BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle
Today we’re talking with Rishabh Sood, founder of GoML, about enabling Gen-I adoption for business and how to use AI for growth.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We are a growth agency and for over 20 years we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead gen and conversion. Go ahead and check out tethos.com/podcast for a free report summarizing what nearly 20 amazing tech leaders have said here. Today I’m excited to explore how to grow a tech company with Rishabh Sood. He, as I mentioned, is the co-founder of GoML, a data science automation services provider.
helping clients scale their machine language adoption with AI consulting, AI app development, and large language model operations, which you might have to explain more to me, because I wasn’t sure I fully understood that. And I hear that Rishabh is an avid reader and a traveler, and he has his own podcast, the Gen.ai CIO podcast. So he is an expert at this as well. He can teach me a thing or two. And today, I believe you’re joining us from Delhi, India. Is that correct?
Rishabh Sood
Well, yeah, I’m based out of Delhi, but currently in Seattle for a few meetings.
Jason Niedle
Welcome, Rishabh.
Rishabh Sood
Thanks Jason for hosting me today and thanks for that really good introduction. Just as a quick introduction, I run a company called GoML as Jason highlighted. GoML is a full stack in a generative and a data science platform services provider. Just as a quick brief background, there’s a second organization that we have launched together. We were doing probably the previous world traditional
Cloud services, managed services modernization when the world was trying to move to cloud, or this was way back in 14 to 19. But we then executed the organization to another lesser. And 2023 is when we started GoML again. And the focus obviously is this time to help customers adopt Gen AI across the board. So really looking forward to sharing some learnings today, Jason.
Jason Niedle
I think it’s so important and everyone I speak to is figuring out how this all is going to work. So I really want to touch on that. Before I forget, do you have a golden nugget?
Rishabh Sood
I do love reading, right? And there’s one, this very specific book called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, that really, you know, touched me. And I continue to read, I think I’ve read that book five times. Not because I didn’t understand it the first time, it just inspires me every time I read it. Because it just puts you back, you know, into the very basic form of why, you know, there is a human existence even on this earth, right? What was the reason why this happened?
But it also gets you to think like, are we probably in the right move in the right direction? He puts up a lot of questions how humans started right up a very good, you know, introduction that he made is that we domesticated humans, right? It wasn’t the humans were domesticated the world and like the, you know, constantly believe so yeah, so it just keeps me keeps inspiring me to probably be better self of myself, right? Every other day, every day. Sorry. And yeah, yeah.
So again, as I mentioned, I think I’ll start the sixth read on my way back to India.
Jason Niedle
It makes me wonder, we’re domesticating AI, I guess, and how is the path of AI’s evolution similar to human evolution? So I bet you for an ML guy, there’s a lot to learn in there.
Rishabh Sood
No, agreed and probably a lot of times obviously technology is there to help us enable us and all of us believe in that. But you know, since I probably see a lot of things that probably scare me as well, like what Nvidia I did probably two weeks back. So yeah, I mean, a lot of these developments definitely are there to support us and probably will dive deeper into some of these. But I do get scared with some of these developments as well as we move forward.
Jason Niedle
So tell me a little bit about GoML.
Rishabh Sood
So GoML is, we’re close to almost two years old of an organization, 100 folks, mostly operating in the US and India. But the idea and the thought again with GoML is and the vision that we had started with was that obviously everyone, today is talking about technology in different tenets, I mean, people talk about technology probably in three areas, if I may, right? So how do you probably make sense of the data? How do you probably bring out the real world data, ground-road data, later
Second piece obviously is how do you probably start consuming this data? How do you start making sense of this data in your day-to-day decisions? But I think the thing that actually changed probably a year back, in the last six months is that how do you now probably build very task-focused, very mundane agents on top of these, which is new for everyone. I don’t think so. We’ve seen this level of technology that actually can probably work at the level of a human. Well, not exactly AGI, but probably almost equivalent to.
something of that sort. So that’s what CoML’s focus this time is that we probably operate across the second and the third layer, which is probably helping customers obviously first make sense of this data in a more intelligent, more organic format, and then probably obviously start building some of these consumable task-focused agents to help them solve their business problems.
Solving some interesting use cases more focused on the healthcare and life sciences space, like building systems to reduce physicians’ fatigue, early disease diagnosis, Helping customers maybe adopt early. In fact, one of the use cases that we built helped the hospital save a human life. So that’s the problem statement that we’re looking at, Jason, and that’s what makes this space more interesting.
Jason Niedle
So I saw that your title is the founder, but what’s really the heart of your role there? How do you see your role?
Rishabh Sood
I always say that the founder does everything that no one else wants to do. Right. Everyone wants to do sales, right. It’s a very interesting job for everyone. Everyone wants to do delivery. Obviously it’s messy, but it still excites everyone. Right. So, but with that, you know, the joke aside, I primarily take care of the complete growth engine of the organization today, which includes your, you know, new customer acquisition, new regions.
the entry, the partnerships with AWS and Microsoft, people’s management, policies management, etc. So all the nine years, but primarily the growth for the organization.
Jason Niedle
Cool, and would you call yourself startup or mid-stage? Because I noticed you said you restarted it a few years back. What stage would you put yourself in?
Rishabh Sood
I would probably say we are still an early state startup. While we’ve grown probably exponentially, we grew from four members to 100 people, close to a 4.5 million revenue company in less than two years. This term is very close to my heart, because I always believe, and I was highlighting the earlier organization that I was part of, but a leadership role called PowerUp. While we exited the company in five years, grew to a 250-member company, but we always called us a startup.
because I always believe that term itself gives you the agility that you actually need to survive in this market. So I would probably still call us as a startup and we continue to remain a startup for the next five years at least.
Jason Niedle
We’ve had
I do find it super interesting. There’s something about the startup mentality that can lead to hyper growth, but then there’s something about the established mentality that has systems and SOPs and a different sense of stability. And it’s like, how do you marry those two things together is always really interesting to me.
Rishabh Sood
So I always derive this and I have been working very closely with AWS in different capacities, managing partnerships, technology partnerships, growth partnerships with them. And I always follow the principle that they follow, it’s always day one. You rightly mentioned that probably when you start becoming very, being very agile, being very nimble in terms of your growth, how do you bring in that stability?
I believe these are two separate tenets, right? One obviously is the way that you execute, right? So today we have processes, right? We are trying to set up processes as we grow into a, 200 member company this year. But one nugget there for my leadership is that processes should not become a, you know, kind of a stopper for your growth, right? They should always fuel growth, right? So a process should not stop for me.
being a customer obsessed company. This process should not stop from me being an agile company. It needs to enable all these tenants as an organization. But when it comes to stability, still feel probably that stability is brought in from two tenants at an organization that’s our level. One obviously is you have the writing flows and so on and so forth. We’re a completely bootstrapped company. Would love to run the business like that. But more importantly, from the people’s aspect of it. So I believe if you build the right people culture.
Accretion rates have been less than 5 % over the last two years, right? If you’ve been the right people’s culture, think that’s, I feel these two tenets, if you have the right financial statements and the right people culture, will anyhow fuel stability, even if probably you’re being very agile at the execution level.
Jason Niedle
Really interesting. and I mean growing from zero to four and a half million in two years is radical growth, not an easy thing and not something that many people pull off. What do you wish other tech leaders knew about kind of that growth process?
Rishabh Sood
So two things right over there again, and I’ll speak more from my, you know, insights would come more from the, you know, world of again, more ML AI and specifically in Gen AI because that’s where we’re operating to. I think the biggest tenet today is all the hurdle that I see for businesses to grow is the tech education and enablement, especially in a world like JNA, right? But everyone understands charge GPT, right? For, mean, and believe me, I’ve been into almost close to, 100 plus conversations with CIOs, fortune 500 companies, 2000 companies.
and they still talk to me about, want to implement chat GPT. So that’s, I feel the understanding of the technology itself, what the technology is capable of. We don’t even go to the business level, that probably comes a step to, is the biggest hurdle today. So my only nugget over there for everyone who’s trying to enter into the space is that be very clear, in terms of how do you want to enable your customers? Like today, how do I probably enable…
or probably educate a CIO who’s actually sitting or who’s managing the business of a Fortune 500 company, that what probably Gen AI can actually do for their business, right? Overall, right? Not even getting into the processes level. So how do you probably first solve that tech layer of education that has been really fueling our growth a lot. Number two, I really feel is that what I’ve seen with other businesses is that the mentality that, we do everything under the sunlight. So you bring a problem to me and I’ll use technology to solve that problem.
Jason Niedle
You
Rishabh Sood
Right, well that was a very good statement probably let’s say 10 years back when people were moving to cloud, right? Or probably even 6 years back when people were moving to cloud, modernizing their applications, etc. But today, you know, it becomes a motherhood statement, boiling the ocean, right? What we’ve seen working with us is that we focused ourselves only in 6 areas, right? Horizontally, and then vertically we are focusing in 3 industries, right? Healthcare, life sciences and capital markets.
Jason Niedle
Mmm.
Rishabh Sood
So that focus, would say, or hyper focus is something that has really helped us probably get to this stage. And the third piece is not a nugget, but be at the right place at the right time. So that’s more of a learning.
Jason Niedle
Mm.
So can I ask what’s your growth goal for this year? You’ve been in hyper growth for a while. Do you want to continue that forever? Do you want to ease that pace a little? Like, what’s your growth goal?
Rishabh Sood
So as I mentioned, right, right place at the right time. So I do feel that probably we are in the right space right now. Like we played our cards well for the last two years. The focus this year, Jason, obviously the growth cannot stop and that has to get more aggressive and exponential. Right. So while we’ve set ourselves on a target to probably achieve, you know, 2.5 X of what we had done last year from the revenue perspective or even more target, you know, partnership wise, the goal again is to be in the top five, is going to be very challenging, right. Seeing the biggies in the market.
But I think most importantly, as you know, I think we were speaking about this earlier is most importantly to build stability into that group. So my focus this is going to be to bring that stability in that group, right? This year, how do you probably make that robust?
technology delivery engine to become more customer obsessed while we are already we sit as a sat C-sets for the power of above eight sorry. But how do I probably bring in that tenet of customer obsession, right delivery practices and most importantly the best, you know, technology backbone that we can bring into the company. So more than the sales engine, right? Well, obviously that will continue to grow. It’s going to be the delivery engine that will fire up all the engines this year.
Jason Niedle
It’s interesting, it’s not the first time I’ve heard that, And at the same time, you still have to bring people in the top of your funnel and you still have to get people to know about you, right? So what are you doing in terms of marketing and sales so that the world knows who you are? A podcast, obviously.
Rishabh Sood
Yeah.
Well, the podcast is more the you know, it’s a friendly hobby that I try to pursue out of work right with my partner Shiva. But so I think from sales and marketing perspective, there are two again, tenants that we’re actually dividing this into right. One is that obviously an organization at our level and probably this is another learning that we had at GoML is building the right partnerships right. Being with the hyperscalers right we are
as I was highlighting, top 10 AWS, are clawing our way with Microsoft as well. That actually gives you the technology, the right building practices and so on and so forth. Second is, we are working with some of these larger SIs, the GSIs, if I may. Because today, GoML, again, developing a very big niche into Gen AI in these six areas, as I was highlighting, has built that space in for itself in the market.
Partnerships angle definitely works out because you know people are looking for niche partners and generate implement, right? So these are the two areas that we are really fighting apart engines from sales perspective, right? Obviously third piece is since second half of last year is started focusing on building our in-house sales teams. We grew power up to almost toast to a you know, 6 million entity without probably just with three sales folks doing the role, right? So that’s what I want to implement and emulate over here. But every day is a new learning on SCJ.
Jason Niedle
And are you reaching out via socials or trade shows or, know, because some of those industries are hard to get in to people. How are you reaching people in financial services, for example?
Rishabh Sood
So one strategy that we are experimenting and has really worked out for us Jason this time is that we are trying to crawl our way from the SMB to the mid-market and slowly into the enterprise. The enterprise strategies are a little different as I was highlighting, we’re working with some of these GSIs to probably enter into some of these larger logos. But when it comes to mid-market and SMB segment, that’s where our focus is from the direct sales perspective, least to this year. Has been a mixture of, I would say, AI field, email marketing is dead.
for all we know. I mean, I don’t remember probably a day when I’ve not gotten close to 100, know, selling emails on my in my inbox. Right. So, but what we are focusing on is probably building more robust engines, right, which is happening either through the digital channels, right, which is webinars, building the right technology leaders, right, to probably speak about how they’re adopting, narrating their customer success stories. That has been the biggest, you know, pull up. Second piece is the reference.
engine Jason that has really worked out well for us. So if I’m probably working with a Bay Area company, right, and the start-up is obviously well connected, the founder is very well connected. If I deliver it well, he’s brought in 10 more leads to me, right? So that engine is working out very well for me. And number three, most importantly, is that today, what is working out for us is that we being, as I was highlighting a startup, right, nimble, agile, but at the same time have the right technology capabilities, have the right build nations from hyperscalers.
These companies in the SME in the mid-market segment do want to work with us and like probably the larger GSIs who probably lack that nimbleness today. So that marry or probably combination of execution plus the technology capabilities and the validation of those capabilities is really working.
Jason Niedle
Interesting. So referrals, think all the tech people out there love them and want them. How do you facilitate that? Do you have a standardized way that you make referrals happen?
Rishabh Sood
No, I mean, I would probably say the best way to get referrals or at least what has worked out for us, especially is because, you know, these startup founders, et cetera, are very well connected across the YC. We work with a lot of YC back companies back home. So YC networks, They’re Howard networks and whatnot. I think the best way is to deliver well, right? And that’s my only nugget, right? Because if I’m doing this well for the Bay Area founder today, right?
And this just happened so that we probably started building this for this single man army founder startup towards the very early stage. He was so happy, actually probably invited us to a YC event, which is a closed door event. And I was able to get four more leads from there. So I mean, my only golden nugget over there is deliver well. And these YC back founders are not easy to work with. So yeah, so that’s my only nugget over there.
Jason Niedle
you
Yes.
Deliver well.
So what’s your biggest obstacle to hitting 2 and 1 times x this year?
Rishabh Sood
I would probably say focusing on building that enablement arm, right? So today, and the biggest hurdle that I again see probably in this market specifically is like, because a lot of people sitting at the executive level do not understand the capabilities of this technology very well, for them it’s still challenging when they speak about Chennai. The adoption obviously is very slow. They’re doing a lot of POCs, they’re doing a lot of pilots.
what’s moving to production, right, actually. So that still remains the biggest challenge, right, for us, Jason, that we’re going to focus on. So we are building a lot of our offerings around how do we do enablements for these workshops, just to probably enable customers in terms of what is the capacity, what is the capability of this technology, right? The second, obviously, is building a differentiator, which you obviously did last year, but probably sustaining a differentiator for ourselves, right? If you speak about JNA, every, you know, one, every SI, would say probably is…
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Rishabh Sood
you know, doing Gen AI right. Maybe they’re doing that for the, know, opening the door perspective and so on and so forth. But for GoML that’s subreddit bottom, like we only do, you know, generating various services. So what we are focusing on as I was highlighting, building our niche writing into six areas. And, you know, we’ve actually built something called as boilerplates. Well, I’m not getting the details of it, but kind of a repeatable framework, which helps customers go live with their, you know, pilots in less than four weeks experiment in less than one week.
So iteration is probably much faster than what you’d see in the market. So that’s how we’re building and sustaining our differentiator.
Jason Niedle
Well, and I’m just looking through some of you’ve covered a lot of my questions and notes here so far.
Rishabh Sood
you
Jason Niedle
If you had some kind of a magic wand and you could change something about the business, the industry, whatever that would supercharge your growth even faster, what would you change?
Rishabh Sood
I’d probably get $10 million and distribute it to my employees. See, I think as I was highlighting, and maybe this might be a bit of a repeat, the biggest hurdle for growth for us or the technology companies operating in this area today is understanding of this technology. And when I say understanding, again, I’m not going to probably the level that, know, what are different models available.
What can chat GPT do? It can build a chatbot for you, blah, blah, blah. So I’m more talking about how is this more business oriented. So probably if I pick up an anthropic model today, what is the capability that I can actually bring in to enable my business and what is that ROI that actually I can achieve with that enablement.
Jason Niedle
I love it. So, and this is a really broad question in a way, but what should other tech leaders know about AI and in particular, like how they can use that maybe to grow their companies?
Rishabh Sood
I think the first step to this is and how we also approach this Jason is, which has helped us heavily is let’s not even talk technology, right? What all of us need to understand is technologies and enable it. Right? So today when I probably enter into a conversation, you know, with the CIO and he starts the conversation with Chad GPT. Right. I just probably ask them to stop over there as well. So technology is always comes at probably level.
So what we started doing with our customers is we have, I mean, just probably in the last 10 months, we built a consulting arm, right? And the idea and the thought of this consulting arm is not to be revenue focused, right? This arm is more to probably work with customers, help them understand their business, identify the right use case, which obviously is the lowest hanging fruit. There are some tenants that we follow, it cannot be very simple because it doesn’t prove the business value, but it needs to have a clear business ROI, right? So these two tenants needs to be very clear with that case.
And then let’s start talking technology. The first phase, and in fact, to highlight, I think when we started working with some of these mid-market customers and enterprise customers, we don’t even talk technology in the first two weeks of engagement. That actually probably comes in the third week once you’ve identified the use case. So my only nugget over here would be probably let’s not talk technology at the face of it. Technology is an enabler. Let’s first understand what is the problem statement that you really want to solve.
Identify a clear ROI out of it that you really want to achieve. And I’m pretty sure the technology is so mature today that it will be able to probably help you achieve that.
Jason Niedle
makes so much sense. I would never call my plumber and say, hey, let’s talk about your wrench and what other tools you have. I’d say, I have a leak, right? why do we call a tech company and talk about the tool?
Rishabh Sood
That is such a beautiful analogy.
And see, to a extent that wasn’t a wrong approach probably when let’s say, we were talking about cloud migration, right? So probably someone calls and probably asks you, right? Okay. I want to probably migrate to AWS. Okay. That’s a good driver, right? But why do you want to migrate? Right? So that becomes a conversation. But today if someone says, I want to implement GPT, that really pisses me off.
Jason Niedle
So I wonder if from, I read your website and all that and you’re talking about the what you do, but I wonder if on the marketing side, because you’re talking about the clarity and the education, that maybe it’s more about being more clear on the problems that you’re solving and, you know, this having this big giant range of problems you solve can then help me see, okay, look, you can solve those who cares about the tool.
Rishabh Sood
Absolutely. And there’s something called as a leaderboard that we actually run, right? It is similar to what Huggins does on the open source models. Ours is more focused on closed source models. Maybe talk about business problems. If you go to that leaderboard, it just probably lists on top 50 problems that we’ve solved across three different industries, right? It doesn’t even list anything from technology perspective. So that’s primarily just for the CIOs and the business people to just go through and just get an understanding what industry is solving, right?
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Rishabh Sood
what this technology is capable of and draw parallels from that for their businesses.
Jason Niedle
Perfect. So the world’s in massive flux. What trends do you see for the year ahead?
Rishabh Sood
So I do see probably three areas where, know, again, from the world of Gen AI that we’re actually approaching. One I really feel, and this is, this probably is a shocker for all of us, right? Is that the customers are moving from, well, this was always a debate, right? Build versus buy, right? And more often than not, when probably this was very business intensive, it was mostly a buy, right? But that trend is changing.
slowly, right? Because of how fast you can now probably build some of these workloads, applications, automate these agents, and so on and so forth, right? We are moving more toward the build phase, right? And while again, everyone, I mean, I’m not again telling anything new. SaaS probably is slowing down a bit in that case, right? So I’m seeing that probably as a big change, right? The second piece that I really feel today is that
I think probably when we started adopting this technology, we’re still probably talking about, you know, larger business use cases, right? So probably how do I automate, you know, we’re working with this healthcare or probably a provider. How do we automate end to end admin process for a patient, right? But what that now has changed in the last six months, and I think we’ll continue is we’ll start talking about very specific business problems, right? So within that chain, right? What is the problem? The problem statement is that the customers onboarding onto a hospital network is slow. So how do I probably now automate the first step?
And that obviously is leading us into more agentic workflows rather than probably building these applications and so on and so forth. And I think the third piece that I really feel probably would be more the way again, I’m seeing probably the world moving towards us that we move into a more business value based adoption. Well, probably till the early last year, people were still talking about let’s do a POC, let’s understand what technology does. I think people now understand more or less what technology does. Obviously, there is enablement education that needs to be done.
But they’re now moving more to the business value. How do you now derive business value from these systems, which is a good trend for all of us.
Jason Niedle
Absolutely. I know you have a hard stop. So this was great. Thank you very much. Where can our audience find you?
Rishabh Sood
in a podcast but always happy to probably you catch up with anyone I’ll drop my coordinates probably in the podcast as well once you see some hosts but you know just tap me into my email reach out to me on LinkedIn I’m happy to probably chat
Jason Niedle
And the website is goml.io G-O-M-L.I-O. Rishabh, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS.
Rishabh Sood
That’s good.
Jason Niedle
For leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, we drop episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Niedle at tethos.com. T-E-T-H-O-S.com. And don’t forget to grab our report at tethos.com/podcast. Please drop any comments for me or questions for future guests below. And don’t forget to share with a friend. Until next time.
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