#99 Naveen Verma — From Princeton Professor to Venture-Backed CEO, Fundraising Without a Network...

Okay, so the first thing I would say is empathy doesn't mean that you're not hard on people. I do think that there's an important aspect of being, there's an important role in being hard and firm with people. But empathy is understanding, I think, you know, sort of, or making sure that that being hard on them is in the service of getting more out of them. Where there isn't a consistency is I don't have the luxury to torture someone into becoming a better employee as a startup. If it's not working, You need to recognize that, I need to recognize that, and we both need to decide that it's time to move on. You know, when you're a CEO of a $4 trillion company, you maybe have the time and space to play that game, but I don't.

Welcome back. This is From Startup to Grownup. My name is Alisa Cohn, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Naveen Verma to the podcast. Naveen is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University and the co-founder and CEO of Encharge, a deep tech company building ultra-efficient in-memory computers that slash the energy cost of artificial intelligence. This is a very exciting startup, and they just raised $100 million in their Series B fundraising. Now, Naveen's path to becoming an entrepreneur was through academia, and he spent 6 years inside of his Princeton lab hunting for a way to keep data parked inside memory instead of shuttling it back and forth, an insight that unlocked orders of magnitude gains in power efficiency and set the stage for the company's 2022 spinout. So we had a great conversation about how he bridged the gap from tenured academia to venture-backed startup, why PhD work turns out to be a perfect founder training, and how he recruits industry veterans to commercialize a technology which no one has ever seen before. We also dive into raising capital as a first-time CEO, how he thinks about building culture, and the mindset that keeps him steady when the learning curve gets super steep, as it always does for a first-time CEO.. It's a conversation packed with candor and practical lessons on turning breakthrough research into real-world impact. You are gonna love it and you're gonna find it very practical. So please enjoy this great conversation with Naveen Verma. Naveen, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.

Thank you, Alisa Cohn. It's a pleasure to be here.

I'm so excited. And you know, you are, I mean, there's so much to say about you and your, um, I would say dual role here. You started your career as a PhD and researcher, and you're now a professor at Princeton as well as the co-founder, I think, and CEO of Encharge. So I have to ask you about that journey because, you know, you're definitely a deep tech guy. What made you get your PhD and how did that kind of turn itself into a company? Right.

So it sounds like a lot of different things. Actually, it turns out, at least in my view, there are things that are very complementary and consistent with each other and so on and so forth. The decision to do the PhD was made early in my career, but relatively late in a timeline where one would typically decide to do a PhD. It turns out that I was undergraduate student doing engineering. I was having, you know, second thoughts about doing engineering at all very early in that process. At some point I really got inspired by engineering and all of that went away. I started to see engineering as an extremely powerful bag of tools to do all sorts of creative things and, you know, to innovate in all sorts of interesting ways. And that really inspired me to, to do engineering. Um, and then, you know, it just kind of snowballed a little bit from there. I spent a little bit of time doing internships and, you know, doing various industrial positions and, and things like that. It was all very, very exciting, but I felt like I wanted a little bit of time and space to innovate a little bit outside of the rigid, sometimes rigid boundaries that we have in, in, um, uh, in, in industrial R&D roles. And so I wasn't quite ready to go out and, you know, sort of be constrained by those things yet. So I went on and did my PhD. I did that thinking that I would, you know, spend time and get my fill of kind of doing freewheeling and free-thinking research. But it turns out, especially towards the end of that, I felt like I actually didn't get my fill yet, and I wanted to be able to define problems that I thought were interesting, problems that I thought were, you know, sort of aggressive and maybe weren't being pursued in industry in quite the same way. And so I said, it seems like a reasonable path is to go on and continue as an academic and become a professor at Princeton, which is what I did. But you could see that I always kind of had this draw towards industry and working on real-world problems. And being totally honest, being a professor is a very privileged thing. You have all sorts of freedom to work on problems. You also have freedoms to engage with collaborators and connect with all kinds of very interesting people who, you know, bring you problems, to whom you bring problems, and with whom you work together towards solving those problems. And so I'd always have an eye in my academic research career towards real-world problems and, I am very inspired by the kinds of real-world problems that we're facing today, especially in the area of artificial intelligence. And so when, you know, some of the freewheeling and free-thinking research opportunities presented a potential path to impact those problems in what I thought was a really meaningful way, I felt I had to jump in. And the way I did that was, in addition to all of the collaborations and interactions I've had in the past, in this time to actually start a company and really, you know, sort of put my money and commitment where my mouth is and really pursue a technology that I thought was a real breakthrough and that I thought could make really meaningful impact in the world.

Oh my God, Naveen, you just said a lot. I wanna start though, back, just back to when you said engineering. I don't, I guess it sounded like you were like, oh, this is not inspiring. And then you're like, oh, actually it is inspiring. Like, was there a turning point? Why did you pursue engineering in the first place?

So I pursued engineering at a time when, you know, hey, listen, if you're good at math and physics, it's like, go on, be an engineer because there's a clear career pathway for you. But you could see that whole logic is not intrinsically inspiring, at least the way that I said it and the way that I felt it, it wasn't intrinsically inspiring. So I went into engineering thinking, well, you know, I'm good at math and physics and things like that, so I might as well do this. But there were many other things that inspired me as well. Then I discovered that engineering is not just about, you know, you happen to be good at something and now you're pigeonholed into something else. It really was this, like I said, very empowering set of tools to go and solve problems in a very creative way. And that was the turning point for me. And it happened in about my second year of college.

You discovered what it really was and you were like, oh, actually this is super cool. And so then you went to pursue your PhD and I love how you was like, and then I went crazy and freewheeling, woo, and started my PhD. That's like, not everybody's version of what a PhD is. It wasn't like, it's not always freewheeling and aggressive problems.

And you know, when you're in the thick of it, it doesn't always feel like freewheeling and aggressive problems. But I think that's also one of the benefits of the PhD. Maybe it's not the thing that attracts you to it, but it's one of the real gifts that you are given by going through the PhD. You are, I think, and many, many of us are inspired by just the ability to work on broad problems, not problems that necessarily the industry is under the gun to solve. And so that's a great reason to start. I think when you do start, what you find is that the PhD journey is a bunch of peaks and valleys, and it can be extremely hard, and you can go months, you can go years struggling on problems that are at the frontier of the knowledge we have as a society. So it's very likely when you operate in that place that you're not going to have immediate successes. Sometimes you'll have to pivot and sometimes you'll have to think about different problems or problems differently, um, and all of those sorts of things. So, you know, yes, I framed it initially as a kind of freewheeling and great opportunity to exercise all sorts of inspiration. Um, and that's probably what drew me in. And of course the reality of it is it's, uh, it's something that's challenging and it builds resilience and it builds creative thinking and all those things.

Well, now I understand, and we're going to talk a lot about this, about how it prepares you for the entrepreneurial journey when you talk about ups and downs and pivoting and having to have resilience. That totally sounds familiar to me. So now tell us exactly what nCharge does. This is deep tech, folks. So like explain it to us in a way that we can all understand it.

Sure. So it turns out that what nCharge does is we build extremely efficient computers for artificial intelligence. And the reason that that's important is because artificial intelligence in ways that we have never seen before is stressing our ability to do that computation because of fundamental reasons. The fundamental physics of how we do computation is limiting how much of the computation we can do. And in fact, you know, in many cases, AI is demanding more and more of it. And so that's the problem. As I've described in much of my career, I've sort of followed the inspiration And I've certainly been inspired by artificial intelligence from very, very early stages of it when it was still a relatively primitive technology and a relatively early-stage technology, not like today. But, you know, I could see kind of where it was going and that it was doing something a little different than other traditional forms of compute workloads. And so I was very inspired by that, and I felt like we did need to solve some of the problems that I could see coming about around the sustainability of compute. So that's what nCharge does. In order to solve some of the problems, we had to really think about compute in a very different way in terms of the fundamental physics. As I mentioned, that's what ultimately is limiting our ability to make compute sustainable at the scale we need for AI.

And by sustainable, do you mean like, like climate sustainability, or do you mean our ability to keep up with the energy or expense? Or like, what do you mean by sustainability in this case?

Yeah, I really mean very fundamentally energy. The way that I think about computing systems or the way that I think about engineering systems is they take some resource and taking that resource, they do something useful for you. And really what computing systems do is they take energy of some form and then they do some compute for you. Ultimately that energy is the resource that you pay to do that compute. And it can show up, it can limit sustainability in various different ways. It might mean that you can't run a battery-powered device long as you would like. It might mean you can't put it in places that are constrained by the amount of power you can deliver. It might mean that you are delivering so much power that it's having, um, really adverse consequences at a planetary level, right? It, it goes in all of those different directions, but fundamentally the resource we pay to do compute is energy.

Got it.

Okay.

That's really helpful. And so if I'm not mistaken, you were inside, just inside of your academic sort of in a bubble in a good way, right? You're in your academic world and you were researching and like building this technology before you spun it out into a company. Is that right? Like, what was that journey like and how long did that take? And what was the aha moment that you said, you know what, we're just going to spin this out?

Great question. So, you know, I've mentioned it before, being a professor is an extremely privileged thing. And I had the great privilege of working closely with industry for my entire career and seeing all sorts of problems and being inspired by all sorts of problems, but really being in academia and having the freedom to think kind of further ahead than, you know, what are we going to do about this problem for next year when we have to deliver the next generation of products? I could think about it in a more broad kind of sense and taking a step back. And so that's what we did. And we had done many things in my research career and in my lab, and we've gotten many citations and many PhD students have graduated and gotten all sorts of recognition. And most of that stuff doesn't work. That's the reality of, of research. Yeah. Um, we encountered a particular breakthrough, which was really the result of pursuing a direction that I knew computing systems had to go. Um, and I can say more about this. We've developed a technology called in-memory computing. It's an area that my group has been doing research for many, many years. It's very important to AI because it turns out that it's solves two problems that AI uniquely poses for us. One is an enormous number of operations that we have to do in these workloads. So you need very high energy efficiency effectively to do math. But the other is we're operating on massive amounts of data. And so actually moving that data around and managing it becomes a big limitation. And it turns out that this particular technology called in-memory computing is very rare in that it solves both of those problems, potentially solves both of those problems simultaneously.. It keeps the data in the memory where it's stored and it doesn't move it out. It's able to do the computation right there in, in place. And so we knew we had to go in that direction, but to make that kind of simple concept work, there were all sorts of fundamental challenges that really go down to the very physics of how we think about doing compute. And when you, you know, try to invoke physics, physics is governed by like the laws of nature. It's not going to do what you want it to do. And so you have many, many failures. And we did, we had a breakthrough. And we had it, you know, some time ago. It was in about 2017 that we had a particular approach to doing analog in-memory computing, which really unlocked tremendous efficiency but also solved some of the practical challenges of using this physics in a way that's robust and that can scale and that can be programmable in all the ways that we need practical computing systems to be. Um, but having had that breakthrough, I realized actually at that point very early on that, that this is something that the industry is gonna care about and that the world is gonna care about. And, and the thought, uh, and plans to spin out a company started there, but we didn't spin out the company then. Um, when you have a new technology at a fundamental level, boy, are there a million things that can go wrong and you need to give yourself the time and space to let them go wrong. So that you can then, you know, eventually land on the right solutions. On the other hand, if you go and spin out a company and you've taken money from investors, now your mandate changes. You've got to deliver real products to customers and start returning the investments that people have made in you. And that doesn't give you the same time and space to, you know, make mistakes and, you know, sort of land on the right solutions ultimately. And once again, it's a great privilege of being a professor in academia where I have that time and space to do these kinds of things with these very and differentiated technologies. So we spent about 6 years doing that, building this fundamental technology into complete architectures and software and all the things you really need to build something that would be useful to the world.

You know, it's a real testament to like the notion of incubation and being able to, I mean, I'm just sort of picturing like, first of all, like any incubator, which gives you, I mean, you had a long time, 6 years, but like a long time to just like make mistakes and screw it up and build infrastructure around it and understand what makes it work and make it work. Like the sort of safe space of not having to worry about customers, not having to worry about all the things around running a company. And like, there's like, obviously in your PhD or in your lab, that was one spot. Incubation is another spot. And then also, even if you're in a large company, large companies also expect you to return the investment very quickly. Like they give you 3 months to figure it out or a year to figure it out. So even finding like safe space in a large company to really spend the time in R&D is you're really like showcasing how important it is.

Yeah, like I said, it really is a privilege and I really do feel it is a privilege. Now I do wanna give the following caution, right? When you live in a world where you have the freedom and you know, there isn't that pressure, you know, to in 3 months or in 1 year actually convert this thing into something that is gonna have some sort of business value, it's very easy to also deviate from, you know, sort of the objective of creating something that will ultimately have real-world value. And so, you know, one does need to operate here with, you know, a very clear eye on what you want to get out of this. And, you know, contributing to the knowledge base that we have and writing papers is a very, very rewarding and gratifying thing to do. But there's another form of impact here that, that really mattered. And when I realized that we have something that is really going to work on a fundamental level this became a big priority alongside, you know, sort of publishing and contributing to the knowledge base and so on. So, you know, I think it is a real unique place to be able to incubate, but it's something that requires also a certain kind of focus in terms of driving this towards, you know, something that can actually fit into and solve real-world problems.

Yeah, definitely. And you have to have that kind of inner drive. And I think also just like the mindset of I want to do this. I guess I'm curious, like, did you— I can tell that you have a mindset around— I mean, you said inspiration 4 times in this conversation already, so obviously, yeah. So you have a mindset around being inspired, you have a mindset about practicality that's very clear, and I think that you, you have a mindset around looking for breakthroughs. Is there anything else that you think is important that really drove you to be an entrepreneur? And then I want to hear about actually how you set up the company.

Yeah, maybe the one that I'll add to it, and it perhaps goes in the direction of practicality, but it's one that goes in the direction of not just what is practical in my view, but what is actually a real problem that a person across the table who I wanna work closely with and whose commitment I want, you know, to together solve interesting problems, what matters to them? So I think there's also, you know, sort of, sort of really having an eye on what matters to your partners as you're starting to now create value and deliver something into an industry or a market. That's the other one that I would kind of add there, which is just a little bit adjacent to practicality.

Yeah, I think it's so important, the idea of like actually what someone's going to buy, like what's a problem that people are struggling with that you can then help them solve. And then of course there's a commercial experience around that. So then what happened? Did you, I think you have a few co-founders. How did you connect with them? And then I know that, you know, you, you raised some money from VC. So what was that journey like?

Yeah. So I mean, I think one of the very scary things when I realized that, that I do feel I have to spin this out into a company because we really do have something that here that's gonna make a difference here. One of the really scary things was, you know, professors have no business going and, and delivering things into the real world. That takes real experience and real understanding. And so that was a very scary thing. Um, because of the interactions that I've had with industry throughout my research career, um, I was very fortunate to have a really, really strong network, uh, of folks who I kind of knew who also know how to execute, um, in the real world. And I'm very grateful for two co-founders of mine who actually got involved in the research at a very early stage as we started to realize we really have something here. You know, I wanted to get them excited about it as well and to also build in their perspectives into how, you know, we can best de-risk this and build this into something that would ultimately be impactful in the real world. So I feel like a big enabler for me to even think about doing what I'm doing here is having co-founders who to recognize what my shortcomings and weaknesses are as somebody who's going to be a CEO and try to deliver something to the market. And there's a lot of those, let me be clear. And also who bring very complementary strengths. And so I have two incredible co-founders, Kailash Gopalakrishnan, who was previously a fellow at IBM. You know, I looked across my network at, you know, sort of who has actually done the following thing, who has taken deep research ideas and actually converted them to real products. And we have all sorts of research labs at all sorts of companies. Intel's got them, NVIDIA's got them, IBM's got them, all, every, you know. I see very few instances of really transformative successes in those industrial research labs getting translated into real products. It happens and it's incredibly impressive and I have great respect for when it does happen, but it's rare. Kailash in particular was somebody who I saw did it and did it repeatedly. And so as we think about taking something from deep research and really executing it into a product, it was just clear he's going to be the critical co-founder here. The other co-founder, his name is Ichiro Araga. He was VP of engineering and general manager of a business unit at a company called MACOM, delivered what I thought are some of the most complex mixed signal parts into the industry. What we have here is a mixed signal part. That means it's not digital, it's not analog, it's both. That's a very rare thing. And it's where some of the key advantages at the level of the fundamental physics come from. So having somebody who understands what that looks like in a way that, you know, he's always been operating in his career at the very frontier of that was very important. So it gave me confidence. And with that confidence, you can do anything.

Totally. And so you just approached both, they were both in their jobs and you approached both of them and said, hey, let's co-found this company. But I mean, they already had, they already knew what you were working on.

They knew what I was working on. I had known them from before, so I felt like I had some social capital with them as well. And it was also a matter of finding the right conditions. I think the story that Kailash says is he and I happened to be at a conference in Hawaii. At the time and I knew he was coming and I knew what I wanted to get out of it. And so I messaged him and I said, hey, can we catch up? And you know, when you've got, you know, beautiful oceans and rainbows in the background, it can be hard to say no. So it's a combination of all sorts of tricks in the bag to sort of make it happen.

So romantic.

That's right.

I love that. And so why are you, Naveen, And with the most respect, why are you the CEO? You're not the business guy. I mean, I understand you're the technology guy. I get it's your technology. I look forward to hearing your answer, but like, you're not the business guy.

You know, I will say that when we initially were thinking about the company and starting it out, we didn't really think a whole lot about, you know, what are you going to do and what are you going to do and all of those sorts of things. And I think one, I'm not saying that you shouldn't. This just happens to be the path that we took. For all sorts of reasons, even as I'm saying it, I can see that it could be fraught with all sorts of problems. You maybe want to plan these things out carefully. It worked in our case because I think between the three co-founders, we really have a strong sense of self-awareness across the three of us. In other words, I know what I'm good at and what I'm bad at, and I know what Kalashachura are good at and what they're bad at. And so it was very natural for for us to be able to complement each other where needed, even without, you know, sort of clear designations of roles. We started to get to a point where we needed to be able to articulate our story and our vision and the path by which we were going to get there. And, you know, some of us could articulate some parts of that story and others could articulate other critical parts of that story. And that kind of became how the roles emerged. And I think it continues to work today, even though that kind of It was driven by a very early need to kind of articulate this to investors and partners. It works today because we all understand what we're good at and what we're not good at and are able to, you know, sort of come to each other's rescue where needed.

So it sounds like it was really an evolution. And you guys have— how long has the company been around?

The company was spun out in '22.

In '22. So about 3, 2 and a half, 3 years?

Yeah. -ish.

Okay, have you— have the three of you had any significant, let's say, arguments or conflict or something that was like, you know, really challenging? I don't just mean like regular conflict that you then can resolve, but anything that was sort of challenging that got in the way for the three of you?

I mean, all the time, but never at a level that was, uh, you know, sort of made us question each other and each other's commitment and made us question each other's value and role or question the respect that we have for each other. And I think that those are very important core principles. And with those, what that enables is that you can have conflict and challenge each other and feel like you're in challenging situations. And the hope is that you then emerge from that stronger. And we continue to battle on perspectives and things like that, which I think is across the team, one of the superpowers.

I could get that. It sounds like part of your— I mean, in academia, this is true, and it sounds like part of the culture you're trying to build is being able to talk straight to each other and have conflict with each other. Did you have conflict about, let's say, the technology and the approach or the business building or the company building, or which aspects brought some of that conflict?

Yeah, I would say all of this healthy conflict has happened on all of those fronts. Um, and you know, part of the reason here is we've got technology that no one person can be a complete expert in. Um, the kind of computer we're building doesn't look like any other computer out there. And so if you're an expert at building computers and have delivered products and have experience through that, this is going to upend some of that experience. Um, and you know, if you've built mixed signal analog chips and, you know, done that really well and executed those, well, now you need to build this into a computing system. So, you know, I think no one person can do all of that. And so you will have pushes and pulls that come as a result of that. And that's very, very healthy. Some of these are, you know, quite frankly, at levels of foundationally, like at a vision level, like how do we see this? But I think, you know, vision is not one of these things that needs to be static, that needs to emerge from some magical point of origin and never change. It's something that can emerge, can evolve, can be, you know, sort of deformed by collaborators around you into something that is ultimately bigger and better. And so I think having that attitude or perspective towards one's personal vision is also critical to, you know, sort of being able to leverage that superpower.

Yeah, I love that. What specific advice do you have for other founders who to choose and then maintain great relationships with their co-founders?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think, you know, one of the mistakes that every founder makes, I feel, or many founders make, is they think that their experience is like now one that can be replicated and generalizes to everyone else's experience. And I don't feel that way. So I don't know if what was really critical for me is going to be the most critical thing for someone else. But I do think that in my case, you know, I'm not a traditional CEO, and yet I feel like I, I hope I'm bringing value in the CEO's role in ways that a non— that a traditional CEO wouldn't have been able to do. Um, and so for us to be able to unlock and leverage that, I need the support of my co-founders in, in the places where I'm not a traditional CEO and I've got things in my blind spot and, and so on. So I think for me, you know, there's no one of us who who, you know, sort of satisfies a traditional role as the CEO or the CTO or the COO. But I think together we kind of address that. And if that doesn't happen, then there's all sorts of problems at a very foundational level in the company.

Yeah. So it sounds like you're really saying like figure out sort of almost like the complementary strengths and what they bring to the table. And it sounds like you also would say bring people, I mean, this sounds obvious, but like people you respect so that you can— Okay.

Very self-aware.

Yeah.

Very self-aware of what, you know, your limitations and, and so on are and what the limitations are of your co-founders so that you either know that they can be addressed or if they can't be addressed or if they aren't addressed, that's okay too. But you have them within view and, and there's other ways and structures within a company to, to address them. So there's many, many paths forward, but being aware and especially being self-aware is just really important. Self-aware of your limitations.

Yeah, very wise, very wise. So you then went off to, to raise— you've raised a Series A and a Series B. And I'm so curious, how did— you know, you, you sound very well networked, actually. So like, I'm just curious, was that part of just being part of the network? Was that harder or easier from academia? Was there any concerns from them about you being not just a first-time CEO but like a professor? And so like, maybe He doesn't know what he's doing. Like, how did that all come together?

Yeah, so, you know, I think first of all, I have great networks and I deeply value the relationships that I have, but it's very interesting. I had those in a completely different domain. You know, other professors I can talk to, they have a certain level of trust in me because they've, you know, read and relied on my work. I have a certain level of trust in them because I've read and relied on their work in various ways, so on and so forth. All of a sudden, when I started talking to investors and spinning out this company, I'm operating in a completely different world, and I'm kind of like a nobody, which was a little unusual relative to the position that I've been in before. And I really had to figure out how to like build trust with people to whom trust meant something different than what it did in my academic career. So it took a lot of, you know, kind of understanding that. But I think it also took a lot of not deviating from too far from who we are and what we want to build. And for sure, there are some VCs who look at me and they're like, professors have no business being CEOs, and they're probably right in many ways. But then there are also, you know, partners and investors who say, you know what, a CEO can bring a really— or a professor can bring a really unique perspective and capability to the role of the CEO. And once again, it's important for me to understand how and where I'm limited and how and where I can bring real strengths. And the investors who understand that as well are the right partners. And so there is a, you know, sort of process that self-selects and regulates here.

Yeah. So what was your step-by-step process?

Well, I mean, to be frank, right, and any founder will tell you this, when you're going to find investor partners and raise money, you talk to, you talk to a lot of people. And you kiss a lot of frogs and, and so on. And some of them you get the right feeling from, and, and sometimes it's the ones that show an interest in you are also the ones that symmetrically, you know, you feel an affinity and, and, you know, kind of a connection to. Um, I'm not sure that we had at the early stage a whole lot of process for this, and especially at the early stage, it's so important to bring in investors who you just feel comfortable with who, you know, are going to get it when you feel you could be honest with, and, and their reaction in the face of that honesty, you know, when the news is good and when the news is bad, is going to be, "I appreciate the honesty, and I appreciate the ability to understand what you're telling me." And that was kind of just like— most of that is like a rubric that lives in your gut, um, and, and that's kind of what we did. It was less of a step-by-step and formal process. As we got a little bit more mature, Please go ahead.

Well, I was going to kind of interrupt you, but you must have like, you did cold emailing or you asked all your friends who knew people in Silicon Valley, you took trips to San Francisco. Like, how did you even just get in the door with these folks?

So it was all of those things. And, you know, when you do all of these things, your success rates are not high. And mine were not when we were doing that fundraising. And I hope that all other founders realize that. You know, sort of failure with investors is one of the things that's a very natural part of this process. And, you know, please don't be discouraged. Um, ultimately, actually, where we found the strong connection was it did leverage some of my academic background. So I'd been a performer in DARPA programs. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Um, and I'd worked on various, you know, very aggressive and very risky research projects in my academic life, and they had actually an initiative where they were interested in seeing some of the, the researchers spin out technologies from this deep risky domain that they'd invested in. So actually, the, the, the first investors with whom we have a very important and unique kind of relationship, in my view, were actually introduced to me by some of those contacts at DARPA.

Oh, that's amazing. Okay, good. That, that makes complete sense, especially like as a bridge from academia to, into sort of the investment world. So then how did you find your, your later stage, your B, your Series B investors?

So as we started to mature a little bit, um, you know, we started to find out who we are, not just as people, but also as a company. Um, and we started to figure out, you know, what are the things that are gonna be challenging going forward and what are the things that are gonna be real strengths for us going forward and who's going to let us really be true to those and who's going to really understand the challenges. So that, that allowed us to now start to do some profile matching. And we definitely had some targets for who we thought about as a lead investor and who we thought about as the syndicate. You know, and we wanted to have a very strong financial investor as, as the lead, but, but someone who really understands the space of advanced computing. That's where we live, that's where our DNA is, and is interested in transformative thoughts and ideas in that space. And, and so Tiger Global was a just an absolutely fantastic partner for us. Even as we were moving through in conversations with various investors, it became clear to us that this is the one that we really want. And, um, you know, like I said, often that, that may mean as well that, that, you know, sort of they feel the same kind of affinity. And so it worked out that way. There's that symmetry that happened. But then it's also very, very important to think about the rest of the, the syndicate, you know, as we go forward as a company, who are strategic partners that we want on a development level, on a commercialization level. And we're at a stage in the company where we, we did want to think about that very carefully, and we were very, very fortunate to get extremely, extremely strong and, and, and good supportive investor partners.

Yeah, I think it's so important to just be aware of who you're taking money from and also what I think of the implications of taking money because you were incubating quietly and calmly and then now you really have expectations on the line from— I'm sure you have a board now and you have people who are kind of expecting something different from you.

Yeah, absolutely. So really having a strong alignment with those folks is important because they've put a lot in. They've literally invested a lot., you know, not just dollars, but in many ways their careers and, you know, their reputations in you. Um, and all of those things along with the dollars mean a lot.

Yeah, for sure. So do you have, I think you have like 60 people in your company right now, is that right?

I think we're more like, um, high 70s.

Oh my God. Blowing up.

Yeah. We're in a period of growth here and those are, that's what, that's what it takes.

Yeah, for sure. Okay. Wow. So this really is a high, I mean, this is just a high growth moment for you. Absolutely. When you were starting to hire employees, I think my first question is like, what did you notice? You had 1 person, 5 people, and then 10 people, and now like 30 people, and now 70 people. What did you notice as your headcount started to grow? Because it really is this moment of rapid growth for you.

Yeah, I mean, I do really think, um, some of this is going to happen naturally, but I do really think you want to think about what kind of culture you're building, which kind of— and that's really entirely driven by who you bring in. Um, and for us, you know, it was a culture of real sort of technical excellence and innovation. Uh, and we, you know, leveraged initially our own networks, uh, to really think about who are people that really the AI computing industry grew up with, who were the big drivers of ideas that made the whole industry mature. And then the next challenge is how do you take such people and attract them into this little thing that you've created that is no more than just 3 people and, you know, a story. And you got to inspire them. You got to share the vision with them and, you know, what this thing is and why it's so different. But then as more and more people come into the company, and this goes to your question of, you know, sort of after you hire the first 5 and then the first 10 and then the first 20. I was just having a conversation with one of my colleagues at nCharge, and the point he made to me was people work for people. And even for me, right, I think for the 3 co-founders, when we initially spun out the company, for me certainly, I thought that what would inspire me day to day is this transformative new technology that no one has ever worked on, and it's gonna— all that has moved to the background, right? It's really the inspiration is the team that we have. And so we— it is people working for people. People. And so as you go from your, you know, 5th to your 10th to your 20th employee, a lot of it is they see who else is on the team and are attracted by that and the opportunities to work together there. Um, so setting that culture at the early stage is so critical. It will, you know, set you on this path for much of the rest of the, um, the journey.

Yeah, of course. As a coach, you're giving me red meat now. Like, yes, culture is important. Did you guys— did the 3 of you sit down and have a conscious conversation about culture, or were you just kind of looking for that same kind of person, like that innovative person, the, you know, sort of the cutting-edge person who wanted to adapt and grow? And then by the time you had 20 of them, you're like, oh, that's kind of what our culture is. Like, how did— did you talk about that consciously?

We did talk about it. I don't think we talked about it as culture. I think we talked about it as what is it going to take to build this thing. But we didn't answer that question in terms of, you know, what is the engineering role that the next person needs to fill. It was a much broader, what is it gonna take to build this thing? And so we were really asking ourselves a question about culture without knowing that we were asking ourselves a question about culture. But that was a very conscious conversation that we had in terms of what kind of people do we want? What are we looking for from them? And it evolved a little bit as you go from the first 5 to the next 10, because, you know, sort of people start to fall in, in certain organizational structures and roles and team dynamics and so on. But there's a baseline to it that doesn't change. And then there's, you know, kind of various bits and pieces on the fringes of it that do change. So we're always asking ourselves questions about culture without really knowing it.

Yeah, totally. And as you were hiring people, I have to assume that you personally were super involved in the first 5 hires, maybe the first 20 hires. Are you personally still super involved? Where are— where do your co-founders fit in? Who is doing your hiring now? Is it the three of you? Is it other managers? Like, how's that going?

Uh, we definitely do get involved, but I think the important thing is, uh, and one of the things that we've been learning, um, the three of us, is, you know, look, especially when you've got the kind of team that we've got and the kind of team that we very deliberately tried to put together, you gotta let go. You gotta give, empower them to do the most important things in the company. And hiring and the people we bring in is maybe the most important thing in the company. Uh, and so we do it, but we do it our fair share of it relative to the other, you know, sort of leaders in, in the company and, and also our, you know, sort of engineering contributors, um, in the company. So we're involved in it in the ways that I would say others are, are, um, because we, we do need to empower, you know, everyone to be able to get involved in the most important aspects of running the company, right?

But you're not personally kind of doing it in the same way that you were, like, the first, like, say, 10 people?

I am still personally interviewing.

Oh, you are?

First interviews with some people. Yeah, it does go that way, you know. It's still a little bit of whatever it takes.

Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, I think when you say whatever it takes, I mean, there are some founders who would say, I'm going to I personally hire, you know, the first 100, 500 people in my company because if you think we're gonna be a large, massive billion-dollar, you know, multi-billion-dollar company with like tens of thousands of people, these are our cultural co-founders. And so, you know, and I think Steve Jobs would've also said like, you know, the whole A players hire A players, right? So you kind of have to make sure that quality stays up in the early stage. And you are, as we talked about, you know, off air, you are still quite the early stage.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So you having your hands in is important. And did— what point did you— at what point did you start saying, okay, you're a manager, you're a manager? Did you hire managers in? Have you promoted managers? Like, how is that all working now with your 70 people?

Yeah, we've done both. Um, you know, we definitely knew that, uh, to do what we're doing is a very complicated thing. We're trying to build a chip. Doing that is extremely complicated. Um, It's got, you know, components that operate in the analog domain and digital domains, and then you got to build architecture on top of it. You got to build— there's a lot of bits and pieces to it. So, you know, unless you've got the proper structures, it's going to get very chaotic very quickly, and even then it'll get very chaotic very quickly in many cases. So we definitely did think about organizational structure and how are we thinking about these teams and, you know, who has to play what roles in these teams. Teams. And, and then of course the other thing that happens, and this is extremely gratifying, is you start to see leaders emerge. People, you know, came in, and this is what's supposed to happen at a startup, you know, it's supposed to be this high-energy environment where really, you know, people can try many different things and get involved in many different things. And some of those things are becoming technical leaders and becoming people leaders and so on. And so we've had definitely really great opportunities to promote people, and it's just incredibly gratifying when you see somebody who was a junior or an individual contributor now, you know, sort of taking initiative and leading by example, and then ultimately leading by authority and things like that. You, you really start to see the other kinds of impact that, that having a startup and an organization can have.

Yeah, totally. Have you hired in non-technical people Yes, absolutely. Who are, who right now, who are your, who is your first non-technical hire and what are the roles that you're doing that are not, they're non-technical?

We're definitely a tech-heavy company. That is definitely where much of our, our hires are. But we need technical, we need non-technical leaders, and, and I do mean leaders, uh, to bring the important perspectives here in being able to tell our story to non-technical technical audiences. We need people who are doing marketing and communications and, you know, sort of government affairs and things like that. And we had a VP of government affairs at the early stage who was a really incredible individual. And it's challenging because, you know, you live in a world where you're surrounded by engineers and you're a little bit of a fish out of water. And sort of, you know, that takes a special kind of person as well. And, you know, that individual recently found a— his family found another opportunity and left the company. But I'm so deeply grateful for everything that he did. And we have a new leader now who brings a new perspective and, uh, and so on, which is all also very, you know, sort of very natural and very good. So that's one. I think also organization development, um, is an area that, that one needs to really have a deliberate focus, right? These things don't just happen. They kind of just happen at that early stage, but to sustain them and keep them, they don't just happen. You do need people who wake up in the morning thinking about that sort of thing if it's really important to you.

Yeah.

So that's, that's another area. And then of course there's, you know, roles that are like finance roles and those kinds of roles where you also need important leaders who will have important impacts on the company as you think about commercializing.

Yeah, for sure. Do you have an HR person yet? A full-time HR person? Yes. Yeah. So that's the organizational person.

Yeah, totally.

Yes, exactly. So for you personally, Naveen, what was, what was the, what were the easiest things for you to, because you know, you were a professor and that does require some management of labs, even like dealing with politics internally, but nonetheless it's very different from running a company. So like, what were some of the easiest things for you to pick up as a manager and as a leader? And what were some of the hardest things for you to pick up as a manager and a leader?

Um, I would I would say one of the easiest was just being able to tell a story. You know, professors, for better or for worse, are basically storytellers, right? You try to put together, you do research so that you have the right fodder to put together a story and to, you know, sort of have the elements of your story. But I think telling the story is something that I love doing and it comes naturally. Now, the way that I tell the story comes from this academic kind of background and training. And so I'm sure the folks receiving that story are like, well, this is a little bit of a different way of hearing this story. And sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn't and I need to check myself, but I like telling stories and I like being involved in conversations with partners and hearing their stories and problems and figuring out where we make a connection on that level. So that's one of the things that kind of, I feel, I don't know if it came easy, but it's something that I've really greatly enjoyed and it just felt like energizing to me. You know, the challenging thing is just sort of in academia, you have a level of rigor and slow down so that you can address that rigor. And that I think is the best way to make progress on really fundamental problems where there's a lot of dark spots or a lot of blind spots. In where you're going. But if you want to be able to create something that somebody can actually use, sometimes being slow about it doesn't serve you well because you need to get something in the hands of someone else so that you can get the proper feedback. And in that scenario, sometimes doing something even if it's not quite the right thing is the greatest value, right? And service to the enterprise. And so sort of understanding what that balance is has been something that's challenging and has required kind of constant thought.

Yeah, I can definitely imagine that. Have you had to, you know, sort of have given difficult feedback to people, or have you had to like hold someone accountable who wasn't being held accountable, or, you know, sort of that kind of thing?

Yes. And that's no different than what's happened in my academic career either. And I bring the same principles principles when I have to do that at nCharge that I did when I, as I've been a professor. It's a lot of, you know, sort of being honest and being firm and, you know, sticking to, tying the concerns to real priorities so that it's not just that you're criticizing someone in places that, you know, don't matter, but it's also an opportunity for them to understand priorities and alignment to those priorities.. And sometimes those are the reasons, you know, mistakes happen or things go wrong. But it's, you know, it's not judging someone too harshly when they do make a mistake, but being firm and clear about it. And those were the principles that I think worked well, you know, sort of in my life as a professor and my life as a CEO.

I mean, Naveen, were you just born with that? Like, I have to tell you, I've had over, I've had 95 founders on this show. I've talked to, and I've coached for 25 years startup founders and other leaders, and I just want you to know that actually they find it not so easy to give difficult feedback. How did you learn how to do that?

Well, I will say this, it was not easy for me as a professor. I remember, you know, sort of giving feedback to students who cried in my office, and I was like, well, I'm not ready for this. It was challenging. And then you work with sometimes students, and as I mentioned before, PhDs are these freewheeling, but they're also these high-pressure situations, 'cause the lows are really low and the highs can be really high. And that brings out, you know, certain kinds of, you know, sort of stress brings out certain kinds of attributes and certain kinds of reactions from people. And I at times felt like I need like a psychologist's training for this, not an electrical engineer's training to do this job. And it wasn't easy at first.. But I think, you know, universities are safe environments. It's not like, you know, you're under the gun in quite the same way. You do have the space to fail. And ultimately that can be the message to the person you're delivering the hard, you know, sort of news to. So it's like a, you know, it's not all is lost. There's, you know, opportunity here in the face of this failure to do something else. So, you know, it wasn't easy. But I think being a professor actually is one of the things that helped prepare me in ways that I probably would have taken a lot longer to learn this otherwise.

Yeah, yeah, you're beginning— I'm beginning to think that like becoming a professor is such a great background for startup founder, which I wouldn't have thought before this conversation. Yeah, that's amazing. You seem very calm, you seem very calm, very like analytical, and yet there's a lot of stress, there's a lot of stress in academia because you said the highs and the lows, and actually there are stakes. And then certainly there are a lot of stresses in startup world, especially as a founder and the CEO. Do you get stressed and how do you handle that?

I very much get stressed. And I think one of the things you learn to do well as an engineer, whether you're a professor or not, so this is something that I will credit my training as an engineer on, is you learn to create abstractions. So even as we're talking, there's in the back of my mind all sorts of things going on that are causing all sorts of stress. But there's, you know, you need to have the ability to abstract away fires that are happening and know when to go and deal with those fires, hopefully as soon as possible. But when something else needs to be moved forward as well, to be able to create an abstraction from that and be able to, you know, switch context and focus on the thing in front of you. And I think that that's an important way for managing stress and anxiety because it also means that you can have all sorts of complicated things. Often anxiety comes from being overwhelmed by those things. Just being able to abstract things out and break them down into one-by-ones is something that I think at least helps project less stress, even if it's not the reality inside the head.

Yeah. Well, you've talked about abstraction, which totally makes sense, especially the way you're talking about breaking things down. But the other thing you, I really heard you say is like compartmentalizing, you know, like to sort of put all the 5 other things or the 20 other things that kind of in the back of your mind. Do you have advice for other founders about how to, as you say, abstract or to compartmentalize, you know, issues so they can deal with this thing in front of them?

Yeah. You have to be really present, right? I mean, the, the hardest things to deal with end up being not your engineering problems, but they end up being in some form of an, or another, a people problem, right? Either it's because you need to support a person in an engineering problem, but that's not an engineering problem. That's really a, you know, how do you support your team members kind of problem if you're really talking about it from a leadership perspective. And so I think compartmentalization really comes from like empathy and just being able to tune into the person in front of you. And tune other things out and being able to focus and be present in that conversation. So I think if you, you know, sort of think about it that way, that I need to not tune into this issue, I need to tune into this person, I think it becomes a little bit more natural, at least for me.

Yeah, that makes complete sense. Who are your mentors? Who's the founder community that you connect with, if any? Who are your mentors? Who do you learn from? How do you kind of grow and learn as a CEO?

You know, it's really interesting. I grew up in the kind of academic world. My strongest mentors are academics, but they're ones who have what I believe are real attributes of entrepreneurs. My own PhD advisor, an individual named Anantha Chandrakasan, who's now the provost at MIT, was was just somebody who could stay clear in thinking even in very complicated situations. And there was like a level of, you know, I don't have to be right and I don't have to be the one in the room who knows everything, but let me keep things on track a little bit. And that's a very powerful thing, whether you're doing really complex research in academia or you're, you know, running teams in industry. Another very strong mentor for me is an individual named Yan Rabai, who's another professor who I've collaborated with a lot in my career and who was just like a dynamo when it comes to innovation. And, you know, sort of just to see the highs that come from innovation through him, like, made me be like, "Wow, I wanna be on that drug all the time," is one of the things there. And then, third one that I would point to is an individual named Andrea Goldstein, Alisa Cohn Smith, who was actually the dean of the engineering school here at Princeton. She's an academic, an extremely strong academic, but also an entrepreneur. And I think some of the attributes in particular of just being an empathetic leader were things that I wouldn't say that I've mastered, but things that I saw in her that made me say, that's what I really want to strive to be, and not just the smartest person in the room.

Yeah, and you think that's what that sort of made her effective, and so you sort of saw that that would help make you effective?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, everyone talks about wanting to be a good leader because we somehow value this quality of leadership. But what does it mean? It doesn't really mean being the most effective individual at a specific task. It means bringing the best out of other people. And, you know, a lot of what I saw in her around, you know, kind of empathy and wanting to bring up the others around her is, is what I associate with real leadership.

That's fascinating. I just read the book about Jensen Huang from NVIDIA, and I just happened to see a video of him. And it's so fascinating because he says just exactly what you said. Like, my job is to bring out the best in people so they can do the best work of their lives here. But also he says, and he's sort of known for criticizing in public, and not being that empathetic per se, he's like, this is a learning opportunity that we should all be able to take advantage of. And also he doesn't wanna fire people. He wants to torture them into greatness. So I think that's a really funny contrast with what you are saying about empathy. What do you think about that?

Okay, so the first thing I would say is empathy doesn't mean that you're not hard on people. I do think that there's an important aspect of being— there's an important role in being hard and firm with people. But empathy is understanding, I think, you know, sort of, or making sure that that being hard on them is in the service of getting more out of them. So there might be a consistency there with what Jensen Huang was saying. Where there isn't a consistency is I don't have the luxury to torture someone into becoming a better employee as a startup. If it's not working, you need to recognize that, I need to recognize that, and we both need to decide that it's time to move on. You know, when you're a CEO of a $4 trillion company, you maybe have the time and space to play that game, but I don't.

That's right. Well, I guess a guy can dream, right? Navid, have you ever experienced imposter syndrome or severe self-doubt?

You know, it's interesting. I've got, I mentor graduate students and undergraduate students and I have kids and I see it come out in all sorts of places and it seems very natural. It's not something that I really have experienced and I don't know why. I should have. And if I think back at, you know, in the various situations I've been fortunate to be in, I probably should have looked at it been like, why am I here? And, and, you know, how did I get here? I don't know why I didn't, but I, it doesn't feature prominently in my, my recollection of myself and my background.

That's amazing. So you just kind of think whenever you encounter a challenge, you're like, okay, another challenge.

I've failed a lot. And I think, and then, you know, it actually was that there was a period in my life where I didn't fail a lot and then I hit a period where the more you don't fail, you hopefully take that as a signal to do more and more difficult things. And then soon enough you start failing a lot. And I think I became very, very comfortable with failure. And it was like, if I failed, it's kind of like, I really do realize and live the old adage that you don't really fail unless you stop trying. It just means you gotta take another swing at it. The minute you stop taking swings is when you fail. So, you know, I've had enough failures that I'm like comfortable enough with it. I wonder if the people around me appreciate that or not because, you know, if there's maybe such a thing as being too comfortable with failure, I don't know.

Could you describe maybe a meaningful, actually important failure that you then were like, okay, I gotta keep swinging or something? And what you learned from that?

I would say that the time that things really got tough for me were at a very early stage as a professor. I, you know, being a professor is like a very, very steep learning curve, and then, you know, sort of starting the company and being the CEO was a similarly steep learning curve. But I think, you know, there were just a lot of occasions where you're now trying to not just do your own thing, but you're trying to get an operation off off the ground that will support many other people in doing things. And that changes from not just, you know, having to innovate. It changes to having to be able to pull in resources, having to be able to set up infrastructure, having, you know, to be able to define problems and opportunities for individuals and make those come together into something that is bigger than the sum of its, its parts. And all of those things were very new and they're very challenging, especially if you're really pushing yourself on them. And I failed on all of them multiple, multiple times.

Like what happened?

I mean, I recall times where I was not able to get funding in the early stages of my research. And it's like, okay, I got mouths to feed here. And you know, there's a certain kind of heat and pressure you feel. And you know, you kind of start wondering, well, how was, you know, how do I need to tell the story to sell it to, to people and so on. So I think that was a very stressful sort of a thing. Experience the same thing as a founder. I mean, you know, when you go and raise your first round, I got a lot of funny-eyed stares, right? And not, you know, oh yeah, you know, here we are, let's write a check immediately. That didn't happen, you know, and I think that's a very typical journey for founders, but, you know, being able to convince people to, you know, sort of put their money in you, whether that was in the academic world or in the initial stages of sort of the startup were challenging, big challenges.

Yeah, and then it sounds like what you learned was just like, all right, got to keep trying, got to find a different way to say it.

Yeah, sometimes got to find a different way of saying it, usually a combination of finding a different way of saying it, but also continuing to say it with even more conviction in some cases, right? Saying the same thing but with with a little bit more detail and conviction and nuance that will resonate. I don't think that I've ever been successful in sort of changing my story or changing what I believed in too much.

Did you ever, when you were getting rejected by investors, did you ever think maybe we have the wrong idea? Or was your conviction in your thesis always pretty solid?

I guess this is like that stubborn and the sort of not having the imposter. I always felt the conviction in what we were doing was very solid. I felt like I always maybe explained it away, and maybe this is justified and maybe it's not, as, well, we got this really complicated idea and some, there's someone, they're just not getting it. And that might've been true. And that the answer there might've been the problem in the way that I was telling the story. And I definitely had to, change, right? I was telling stories previously in my career to a very different audience than I was to this new one. But I, I kind of have always felt a strong conviction. I'm also optimistic. I know, you know, that, that there's all sorts of challenges all the time all around me, right? But, but I am optimistic that they can all be solved. And I've kind of— that's kind of how things have played out mostly.

Yeah.

Even, you know, sort of after multiple failures.

Yeah. Naveen, I have a couple more questions for you about kind of advice to founders. Before I go there, I really have to take the opportunity to say you're in this new thing called AI. It's called AI. It's spelled AI, but pronounced AI. So like, what do you have to tell us? What do people, what should regular people know about the journey of AI? What advice do you have for people right now? As AI kind of envelops the world?

I would say get very familiar with it as much as you can. Now, I'm not saying you need to go and become, you know, an AI developer and, you know, a deep researcher in AI, but become very familiar with it. AI is like nothing we've seen before. It's scary good. And I'm blown away. In my career, I've seen a lot of incredible things. This is something that I've never seen before. Um, and I think it has real potential consequences on, uh, society, right? I mean, we've never had technologies that really replaced or started to act like they could replace human value, right? Human cognition and, and the kind of value that a human would bring to a certain task or, or situation. And now we do. Um, and why is it important for us to become really familiar with it? Think about it this this way, right? Human intelligence to me has always been about who knows how to use the tools that they have at their disposal well. That tool might have been a primitive hammer, or it might have been a primitive, um, you know, wheel, or some, some tool like that. And that might have become more and more sophisticated. You know, in my world where we build chips, we use computer-aided design tools all the time. The The greatest value that humans add are the ones who kind of know how to use those tools, know their limitations, know how to steer them. This is going to be a very powerful tool. It is going to up the ante, uh, in terms of what human intelligence is gonna mean because of how powerful a tool it is. Um, being able to understand its limitations, being able to understand how to use it is gonna be important for all, all of us.

Very good advice. Very important. And what do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

As a founder, you mean?

Yeah.

I think that there's many, many things. I think knowing how different the environment is when you're, so, you know, as a professor, you're kind of dealing with students a lot of the time. And you're dealing with other professors who in many ways are, like children as well. But you go out into the real world and you're dealing with a level of maturity that is different. And I think that that's important to recognize. I think that there's important aspects of creativity and playfulness that happen in that environment as well, but— and learning that happens in that environment as well. But you're dealing with mature people. And when you have that, there's this is like their lives and their livelihoods, which is not what it is in academia really. And so, you know, there's stressors that people have around how they think about their position in any social construct, including the company. And I think really understanding that and how people react to different situations in that context is something that for the specific place that I started to now where I am is something that was in my blind spot and I wish I knew I knew and understood more from the very beginning, but it's been a fascinating thing to learn about for sure.

Wow, that's really powerful. I really get that, you know, in the sense of like the perspective that you had and that now you're kind of, you got awakened in some ways through this journey. Naveen, last question. What advice do you have for other founders as they embark on their journeys to grow into leaders?

I really just want people to feel comfortable with and normal with failure. Like, it's gonna happen and it's gonna happen a lot, and it's a good thing. It's really a good thing. It means you're pushing the boundaries in the right way. And, you know, remain optimistic. And it's hard to do, maybe immediately after failures it's hard to do, but find a way to pick yourself up and figure out what is what's the next best thing to do to get yourself another swing, you know, sort of at base sort of thing. Just be really— it's normal. Just remember it's normal. It's not like successful founders don't fail. Successful founders fail a lot.

Totally. And then they become successful. Naveen, so fantastic to talk to you. And as we said, you know, sort of off air, like you're not yet quite a grownup, but like you're You're on the rocket ship to begin grownup, so I can't wait to have you back when you're even more grownup to kind of see more about your learnings. It's really been great talking to you.

Yeah, thanks, Liz. It's been fun.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website, alisacohn.com.