Anu Shukla - Co- Founder & Executive Chairman at Botco.ai

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom pod. We have Anu Shukla with us today for round 2. She's co-founder and executive chairman at Botko.ai up in Fremont, California. Anu's been on my pod already. I've worked with her son, Aryan. She's a great entrepreneur in the making. Anu is very successful herself, 10 years at Botko. Before that, RewardsPay, which I think is still active. You're also an investor, if my memory's working well, and yeah, hell of a background. So Anu, welcome to the pod again. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Sure, thank you so much for that intro. So I'm currently the co-founder and executive chair at Barko AI. It's a company that we really, you know, started to fund and get into action about 3, 4 years ago, actually, even though we started 6 years ago. And we're basically doing agentic workflows, very focused on pharma right now and clinical trials, and really, really exciting field. I think healthcare is a place where AI is going to have a huge impact. And then prior to that, I've had about a billion dollars in exits with various SaaS companies, including one of the first pioneers in marketing automation 20 years ago. And currently I'm a venture partner at Elevate VC for the Fund 2, I believe, and they're, they're now raising Fund 3. And also from Thai Angels, I've done some angel investing and helped with the screening of, of startups. I also have an investment in a home, home health care, home services business, and I'm also a partner in school for autistic children. We have 6, 7 campuses. It's growing very fast, called Rising Star Spread Academy. Real great need for a school like ours, an academy like that, that takes some of the children with the, you know, extremely large— on the spectrum with a lot of challenges. So we have 2 campuses in San Jose, a new one opening in Dublin, one in Hayward, Yuba City, New York City, currently opening in Texas and Los Angeles as well. And on the march there. So kind of now, you know, become a parallel entrepreneur and launching out a bit from my serial entrepreneur days. Yes.

Right. And why the autism stuff? Why did you launch that? What prompted you to? To invest yourself in this?

Sure. I was just fortunate to be working with a great team that really knows the ins and outs of education, and working with districts and running and opening and running schools. And I really believed in their mission. And they're not only really qualified to do this, but also, I could help them in, you know, maybe thinking big, maybe thinking about exits in the future, and expansion, scaling, and growth right now. So I was very fortunate that they invited me to be part of it. And so I'm really enjoying it because it's, believe it or not, a very fast-growing business. My contribution, in addition to just being a partner with the team and helping in whatever way I can, is also to look at how AI can be applied, the education you know, materials and techniques in the field of autism, you know, really could also benefit from AI. So I'm looking at that. And with their help, I'm actually bringing BotCo and Rising Star together to maybe provide various AI techniques to allow, you know, in this field, there's a real shortage of talent. So, you know, there's not enough qualified teachers, BCBAs, even behavior technicians. It's a very demanding job, and there's a huge shortage of talent. So whenever AI can help relieve that, it's huge. So I just find that the intersection is just perfect for me.

Right. How's Botical doing since last time we spoke? I think last time we spoke was GPT-4. Things have moved a lot since then, right?

Yeah, well, for one, we're using a lot of cloud.

Yeah, Opus is better than Fable, right? Like their last update, that's been pretty intriguing.

I really like Fable, it's very powerful.

Yeah.

Yes, I really like, and we always like to keep a little bit slow in our adoption. So, you know, in Botko's case, we have a platform that can use any LLM. Our value add is in our own RAG and in also the way we train our applications, the guardrails that we can put the SOC to, and what we do to prevent hallucinations, and then we can, and the interfaces we have to continue to train. And then we've done a lot of backend specializations in the LLMs, in the output from the LLMs, or not using the LLMs at all. Where we, you know, I do, you know, predictions using machine learning on various aspects. So we definitely have our own differentiated technologies, but we do not reinvent the wheel. We actually use whatever LLM we find suitable for that particular task sparingly, but also with guardrails and with also with fine-tuning the models.

Right, and I see here you specialize in pharma and city services. So you have, products for each, right? Tell us a bit more about Accesso, Alerta, etc.

Yes, yes. So we have different agents that we've developed with multiple, you know, with multiple applications. So these are available at the— our proprietary technology is available out of the box, so we can get that, you know, deployed very quickly. Those models are pretty sophisticated at this point because they're trained on thousands of— hundreds of thousands of data points. So in pharma, you know, it's about launching new products. It's about adverse, the agents can detect and launch a workflow on adverse events. You know, if they, we are matching, we're helping providers using voice providers, meaning doctors at UCLA Health and UCLA. I mean, UC system is the largest public health system in the country and we're working with them to match very easily patients to the right trial, the right oncology trial, focused on ovarian cancer. We also work with a lot of behavioral health organizations too, and with, you know, and with the organizations that support autism education as well. And so we'll help them, you know, assess You know, AI will assess, you know, by having a voice conversation with a parent, will take down all the details they need to assess the right education plan for a particular student that's trying to income— be incoming. And also, we do also things that agents that do, agents that check, you know, benefits verification for mental health. We do have— we have deployed at certain cities as well, and they're very, very pleased. So this was something that we were doing before. It's really the same function we're doing for certain parts of pharma and healthcare, but it applies to the cities, so we made that available to them. But if you look at our focus right now, It's definitely pharma and behavioral health, you know, versus state and local government. But we do have certain good clients in that area.

And the end product is a chatbot, or what's the end product? Is there a dashboard as well? Because you say agents, right? So what's the end product?

It's completely an agentic platform. It's working autonomously. And there is a dashboard in which you can you know, you can see, you can get insights as to what is going on. But it can work very autonomously at a scheduled time, all the time, or whatever, however you configure it. So it's basically an agent platform.

And it's not like end customer facing, right? It's like the enterprise uses it, but the end customer doesn't use it.

The enterprise uses it and they can interact with their customers if they choose to. Yes.

Okay. And why would they not use like any types of other chats out there? Yours is specialized into being compliant and doesn't make mistakes because mistakes cost millions.

Uh, we don't— yeah, mistakes can cost millions. For example, if a pharma company is out there, unless they have— and they were Their standard practice was to have very scripted bots, basically, or agents that can only, you can only, you have no choice. You can just basically do A or B. So with our Alerto or adverse events agent, you can actually, it's trained to pick up adverse events and know what to do with them autonomously. So it will, you know, based on the, the interaction that's happening, it can tell you whether what you have is something that needs to be reported and take your complaint and then forward it directly to the FDA or to the pharma company. Okay. In the right format saying this adverse reaction was reported on by this person and do it completely in a compliant manner. So these agents are all very specialized in regulated, highly regulated industries. Like pharma, like healthcare.

And the pipeline, uh, to get these companies, these pharma companies to adopt you, are we talking about a very long sales cycle? What are the challenges to selling to these big pharma companies?

Uh, yeah, there's definitely a longer sales cycle than, let's say, a mid-sized behavioral health organization, but they're not that long because we work at a departmental project level first before expanding out. So I don't think we've seen any sales cycle beyond 4 months, even in pharma, maybe 5 if it's a really big project.

Wow, okay, surprising. Um, really big project. So the ticket size, are they paying like a monthly, are they paying yearly? What's, uh, what's the ticket size if I pay for your solution?

A lot of them just prefer, uh, in order to get a slight discount, they prefer to pay upfront. But our system is really designed for them to pay monthly. It's SaaS, basically. So you're using our platform, you're getting your agent, you're deploying your agent, then you're managing your agent. You have a dashboard to manage. You can make changes, you can retrain, you can add new data sources, you can program all of that, uh, configure all of that. There's no— it's a no-code platform, so you can do all of that. And we do have services to help you. And you don't have to know coding or anything of that sort. So we really price ourselves as if there's any integration, like you want us to integrate into Salesforce to push leads into it, or you want to integrate into EHR so we can pick up signals from it and give you a prediction on what the, you know, the care will be required for a particular person coming in, so on and so forth. Some of that is custom work integration into your systems, and generally customers will pay for that upfront. But then there's a monthly fee to really run the agent that you have basically configured in our system.

Interesting. And it's per seat, right? It's per user.

Actually, it's based on the amount of interactions you're getting at our website. So it's generally a flat fee based on what we know about the traffic to your website or to whatever system you tell us. They say you tell us you know, a million doctors are going to be using this system versus, you know, I think 5,000 doctors. So there'll be a difference.

A million doctors, that'd be a lot. That'd be a nice contract, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Multi-million dollar a month contract. Um, how do you spend your days nowadays? Because you're, uh, executive chair at Botco, you're into the autism school as well. Like, how do you spend your time? How do you separate your day?

You know, I think I'm very fortunate. I've actually had, you know, a lot of time to design my, you know, my life at this point. So I'm the executive chair at BATCO. We have an excellent CEO, Rebecca Clyde, who's in place, and a whole team. So there are a few areas where I can help the team, and those are the areas that I get involved in. Generally, it's getting new team members in, finding them, and bringing them in, overseeing the marketing function, for example, overseeing certain, you know, giving executive oversight to certain important relationships, helping out in certain sales contracts. So I generally pick what I'm good at and what the team looks to me for help. So I'm not tied, you know, tied to, you know, a daily churn or whatever. And then, and then the strategic matters, board matters, and all of those stuff. So I would say Bhartkot does take up a lot of of my time. Rising Star is pretty much run by the team that knows this area really well. And I'm involved in sort of strategic decisions, bringing AI, you know, whenever I have like an AI product, innovation that could help them in our strategic matters, corporate matters, you know, looking at our growth and looking at, you know, certain staff, you know, enhancements. So operationally, they are very good at everything. And then I'm working at a partner-owner level with them where needed. Again, getting involved in, you know, investments through TIE or through Elevate VC whenever they need me or want me to do due diligence and look at certain deals. I'll attend the ones that I'm good at or help the companies that I'm really good at. And I try to set up a bunch of my time, you know, for my kids. Uh, and in, uh, in guiding them and, uh, and for, you know, my own, my, my own self and my travel, my, my yoga.

Very important. Yes. Um, how are the kids doing? Think you did a good job with Arian. Uh, he's a beast. Like, I, I love this, this young guy. Makes me think of myself a lot.

I actually, Charles, I encourage him to have some fun and he just won't have fun. He's just like, I have 19 meetings between now and Sunday. I'm like, listen, today he tells me, because he knows what I want to hear, so he says, tells me today, I have no meetings today. And then the second thing is, do you want me to run any project for you in Claude? Like, do you want me to get you, um, I mean, do you want me to get you, uh, you know, certain leads, uh, in, uh, pharma for clinical trial recruitment, for example? And so I put 100 in your Slack. You want more? I can go and I can use it with call her and get you. And I'm like, no, no, let us do the drip campaign on the 100 first and then we'll let you know. So he's always— he's got no nothing today, but he wants it all. So he's—

he's got no brakes, he's got no brakes, just pure acceleration.

Yeah, he's so motivated. Yeah, he loves this stuff, by the way.

So, but you know, like when I worked with Darian, I never tried to stop him because I don't see that often in young people. And I would encourage most people to have more ambitions and have less breaks, right? Like, take some risks, fall on your face, you will learn, you know. That's, that's how it goes. And I mean, yes, um, me, I take, uh, what, after my 12-hour day, I do go and run out with my dog, spend time with the family, and so forth. That's my quote-unquote break. But I'm still very intense, and I love doing what I do, you know. And just like, money is good, you know, like, money is fun. And money is very important, right? And I think a bunch of people, they talk trash on money because one, they don't have it, or they never found out how to make it. And it's extremely hard to make money, great money, like not just being rich, but like generational wealth, right? What do you think about that?

I think, I mean, I, you know, I talked to one of our earliest VCs a long time ago, when I was just entering the industry. And he just asked me, he goes, you know, what is, you know, what is your philosophy in life? Or like, what drives you? And I'm like, well, before I tell you what drives me, tell me what drives you. He's one of the most successful venture capitalists that we've ever had in the Valley, one of the originals, right? He's the founder of Accel, Accel VC. So he was already semi-retired when I talked to him, and he was on his way out, um, to a well-deserved retirement. And he said, well, I think it's, uh, for me, he goes, it's, uh, uh, it's, uh, having fun and making money. So, and he said, and if you can have fun while making money, it's the best thing. And I go, you know what, I really like that. I think I'll adopt that too.

Yeah, yeah, no, I like it. But also, we, we were born in a capitalism age, right? Like, I think that may change in the next 10 to 20 years.

Like, we might have a very different conversation once AGI, super intelligence, uh, new guys, I think, all the work, and then we, we can just focus on being good and taking care of ourselves because AI will do all the work.

But I still think that you and I and Aryan will still be competing, and, uh, I mean, that will never stop. The 1% will never stop, like, uh, competing on stuff for resources. But I think most humans, if given the options, they would take a break and they would just chill.

Yes, I just need to remind my— I mean, I need my brain to be occupied. So there was a little lull, believe it or not. I had, uh, I had— I'm not a micromanager, but I— unless I need to be. So I had, I think, distributed my work like really well, and then I had some time, and I immediately, I'm like, okay, I'm going to design a new course to teach AI in college because I do these courses at, you know, different universities, Stanford, etc. I've taught entrepreneurial classes. So I said, how to be an entrepreneur in the age of AI. I want to design this course. I want to tell exactly what it'll be, and I want to offer it for, you know, credit, because I teach an MBA class at Santa Clara every summer, you know, with someone else, right? I go in for a day and she's— he's got the rest of the class. And I said, well, I think I want to really come up with a curriculum that takes AI into effect, and I want to design this. And then I want to get this book going which says how to Now that AI is a reality, how do you turbocharge your marketing efforts in B2B with using AI? And, you know, what are the latest tools? What are the tools you should avoid? What are the things that are good? What didn't change? Because remember, I set up one of the most, one of the first pioneering marketing automation companies when people used to think marketing automation was an oxymoron. And like, look at it now, right? One of the things that's really impacting, you know, AI first impact marketing, right? I mean, you know, the things that we should need 15 people to do, we're doing with 2 people now, you know. So, uh, like, what are the tools they're using? What are the tools that are a complete waste of time? And like, I introduced these tools to some of my team members and they're like, this is useless. Like, we want that $20,000 a year product that we used to have before. And then I told— then I brought in people like Ari, Ari, and actually it was him, to show them how to use it. And they go, oh my God, it's saving me so much time. And so I'm doing more. And because in the joke we had was when Arjun was teaching them or showing them how to use it, much more teaching than just showing, like, this is what I do. He was telling them, oh, wait a minute, while I was talking to you, I got 2 meetings booked. So people joke about that. They're like, oh, he goes, you know, I'm having AI do the work for me so that I can do— so I said, well, maybe we need to condense this and like write a book and then apply like our Traditional B2B marketing principles, which I codified in my first company, Rubrik, and we now have a book. So like, I couldn't sit still, okay? I had a little bit of time and I immediately took on two projects for myself because they're just interesting.

I have this disease too, right? Um, I mean, there's been science that proves that people that retire live less, uh, time because their brain is more inactive and oxidizes quicker. One lesson that I'm taking from you for sure— I just had my daughter, by the way, she's 4 months old— and, uh, it's definitely gonna be to hire Savages to teach her how to do stuff. It's like, it's like, yeah, I know, I'm taking notes from you. Like, I'm definitely gonna put like a bunch of really—

my son still thanks me for, uh, the time that I got him with you. He's like, Mom, that's the best birthday gift I ever had. It literally changed his life. Look at him now.

It's going to be crazy. It's going to be crazy for him. I really think— well, you gave me like a very ambitious person, right? With like no brake pedal. And I just like put my system on him. I had a mentor as well in my 20s, and he changed my life, right? He taught me that pretty much anything was possible. He was very eccentric as well, right? So, and you have that flair to identify these people, but yeah, it's grateful to have known you and Aryan as well. I need to leave 'cause I have this Spark Tank show coming, which I want you on by the way, but till then, where can people find out more about you, Anu?

Oh, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn, but you can go to botko.ai, www, and I'm there as well and on LinkedIn. So, and you can email me at ashoklah@botko.ai. So I'm very, very accessible.

That was Anu and Charles for,