Is the American Dream Still Alive in the Age of AI? | Raghu Gollamudi – Included.ai

Shamil Malachiyev: Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of The Founder's Code podcast. This week's guest is Raghu Gollamudi, a serial entrepreneur who has now raised over $7 million with his latest venture and is building Included.ai to help companies make the best decisions, people-wise, in their companies. Hi Raghu.

Raghu Gollamudi: Hey Shamil, how are you?

Shamil Malachiyev: Very good, thanks. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It's incredible to have you.

Raghu Gollamudi: Likewise.

Shamil Malachiyev: To start with, maybe many people don't know about this, but back in 2012 you had your first experience of dipping your toes into the founder's chair with a startup called Mingles. And it fascinated me, because I was working on a very similar idea called ClickPick, bringing people together around similar interests, in that exact 2012 timeline. Could you go back and walk us through that experience?

Raghu Gollamudi: Wow, I didn't expect that question to come in, but perfect. Good segue there. So I'm an immigrant. I moved from India to the US, and working here, you focus on career, right? You come here, you're educated, you want to focus on career, you want to make money, you want to send money home and all the good stuff. And in that mad rush, you forget about your personal life. Then what ends up happening is, as you get older, you become picky, choosy: I want this kind of a person, all the good stuff. And it took a long time for me to meet my wife, Kavita. And I was like, okay, I went through the struggle. Is there a way to make it easy for folks like myself looking for a partner or a companion? And this is the pre-Tinder era.

The concept I had was: birds of the same feather flock together. If you're interested in certain activities, depending on your passion and interest, you go to certain places, and you see similar like-minded people there. Like if I like to go to the gym, I see folks in the gym who are like-minded people, and it's easier for me to meet folks there. At that time, location-based proximity was not even a thing. My concept was: I go to the library, I'm sitting in the library, I'm reading, and I want to meet like-minded people in the library. How do I know that others exist around there? So the concept was check-in. You go to a place, you check in, other people check in, and now you start seeing them, and then you can swipe left and right to say whether you're interested or not. Because I'm a shy guy. I don't want the other person to know that I'm interested. The only way I want them to know is if they're also interested; then, voila, there's a match. So similar to the Tinder kind of thing that came up like three years later. The same concept, but super location-based, activity-based and interest-based cohorts, with a check-in mechanism to know they exist, and then swipe right, swipe left to show the interest. And if it matches, then boom, now you are matched and you can have conversations. Once the match happens, now you're confident: that person likes me, I like them. I don't need to be intimidated; they need not be intimidated. Now let's start having a conversation. So that was Mingles.

Shamil Malachiyev: And at that time you probably looked at the competition. I remember from my SWOT analysis it was Meetup.com, City Socializer, these kinds of companies.

Raghu Gollamudi: Yes, Meetup was the main thing, and also this other thing called speed dating. You just show up there, you sit in a chair, you meet people, you talk about your interests, and then you take it to the next level. So you had those kinds of things, but nothing that was digital, made it easier and could scale. That was the challenge, and that's what I tried to solve for.

Shamil Malachiyev: I also used to think, we're going to revolutionize this, and Meetup is going to die within like two years. Look at Meetup now, still standing strong.

Raghu Gollamudi: Yes, exactly. But the thing is, from Mingles came Tinder, and I was like, damn, I wish I had actually followed through the whole thing.

Shamil Malachiyev: Should have patented the swiping idea, right?

Raghu Gollamudi: Exactly. And check-in. The check-in idea came from Foursquare. Foursquare was that company that allowed check-ins and all this stuff. So it's a mix and match. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. There are ideas that have been solved; all the problems have been solved. How do you take those things, create a workflow around it and come up with your own solution, creatively? That's what I did with Mingles.

Shamil Malachiyev: When you were a kid, did you have any hunches that in the future you'd be working at startups in the US?

Raghu Gollamudi: No, no. As a kid, jobs and career and education were the last thing on my mind. I was like: how do I have fun? How do I enjoy the moment, live the moment? I was born in India, and we're not rich; we're from a humble background.

Shamil Malachiyev: So not from the Gujarati area?

Raghu Gollamudi: Not from Gujarat. I'm from this area called Chennai, the southern part of India. Pretty warm weather and all the good stuff. And the thing is, coming from a humble background, I did not have a TV until I was like 13 or 14 years old. And at that time: no phone, no cars, nothing. So pretty much you've got to talk to people to entertain yourselves. My experience was through people, meeting people and doing stuff. The knowledge base was essentially learning from others, learning from your experience, learning from failures and successes. That's how I grew up. Startups and ideas were not the goal; the goal was how do I get the best out of the time I have as a kid. In fact, I remember when I was a kid I never used to be home. I was always outside, playing with friends, doing all kinds of stuff, and my mom used to come out every day at like 6:30, yelling at me to come inside and have lunch or dinner or whatever it would be. That was the life I spent, and I really loved it. I have very good, thick friends from my school, from my college and from my neighborhood, and I really cherish that.

And I see a dichotomy right now, because kids are stuck at home. They have their video games on digital devices. Initially I was a little bit of a naysayer, saying that is not the right thing. But the world is evolving, so we also should evolve; our thought process needs to evolve. And when I see my daughter playing video games with some random strangers on a first-person shooter game, she's having fun. That's also a trait and a skill to learn: how to talk to strangers, how to be able to express yourself, live the moment, have fun and learn from the experiences. So that's the dichotomy I see, and there's nothing right or wrong. It's a way of life. That's how I look at it.

Shamil Malachiyev: Interesting, because I would always think that our strong suit was that we had a lot of that social experience in our childhood. We would spend all our time outside; until nine our parents didn't know where we were or what we were doing, and we would be mingling with other people, developing our leadership capabilities and social roles. Then look at my younger brother, who would always be sitting in Minecraft or Roblox. He's not developing those social skills, but at the same time there is a different kind of social ecosystem they have over there. And now the world is more online, even us recording this podcast online. They're probably developing the right type of social skill, right?

Raghu Gollamudi: Absolutely. I'll give an example. Pre-COVID, all sales were happening in person. All fundraising was happening in person. And now, I raised all of my money without meeting anyone. Everything's on Zoom. I'm selling without meeting anyone; I don't travel anywhere. Everything's on Zoom. So that's the natural evolution. It's all about how you become more efficient and how you lower the barrier. When I say lower the barrier of entry, what I mean by that is: previously I needed to have a lot of money, because I'm traveling, there are expenses and all those things to make a sale, to do what I've got to do for daily operations. Now everything's happening on Zoom, so I don't need to raise so much money and I still have the same outcome. And you'll see the impact even more with AI. Now the barrier to entry is going to be even lower. I don't need a 10-person team to build something; I can build it with two people. That's how technology innovation is going to help: reduce the barrier of entry and still be able to get to your vision and deliver on your outcomes and goals.

Shamil Malachiyev: Actually an interesting topic. You're one of the people on the podcast with a very strong technical background. What do you see with the use of AI tools, with the whole vibe-coding generation? What's your experience been?

Raghu Gollamudi: I do have a technical background, but I stopped coding for some time. I still do some level of coding. Any time my CTO says this is going to take a long time to do because it needs to get professionalized and everything, and I want something quick, I go: let me jam, let me code. And I use all my AI tools in place to help me with that. For proof of concept, getting something out quick, that's where AI is very useful. The minute a lot of people are going to use it and they like it, now it needs to be robust, it needs to be resilient, it needs to scale, it needs to be performant. When all that good stuff comes in, that's called productionalizing that particular piece of code. AI can be your companion, but that is not your goal at all. You still have a human in the loop. They need to figure out whether the code is working or not; they need to test for all of these things, resiliency and all the good things. And when things break, ask AI for help, but that's not going to solve everything. Eventually it will get there. But right now, where the LLMs are, in the end it's an LLM model that's more focused and localized for developer experience. It can still write code, but it's going to write like 10,000 lines of code, and now we need to have somebody looking at the code, understanding whether the code is going to work or not. That's also work for someone. So it's very critical to know how to use it in the right way. Be more prescriptive: I want to write this function that's able to call an HTTP request, get something back and convert it. Bit by bit, use it that way. And then eventually, when the models get much better, that's when you start seeing widespread disruption. The ultimate utopia is that a product manager will write a spec, and the code interpreter will come and read the spec, design the whole system automatically, generate the components, generate the code and say: here you go, it's ready to use.

Shamil Malachiyev: So it's going to be like prompt engineering. Exactly prompt engineering.

Raghu Gollamudi: Yes, exactly prompt engineering. And your product spec is your prompt, because you give the spec. Actually, prompt engineering is an art. It's not giving instructions; it is letting the LLM know what clarifying questions to ask. Usually my prompts are: hey, I want to do this thing, at a high level. I start with a two-liner. And I say: you ask me questions. I say, hey LLM, ask me clarifying questions. I'll start giving you more and more details, and then you give me the final prompt or the response I'm looking for. So I'm letting the LLM ask me questions about what my goal is and what my context is, and that's how it's learning and it's able to generate the final outcome. That's how I use the prompts. I don't instruct it. My only instruction is instructing it to ask me questions.

Shamil Malachiyev: And I think that's the smartest way to use them, because a lot of people don't even know that they can do that. Another cool thing I found: you can ask it to act as a different person, and it would pretty much activate a different side of its neurological brain and actually perform better as a certain person.

Raghu Gollamudi: Absolutely. I'll give an example, even in my company. We are a people analytics company, or HR analytics, human resource analytics. The LLM has a wealth of knowledge on everything, including the human resource aspect, the operational aspect. So now if somebody says, hey, what is the health of my organization, it's a very, very generic question. Let's say that I'm the end user. I want to know the health of the organization. I might not know all the best-practice questions and the things I need to look at to know the health of the organization. But that has been done and dusted. People have figured it out, and the LLM has learned that. The LLM has crawled the web, and it has all the knowledge. Let's give an example; I'll pick a company, say Google. In Google, health of the organization might mean you need to look at these eight or ten metrics. In Facebook, it might be looking at twelve different metrics. So what the LLM does is: it has all this information, and it brings it back to me and says, hey, if your end customer is asking for the health of the organization, these are all the best-practice metrics that everybody looks at. Now I take those metrics. I have the data for the metrics; I just needed the plan, to know what metrics I need to look at. Once I get the plan, I execute the plan on my platform, and then I get the result. And then I go back to the LLM saying: this is what the question was, this is my result. Summarize it in a nice way so that it's easy for somebody to read. And that has been a super hit among our customers. They're loving that.

Shamil Malachiyev: When you were starting Included, were you planning to use LLMs to do all the heavy lifting, to make it AI-first, or did you have to pivot somewhere within the cycle?

Raghu Gollamudi: We actually had to pivot, in the sense that we were AI-first from day one. The only difference is that those AI models were in-house. We built them. We had our own classification models, we had our own NER models, we had our own text generation model, everything. But it was a lot of effort to do that work. Every time we needed to change something, change the text, change the way it works things out, we had to train the model a lot. Now with the LLM, all that extra work we were doing is gone. We're handing over that piece of work to the LLM, because the LLM is good at that. So it's very critical to understand the roles of every component within your stack. What we decided is: the LLM is good at knowledge base, the LLM is good at narration, the LLM is good at getting benchmarks. Like, I want to know what the attrition rate benchmark is for fintech organizations. That information is already there on the web; the LLM has already crawled it. So I don't need to create that superset of data in my system. At runtime I can say: hey LLM, this is my company, this is my customer, a fintech customer. They're asking about attrition. Go browse the web, tell me what the attrition benchmarks are. And then compare against it and tell me whether they're doing good or not.

In the end, when you're giving information to your end user, anything can be like: my marketing conversion rate is 5%. Is that good or bad? I need to know if it's good or bad, so I need to compare it with something else. The LLM knows what is good and bad, because that information is already there on the web. It knows the benchmarks; it knows everything. So all you've got to do now is take your data, take the benchmark data, the knowledge base from the LLM, and then narrate a story, because the LLM is good at narrating a story. It'll say: your attrition rate is 20%, but for companies in that same industry it is 25%, so you're doing good. So that is critical, and that's the power of the LLM, how we are harnessing the power of that and providing value to our customers.

Shamil Malachiyev: And now the information is not as subjective, I would say. Before, you would probably pay for some research, or interview those customers to get their attrition data. And now you're pretty much getting the real data that was somewhere out there, aggregated, assimilated.

Raghu Gollamudi: Exactly, right. The research has already been done. The research has already been published. The LLM has already crawled it and learned. Now the question is: how do you use that data? How do you ask the LLM to give that information to you? And that's what we do at Included.

Shamil Malachiyev: Can we take a step back, to you joining Microsoft? How big of a decision, an event, was that for you?

Raghu Gollamudi: Great question. Before Microsoft, I was working for this company called Commerce One, in the Bay Area. It was a high-flying startup, and this was in the 2000s. The 2000s were like the startup mecca. You were seeing all the stocks going to like $3,000, $4,000, and stock splits, and everybody floating on paper money. And I was like, I need to get on that train. I'm a consultant; I need to get on the train. So I joined this high-flying startup, Commerce One. And trust me, the company was doing excellently well, and life was good. Three years later, they shut down. That's when it struck me: okay, I'm getting close to my 30s. I don't have a retirement account, I don't have any savings; I went into startup mode. Now let me get a stable job and start learning from the corporate world. Because I was fresh out of college, shoved into startups, I did not learn what it means to work for a corporate American company. What does it mean to wind your way through politics and still get your voice heard and still have an impact? It's an art, and you need to learn those things.

And that's when I decided, okay, let me join a Fortune 500 company. And I was super happy and thrilled when I got an offer from Microsoft. I was there for 10 years, in different roles. One of the major roles was managing the Xbox Live data. That was pretty challenging work; it was both supply chain and Xbox Live data together that I had to manage. And we built one of the, I would say, world's largest distributed computing platforms using SQL Server and an in-memory database.

My career progression was more like, think about it, a 10-lane highway. When I started off my career, I was in one lane, which is: get yourself good at something. Coding. Be excellent at that. And then as I matured in that, it was: how do I impart this knowledge to others? So I slowly started venturing into the other lane, which is more like the managerial and leader lane. And then I was managing these two lanes, and then came: how do I go beyond that? How do I understand the impact of my product? To date, I'm building a product. But why am I building it? Who wants it? In a corporate structure, you have product managers and program managers in one vertical, and you have developers in one vertical, and you only talk between them; you never talk to the customers. And I was always fascinated: can I just jump over this hoop and talk? I'm building the product. I know who's going to use it. I'd better get to know what they want. Let me go directly to the horse's mouth and understand it. Why do I need a middle person to tell me what to do? So slowly I started learning that piece. And then came: okay, now I understand what customers want. Next is: how are they using it? So I got into the customer success standpoint. I built a product, I've thrown it out there; now, how are they using it? So slowly I was expanding my lanes. I started off with one lane, slowly I went to the second lane, which is leadership, then into the other functions. And then finally, now I'm owning the whole company.

My whole learning through this process is: you don't need to know how they're doing the job, but you need to know the person who knows how to do the job well. At a high level, you understand what marketing is, what sales is, and all that good stuff. But the thing that really matters is identifying the traits of people who are good at their job, so that when I start my own company, I'm able to bring in people with those traits, so that they can excel, and that way the company can excel.

Shamil Malachiyev: And what are those traits that you found?

Raghu Gollamudi: The main thing, I mean, it all depends on where the company is. There is the experience trait. You need to focus on experience, because when you're at the scaling stage of the company, you need to bring in somebody who has scaled a company. You cannot bring in a person who's going to be more like "let's figure out how to get stuff done," because at that stage you need somebody with that knowledge. When I am at my stage, as a seed-stage company getting to the scale part: can I bring in somebody who's hands-on, sleeves rolled up? Who's not afraid of sending emails and creating an email campaign, an outbound campaign, if required for sales or from a marketing standpoint? Who's not scared of writing content, understanding what the customer wants, talking to the customers and doing that?

And the way I look at it is that initially you don't need those people. Initially, your product leader is a person who's thinking that way. The product leader is like: hey, I built something, I see value, let me tell others what I built. So, writing content around it. Similarly, from a sales standpoint, it was me who was doing all the sales until I brought in my salesperson. I was literally sending out emails. Everybody can do everything. The goal is: do you have the ownership? Do you have a problem-solving mentality? That's the critical thing. When there's a problem, is that going to excite you? Are you going to go into this mode of "I'm going to solve this problem," as opposed to "this is not my headache, somebody else should take care of it, because I'm more of managing and not doing it"? The key thing is ownership, being passionate and excited when you get problems, so that you're solving them and then showing the impact of it and making it repeatable. And when you realize "I'm able to do this in a repeated way," now: how do I expand that? How do I scale it? That's how I look at it. It doesn't matter which function you're bringing in; those are the traits I look for. Are you able to take a problem? Are you able to dissect the problem? Are you able to come up with solutions, try them fast, A/B test them out, and then get to the solution?

Shamil Malachiyev: I think every founder listening right now is thinking: okay, how do I probe for that quality of people taking ownership of their role and solving their own problems, when you only have like an hour during the interview? Because it's hard to look at a resume and think, okay, that person takes ownership. Without having to hire them and spend two, three months looking at them, what kind of questions do you ask to check for ownership?

Raghu Gollamudi: I'll be very transparent: interview processes will only get you to a certain level. The main thing is when the rubber meets the road. Because people are smart. You can pose the most convoluted, complex question, and they know how to answer it, because they learn. It's a learned behavior. So I do it two ways. Let me put a percentage on it. Interview is 30% weightage, 70% is when they come to work. So it's not a 30, 60, 90-day plan in my company. It is a 15-day, 30-day plan. You've got to move fast, because money is always going to be a constraint. Every day you're spending the money, your runway is going down. The question is how fast you can audit what the person is doing in the first 15 days and see whether they can sustain the need of the company in the long run. If you feel that they're not the right fit, you need to let go of them. It's not that they are bad; it's just that for your company, for your needs, they might not be the right fit. They might be a great fit some other place. Human beings are amazing. They're intelligent people. The question is: is it the right fit here? Like, I might not be a great day trader, but I might be a good long-term investment guy. So I might be a good fit there. People also need to realize where they are a good fit.

Myself too, right? I worked at Microsoft for 10 years, and then I got in as CTO at Shippable. It was night and day different. At Microsoft, there's no barrier for money. The budget was there. All I had to do was succeed. I could fail a million times and still I could succeed, because there is money there. In startups, you cannot do that. So here I come into Shippable, and I'm only used to Windows. I was used to editors and visual editors and all the stuff. And I come here and I get a Mac, which I never used in my life, and I get a terminal window, and this is my view into everything development. It took me like two months just to learn how to use all these tools and everything to get productive. And it was pretty intimidating, because I did not realize it was a heavy lift for me. I was like 35, 36 when I joined Shippable, and my whole experience had been in visual editors, everything visual. And now all of a sudden I've been asked to code with nothing. You have GitHub, you have your terminal, and that's it. There's no help, nothing out there. The internet is your help, and you've got to figure out how to succeed. And this is pre-ChatGPT. I had the problem of me learning all those things, and I had to solve the problems that the company had. Flying the plane while you're building it, kind of a thing. And I succeeded.

But these are all outliers. There are people who have the passion, and they're like: you know what, I want to go into a startup and prove myself, because they're tired of corporate culture and all that stuff. But that doesn't mean that they can be successful, because it takes a different DNA to go from this cushy life, a successful, nice career which is well taken care of, well fed and well bred, to something where there's nothing out there and you're in the wild, and you've got to sink or swim in the ocean. That mindset is very, very critical. And you will get to know that within one or two weeks of the person being in the company. So I look for those kinds of traits. And if I see that they're able to swim, and they're able to go against the tide, and they're going to fight and do it: I'm in. I will arm them with what is required to succeed. But that is what I look for in the first 15 to 30 days. Yes, it is a drainer. It drains the resources, it drains time, because time is the most critical thing. But it's very, very difficult to prove it otherwise, because interviews can only take you to certain levels.

Shamil Malachiyev: And what would you say is different if we compare the Raghu before joining Microsoft and Shippable with the Raghu after that, before starting the startup?

Raghu Gollamudi: Great question. The way I look at it now: it's not about the problem, because I've solved so many problems in life. I can say I've been there, done that in solving problems. Yes, this is a different problem I need to solve. Now I'm more focused on the impact that I'm having with my customer base. Because I can solve a problem that does not have any impact. It's a great problem to solve; I can go in, I can do it. But if there's no impact, that's useless. So now it's all about what impact the thing I'm building has on my customer base.

Shamil Malachiyev: How does it show in your actions?

Raghu Gollamudi: The way it shows in my actions is twofold. One is listening to our customers' pain points. And the challenge is: do you want to build to what your customers are asking, or do you want to build to the underlying pain they're facing? That is the challenge. I'll give a classic example. If you look at the whole analytics space, what I call them is: they are faster horse carriages. And the reason I call them faster horse carriages is because the problem the customer stated is: it takes me a long time to create a dashboard and a report. So you see tools like Tableau and Power BI and all these tools out there that help you create dashboards and reports fast. But that is not the problem that a customer has. That is a symptom of a pain. The pain is: I want insights.

Today, the way the customers are getting insights is: they get a dashboard or they get a report. They'll say, oh, I see this report; let me put a filter clause here and say, show me all the high performers who left last year or last month. Now they are doing the analysis. So they want a tool on which they can do very fast analysis, but they're still spending a lot of time on analysis. And a customer will never have time to analyze every aspect of the data. What the end user is actually asking for is: can you automate the whole analysis for me and tell me where the issues are, so that I can focus on them and I can focus on strategies? As opposed to bringing this data together, stitching it together, then doing the analysis, and then getting to that aha moment: people are leaving at the director level very fast in our organization because they don't see growth. If that is the aha moment, and that's the insight, today it takes roughly around 8 to 24 hours to get to that insight. And the tools that have been created are all helping you get to the insights in 24 hours. Prior to these tools, it used to take 36 hours or 40 hours. Now with these tools, it's taking you to like 24 to 30 hours. What I'm saying is: you need to get those insights automatically, within a minute. That is what I have created with Included. Understanding the underlying pain and then solving for the pain, as opposed to the symptom. I don't just want to reduce the fever; I want to understand why I have the fever. People are solving for "how do I reduce the fever" and not "why do I have it."

Shamil Malachiyev: Can you tell me about those early inception days of Included? How did you come to the idea?

Raghu Gollamudi: That's a great question. My previous company, Integris Software, where I was a co-founder and CTO, we sold to OneTrust. It's a data privacy company, and OneTrust is the number one company today in data privacy. When I sold that, it coincided with the murder of George Floyd. The nation erupted on that. The question was: how do you bring dignity to life? That's the main thing. And I was like: how do I bring that same kind of dignity to the workforce? One of the biggest challenges in the workforce is that there's no visibility into what the experience is for different demographic segments within the organization. That visibility is not there. And what you saw initially, when George Floyd was murdered, was that the transition that happened in enterprises was they started hiring DEI leaders: diversity, equity and inclusion leaders. That was the fastest-growing C-suite title in all of the US. And the problem for them is they don't have tools or any way to know what is going on. They were just brought in and told: solve it.

Shamil Malachiyev: Especially with companies like 8, 10, 20,000 employees.

Raghu Gollamudi: Exactly, exactly. So you bring in a person and ask them to solve it. They don't have the tools, nor do they have the data, nor do they have the insights to figure out how to do it. So now they were brought in, and they had to work with the People Analytics team. It's a shared resource. The People Analytics team is already inundated with a lot of requests from business stakeholders, from your CHROs, from CEOs and everything, and now this is added work for them. So these DEI leaders were not being successful. They were there, but with not much help. So that's when I said: okay, let me create a product that can analyze the data. It's all about analysis. Are women getting hired at the same rate as men? How do you answer that? You have to analyze the recruitment funnel. You need to see how many applicants applied, you need to see how many women and men went to the next stage, what the rate of progress of different demographic candidates through the funnel is. All that complicated work was done by our platform automatically, and then we gave them the answer, saying: you know what, women are 30% less likely to get a job in your organization, because of X, Y, Z reasons. We were giving those kinds of insights.

Fast-forward two years: our existing customers were like, hey, you're giving these insights for DEI. Can you also give me similar kinds of insights for the whole of people analytics? Because this is exactly the thing we want in other places. Then we were like: yes, let's do it, because we already have the underlying platform. I'm a technologist. Chandan Golla, my co-founder and chief product officer, is an amazing technologist too. He was like, boom, let's do this. And so we took the platform, forked and lifted it, and we started doing it for enterprise-wide people data. So now you can go to the platform and say: hey, tell me the health of my organization. And we give you a readout, which no one else does. We give you a beautiful readout talking about what your headcount is, what your headcount growth looks like, what is happening with your management levels, all that good stuff. And the best part is: tomorrow, if, let's say, a different CHRO at one of the fast-growing, forward-looking companies comes up with a plan for the health of the organization, our platform will automatically learn from that, because the LLMs are learning from that. Our platform will automatically learn and say: hey, you know what, this is a new set of metrics we need to look at, these are the additional two more metrics to understand the health of the organization. The LLM will give that automatically, and then boom, we will go in, and we'll start executing and show that result. So that is the beauty of it.

Shamil Malachiyev: Nice. And when picking co-founders, was it just friends, or somebody you've worked with, where you decided: there's this good idea, let's do it together? What were the qualities of the people you were looking for?

Raghu Gollamudi: One of the biggest, I would say, strengths and weaknesses in me is that I'm an idea-generation machine. Every day I generate like a dozen ideas. That is my biggest strength. And the weakness is that every time, the new idea always looks better than the other idea. My wife was tired of hearing ideas. She's like: you're always coming up with ideas. So the thing that I'm learning, as a founder and as a human being, is how do I stick to an idea and how do I make it successful. That is the biggest challenge. I think I heard this from a great investor: hey, I have a million billion-dollar ideas, and I can sell you each for a hundred bucks. Because ideas are a dime a dozen. How do you execute? How do you come up with go-to-market? How do you understand the challenges? How do you make sure that your customers like what you're building? Execution is where the rubber meets the road, and that's the most difficult thing to do.

So when I look out for my founding team, I'm looking for people who are interested in execution, who are good at it, who can weather the storm. Because in a startup, you have lots more downs than ups. Who can weather the storm? Perseverance: they need to be able to go through the process, the grind. And that is what I look for from my co-founders. Initially I thought I could do everything alone, by myself. I thought you don't need salespeople, you don't need marketing, because if you're a good coder and you build a kick-ass product, it should automatically sell, because the value is there. But then later, as I started running the company, I started realizing: yes, you're building value, but nobody knows that you're building value. Because everybody is saying the same thing. Everybody is saying they're using AI. Every faster horse carriage is saying that they are an airplane.

Shamil Malachiyev: And can you talk about that experience? When you realized that just being a founder doing everything yourself is not enough. How was the first hiring, giving people KPIs, managing? How did it go?

Raghu Gollamudi: My first hire was a CTO, and that was the most difficult hire, because I was a CTO before. I wanted somebody like me, or better than me, to drive. And it was very, very difficult to find somebody who aligned with my thought process. And that's when I realized that I should not hire somebody like me. I need to bring in a person who brings a different perspective. Thinking from a different perspective is very, very critical for anybody's success. It takes a village to get there, and if everybody has the same skill set in the village, then you don't get there. If everybody knows how to dig a well, all they do is dig. You need to have different skill sets to dig a good well and get water from it. So similarly, what I realized is: yes, I have my skills as a CTO, but I need to bring in somebody who has a diverse skill set. Constantine, who's my CTO, is an amazing dude. He knows how to productionize stuff. He knows how to break a complex problem into smaller pieces to get there. And similarly, the same thing with Chandan Golla, my co-founder and chief product officer. He's been building products and customer experiences for customers. Now, your employees are also like your customers. How do you bring that kind of an experience to employees? That is an amazing skill set to have. We are revolutionizing everything when it comes to people analytics. So that's how I think about it: we're going to revolutionize this game. What kinds of skill sets do I need to bring in to revolutionize the game? It's a long game. It's not going to happen overnight. So bringing in the right set, bringing in diverse-mindset people, and getting there is what is critical.

And Laura Close, my third co-founder, she's also our chief business development officer. She was an expert in DEI, tech and inclusion. She was in grassroots movements. In college, she fought for things. She went to the government, going into your municipal or local city council and fighting for something. You need to have that mindset too. So all those three: that's how I created this group of my co-founders. The three of us are like dynamite. Different people bring in different strengths, and we're able to work together toward that ultimate vision of Included.

Shamil Malachiyev: And how quickly did you see results coming from these different directions?

Raghu Gollamudi: Oh yeah. From DEI, when we initially launched it, Laura Close was able to totally resonate with DEI leaders. They were speaking the same language. So it was pretty awesome to see them gel and understand and build trust. What I realized is: building technology is one thing, and building trust and empathizing with your customers is more important than technology. Because you can figure out how to build it. How to build the technology, you can bring in the right set of people and do that. But empathizing with your customer, understanding the pain points and building trust with them is the most difficult aspect of company building. And that's what we are doing right now: building the trust with our customers, empathizing with them, and then showing how the product can help them.

Initially, when I started Included, every sales demo was: look how cool a product I built. Look at this feature. It is amazing. And now the product is not important for me at all. It is: hey, tell me the challenges you're facing. Tell me your day in the life. And then slowly transition into: hey, here's how we can help you. The product is just one aspect of it. What I believe is: a tool will only be successful if people are using it. Now, how do you drive them to use the tool? How do you educate them? How do you show the value of the tool? So the focus now is more on driving adoption of the tool, and not just giving a tool and saying: here's a horse carriage, go figure out what you want to do. We're not doing that. And what we're seeing is good. Analytics products usually see roughly around three or four people using the product every month, or every week. We are seeing like 10 to 20 people in a 300-person organization using it every day, which is an amazing metric to show. So again, as I said, my goal at this stage is impact. Am I having an impact? Are people using the tools and the knowledge base that we are providing from an Included standpoint? Every person in the organization has value that they can provide to the organization. Understanding what that value is: that is my goal, and the impact of this tool and the knowledge that we're providing.

Shamil Malachiyev: To make a strong founder, you've mentioned that you need perseverance. And perseverance is one of those muscles that gets built in very difficult and challenging situations. What were some of the hardest moments, where you were really close to giving up? And what helped you stay on course, to get up and keep fighting?

Raghu Gollamudi: Great question. I would say I had the thought of giving up in the first one year of the company. And now I don't have it, because now I'm looking at the people I've hired. The thing that gets me going every day is: I have a team, they're passionate, they believe in the company, they believe in the vision that I've laid out. And now, how do I make sure that they are being taken care of? That's what gets me going every day. It's not about money and all the stuff. We'll make it; that's a by-product. The question is: how do I make my team feel valued for what they're delivering and what they're doing, and see the fruits of it, and make sure that my team, who believe in me, are successful in their endeavors? That's how I get up every day and keep working. I lose my midnight sleep thinking about my team and thinking about my customers. These are the only two things that are always in my head: my team and my customers. What do I need to do to keep them happy? How do I provide value to them? How do I make an impact with my customers, and at the same time, how do I take care of the team that's helping me do those things? How do I help them get the best out of all the time and sacrifices they've made in this company? That's what gets me going every day.

Shamil Malachiyev: A lot of founders, before they have their first founding experience, think of it as this really fun experience. There's a lot of news of VCs giving out money, people getting into YC, and they're like: yeah, I'll do it too, it seems so fun. But they don't realize that this journey is you deciding to play a game which is probably the best game there is: to start a company, you're going to grow, you're going to learn every single day. But at the same time, they don't realize just how difficult it's going to be. If you were talking to the younger Raghu, the person with maybe less experience, less prepared, what would you tell yourself?

Raghu Gollamudi: That's a great question. I was in the same boat. There's a concept in Indian cricket called "hit out or get out": go fast, go big or go broke, kind of a thing. My idea was, like I said, I've seen so many companies building the most basic thing and exiting at great numbers. And I was like: you know what, I can do the same thing. I'm a technologist. I can build something that is simple, easy to use, and exit fast. And then reality struck: that's not the case. Some people, and I would not just say it's luck, they're smart. They know how to find an area of opportunity, how to execute on it, and exit in a faster phase. And I realized that I'm not that guy. I realized that I am picking problems that take time to solve. It's a long game. And that struck me. It was like a freight train hitting me: this is not that. This is a long game. And that started bolstering, as I said, as I started hiring the team and I saw the passion and everything. And that also changed me as a human being. It was like: now we are in it for the long run. Let's figure it out. Let's execute as one team and get there. So it's a learning. And actually, I'm happy that this is what I'm doing, because I'm sure post-Included, whether it's an exit or an acquisition, I'll be a better human being, because I've learned a lot. That's what matters to me.

Shamil Malachiyev: And how would your closest friends describe you?

Raghu Gollamudi: I would say I don't bring work home. CEO is a lonely place. It ends with me, and that's about it. So when I'm with my friends, I'm chill. I'm listening to them. I'm more of a listener. And what that does is help build trust for us. My friends trust me a lot. Everybody confides stuff to me, because I keep listening, listening, listening. On my birthday, we had a toast, and my wife asked my friends: okay, tell me something about this dude. Why do you like this dude? And the unanimous answer was that he is easy to talk to, he does not judge people, and he's there when we need his help. So those are three things, and that is a trait I'm always with. And I don't expect the same from others, but at least the goal is: be there in the moment when you're with somebody. Spend that moment with them. Don't get distracted. And if they're talking, listen to them. That's very, very critical. Be a good listener, and be there when they need help. Because being there when the wins are there is easy, but being there when things go wrong is not easy. I would attribute that to my wife. My wife has taught me a lot with respect to that. She's with me when things are not easy. She's playing the game for the long run, and I see that and I learn a lot from her. So I have to give kudos to her for teaching me all those traits.

Shamil Malachiyev: How much did her support, how big of a role did it play in your formation and success?

Raghu Gollamudi: She's not a controller. She's like: it is your life, your career. You decide what you want to do, and I trust that you'll take the right decisions. She's that kind of a person. And from a health and everything standpoint, she plays, I would say, 100% of the role. She's helping, she's there, she gives me both moral and mental support, which is very, very critical. And at the same time, I don't want to abuse that support. Initially, every problem that I faced, I used to go to her, and I used to vent. And eventually what ends up happening is the other person starts getting the brunt of it. Because now they are like: how should I help him? Raghu is venting to me; how should I help him? What should I do? They feel helpless. So I realized that it's very critical to understand the balance. How do you balance it out? That's what I learned over the last couple of years, and now we're getting there. We're still learning. Sometimes I want to vent stuff out, and I'm like: you know what, she already had a long day. Let me not mess her day up by adding my challenges. And she does the same thing too. She's a business owner, so we both are business owners. When she has a bad day, she also knows how much to balance out, how much to talk, how much not to talk, and all that good stuff. So we have a pretty healthy way of supporting each other and being there for each other.

Shamil Malachiyev: That made me think. I remember I was talking to Court Lorenzini, and he gave me the best advice, which has transformed my relationship with my wife. Whenever your wife comes to you with an issue, it's good to ask: do you want one of the three H's? Do you want me to hear you out? Do you want me to hug you? Or do you want me to help you? And that will change the tendency of the relationship, because sometimes they just want to be heard. And we as men are like: so here's what you need to do. You need to stop doing that, change that.

Raghu Gollamudi: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. For me, of all the three H's, the first H is compulsory. You have to listen. Hearing, you have to do it. That's a basic courtesy that you have to show to your spouse. Next is hugging, and helping is up to what they want. I think hearing and hugging are the two basic things you've got to do, irrespective of whether they want it or not. You just do it. That's it. Done. Now, helping is a different thing. If they don't want it, you don't do it.

Shamil Malachiyev: And what are you most excited about for the next 10 years?

Raghu Gollamudi: I'm going to be very specific with Included, because this is my baby right now. You're trying to figure out how to scale and how to get there. It's all about impact, as I said. I'm super excited to see how my company can have a widespread impact for employees within the organization. And that is the goal for Included: having that widespread impact. Nothing should be surprising for an employee. That is the goal. When things are surprising, that's when you get heartburn. You see the Glassdoor rating go down to three or 2.5, because everything is surprising. So nothing should be surprising. If a company is going to lay off, there is a business reason why the company is laying off. The employees should know: you know what, this is happening, and this is the criteria we're using, so that employees can be prepared for what they need to do next. Just doing everything out of the blue and then causing that heartburn and churn is not good. It's not an easy place to get to; that's the utopia. How do you get there? So the goal for Included is: there is the business side of the house, where the business needs to run, and there are metrics and everything for that. And I also want to provide something for the employee side of the house, where employees are getting recommendations and suggestions saying: you know what, you have not upskilled yourself in the last one or two years. These are the things that are hot in the market right now. This is where the technology and the industry are heading. Why don't you upskill yourself? Giving those kinds of nudges and helping them out, so that they're ready when things change. Because when the industry is changing, the company will have to morph and change to those industry changes. Some companies will change fast; some companies will change slow, they're late in the adoption, but they are going to adopt, they are going to change. Now, how do you make sure that your employees are ready, so that the impact is not that hard?

Shamil Malachiyev: And how would you advise? Because right now it's a very relevant topic, and we've seen Microsoft laying off thousands of people, and there was a lot of criticism of their senior-level people who, after having fired so many people in their divisions, would give suggestions on LinkedIn like: if you're looking for work and you were laid off, just use this prompt to help you deal with the psychological side and prepare yourself for the next role. How would you advise managers and founders to better approach this concept of having to lay off certain divisions to allow the business to stay afloat? What is the most humane and healthy way to approach it?

Raghu Gollamudi: Honestly, if you look at companies like Microsoft, even the managers don't know who's getting laid off. It's happening; those decisions are happening at a very high level. Even if I'm a manager at Microsoft, let's say I'm an M1 manager, I have no idea who on my team is going to get laid off. Those decisions are being made at a higher level. And this phase is a pretty interesting phase, because everybody is betting on AI, and companies like Microsoft, that are at the forefront of this AI revolution, have to show that the proof is in the pudding. They have to show that they are adopting first. It's called dogfooding your own product. They have to show that they are dogfooding their own product, and they have to show the impact of that and the efficiency gains to the world. Otherwise: hey, you're selling a dream, but you're not using it. That doesn't go well. That is the quagmire that Microsoft is in, and that's the quagmire every company is going to be in. My company too will be in the same quagmire. When I start seeing reports saying that developers are getting 20% more efficient, 30% more efficient, I'm going to talk to my CTO saying: you know what, bring in the efficiency, so that I can extend my runway, or I can deliver products faster and much more valuable sooner. Those conversations are bound to happen.

In the end, the bottom line is: how do employees catch on and understand the trends that are happening, educate themselves and be prepared for that? If Included does not catch the train, we will be non-existent. So me, as an employee of Included, I have to catch the train too. I'm also running behind a train. Everybody is doing that. It becomes the responsibility of the individual to figure that out. And that's where, as I said, my vision is: when that is happening, Included should be your buddy, to understand that this is happening, and to give them the impact of what happens if you don't do it. Because people go into this monotonous day of life: I come in, I code, I do my work, and I'm done. Nobody thinks out of the box, because there's no time to even think, because there's so much workload and everything. So it's very critical for somebody to come in there and help you be prepared for that. What will happen eventually, in the utopian world, is that when there's a new technology or new disruption coming, employees are already prepared. They already know it. Either they have upskilled, or they have found a job somewhere else, so that they don't feel the impact of it. And people who are not doing that will feel the impact of it. Unfortunately, that's how the world is. The goal is: how do you have the support system to be ahead of the curve, as opposed to being a laggard? That stands true for employees, and that stands true for organizations as well. If organizations don't innovate fast, they're going to die too.

Shamil Malachiyev: Well, I want to thank you for giving us the time of day today, and wish you the best of luck with your vision of growing Included. And thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Raghu Gollamudi: Thanks a lot, Shamil. This has been an amazing hour with you, and I really loved all those questions. You made me think, too, on some of those questions, which I was not prepared for. I was like: wow, this is a great question. Mingles was one of them. I really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope we can jam more later.

Shamil Malachiyev: Likewise.