Snap Mafia: Rajan Vaish, founder of Easel, on building at the intersection of social and Gen AI and what he learned doing research at Stanford and Snap

30 May 2024 · 40 min
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Episode interview (recorded May 30, 2024) with Rajan Vaish covering his path from undergraduate CS in India to PhD at Stanford, his crowdsourcing and accessibility research (Stanford Crowd Research Initiative, ~1,500 global participants), his industry research at Snap focused on AR/VR (Blocks, Snapmap studies), and his current startup Easel — an AI-first visual messaging app built into iMessage that lets users generate and remix avatar-based scenes with friend-safety controls. The host discussion includes product vision, early traction (announced TechCrunch launch), funding and team details, and links to easelapps.ai and rajanvaish.com.

Questions this episode answers

May 30, 2024

1500 people (from all continents except Antarctica)

"We raised like 2.65 last year" (quoted phrasing from transcript)

A small team of five people

easelapps.ai; rajanvaish.com