[00:00:00 – 00:00:08] Nitin Bajaj

Welcome to the Industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me again is Ashwin Rangan. Ashwin, welcome back on the show.

[00:00:09 – 00:00:13] Ashwin Rangan

Thank you so much. Nitin, wonderful to be back here with you as always.

[00:00:13 – 00:00:17] Nitin Bajaj

Great to have you here. Let’s start with who is Ashwin?

[00:00:20 – 00:00:42] Ashwin Rangan

Well, that’s a complex question. I often think about it too, but I think I could boil it down in retrospect. I guess enough history has gone by that I can encapsulate it now. I think I’m a hard charging and passionate community builder and I’m a professional with an eye for business.

[00:00:44 – 00:01:11] Nitin Bajaj

Love that it’s extremely short for someone of your stature, but I appreciate the many things that went behind those very few words. But here to unlock a few of those today. So tell us about you recently ventured on to a new journey. Tell us about DoubleCheck and more importantly for me, why do this and why now?

[00:01:13 – 00:04:02] Ashwin Rangan

Very good question. One of life’s challenges for ever from times immemorial has been the management of whatever is the container of value in life, especially when it comes to currency, money, wealth. That has been a challenge. And if you think about that in the context of the present day, we have a very large population on the face of the earth and not everybody has access to the same wealth no matter how you define it. Many a time people find themselves holding the wrong end of the stick when they are desperately in need of money to just cover whatever may be left over at the end of the month. And they find themselves when they’re in that situation where with in banking terms, what’s known as non sufficient funds and they enter into a territory called overdrafting where they’re already in the hole and now they’re digging a deeper hole and getting farther into the hole with potentially unknown consequences, particularly if they’re a small business. And if you think about our country, we’re a country of small businesses. 80 plus percent of our country is involved in businesses with less than 50% deployed in the business. When that happens, imagine if you’re a business owner, you think you have paid an invoice but your check doesn’t clear. But in anticipation of it clearing, your vendor has issued multiple payments to his vendors. Now the moment your check doesn’t clear, you’ve started a cascade over which you have no control. So multiple people in that value chain can be adversely impacted. What we have done with DoubleCheck is to step into that very breach where there is insufficient funds and overdraft needs and we’ve put in place mechanisms that enable consumer financial institutions to give their members to give their customers a day’s time so that they can react and figure out what to actually pay versus what not to pay. Instead of the bank making that decision or the credit union making that decision. This is powerful technology. The company had invented it before they reached out to me. I’ve scaled businesses many times in my professional career and they asked whether I would take this on as a challenge, as I thought I would retire. And I was spectacularly unsuccessful in that. So here I am back in the saddle again.

[00:04:03 – 00:04:11] Nitin Bajaj

The thought that you had that you could retire was funny enough for me, but I was like, yeah, you should try. Why not?

[00:04:12 – 00:04:16] Ashwin Rangan

There you go. And I did. And it didn’t take.

[00:04:19 – 00:05:03] Nitin Bajaj

What you shared is so important, so critical given that most of this country is a small business and a majority of those small businesses at some point, in many cases at multiple points in that journey, face that very issue. And one for the system as a whole. To not have something like that in place from the get go is alarming. But thanks to DoubleCheck, that system now exists. I would love to understand what is the potential impact that this can bring to the community.

[00:05:06 – 00:07:44] Ashwin Rangan

That’s a very good question. If you think about consumer financial institutions, quote, unquote, banks, they actually are two breeds of banks in this nation. There are about 9,000 financial institutions in the nation that serve consumers. About Roughly half of them are regularly chartered banks and the other half are chartered credit unions. Between the two, credit unions come from a place of wanting to serve the needs of their consumers. Banks come from a place of innovating in the finance technology domain. Very different drivers, the value drivers are different. What is considered success is different one from the other. So we have chosen to enter the market through credit unions as the primary vehicle for multiple reasons. One of them being that they have been early investors in our success. But their charters are also very much aligned with their purpose and our purpose. So that specific category caters to about 100 million account holders. And it’s relatively early days for us. But we have north of a million account holders using our system now. So we’re seeing early traction. And through that early traction, we’re able to see that there is loud resonance with the served base of consumers where they regularly use this. Some of them are literally daily users toward the end of the month for precisely the reasons that I talked about, where they’re running out of money before the month is out. That’s a race condition that occurs in many lives. So we’re seeing them use this facility, make better informed decisions, take advantage of the fact that they now have a window through which they can either readdress what they thought they were in a position to in fact meet, or they now, with our capabilities, have the facility to transfer money from other places. They may have money in Venmo, but not in their checking account. They may have money as headroom in their credit card, but not in their checking account. We make it easy for them to transfer those headrooms and monies so that they can fulfill the obligations that they have at the end of the month. So 1% penetration. We now are looking at the next 5 or 6 customers which will put it at 3% penetration and then the next 15 customers will put it at closer to 10% percent penetration. So it’s a slow but steady build up. Love that.

[00:07:44 – 00:07:52] Nitin Bajaj

That’s massive scale in such a short time. So congratulations and kudos to you and the team for tracking along really fast.

[00:07:53 – 00:08:21] Ashwin Rangan

Very much a team effort. I can tell you that I am blessed with a brilliant team. They’ve crafted a solution that seems rock solid. And one of the reasons that I took on the assignment is when I witnessed the demo, I was blown away at how well it flowed. And then I said, let me also sit through a customer prospect demo and the prospect was lighting up like a Christmas tree. I’m like, okay, this has got legs.

[00:08:23 – 00:08:50] Nitin Bajaj

And knowing you, you’re not an easy person to impress, let alone convince because you’ve been at the helm of and defining the edge of technology and many other things from the biggest of names in the world. And something that impresses you really intrigues me. And I’m super excited for you to be leading this and bringing this to life.

[00:08:50 – 00:08:53] Ashwin Rangan

I can see being very kind. You’re being very kind.

[00:08:54 – 00:09:29] Nitin Bajaj

You have the credentials to back it up. And you’ve been there, done that. And that’s why I said it was funny enough to me when you said you were going to try to retire. Like, that’s going to be a massive failure. So while you’ve been doing this, you’ve also recently come out with a bestseller book. Tell us more about that and what got you thinking about it and writing about it and what has that journey been like?

[00:09:32 – 00:12:01] Ashwin Rangan

Yeah, it’s been fascinating. Nitin, my co author, Dean Used, is a prolific author. He has written seven or eight books before we decided to do this joint project together. He’s a wonderful friend whom I meet regularly for a cup of coffee. And it was in January of 2024 that we met for a cup of coffee to welcome the new year together. It was in the first week of January and we were looking at each other, talking about challenges in technology and digitization and where people are in the journey and the fact that AI is coming here in waves faster than most people can comprehend. I have briefed a group of corporate directors. I think it was in November, just a month and a half prior. And he looked back at that. He said, in those 90 minutes, I understood more about what’s happening in AI than I had in the prior nine months. And I really wanted to appreciate you for casting a light on it in the way you did, which was very much a storytelling. That’s my method of communicating very difficult messages. Said I loved it because I kept reeling that story back and then replaying it in my head. And I understood more and more. He serves on some of the most prestigious of boards. He serves as director on the board of Pacific Life, for example. He said, I’d love for you to think about how we can help boards like mine so that we can all lift our games up. Then he said, what do you think about writing a book? I said, I hadn’t thought of writing a book. He said, since we’re here, what if we were to think about a table of contents, if we were to write a book? And I was like, it’s 8:45 in the morning, my brain is barely engaging with coffee in my hand, and this gentleman is already off to the races here. But by 9:45 we had a table of contents and we’d split the table of contents, six chapters to him and six chapters to me. And we then set a goal for ourselves. We said, by end of June, let’s have this done and be ready for edits. We met the goal. We met the goal. By end of June last year we had it ready. And then we went shopping for a publisher. And to our astonishment, Simon and Schuster decided to pick us up.

[00:12:02 – 00:12:03] Nitin Bajaj

It doesn’t surprise me.

[00:12:04 – 00:12:58] Ashwin Rangan

Then we went into their publication factory. They put us through some hard wire brushing over the next six months. This script was, I think it was wire brush four times before it was ready for printing. And then roughly in February of this year, they said, we’re ready to start designing the COVID And that process took about six weeks. So mid March we were ready. But in the meantime, we’d been reaching out to friends and family who were willing to read the script and come back with commentary. We were very lucky to get some very highly placed people review the book and come back with commentary. And comments on the back cover and things like that. So April, that was done. In May, the book got published and here we are. That’s the journey.

[00:12:59 – 00:13:33] Nitin Bajaj

Amazing. So cool and so exciting and so timely. This is coming from people who have been there, made these decisions, or are facing these decisions. To have that perspective for them is extremely important. There is billions and trillions of dollars at stake, but also future careers and most importantly, the heart of the topic. How do we govern this? And we can’t govern it if we don’t understand it precisely.

[00:13:33 – 00:15:05] Ashwin Rangan

You hit the nail on the head in one sentence. That is exactly where the world is right now. Because if you think about it, the universe of experts in how does AI work in technical terms is probably no more than 10,000 people. And if it follows the typical pyramid law, then there’s probably 100 people who really understand the innards of how this complex mathematical engine works. But that’s not the problem. The problem is the impact that this machine has on the rest of humanity who treat this as though it were something new, which it is, but fail to understand the potential and the power of what we have already unleashed. And these 10,000 people are in the business of accelerating what they’re doing while the rest of population is even trying to figure out what is going on right now. True. So that race condition is a dangerous condition to live in. Where there is super fast cars. Imagine that this were a freeway and you’ve got Formula one cars and you’ve got Mack trucks both trying to navigate the freeway at the same time. 99% of the traffic is Mack trucks. 1% is Formula 1 cars, but they’re both on the 405 freeway. This is not a good picture.

[00:15:05 – 00:15:06] Nitin Bajaj

True.

[00:15:06 – 00:15:19] Ashwin Rangan

And that’s where we are, where the 1% is racing ahead and the 99% is slowly waking up to the fact that there is a race on and we have to do something because this race is not going to stop no matter how hard we try.

[00:15:20 – 00:15:40] Nitin Bajaj

True. Very visual picture. You’ve always been an amazing storyteller. Now, as you think through, put your thoughts across, speak to leaders in various industries, what would you call out as the one big challenge you’re facing?

[00:15:47 – 00:19:17] Ashwin Rangan

I would love to see more people tell more stories to make this more human. I believe that we started out on the wrong foot. As a matter of fact, by calling this artificial intelligence. And I say that because by labeling it as intelligence, we attributed certain connotations that come with the word. So there is an expectation of fairness, an expectation of discernment, an expectation of right versus wrong, legal versus illegal, moral versus amoral. All the attributes you would attach to the word intelligence are now connotations attached to this machine, which is all it is. It’s no different from a hammer. A hammer doesn’t know whether it’s harming somebody or hitting a nail. Yes, we cannot label the hammer artificial intelligence, but in this case, we’ve chosen to label this hammer artificial intelligence. It’s significantly more potent hammer than a mere hammer which has a ball. And so I think there is a problem right there. Now, in a different discussion, I talked about what does intelligence really mean? So that we can bring this into focus. And there I use the metaphor that comes from the Greeks. The Greco Roman culture talks about intelligence being a combination of ethos, pathos, and logos. This machine is no doubt capable of logos. It is a logic machine par excellence. No question about it. And it’ll get better. It’ll become faster, and it’ll become more accurate, and eventually it’ll surpass you, me, and the rest of us put together in its capability to reason things out and show us why it’s making those logical deductions and conclusions. I think we saw that with Lee sedol and move 41 in the go game. Nobody understood why that move occurred until all the experts in the world went back and looked at it and said, oh, my God, this is like the hand of God that played exactly that. Logic is beyond human comprehension. And we’ll see that across a broad spectrum. Ethos, which is more discerning, is codification of what we consider to be law. And that’s more difficult because the spirit of the law is as important as the letter of the law. And therefore, we have interpreters of the law, we have lawyers who interpret the laws, and we have judges who interpret the lawyers. And then we have bodies of work that are looked back and judges themselves are judged for whether they were good or bad. So there’s this hierarchy where ethos can actually have multiple interpretations. It’s not hardcore black and white. And then finally you come to pathos. Nobody can interpret my feelings. True. So those three are all three necessary together as a condition to declare something as intelligence. And yet we’ve rushed to this place of calling this artificial intelligence. We’ve let loose the beast, and now we want to put it in a cage. It cannot be put in a cage. We barely know how to put a chain around its neck right now.

[00:19:18 – 00:19:26] Nitin Bajaj

Big challenge. Now, on the flip side of challenges come opportunities. What’s the one you’re most excited about?

[00:19:28 – 00:22:08] Ashwin Rangan

I believe that some of the most difficult problems in the world today are likely to be solved by this machine. Give you two examples to illustrate what I’m talking about. One example is from mit, where the Lincoln Laboratories decided to field a question to their supercomputers fueled with GPUs. So essentially artificial intelligence infrastructure. They said, look, hospitalization oftentimes is the reason for more morbidity in vulnerable patients, because hospitals are crucibles of many different kinds of organisms. And superbugs are emerging which are able to combat the most potent of medicines and surpass their capabilities and infect people who are most vulnerable. What can you do to help us out? Literally, that was the framing of the question with a whole library of molecules. And wouldn’t you know what? This machine, within a short span of less than a month, came up with antidotes, not one, but multiples, for most of the most severe superbug conditions, all within the last one year. And now they’re in the patenting process with all kinds of trials in the process. So I think that was a problem that was killing people who really desperately needed help going to the one place where they could get help and yet being vulnerable enough that they were dying in the process. And here we are solving that condition. That’s one case it is remarkable. We could not have done it 10 years ago. We could barely have thought about it 10 years ago. We are not only doing it, but we’re looking forward to this becoming publicly available within the next 12 to 14 months. That’s remarkable progress fast. The second. There’s a machine that just got released called Delphi 2. Human beings are known to have all kinds of disease conditions. The catalog says that those disease conditions are roughly about 1300 in number. Delphi 2 has the entire catalog. And if you give it the symptoms with an accuracy that exceeds 70%, the machine is able to tell you exactly what condition or what combination of conditions are causing the symptoms. Holdout sampling with expert panels of doctors is not able to come up with the same percentage of success.

[00:22:11 – 00:22:15] Nitin Bajaj

That is mind blowingly good, right?

[00:22:15 – 00:22:47] Ashwin Rangan

So now the next step will be to put Delphi 2 through its paces and make it available to doctors. Not to supplant doctors or replace them, but to assist them as though they were a robot. And say, consult with your robot, confirm your hypothesis with the robot, further confirm it with laboratory work if you need to. But the probability that you have arrived at the right conclusion is substantially improved. So that your success rate is substantially improved. And who doesn’t want to be Successful.

[00:22:48 – 00:23:30] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah, I love that. I just love where things are going. All the negatives aside, I think we are blessed to be living in such a fascinating time where pretty much anything is possible. And as we talk about the future, I want to take the opportunity to pause and reflect and have you share two moments from your life and career. One where things did not work out as you’d expected. There was disappointment, failure, lessons. And another where things exceeded your expectation and there was success beyond your imagination.

[00:23:33 – 00:26:56] Ashwin Rangan

Those are really good questions. Everybody talks about successes, and yet the defining moments in life are always the failures. Because that’s the most learning, potent moment that you go through where you have the ability to look back and say, that didn’t go to plan. It’s a reflection of intelligence. If you’re able to sit back with no ego, think about it, and say, what can I learn from this? And I’ve been blessed with a number of failures, and I look back at every one of them with fondness because they were seminal moments of teaching. They were humbling moments where my pride was shattered. But fortunately, to the point that you started out with where one has mentors. I had wonderful mentors who were willing to pace me through it without necessarily making me feel bad about it. But that also created the condition where I could share my innermost thoughts with them and we could have a dialogue, a very Socratic dialogue of them questioning and me answering, and through that process, coming up with deeper revelations, if you will, without feeling like I was being judged. So I’ve been blessed with two, three good mentors through my life, and this has been a journey with them. The very first one was where it was a company in Orange county at the time. We eventually became a Fortune 500 company. The name of the company is AST Research. AST Computer in three dates, the Internet. So I’m dating myself in the process. But I was blessed with a wonderful mentor while I was going through my career steps there. And I recall I hit what I thought was a glass ceiling and couldn’t get past. And I thought I was a complete failure. For some reason, I could not get past that. And from a career trajectory perspective, I started feeling very frustrated that I couldn’t get past it. And as one does, I looked elsewhere. And as I was looking elsewhere, the company got acquired, and those two came together literally within a week of each other. So the company said, would you care to leave? And the other person made an offer, and I moved on. But I went back and I asked my boss at the time, I said, you know that I was already looking. He said, I suspected as much. I said, I felt really poorly that I was looking without telling you. He said, ashwin, I actually wanted you to look elsewhere because all you knew is ast and the world is way bigger than ast. I was like, wow, I didn’t even know that people think that way. And I made it a point after that, when I would have conversations with people who reported to me if they were looking for things that I could not fulfill, I learned to be bold enough to tell them, you should look elsewhere. And even to the point of pointing to the companies that I thought would best fulfill their definition of success. And many of them have come back to me saying, that’s the best single thing that has happened in my whole life.

[00:26:58 – 00:27:23] Nitin Bajaj

That’s fascinating and obviously unheard of in the bigger scheme of things. I know very few people, you being one of them, that truly are there as role models and mentors and see the bigger picture and come from a mindset of abundance and are there to help others. And that’s why you command so much respect in the community and industry.

[00:27:26 – 00:27:48] Ashwin Rangan

Yeah, I feel good. This is part of the community building process that I think of as me being an instrument of. So I love the feeling of having helped people. I love the feeling of having this wider community that comes back to me whenever I need help. It’s not more than one or two phone calls away as a result. So it’s all goodness, it’s all feeding forward.

[00:27:50 – 00:27:55] Nitin Bajaj

Now a change of pace. What do you do for fun?

[00:27:58 – 00:28:03] Ashwin Rangan

If I take off the background, which is a picture of our Texas facility.

[00:28:03 – 00:28:04] Nitin Bajaj

King of books.

[00:28:04 – 00:28:43] Ashwin Rangan

Yeah, it’s all books. That’s all it is. I’m sitting in my library as we speak here, let me take it down if I can. Don’t think I can. I don’t want to do that. But it’s books. I enjoy books. I enjoy singing. I am a passionate singer. I’m okay. I’m probably a 7 or an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. I record my songs for my own listening pleasure and the listening pleasure of probably a thousand people who get them as feeds on their whatever social media. I travel, love traveling. So between those three, it’s a pretty fulfilling life.

[00:28:44 – 00:28:46] Nitin Bajaj

We need to get you to sing one of these days.

[00:28:48 – 00:28:49] Ashwin Rangan

Not on your show.

[00:28:50 – 00:29:03] Nitin Bajaj

I’ll do a one on one private audience. I’m okay with that. Now on to my favorite part of the show. Ashwin, I would love for you to share your one line life lessons with us.

[00:29:07 – 00:32:17] Ashwin Rangan

I have a few things that regularly go through my head and those are to me, the guardrails within which I live myself. So one of them is lead, follower. Get out of the way, pick one and make that decision really fast. You can’t be a leader always. You can’t always follow, but you can always get out of the way. But you pick one and then you move on. It’s not about can you, it’s about should you in this circumstance here and now. So it’s situational. So that’s one. The second is pursue excellence, not perfection in everything. And that excellence bar is subjective, whereas perfection is absolute. The gap between the perceptive and the absolute is much wider than you think it is and the cost is exorbitantly higher. The world runs on a mean of 50. That’s the reason it’s a mean. So perfection is substantially better. It’s already in the six sigma zone. So you’re great. So don’t worry about it if you’re not perfect. Even if you get to the three sigma range, you’re far better than mean and that’s all you need to aspire to. You’re now in the 1% 2% range. That is excellence. So pursue excellence, not absolute certainty or perfection there. No matter what happens after you pursue excellence, I tell myself good. No matter what the outcome good. Because hey, there is always a flip side. If it’s the outcome is wonderful, there is a flip side. There was a price that was paid. If the outcome is poor, there’s an upside because hey, maybe what you already have is good enough. So it’s just shifting your perspective just a little bit and saying good. That’s all it is. No more value judgment than that the outcome is the outcome good. Move on. Be very mindful and kind. Especially when you’re dealing with people because at the end of the day they have feelings, thoughts, aspirations, desires. So zoning in on how they are thinking every once in a while. Not all the time. I don’t want it to be that you’re an empath, but be empathetic. And finally I would say, and this is something that my kids learn from me, I say it all the time. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity and you have control over preparation. So your job in life is to continually prepare so that when the opportunity arises, luck springs.

[00:32:21 – 00:32:40] Nitin Bajaj

Love those. Ashwin, thank you so much for making time to share your journey, your story, your life lessons. Super excited about the book and to share that with the community. Thank you for everything you do and for continuing to be a guide and a mentor. Really appreciate it.

[00:32:41 – 00:32:44] Ashwin Rangan

I appreciate you, and I thank you very much, too.

 

Chapters

00:00 Introducing Ashwin Rangan and DoubleCheck

00:56 The Problem of Overdrafts and DoubleCheck’s Solution

04:54 Impact and Traction of DoubleCheck

08:50 Writing a Bestseller on AI Governance