Post-AI Entrepreneurship with Rahul Sonwalkar of Julius AI

12/13/24 • 60 min

There’s a section of our website that generates more reaction than any single piece of content I’ve ever written. It says:

We’re obsessed with the idea that someone is going to build a business doing $100M in revenue with less than 10 employees and see it as this generation of founders’ 4 min mile. Once someone shows it can be done, many more will follow. We want to partner with the one that does to help define a repeatable playbook for those that follow.

Whether the numbers are correct or simply guide posts, it’s undeniable that how and what we build in a post-AI world is changing by the day. (Maybe hour?) This theme has been a clear focus for our investing at indie and has shown up in the form of AI infrastructure, AI services, and new work modalities enabled by AI.

This week, we sit down with a founder at the vanguard of post-AI entrepreneurship — Rahul Sonwalkar of Julius AI. One thing I was struck by in this conversation is not only the efficiency and speed that new AI tools unlock, but the ability to embed more of the humanity of the founders into the businesses they are building as both a competitive moat and differentiator. Rahul is the embodiment of this in ways that will become clear in the video.

The story of Julius begins after six pivots and countless experiments. Rahul and his team built Julius.AI by embracing a hacker mentality and following their instincts rather than conventional startup wisdom. Instead of building a massive sales organization or chasing traditional metrics, they focused on product-led growth and let users discover the value naturally. Today, Julius processes over two million lines of AI-generated code daily, helping knowledge workers analyze data without needing to code or relying on data analysts for their insights.

The funding landscape has shifted dramatically with AI-native startups. These companies can operate much more efficiently than their predecessors, giving them more optionality around fundraising. Rather than raising capital at predetermined milestones, Rahul has taken a more opportunistic approach, something we call “macrodosing capital”, raising smaller amounts when offered and focusing on infrastructure investments that will pay dividends long-term.

Looking ahead, Rahul believes the key to building in the AI-era is positioning your company to benefit from, not be threatened by, improving technology. While giants like ChatGPT attempt to replicate features, Julius has found that the large player’s marketing efforts actually educates the market and drives users to more specialized solutions. Rahul aims to go public eventually, seeing a massive opportunity in making AI-powered products accessible to everyone — not just developers.

This is a must watch for anyone curious about how AI is reshaping entrepreneurship and the opportunities it presents.

That said, if you’re looking for actionable insights or a playbook here, you may find yourself frustrated. This is an emerging field where the landscape is shifting underneath us. Any tools or tactics mentioned here could be obsolete by the time you finish watching. The core ideas of being true to your instincts, staying lean, doing more with less, and delivering value for customer feel even more timeless in the context of this conversation.

I hope you enjoy watching as much as we enjoyed making it. And if you do, please share widely. Like and subscribe. All that jazz.

And, as always, if you're working on anything in these areas that could be a fit for an investment from indie, don’t hesitate to reach out.

There’s a section of our website that generates more reaction than any single piece of content I’ve ever written. It says:

This is a must watch for anyone curious about how AI is reshaping entrepreneurship and the opportunities it presents.

I hope you enjoy watching as much as we enjoyed making it. And if you do, please share widely. Like and subscribe. All that jazz.

And, as always, if you're working on anything in these areas that could be a fit for an investment from indie, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Previous Episode

Startup Confessionals Vol. 1 — Ben Kaufman (Camp), Harper Reed (Galactic), Finbarr Taylor (Shogun)

A few weeks back in this very email, I put out a request for a new content format we wanted to experiment with that we called “Startup Confessionals”.

From my note:

If you, or founders you know, are willing to share a startup confessional, we’d love to help. We can make these totally anonymized or public, whatever you're comfortable with. We'll be recording these remotely and aren't looking for hours long conversations — we're planning on editing them into quick lessons and anecdotes.

For example, here are “confessional” conversations I’ve had with people one-on-one just in the last few weeks:

— Over/under raising
— Surprising/shocking fundraising stories
— Horror stories of investors/board members behaving badly
— Hiring to please investors
— Acquisitions blocked or held hostage by investors/board members

Thankfully, a few heeded the call. I think this week’s video captures the essence of what we were going for and the experiences we were hoping to mine.

This week, we have stories and lessons from some legendary founders —

Ben Kauffman
Founder of Quirky and Camp as well as CMO at Buzzfeed. Ben has an incredible knack for building brands and storytelling that has attracted some of the largest brand partnerships and most legendary investors.

Harper Reed
Came into the national spotlight as the Chieff Technology Officer for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Shortly after, with encouragement and funding from then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he founder Modest which was later acquired by PayPal. Most recently, he wound down a venture backed startup Galactic. He’s currently exploring new ideas with his longtime collaborators.

Finbarr Taylor
Got his start in tech in various staff roles at companies like Groupon, Pebble, and Y Combinator. As a co-founder of Shogun, he and his partners bootstrapped to over $1M in ARR before raising their first round of funding. That first round let to another and then another. Shogun continues to be a thriving business that Finbarr remains on the board of and actively advises in addition to angel investing. His takeaways from bootstrapping to rocketship growth to near unicorn status are lessons not to be missed or dismissed.

This is our first attempt at this format and we’re so grateful to Ben, Harper, and Finbarr (as well as the others we have in the can) for being willing to wade into such uncertain waters with us.

We’re really happy with how this turned out and welcome your feedback on how we can improve it over time.

We’d also welcome more stories from you or your networks. If you know someone who’d be fun/interesting/insightful on the topic of unpacking their founder, or early employee experiences and lessons, please send them our way!

As always, we hope you enjoy watching this one as much as we all enjoyed making it.

Bryce

Next Episode

Where Are They Now with Joshua Schachter from Del.icio.us

Once upon a time, when MTV played music videos, their more mature sister channel, VH1, had a show called “Where Are They Now”. The idea behind the show was to track down notable artists of previous generations to see where life had taken them once they’d stepped out of the spotlight.

OK boomer, what does this have to do with the indieverse specifically, and the culture of technology more broadly?

In most creative fields, whether it's art, fashion, architecture, etc., there's a deeply held sense of respect, even reverence, for the innovators who came before. The breadcrumbs of insights and artifacts or creation serve as a foundation of reference points for those who come after.

But tech, as a creative field, feels different. Always forward, never back. There's frequently disregard, even contempt, for the innovators who came before.

I often say we have the raw materials for any number of possible futures. Breakthroughs in AI, energy, chip design, crypto, biology — the future has never been brighter. As excited as I am to charge forward, I thought it would be valuable to look back.

When I entered the venture market, it was in the wake of the dot com crash. Shortly after, my partner, Tim, popularized the term Web 2.0. Then, as now, there was a deep sense of hope starting to swell in technology. There were lessons to draw from and infrastructure to leverage to build upon, in addition to a renewed sense of optimism for the role technology could play in our lives.

As we enter a similar moment in tech, I wanted to return to some of the innovators of Web 2.0 to see if there were any lessons to glean from their experiences, and to celebrate their contributions to the progress we're building on now.

The first of these came up in our conversation with Charles from Are.na earlier this year. He and his team and had drawn inspiration from a popular Web 2.0 called Del.icio.us, known primarily as a shared, social website bookmarking service. I have known and respected its founder, Joshua Shacter, for years. We decided to trek to Mountain View for a catchup with Joshua on his past learnings and current projects.

Joshua built Del.icio.us as a side project while working at Morgan Stanley, evolving it from his earlier project called Meme Pool. He didn’t set out to build a startup - it was simply a tool to manage his own bookmarks that grew organically to millions of users. Within less than a year of raising funding from Fred Wilson at USV, Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo, where Joshua experienced the challenges of corporate bureaucracy and struggled with the loss of control over his product.

The Web 2.0 era allowed for more experimental approaches, whereas today’s entrepreneurs are highly focused on specific business opportunities, particularly in areas like AI tooling for business functions. Joshua believes that the current AI revolution has reset computing to a pre-6502 type era where fundamental architectures are still being determined, making it an exciting and challenging time for founders who need to balance innovation with market demands.

When investing, Joshua looks for founders who are perpetually unhappy with their tools and constantly seeking improvement. He prefers to invest in weird ideas that make him think, “I never would have thought of that”, rather than incremental improvements to existing solutions. His approach is fundamentally engineering-driven, and he values founders who can engage in deep technical discussions.

This one was a ton of fun. It's a new format for us, so be gentle with the feedback. We’ve already learned so much and hope to improve on it. We have a few more of these in the can and a few more lined up for the new year. If there’s someone you’d love to see us catch up with, shoot us a reply with suggestions.

As always, if you or someone you know are working on something that could be a fit for the indieverse, we’re always on the hunt for our next investment.

Finally, from all of us to all of you, wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons.