[00:00:00 – 00:00:07] Nitin Bajaj

Welcome to the industry show. I’m your host, Nitin Bajaj. And joining me today is Saumya Bhatnagar. Saumya, welcome on the show.

[00:00:07 – 00:00:10] Saumya Bhatnagar

It’s really great to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:10 – 00:00:14] Nitin Bajaj

Pleasure is all ours. So let’s start with a big question. Who is Saumya?

[00:00:15 – 00:00:48] Saumya Bhatnagar

Ah, you dropped the big one first. So I am the chief product officer of a company called involve.ai. We started the company about 5 ish years ago, and we’ve been growing ever since. I handle product and technology, and I I would consider it my passion to build things from scratch. So that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve done my whole life. So the path of quote, unquote an entrepreneur is the exact one I was meant to be on since the beginning.

[00:00:49 – 00:01:15] Nitin Bajaj

That’s awesome. And we’ll talk a little more about Involve. If you can give us a sense of what’s the size and scale of the operations. But before we go there, why involve? You could have done many different things. You your parents, your family is in a completely different profession. Why take this not so easy path of entrepreneurship and that too in a foreign land?

[00:01:16 – 00:02:22] Saumya Bhatnagar

Very good questions, all of them. Starting with my parents, I do come from a family of about 50 doctors. So you’ve got everybody from a trauma surgeon to a psychiatrist, all of which have diagnosed me at some point. Especially when I just told them that I’m gonna start a company. Like, it was, like, serious prescriptions being bandied about. But, yeah, my family, my grandfather wanted to pass on this legacy of being a doctor. And in India, you have to decide your entire life and career path at 15. If you’re not you choose to not study enough with exams and don’t get science, you can never become a doctor. And in general, your parents decide for you. So my parents were trying to really push me in the direction of let’s become a doctor. And my dad’s a Saumya surgeon, and he took me to this Grey’s Anatomy kind of room saying, you’re gonna see surgery and you’re gonna fall in love with it, and that’s what you’re gonna wanna do for the rest of your life. He walked back into the room and I had passed out. I hid the tape the table hit the my head. 

[00:02:22 – 00:02:22] Nitin Bajaj

Oh my god.

[00:02:22 – 00:03:20] Saumya Bhatnagar

I got 2 stitches as well. Basically, the family decided the doctor and the patient are both unconscious. There will not be a surgery. So they said, go try or do what you want. You are not meant for this. So we were talking before the show that the universe creates a path for you. Me passing out that day was the path that started me on to, okay. Now what do I want to do? And I always now that I look back, I always thought and code. Everything was a decision tree for me, like, all the way from what I’m gonna eat this morning to what my day is gonna be. Everything’s a decision tree. I have a plan a, b, c for everything. Yes. So I started building. I I was I started coding very early, and it was in the 10th grade that I met my cofounder. And we started building this project that we didn’t even realize became a company. And my path got set for me, I want to say.

[00:03:21 – 00:03:45] Nitin Bajaj

That’s amazing. Yeah. That’s the universe, but then also looking at knowing just what you want and and then someone else coming along that has complimentary skills and and here we are. So tell us more about how and where Involve is today and more so in terms of the size and scale, but also the impact the company is creating for its customers.

[00:03:46 – 00:04:28] Saumya Bhatnagar

Yeah. So Involve AI is a company that basically is we want to call it something like revenue analytics. We’re helping b to b businesses, improve revenue, make more efficiencies in their revenue. So that can be from predicting churn more accurately all the way from automating SDRs, which is our next product that we’re doing, which is like the starting of the revenue pipeline. How do you automate that? So where we’re thinking about from start to finish, what does revenue streams look like for companies, and where can we put AI there to optimize those revenue streams? We’re in an economy that is harsh.

[00:04:28 – 00:04:29] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:04:29 – 00:06:02] Saumya Bhatnagar

And this is the time where companies can truly optimize their operations to continue getting the revenue, at least maintaining the status quo of not growing it without having to grow the manpower behind it. So that was always we were like, again, because I always thought in terms of code and decision trees, I always look for optimizations everywhere. And the first business that we started, this was a very major problem for us because we were selling b to b. It is a very labor intensive Mhmm. Process. You’re always involving more than 3 people. It’s a complex sale. The number of times when we were always about the contract was just about to be signed and you’re like, oh, let me also get my CIO involved, and we’re like, oh god. Where can you optimize it? That was the idea behind it. In terms of impact of Involve dot ai, we’ve grown pretty significantly. We’ve raised a series a. We raised a $22,000,000 series a round from Sapphire Ventures. We are at about 50 employees more or less. They’re spread across. We’ve got some people in South America. We’ve got a lot of people here. We work out of our Glendale office. And in terms of impact for companies, we are reducing significant manual labor for companies, stuff that is mind numbing and stuff that actually doesn’t contribute to productivity or that dollar value, but in fact takes you away from it.

[00:06:02 – 00:06:03] Nitin Bajaj

Right.

[00:06:03 – 00:06:26] Saumya Bhatnagar

That is the part that we’re trying to automate. Our thesis in the world is AI cannot automate the conversation that you and I are having right now. But AI can take away from this mind numbing work and let humans do what humans are meant to do, be creative, have conversations, build relationships. So that’s our stake in the ground.

[00:06:26 – 00:07:24] Nitin Bajaj

I love that. On one end, revenue has always been important even more so in these times. And then 2, especially for b to b, the sales cycles can be elongated. And at every juncture, every milestone, you bring in yet another decision maker. And then now you’re looking at decision by committee, which as we know never goes anywhere. And so I love the notion of focusing, allowing us to focus on the relationships and letting AI do the grunt work, which is in many ways and in many places important, but not something that you and I should be spending time on. So that’s that’s extreme value. Now when you look at solving for x and given your pension for coding, for making decisions, If I were to flip around and ask, what is Saumya’s one big challenge? What would that be?

[00:07:25 – 00:09:19] Saumya Bhatnagar

Not having enough hours in the day is definitely new. But that’s, I think, a challenge we all resonate with. Yes. A couple of more hours in the day would be just perfect. But I think the biggest challenge for me is being able to be involved extremely involved yet detached at the same time. And I don’t know if it’s just an entrepreneur trait or it is just my trade. I really don’t know. But entrepreneurs, especially me, I tend to get very attached to what I’ve done, the work I’ve done. So That’s just That’s just what it is. But, yeah, I do take failure very hard, like, in the grand scheme of things, even if it’s a small one. But on the flip side, even though it raises my cortisol levels that I have more gray hair than I should, you know, have at this point. But on the other hand, it definitely stokes a fire where I can’t stop thinking about it, where I ideate and I innovate to be able to make sure that doesn’t happen again. So it’s definitely it’s a pro and a con. In that moment, it seems more of a con. Mhmm. So that’s definitely a very big channel challenge for me, like, in terms of mindset. And in terms of the business right now, I think the how can we it’s the same thing. How can we get more productivity from our people? How can we grow the business at a pace that is unprecedented? That’s everybody’s goal. How do we ship better features quicker? That is the forever challenge in different variations, but that’s my one big challenge part that I have in any given point.

[00:09:20 – 00:09:52] Nitin Bajaj

I can resonate and relate to the whole notion of ownership. Right? As owners or even as parents, at any given point in time, the product or the child is our baby, and we tend to consider them as mirrors and reflections of us. And it’s yeah. I I can relate to pushing ourselves and beating ourselves up when there is failure, even though failures are lessons, we do take that hard and rightly, but it’s a work in progress.

[00:09:53 – 00:10:05] Saumya Bhatnagar

The number of calls my dad has got in the middle of the night, you didn’t raise me to see your parenting. He’s there was a point he blocked my phone, like, for a week. He’s I’m not dealing with this. You find someone.

[00:10:06 – 00:10:16] Nitin Bajaj

Now on the flip side of challenges come opportunities, I would love for you to share the one that you’re most excited about.

[00:10:17 – 00:11:56] Saumya Bhatnagar

I’m very excited about our new product that we’re launching. We thought long and hard about we want to be called the revenue AI big, lofty goal. The big the BHAG, big, hairy, audacious goal. Mhmm. And we wanted to go next, which is trying to automate what an SDR does. And it’s a real it’s a fairly complex workflow that we’re trying to optimize and let AI do every part of it until the final stage when the human reviews and edits and, like, sends communication. So in terms of opportunities, I think there’s a massive potential there that I’m very excited about, which is where the challenge comes that we can’t ship features fast enough enough because there there’s so much you can do in that realm. So I’m really excited about that. And, also, I’m really excited about, again, trying something. I’ve always built b to b products. This is going to be our first BLG product, which is a very different mindset. It’s a very different way of evaluating problems and very different ways of presenting solutions. But when we create a pure b to b product, you expect customer success and customer support to be there every step of the way. So you can take certain liberties with ease of use, for lack of a better word. But when you’re going completely product led, nobody who’s gonna be helping a user out. So the way you think through solutions of complex problems also takes is a shift. That’s an amazing opportunity for me to learn as well as we’re going through this.

[00:11:57 – 00:12:09] Nitin Bajaj

You’re right. And especially in a PLG environment, you also have to think through a lot of the scenarios, not every single one of them, maybe, but also to rule them out at the same point to not make it too complicated for the user.

[00:12:09 – 00:13:06] Saumya Bhatnagar

Yeah. Just for context, like, I’ve read a whole book that’s just called product led onboarding. There was nothing else but onboarding of product led products, which is an entire, like, Jessa for 5 screens. Mhmm. I spent, like, reading up, like, for weeks because, again, it’s a very different way and a very different notion entirely. The when you do the jobs to be done framework, the motivation with which a user comes into an PLG product is very different from a b to b product. Essentially, users are forced into a pure play b to b product. They’re like, you have to use it. Like, we’re giving you Salesforce. No. You don’t get any other option. You log in or you don’t make a deal. And just but it doesn’t work like that for PLG Solutions. Like, people come of their own volition, and it’s your responsibility to make sure they don’t have buyer’s remorse. It’s a very different way of thinking through solutions.

[00:13:07 – 00:13:37] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah. And people that understand PLG and and live in that realm will have a lot of appreciation for the amount of thinking and work that goes into identifying all of these different user personas and not just catering to them, but really making them feel belong that this was truly designed for them and and me driving adoption through that because that’s one of the other big challenges for a lot of the products is how much of it is being truly adopted.

[00:13:38 – 00:13:38] Saumya Bhatnagar

Exactly.

[00:13:39 – 00:13:39] Nitin Bajaj

Thanks.

[00:13:39 – 00:13:58] Saumya Bhatnagar

Okay. If you don’t they don’t adopt, they don’t pay. So it’s a it on the other hand, it also gives a very quick feedback loop. Yep. For b to b products, the difference is you spend a year trying to get people to onboard. You don’t get feedback until they don’t say, hey. We’re canceling 1 or 3 years later.

[00:13:58 – 00:13:59] Nitin Bajaj

Right.

[00:13:59 – 00:14:15] Saumya Bhatnagar

But here, it’s we’re getting so much feedback and really quick. We’re still in beta. But it helps with the agile mindset of building product, which is why I was talking about my challenges, which is we can’t ship product fast enough because the feedback is also a fire hose.

[00:14:16 – 00:14:19] Nitin Bajaj

True. It’s all related. They’re all connected.

[00:14:19 – 00:14:23] Saumya Bhatnagar

Connected. Hence, my cortisol leveled and my father’s cortisol leveled.

[00:14:26 – 00:14:56] Nitin Bajaj

Now as we look into the future in terms of opportunities, I’d love for us to pause, take a look in the rear view mirror, and I’d love for you to share 2 moments in your life, personal or professional, where in one case, something did not work out as you had expected. There was failure, lessons, and everything good that comes with it. But on the other end, something that blew your own expectations and became a success beyond what you had imagined.

[00:14:56 – 00:16:13] Saumya Bhatnagar

I’ll start with the first one, which is something that blew my expectations. I have forever talking to me right now, you wouldn’t know, but I was, at least up until a few years ago, one of the most antisocial people you would ever meet. I was, like, the quintessential developer that you see in every show or movie. And our 1st sales guy ever when we hired friend Volvi in the US, he’s a very close friend of ours, and he would say, when I met Saumya, that this was the toast he gave on my birthday, and it was, like, 25th birthday or something like that. And he goes, like, when I first met Saumya, I only wanted to be her friend because when she sets the building on fire, I want her to tell me where the exit is. I was so Dutch. So I never anticipated that I would ever be in a profession where I would need to interact with so many people. I would have to have leadership capabilities, and I would have to be warm and friendly and somebody for people to look up to. So when I started building our my first company, which was, like, literally right out of high school, it literally started as a fun coding project.

[00:16:13 – 00:16:14] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm.

[00:16:14 – 00:16:51] Saumya Bhatnagar

I referred to it as a project for almost two and a half years, and I sold it in 4 years. So it was a project for a very long time. So when it started, like, that avalanche motion, the snowball effect started, I really wasn’t ready for it, neither did I anticipate that something like this would happen. So that was truly, like, something that I was like, yes. It was hard work, but it was a lot of divine intervention that that made it happen. So that was, I think, one of the something that I remember, and I’m like, wow. That’s crazy.

[00:16:52 – 00:16:54] Nitin Bajaj

Yeah. That’s I don’t even see a hint of it.

[00:16:55 – 00:16:56] Saumya Bhatnagar

So kudos.

[00:16:56 – 00:16:58] Nitin Bajaj

I’m sure that took a lot of hard work.

[00:16:58 – 00:18:53] Saumya Bhatnagar

It took a lot of hard work because and a lot of books. Honestly, it’s sad to admit it, but a lot of self help books because I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing. Right. Because now I was leading and I was a team lead to all of these people who were twice my age. Mhmm. And I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have credibility. Again, there was a high, but, of course, there were a lot of lows behind it, and I overcame. And in terms of what I anticipated would go really well and didn’t was when I came to the US, I came to do my masters because once a geek always a geek. You have I wanted to do natural language processing. I wanted to really get my hands dirty. So I came to the US to do my masters. And, again, when you ride on a success that came, and I won’t lie about it, relatively easily Mhmm. Because you try for it, you get cocky. Right. And so when I started the second business, the second company, which didn’t work out, like, we had a very small exit, but doesn’t count for in the grand scheme of things. I really expected it to work because I’m like, I’ve done it once. Mhmm. So I’m like, the the country is different, but fundamentals don’t change. And I was very cocky after that. Like, Nitin retrospect, I feel I expected it to do well. Failure wasn’t an option, and it failed, at least in my eyes. And that was something that was at the end of the day, you can apply the same principles over and over. Mhmm. But it’s, again, it’s 99% hard work. You need that 1% of luck. You need that fairy sitting on your shoulder. And sometimes it just doesn’t work out, which is why there has to be a detached attachment to whatever. Failure should always be on the table because 99% of the times, that’s what happens.

[00:18:54 – 00:19:35] Nitin Bajaj

So thank you for sharing this because it’s I’m sure for most people, it’s very difficult to share our failures openly, let alone admit that we had this our past pushing us and and bringing all kinds of ego and other things into play. So really appreciate you being very open and honest about that. It helps many others, including me, for reminding us and also for cautioning us against past does not predict the future. If anything, it it, is a good time to be humble and bring in that humility to our next, project.

[00:19:35 – 00:20:29] Saumya Bhatnagar

Yeah. Thank you. It was. It’s always a learning experience. And I feel like you can always learn how to code. You can always learn how to speak. You can do all of these things. But having these, like, basic qualities of humility, leadership, you know, all the good virtues is very important to being an entrepreneur. You are literally responsible for lives and their families, and you’re responsible, the ripples go far out more than you can anticipate. So it’s always good to have a plan b. It’s always good to do and ever since then, what I’ve started doing is what I call pre mortems. Mhmm. I do a pre mortem for most critical at least most one door decisions. I try not doing it for every one of them.

[00:20:29 – 00:20:29] Nitin Bajaj

Right.

[00:20:30 – 00:20:51] Saumya Bhatnagar

But all one door decisions go through a pre mortem. If something goes wrong, what would go wrong? And then I have a matrix about and the final score is how messed up would things be if this went wrong, and it’s scored. So anything that has a higher score, basically, we try to mitigate risk upfront.

[00:20:51 – 00:20:59] Nitin Bajaj

Mhmm. Yep. That’s a smart way to do it, and we all learn through experiences, and this is your experience.

[00:21:00 – 00:21:00] Saumya Bhatnagar

Yeah.

[00:21:01 – 00:21:04] Nitin Bajaj

Now I’m tempted to ask you after this heavy thinking.

[00:21:04 – 00:21:05] Saumya Bhatnagar

Yeah.

[00:21:05 – 00:21:09] Nitin Bajaj

How do you detach from all of this? How do you de stress? What do you do for fun?

[00:21:12 – 00:21:49] Saumya Bhatnagar

I am I love to cook. I cook a lot of recipes. I can make literally, and I’m not even joking, any Indian recipe you tell me, I can make it. I can make all the way from butter chicken to Bajaj and kabhata to curries, yew, dals. I make everything. And then now I started playing around with, like, more recipes. I made burrito bowls, so I play around a lot with my cooking. So I love to cook, and I’m a very avid reader. I’m is reading. I try to keep a pace of 1 book a week

[00:21:49 – 00:21:49] Nitin Bajaj

Wow.

[00:21:50 – 00:22:35] Saumya Bhatnagar

Which is yeah. That is a chore in itself, but I really do enjoy more, like, listening instead of read like, I read one book a week. I’m reading the 48 laws of power right now, which is pretty interesting. Before that, I read Predictably Irrational, and then before that, I read Everybody Lies, which is an awesome book. So yeah. And then I work out a lot. I love hiking. I have a house where literally there’s a hiking trail every place. Like, it’s in the mountains. I can hike anywhere I want. And I take my lazy dog right here, And I take her hiking. And this way, she doesn’t pee on my carpet when she gets mad. So it’s a win.

[00:22:36 – 00:22:52] Nitin Bajaj

It is. We’re gonna post put your cooking skills to test because I’m an avid eater and I don’t cook. And we can go on a nice long hike either in the mountains or by where we are. So we’ll make that happen here in the next few days.

[00:22:52 – 00:22:52] Saumya Bhatnagar

Take care.

[00:22:53 – 00:23:05] Nitin Bajaj

Done. Some other people may be involved. But we’ll make sure to bring Gaurav in on that so he can validate and certify those eggs.

[00:23:05 – 00:23:06] Saumya Bhatnagar

A 100%.

[00:23:09 – 00:23:17] Nitin Bajaj

Now onto my favorite part of the show, Saumya, the one line life lessons. I’d love for you to share your life lessons with us.

[00:23:19 – 00:25:34] Saumya Bhatnagar

Always keep your humor is the biggest. I think not taking anything too seriously, it has been a very big revelation to me where when you can self regulate and you can reduce your own cortisol levels because I feel and this as an entrepreneur, I think we’re always running on just a little higher cortisol levels than average. That’s just the way of things. So the really important thing is to self regulate and then find a way to self regulate. It helps prevent burnout in my opinion. And the other thing that I feel I keep is always have someone to talk to. Someone who doesn’t I don’t need you to fix it. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Instagram video where that woman has a nail on her hand, and the guy is trying to tell her that you have a nail. And she’s, I don’t want you to fix it. I just want you to listen. And the guy’s just trying to tell her that you have a nail, like, right here. So I have headaches all the time, and she’s going on and on. And he’s but there’s a nail. Just don’t fix it. So you need that person who’s not fixing it, but is listening and is a sounding board and understands that you’re trying to regulate emotions, and then, of course, you’ll find a solution or ask somebody. Having that person who understands your situation at that point is really important. And the last thing is whether you’re true to anyone else or not does not matter as long as you’re true to yourself. Don’t lie so much. And everybody has this thing of fake it till you’re make till you make it. Great. Do it. But don’t lie so much that you forget what the truth actually is because that’s what causes companies to crumble. Everyone embellishes. Everybody bosses over things. When you raise investment, you’re like, yeah. We’re doing really well. We didn’t have 20% churn last month. Do what you gotta do, but just don’t lie so much that you delude yourself into believing that that is not happening. So those are, like, the 3 top ones for me, I think.

[00:25:34 – 00:25:47] Nitin Bajaj

Thank you so much. I especially resonate with the last one. And the one thing I tell others and this because this is what I remind myself is the only person you can really fool is yourself.

[00:25:48 – 00:25:48] Saumya Bhatnagar

Right.

[00:25:49 – 00:26:20] Nitin Bajaj

For everyone else, it’s a narrative. It’s a story that you get to paint, but there’s only one person you need to be careful of is you. And thank you so much for sharing your journey and story and your life lessons. Really appreciate it. Kudos for all the successes so far and good wishes for continued success for this beta that you have that’s going live soon. Really excited for that and looking forward to some lunches and hikes together.