of technical hurdles that have recently been overcome. Below, I will lay out many of the technical challenges, drawbacks, and benefits of both Li-Ion and SSB technologies — and explain why I’m bullish on the latter. 

Benefits and Challenges of Solid-State Technology

Technically, solid-state technology uses a solid electrolyte to regulate energy flow, rather than the liquid electrolytic solution used in traditional lithium-ion batteries. Using a solid electrolyte provides upside on a number of fronts – higher energy density, longer lifespan, and increased safety are a few aspects that make solid-state technology attractive to EV companies in particular. Notably, higher energy density would dramatically reduce price per kWh, doubling range for EVs and reducing charge times. 

This said, the many challenges with solid-state production at scale still leave the technology a few years out from commercialization. Like many new and emerging technologies, solid-state batteries are currently very expensive to manufacture at scale. My conversations with large players building solid-state technology indicate that this expense can be attributed to the cost of materials and the lack of economies of scale in place today (materials and equipment spread across huge supply lines). As a result, heavy doubts remain about SSBs and their mass application in the vehicle and broader energy markets. 

Current and Historical Lithium-Ion Progress

Since commercialization in the 90s, Li-Ion batteries have been the industry standard. Three decades later, however, the technology’s intrinsic limitations in terms of safety, performance, form factor, and cost have many in the industry looking toward SSBs for future progress. 

As mentioned, most current Li-Ion technologies employ liquid electrolyte, with lithium salts such as LiPF6, LiBF4 or LiClO4 in an organic solvent. This raises inherent size and design freedom limitations, as the liquid electrolyte needs expensive membranes to separate the cathode and anode, as well as an impermeable casing to avoid leakage. The flammable and corrosive liquids add health and safety issues as well. 

Advanced Lithium-Ion – Silicon Anodes

However, advanced Li-Ion batteries are more feasible than basic Li-Ion and could potentially rival SSBs in terms of performance. During its recent battery day, Tesla announced its own design of a battery with a pure silicon anode. Relative to other silicon anode concepts, Tesla’s design incorporates the anode expansion issue from the start and utilizes raw silicon metal instead of developing a complicated structure. Tesla has claimed its design, which costs $1.2/kWh, is far cheaper than current solutions. While still ~3 years out from commercialization, this design alone would boost vehicle range by 20%. 

While there is less potential upside here relative to SSB players in the EV space such as QuantumScape, many would argue that Tesla’s execution risk is lower relative to the newer, far less mature battery technology. 

Regardless, it’s my personal belief that while some improvements can be drawn from basic Li-Ion technology, the next great leaps will be attributed to Solid-State breakthroughs. 

The Bounds of Basic Li-Ion

We have reached fundamental physical limits of traditional Li-Ion design; as a result, progress has slowed significantly. The battery of the future will demand the following technical requirements: significantly lower cost (<$100/kWh), lifetime improvements (10,000+ charging cycles), higher energy density (800+ Wh/L), and rapid charge speed improvements.

While advanced Li-Ion designs have the potential to rival SSBs in terms of energy density (Wh/L) and price ($/kWh) in the short term, solid-state energy storage technology is required to break the theoretical limits of Li-Ion efficiency. Best-in-class Li-Ion energy density currently sits at 700 Wh/L and is expected to stagnate at 800 Wh/L due to the characteristics of the technology’s active materials. The goal for solid-state technology is to push the envelope of technical capabilities at 1000 Wh/L, a feat that would democratize EV access and energy storage. 

Due to these technical truths and the all-star teams solving the technical challenges at QuantumScape, Sion Power, and others, I’m betting on solid-state technology to be the battery of the future.

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Social Media Superstar Joins Next-Gen VC Firm to Explore Consumer Opportunities

LOS ANGELES, December 8, 2020 — REMUS, an early-stage venture capital that helps build, not bet on, companies transforming massive industries, announced today that social media superstar Josh Richards will join the firm as Venture Partner. The firm is excited to renew its longstanding interest in consumer technology opportunities, with a particular focus on the retail, health, and financial habits of the next-generation consumer.

One of the top-five highest-grossing content creators on the TikTok platform, Josh has an innate understanding of the Gen-Z consumer and a budding entrepreneurial passion. He co-founded TalentX, one of the industry’s largest social media monetization and talent development companies, and its associated record label; launched Ani Energy, his own energy drink brand; and serves as CSO of Triller, a TikTok competitor. His youthful energy and entrepreneurial audacity mirror the founding values of the REMUS brand.

“In some ways, I see parallels in Josh’s journey and my own,” says REMUS founder and CEO Krishna K. Gupta. “I started the firm when I was 20, and Josh is 18. He is hungry, and what he has already accomplished far outstrips where I was at 18. I can’t wait to work together on some of the big, lasting consumer tech companies of the next generation and help mentor him as a nascent investor and businessman. It is a great learning opportunity for us all, and we now have a presence in Los Angeles!”

For over a decade, REMUS has invested in some of the world’s most innovative technology and science-backed companies. As the world undergoes a generational and societal shift, the firm is keen to identify some of the trends that will define the consumer journey over the next decade.

“It’s clear from our conversations with Josh that he has aspirations to grow far beyond TikTok. I see this partnership as the first step of many as we build impactful companies together,” says REMUS investor Stash Pomichter, a fellow Gen Z-er who dropped out of MIT to join the firm.

“One of the reasons I became an entrepreneur and investor is to actively shape the future,” said Richards. “I am excited to join the REMUS Capital team, a firm that represents my core values of unequivocally helping young founders achieve their dreams. Let’s get to work!

“It may not appear like it from the outside, but Krishna and I both have a lot of common factors on our journeys. At a young age, we both took risks to pursue something greater than ourselves. There are others, but that common denominator alone is why I am extremely excited to be working with him and REMUS. He gets it!”

REMUS plans to take a long-term view to this partnership, as Josh evolves his brand and position in the industry not just as a social media influencer, but also as a young leader helping to forge and accelerate the next big ideas for consumers.

About REMUS

REMUS is an early-stage venture capital firm that helps build, not bet on, companies transforming massive industries. Started in an MIT dorm room during the 2008 Great Recession, the firm has spent the last decade helping build industry-leading technology and science-backed companies. Learn more at .

Media Contact:

Molly Donovan
REMUS
[email protected]