What we talked about
Badri Varadarajan shares how HitWit “brings a product expert to every customer interaction,” moving learning out of the classroom and into the workflow so sales and channel partners can deliver precise product answers in real time. He walks through HitWit’s 2023 origin, the pivot from L&D to revenue use cases, and why mental maps and a realistic sales simulator help reps learn by doing. We discuss the real startup bottleneck:attention:plus adoption tradeoffs when selling AI into today’s orgs, and the value of treating everyone as an engineer focused on outcomes. Badri closes with the roadmap: deeper CRM/PRM integrations, comprehensive partner enablement, and the path to a true “partner program in a box.”
Show notes
Our guest today is Badri Varadarajan, CEO of HitWit, whose mission is to bring a product expert to every customer interaction. He founded HitWit in 2023 to help revenue teams deliver the right product insight, in the right format, at the right moment:so deals move faster and expertise actually reaches customers. Before HitWit, Badri served as EVP/Portfolio CTO at Trilogy and previously built edge-AI systems in retail that measured shopper behavior and automated stockout detection:experience that informs how HitWit turns specialized knowledge into outcomes. He also holds a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech and a B.Tech. from IIT Madras.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01.454) Welcome back to the Prevared podcast where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Our guest today is Badri Varadarajan. I hope I pronounced that correctly. He’s the CEO of Hitwit, whose mission is to bring a product expert to every customer interaction. He founded Hitwit in 2023 to help revenue teams deliver the right product insights in the right format.
at the right moment so deals move faster and expertise actually reaches customers. Hello Badri, how are you doing today?
Badri Varadarajan (00:40.156) Hey, Federico, yeah, great to meet you. Look forward to this conversation. You almost got my name right. The J is pronounced, so it’s not like Guadalajara. It’s like Guadalajara, know, Varadarajara.
Federico Ramallo (00:56.568) Vara Dharajan. Hey, I made it. Woo.
Badri Varadarajan (00:57.962) That’s right. There you go. You did. Let me. Is your last name, is it? Do I pronounce the double L’s or is it like Ramayo? Is it Federico Ramayo or Ramalu?
Federico Ramallo (01:14.414) So, interesting question about that because in Mexico they pronounce it Ramayo. And then in, I’m from Argentina, and there they pronounce it Ramacho.
Badri Varadarajan (01:24.35) Remain you. Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (01:33.188) wow, really? Okay, all right. Ramacho, okay. It is, it totally is, okay. I’m an honorary Brazilian because my lab mates were Brazilian and I supported the Brazil football team whenever they played. But I didn’t know that many Argentines. I did not know this at all about Argentine culture. Okay, so that’s Ramacho. Okay, all right.
Federico Ramallo (01:34.626) Yes. Isn’t that interesting?
Federico Ramallo (01:59.567) Usually people in Mexico and not Latin America say that there’s this concept that the Argentinians are, they have a high ego, right? And there are some people like that, right? in Argentina, when I was there, we used to see all the other countries as, know, we would look down at them, right?
Badri Varadarajan (02:11.298) huh, that’s right, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (02:29.902) It was interesting, yeah. So we’re Argentinian and they are Brazilian. They’re lesser people than us, right? There was this attitude, right? And when you’re living there, you don’t realize that you have that, right? So there is some truth into that, right? But then I flew in 2008. I flew to Sao Pablo.
Badri Varadarajan (02:43.637) you
Federico Ramallo (02:57.726) and the level of, you know, they have 10 times more industry than Argentina, something like that, right? It’s a big, big difference, right? So it was shocking to me just going from the airport to the hotel and seeing the level of industry, level of commerce, level of, you know, of how the economy was doing, right? And, you know…
Badri Varadarajan (03:03.734) Okay.
Federico Ramallo (03:25.632) newer cars, more expensive cars, bigger industries, everything, right? Just in that little trip that I was blown away. So it took me like 15 minutes to kind of shake off that, you know, air of superiority. Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (03:28.566) Okay.
Badri Varadarajan (03:42.326) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it’s one of those things, right? You have to leave a country to truly understand it in some ways. I mean, I grew up in India. I left when I was 21. And yeah, I mean, you think about the country differently. I mean, obviously, countries change as well, just as much as you do. Like, I go back right now, like two things have changed. I have changed and the country has changed. And it’s always like…
In some sense, it’s all the same. You’re going back home. In some other sense, there is no home to go back to. It’s a different country, and you’re a different person.
Federico Ramallo (04:21.51) Yes, yes, it’s a very sad thing to happen, yes. Where I grew up in Argentina, there was a big community of Italians, right? And they moved out of Italy, you know, during the First World War, after the First World War, between the Second World War, right? So…
Badri Varadarajan (04:36.566) Okay, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (04:50.092) and they came with nothing and they built up commerce, industries, everything, right? So for 30, 40 years, they stayed in Argentina until they have enough money to actually travel to Italy, right? And basically they had that same disappointment because so many things changed and they would have this memory of their…
Badri Varadarajan (05:06.294) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (05:19.49) their hometown, right? That they would tell everybody about it, right? And that beautiful town that they would describe where they grew up was no more, right? And it was, when they would come back, they were so disappointed and they shared that story with us, yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (05:33.46) Right.
Badri Varadarajan (05:41.554) I see. I’d say this, it’s like it’s not all bad. I some change is good. mean, there’s a lot of…
The reduction in poverty worldwide is real. So I go back, I see that prosperity, that there is a lot of good to it. I think it’s part of also being open to change yourself, not try to sort of bottle up your childhood as a point in time, but to say that, okay, some change is good and some change isn’t, and you just sort of take it off with a smooth, right?
Federico Ramallo (06:14.668) Yes, but change is life, right? It’s part of life. So it’s very interesting how that happens. But when you’re living the culture, you don’t see those changes. But then when you move out and come back, you see all the changes and the issues that you couldn’t see before. So, yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (06:16.938) Change his life. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (06:37.547) day.
Badri Varadarajan (06:42.474) Yes, yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (06:46.232) So yeah, so it’s important to travel.
Badri Varadarajan (06:48.426) Yeah. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (06:50.88) I hope that the interconnectivity that we’re having now with more internet, more everything, that’s not going to make everybody same, right? I mean, I think that having that cultural diversity is a positive thing, yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (07:08.022) Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (07:14.39) Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, I agree fully. Yeah, that the monoculture is something we need to sort of try to avoid. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (07:25.324) Right. On the other hand, do think that having a core shared values, it’s important as humanity so we can move forward in the same direction. But that core doesn’t interfere with the cultural diversity that we have.
Badri Varadarajan (07:46.762) Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (07:52.766) Right, right. I vaguely remember this. I’m probably mangling the line, but there’s a beautiful line and I think it’s either the great Gatsby or I know it’s Fitzgerald. He talks about how you should look out at life through one window.
And basically what he’s getting at is you need to have one viewpoint. So that is your culture, but you need to look out to the world. So you need to see that there are many other cultures out there. And that’s probably the best mix of it is you have a particular viewpoint. You’re not trying to be everything to everybody, but you also use that viewpoint to see the world so that you’re engaging with the world as well. think that’s the sense in which he says it. I probably mangled the line a lot, but it stayed with me
times.
Federico Ramallo (08:44.387) Beautiful.
Badri Varadarajan (08:45.334) Yeah, it’s a very good line. It’s sort of he works it into a story as well. It’s not nonfiction, it’s in fiction. It’s like, I think he says something about the well-rounded man is the biggest myth of them all. You do need to look at life through one window or something like that. Anyway, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (09:04.847) Amazing. Yeah, I love that phrase.
Badri Varadarajan (09:08.5) Yeah, yeah, yeah, it stayed with me.
Federico Ramallo (09:11.951) So, you know, coming back to topic. Can you tell us a little bit about heat width and who is it for?
Badri Varadarajan (09:16.34) Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (09:26.452) Yeah, so the origin story I think also would be interesting. In 2023, I was CTO at a private equity company and a couple of things. So I was involved in the Alpha Schools. They’ve been in the news a lot recently. There was a New York Times article last week and it’s in all kinds of local news stations at all times.
That school had pioneered two-hour learning. So the concept was, the concept is that kids spend only two hours learning their Common Core curriculum and they do it only through apps. No, no, teachers are not teaching them Common Core. Instead, after those two hours, they’re working with teachers to do projects and so on. And this was super effective.
This sounds like some tech bro weird fantasy, but just in terms of learning Common Core, kids were doing great. They’d go from the 80th to 99th percentile in scores doing this.
But that was one part of the portfolio of the private equity company. I was also responsible for recruiting people, onboarding them, processes for workflow for like there are 150 products in the portfolio and we’d hire something like 500 new people globally every month. So it’s somewhat insane in terms of the scale of it. And we were trying to apply similar techniques, sort of, okay, how do you make this AI first?
longest time we struggled a lot and when 2023 was about the time that chat GPT was hitting the mainstream we’d been experimenting with that for a year, year and a half before that. It was a qualitative change and the way I like to put it is effectively what these generative AI technologies do is the ability to take any information and first synthesize it.
Badri Varadarajan (11:17.992) and then express it in accordance to what the receiver needs to know. I mean, that could be a trainee, that could be a worker getting training, whatever. When I saw that, was super motivated to, okay, so go make this technology available to the broader workforce. And that was the broader problem I set to solve. And startups are…
the best late plans never go where you want them to go. When I first started, I thought I was going to go sell into the training departments, the learning and development departments of companies. In six months, I was like, no, this is not where I want to go because training departments, the problem with that, this is probably a controversial statement, is their metrics are awful in the sense that all they care about is course completion.
Whereas what you ideally want is to embed it into productivity because that sort of goes to a broader point, right? You are not learning something in isolation. are sort of, there is an iterative process, particularly once you’ve joined the workforce where you learn something and then you do a little bit of it and then you have the next question and then you learn the next thing and then you do a little bit of it. There is a complex process in most knowledge work.
And that’s why I think people should ban training departments because they sort of try to keep this as a separate activity, which makes absolutely no sense. So we sort of morphed our product into something that not only does that training, but sort of intersects every part of the the workflow. And that was one realization. The other realization was it makes no sense to do it for everybody. Instead, we should sort of pick a lane and go specialize in it. And so we picked
the problem of sales and customer interaction. So we focus on how does somebody understand a product and explain it to somebody else. When you get right down to it, that’s the process of sales, right? A product team has gone and built something. Now, some other person that could be a sales rep, in fact, most of our business today comes from selling to channel partners. They’re selling somebody else’s products.
Badri Varadarajan (13:32.23) So how does this person understand somebody else’s products without having access to the team that built it? Explain it to a buyer in a sufficiently persuasive and clear way that they will actually understand what the product does and buy. So that’s a long-winded way of saying that was our journey. The motivation was that we are entering a new knowledge era.
And the actual practice of it has been focused on sales teams and channel partner teams which have to explain a product to a customer. And that’s what we do.
Did that answer your question?
Federico Ramallo (14:13.059) Yes, yes, of course, I was letting you finish. I think that there is some value on building courses and teaching people, but I agree with you that they have that tool and they say, I have this tool and I can apply it to everything and everywhere, right? And that sounds great, but…
Badri Varadarajan (14:37.728) Right.
Federico Ramallo (14:42.017) it doesn’t work, doesn’t necessarily translate into productivity or business impact, right? And I think that’s where the maze of the training departments are,
Badri Varadarajan (14:52.34) Right, right, right, take the workflow, right? Let’s say some of our customers today are channel partners, okay? So that company, they have to sell one of 2,500 products. Now, admittedly, not every rep is not going to sell all 2,500. Let’s say they pick a lane and they have to sell 200 products, fine. But it’s still 200 products.
And even if they take training this moment, the time for them to have a conversation about the product is three months later. And it’s not going to be set up as a conversation about the product. You’ve just set up a customer meeting and you’re talking to the customer and the customer is telling you something. It’s impossible for them to remember something that they got trained on three months back. That’s why that whole method doesn’t work.
what you instead want is for them to
get the high level detail, basically form their own mental map and we’re sort of severely, I mean like deeply into this mental map concept. Like every part of our interaction will sort of surface your mental map because there’s also a metacognitive element to it. You not only have to see it, but you have to form, you have to look into your own understanding to understand anything, right? Like this is how you think about the world. That this is this category of products, that this category of products, when somebody talks to me about one thing, I will correlate it with that.
important for you to see that to process it and that’s all you need to know at a high level you don’t need to know every single detail you need to make that association and then when you have that conversation
Badri Varadarajan (16:32.148) That’s where the product training can sort of kick in and give you a lot of help to say, hey, remember you talked about this. So this person will bring it up. But then there is going to be the next level of detail as to exactly how it works in this scenario. And that’s where an AI assistant can help you with this. So you are still doing the work. You are still talking to the customer. But there is something that’s sort of sitting out of the corner of your eye, helping you with providing you the details that you need. Yeah. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (17:00.248) Right, right. Yeah, and the other part of the learning is by doing. So if you get out of the doing and sit down in a classroom and learn, and they dump information to you, you might be able to pass the test, the evaluation that they do. But that doesn’t mean that you actually know how to do the things, right? You were able to rejuvenate the content.
Badri Varadarajan (17:07.178) Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (17:27.22) Night.
Federico Ramallo (17:29.488) whatever they’ve done to you. So that model is flawed by design.
Badri Varadarajan (17:29.726) Right. Right.
Badri Varadarajan (17:39.69) Well, see, you are wiser than I am. I’ll give you a story here. This might be interesting. A year and a half back, it was like early 2024, somebody who was like my prospect who said, hey, this is all fine, but you really need to add a sales simulation where somebody can simulate a sales conversation.
And I’m like, nah, that’s stupid. Why do I need a sales simulation? Anyway, you’re going to talk to customers, which rep wants to talk to a simulated customer. They’ll just go talk to real customers. That’s what they want. And this is where, you know, as product people, which is as an entrepreneur, that’s effectively what you are. You’re a product person trying to define a product, right? We sometimes get pigheaded in our own prejudices, right? This was my prejudice that, okay, nobody’s going to want to talk to a simulated customer.
and three months back.
after 20 different people had told me that you really need a sales simulator, we finally went and built out one. Obviously we sort of did it in a thoughtful way, but this was something where this whole point you’re saying, right, learning by doing, there is one part of learning by doing it in real time with on a sales call, but people do want that thing where they want to try out that sales call. I mean, admittedly, were also part of my prejudice was a lot of these sales simulators in
my opinion solve the wrong problem. They are sort of trying to tell you how to talk, meaning use that phrase, don’t say that sort of thing. But
Badri Varadarajan (19:14.432) That’s the wrong problem. The problem is not how to talk. Most people kind of figure out how to talk and if they don’t know how to talk, they won’t be in sales long term anyway. The problem is they don’t know what to talk. There is a product to a product. You and I are having the conversation.
Federico Ramallo (19:22.8) You
Badri Varadarajan (19:32.726) I’m sure I could say whatever I’m saying a little bit better, but I first need to have good content to talk about too. So there is that. And so that’s one thing that we’ve been sort of keen on is even the sales simulator brings that product knowledge element to it. It is trained on an actual product knowledge base, not just.
you know how to have small talk and you can talk about the weather in five different ways, not that way but sort of know put substance also in addition to style so to speak.
Federico Ramallo (20:05.518) Right, right. Yeah, and the only way you can do that is by practicing and then realizing, well, you did it wrong, right? yeah, the closest you can get to the real thing, and a simulator customer is that, right? It’s how you can actually learn, right? Circling back to what you said that you…
Badri Varadarajan (20:14.634) Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (20:24.106) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (20:35.554) Rejected reality, you know, you were stubborn enough to you know To and until you you you came to the realization that yeah, this is something that we need to do, right? I I think that’s I have a struggle as well, know, like with many things and One way that I can understand this is like this as an entrepreneur We have to be Resilient
Badri Varadarajan (20:37.394) Yeah. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (21:04.836) I would say stubborn, that’s why it’s the word stubborn, right? Stubborn enough to ignore reality, right? Because everybody is going to say, don’t do this, don’t start a company, this is not going to work, you know. Most of people are going to say no, right? Don’t change the status quo, right? Everything is fine. Why are you making waves? Do not do that, right? But also,
Badri Varadarajan (21:11.189) Right. Right.
Badri Varadarajan (21:18.73) Yeah. Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (21:26.464) Right, right.
Badri Varadarajan (21:30.634) Yes, yes. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (21:34.416) sensitivity to find these signals, right? And then the wisdom to tell them apart, right? Between noise and signal, right? Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (21:40.821) Yes.
Badri Varadarajan (21:45.812) Yeah, correct. Yeah, exactly. That’s right. Correct. Yeah, that’s right. What is there? There’s a prayer. It’s like, Lord, give me the wisdom to know what I should dream about, what I should accept and to always know the difference or something like that. I forget the exact quote, but yeah, you know, there are some places where you want to refuse to accept reality. There are some places where you want to be pragmatic and accept reality and it’s hardest to know which right? I mean, it’s like
Federico Ramallo (22:03.77) Yes.
Badri Varadarajan (22:14.922) You can’t be crazy about everything. You can’t be pragmatic about everything, right? So it’s,
Federico Ramallo (22:20.964) Yes, and another important thing that I can highlight is having the humility or the self-awareness to be able to say, I made this mistake before, then I realized it, and now I changed.
Badri Varadarajan (22:42.708) Right, great, yeah, that’s right. And that’s always hardest. mean, as you say, in any given day, that’s the challenge, right? So you know there are a few things ahead of you. There are a few choices you need to make. And I think the question becomes…
are you making should you persist or should you just wave the white flag on some particular decisions and it’s always always hard to tell the difference I mean there are no clear metrics it’s not like something will clearly tell you it’s one way or the other is true right so yeah it’s it’s
Federico Ramallo (23:22.874) Yes, yes, it’s hard. And knowing the difference is not, it’s a judgment call, right? It’s not an easy.
Badri Varadarajan (23:30.582) Yeah, yeah, right, correct, yeah. So as particularly as sort of just getting into the in say software, which is the field that I am in right now, we deliver software. The good news is that the latency between making a bet and getting the answer for, okay.
did this work or did this not? Like basically getting that data point is small. So you get to make lots of experiments, which is a good thing. I used to work in hardware, so I started my career in Texas Instruments. And there, from the moment that you decide to build a chip to the moment that the chip comes back and does what it does, you have to invest a ton of money and also there’s a lot of latency there as well.
So it’s just you need to be sure about your bets. The advantage of being in software is you get to make lots of bets. It doesn’t take you that much time or money to get the answer to hey, did this work or not? But the problem for that, the corresponding problem as an entrepreneur is you have so many choices to make every single day. It’s like, you know you can do this. It’s like there are like five different things you can do in the next three weeks. Which one should you do? It just sort of increases the uncertainty that way, right?
Federico Ramallo (24:57.901) Interesting, yes, yes, I agree.
And I was talking in another episode about how the life cycle of building software, that used to be that when my mom was, she’s a software engineer as well, she had to computing time of the mainframe, right?
Badri Varadarajan (25:29.27) Yep.
Federico Ramallo (25:31.434) And she would write the program on a, I say piece of paper, but it’s actually a roll of, know, it’s a big pile of paper, right? And she had mechanical machines to do that, right? And then you would input that into the mainframe and then you will get the output, which was another, you know, large stack of papers that you would, you have to debug.
Badri Varadarajan (25:39.382) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (25:45.642) Wow.
Badri Varadarajan (25:54.634) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (25:59.556) offline, you know, will take those papers and then you will debug your program and see what was the issue, right? So every debugging cycle will take, you know, weeks, right? Between you book the time, between you get the results, you know, all that, right? So it was a process and now we can do that very quickly. And we were talking about this in the context of AI that now AI allows you to vibe code.
Badri Varadarajan (26:04.18) Right. Yes.
Badri Varadarajan (26:10.176) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (26:29.489) or build code faster or do these prototypes faster even if you don’t know what you’re doing. So now it’s not only faster but it’s available to a broader audience that was not available before.
Badri Varadarajan (26:37.77) Yeah. Right.
Badri Varadarajan (26:49.044) That’s an interesting. Let me take the other side of the argument with you on this. This is interesting, right?
Federico Ramallo (26:55.493) Yes.
Badri Varadarajan (26:59.42) I’ll give you two data points. I was in the early or late 2000s, I had to fight for computing time because we were trying to run a simulator of an entire cellular network for some standards that we were developing and whatnot, right?
Obviously the computing is there is the sort of thing that your mom couldn’t even have imagined when she was doing her thing right I mean it’s like in terms of the clock speeds in terms of memory it’s just faster but I still felt like there was not enough compute to do what I want to do
Similarly, when I’m right now building a startup, which is an AI startup, yes, it’s become easier for me to code, but actually the interesting thing that’s happened is it’s also made it easy for all my competitors to code. So now I need to go stand out in the marketplace and get customer attention. And we have to do that much more to get that customer attention. What I’m getting at in other words is,
I in some sense. Yes, we are in a world of plenty in some other sense since it increases both supply and demand at the same time It never feels like we are living in a world of plenty as a as a supplier right now I feel like we are we are thought like there are constraints. I’m facing I wish I could do this faster and that faster and this faster and that faster Mainly because the other part also
What became easy for me became easy for tens of other people. And so the expectation of the customer or the buyer has also changed. I can’t go to them with just an AI generated lesson and say, buy this, it’s awesome. They’re like, yeah, everybody talks about AI generated lesson. What are you doing? Unique, right? So there is all that that happens. It’s an interesting dynamic. mean, yes, supply has become easier, but success is just as hard as it used to be.
Federico Ramallo (29:04.913) Yeah, or even harder, right? For you describing. It’s an interesting take. I haven’t thought it that way. at one point, this reminds me of a story which is kind of, know, lateral to what you were talking about, but I used to build computers, right? Like putting them together and selling them to homes, right? That was my first gig, right?
Badri Varadarajan (29:26.518) Federico Ramallo (29:34.872) and quickly realized that every new teenager could do this. At that time you had to like figure out the network, the network computer, the network card, the graphic accelerator card, the RAM, the speed of the RAM and the CPU. You have so many things to check. And put all that together and bolt it together.
Badri Varadarajan (29:59.722) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (30:03.441) It was fun, but it was easy for any kid to do that. So it was easy for any kid to compete with me on pricing because they could do it for lower and lower cost. So I did it for a while, then eventually I stopped doing it because of that. But what you’re describing reminds me to this is the story because…
Badri Varadarajan (30:18.079) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (30:31.909) What happens now is that more people can have access to, with an AI agent, can build a working prototype for a tool that they need, right? So the simpler cases for AI agents can be solved with those type of things. And if you compete with those type of products,
you’re going to be more expensive always, right? So your product has to aim higher to bring customers where that level of complexity is, know, that solution is not good enough for the level of complexity that they have, right?
Badri Varadarajan (31:04.192) That’s good. Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (31:20.488) Right, right. I’m also sort of I’m thinking about this live. So this probably is not well formulated. But my thesis here is every company has a bottleneck at any given point of time. The thing that that causes them to fail for want of a better word.
And for software companies, particularly in the AI space, I think that bottleneck is attention. How do you get the attention of your intended buyer?
because there’s a lot of noise around AI. I obviously I think Hitbit is a great product, but then so does my competitors. How do I convince my customer that they should pay attention to Hitbit and not to the competitor? Now in some other cases, the bottleneck could be technology, right? Like for example, my wife works in…
biotech and to them the problem is not attention it’s actually like getting stuff to work like getting a drug to actually cure cancer I mean that’s a that’s the bottleneck it’s not whether you pay get somebody to pay attention to you or not and I suppose every now and then people figure out a hack around the bottleneck you know some form of reality distortion but
hey that’s what it is, it’s like there is a bottleneck to every given problem and sometimes the bottleneck is hidden, it’s not what it seems like, it is something else.
Federico Ramallo (32:59.248) Right, right. Yeah, I think that attention is becoming an issue.
people are having shorter and shorter attention span for everything. And we are all overloaded with more and more information. while I’m talking, I forgot to mute my phone. So it’s flashing notifications, right? Let me put it in focus. There you go. it’s a…
Badri Varadarajan (33:13.525) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (33:37.873) We have so many of those, right? All the time, right? So why should we pay attention to your product when we’re overloaded with your and my product, when we’re overloaded with those, Yeah, even if we need it, right? It’s hard to get that attention, yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (33:49.782) That’s Right, Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (34:00.193) Yes. That’s right. Yeah. We have customers today who are like, hey, this is a very important problem to me, but there is something that we need to do this quarter. So I’m going to do that first. There is that that happens as well. Right. So there is always that. And particularly with AI, I’m seeing that significantly is as product builders, just to sort of take it to the next part of the thought process is
The easier you can make it to adopt it in the current workflow, the faster the product sells. We’ve had this epiphany like multiple times even in our short life as a company, right.
There are two things that are simultaneously true, which is the promise of AI is that it will fundamentally change the workforce, that it fundamentally changes how organizations are structured. And that is true. When When you get right down to it, vibe coding is that, right? It basically says you don’t need a large software team to do something. A couple of senior engineers with experience will just be able to whip up products like.
clockwork. But that’s not the organization today. Today’s organization is a pyramid. There is for every L5 engineer, there are two L4 engineers and there are four L3 engineers and that’s how it’s built. It’s possible this organization structure is wrong.
in the age of AI. It’s possible that the right organization structure is not a pyramid but a tower, a brick building where there is equal numbers on all levels. But that’s not the organization you live in right now. So as a builder, you need to sort of intersect reality where it is, not where you think it ought to be. So that’s one of the things that we’ve had to change always is
Badri Varadarajan (35:58.07) We are promising a better, fundamentally more productive organization in the future, but we are selling into the organization that’s there right now. So fit into this workflow for now, but don’t lose sight of the fact that you are shooting for a fundamentally different capability. That’s pretty challenging as an AI builder. And that’s, in fact, the challenge that I run into all the time is…
Where do I want to compromise? Where do I want to say, this is not the right thing to do, but fine, this is what our customer needs, can use today, so let’s do it right now. So there is that.
Federico Ramallo (36:35.888) Right, right. Yeah, I understand what you’re talking about.
You can have your vision, but the vision, if it’s too far in the future and people don’t understand, don’t connect it to the real needs now, then they’re not going to connect with your product, right? So…
Badri Varadarajan (36:53.429) Right.
Badri Varadarajan (36:58.87) Basically, we won’t stay alive long enough to have the vision come true. There is that. I think there is also the point you mentioned earlier, which is to have the humility to understand that.
Federico Ramallo (37:04.038) Right.
Badri Varadarajan (37:09.244) At some level you are just a provider of a tool and you don’t understand the complexity of an organization and exactly what they’re doing. So it’s sort of also good to have the humility to know that if people want to use it in a particular way, it’s not because they are silly or backwards, but it’s because your tool does not really solve the fundamental problem that they.
So you sort of try to fit into where they live. So there is also that, right.
Federico Ramallo (37:40.432) Right, right, very interesting, yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (37:45.142) Yeah, yeah, there are no right answers here, you just have to discover as you said as you go along.
Federico Ramallo (37:51.355) Yes, yes, and having the humility to realize that, And on a startup, you’re pretty much on survival mode, right, until you can, yeah, until you can have a little bit of footing and then move forward, right. Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (37:55.211) Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (38:09.93) That’s right, correct, yes, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (38:13.778) I’m running an experiment as well on our platform called prevered.ai. And I’m working on that balance. How many features should I build? How many should I validate before building them? And I have advisors that give me advice that I disagree on some level. I agree on some.
Badri Varadarajan (38:21.045) Yeah.
Badri Varadarajan (38:28.468) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (38:43.356) we go back and forth on this discussion, how much or how little should we build?
Badri Varadarajan (38:47.7) Right, right, yes, right, great, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so for what it’s worth, my philosophy has always been if I can’t run an experiment in the next month, the idea is practically useless as of now. I’ll just sort of put it in a document with the things that I should think about sometime in the future. But that…
Federico Ramallo (38:51.28) Yeah, yeah,
Badri Varadarajan (39:18.046) At least that’s how I sort of view this is the only ideas that should be in our attention window are things for which we can run an experiment in the next month. And the downside of that is that there are certain ambitious ideas that you’re not thinking about. But that’s sort of the nature of the beast. think.
That’s where the successful organizations as they mature are able to develop that, for want of a better word, a system one and a system two, which is one part of your engine which is just humming along, doing what needs to be done for the next month, and another part of your engine which is thinking slightly longer term. And you sort of keep the balance between the two as well.
Speaking of, Elon Musk says lots of crazy things, but there is something that he said yesterday which I thought really resonated. I don’t know if you saw that. There is something where apparently they made a change where they don’t any longer have a title called researcher and a title called engineer. Now it’s just everybody’s an engineer. I thought that was spot on. That was great. I’ve been in R &D organizations a lot in my career.
Federico Ramallo (40:05.68) you
Badri Varadarajan (40:29.514) That whole thing of researcher only breeds resentment and confusion. Basically, if you call something a research department, A, they somehow think that it’s a sin for them to produce monetary value, and B, everybody else resents them because they feel like these people are being put on a pedestal.
I think it’s a lot simpler to say everybody is an engineer. You might be engineering something for the next month or for the next year, but you’re engineering anyway. I think that’s a good…
Badri Varadarajan (41:22.272) Frederick was still there.
Federico Ramallo (42:32.881) Hello, hello.
Badri Varadarajan (45:23.285) Thank