In this Business Blast podcast episode, host Tyler Wagner interviews Lavanya Shukla, CTO and co‑founder of the machine‑learning startup DataLand. Lavanya shares her origin story of learning to code at age ten, inspired by Harry Potter fan sites, describing the moment she wrote her first line of code as a love‑like revelation that sparked a lifelong passion. She then draws a parallel between machine‑learning engineering and personal development, framing life as an optimization problem where defining goals, measuring error, and taking incremental gradient‑descent steps lead to progress. Lavanya offers business advice centered on being genuinely useful to the people who matter, emphasizing relationship building over mere networking. She advises her younger self to ask the right questions to deeply understand problems, and she identifies authentic community and unconditional relationships as the key to happiness, critiquing social‑media‑driven validation. Her favorite book, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," reinforces the importance of curiosity and wonder, while her favorite quote—"A ship is safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are built for"—captures the entrepreneurial mindset. The episode concludes with Lavanya’s online presence, inviting listeners to connect with her on Twitter for machine‑learning and Silicon Valley insights.
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Welcome to the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with all the resources you need to become a successful author. You can learn more about Authors Unite and join the free community at authorsunite.com. Now let's jump into the episode. ¡Hola!
¿Cómo estás? All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. I'm very excited for today's guest. Her name is Lavanya. We're old-time friends. She is the CTO and co-founder of DataLand, which is a machine learning startup that automates data prep. So welcome to the show, Lavanya.
Thank you so much for having me, Tyler.
Of course, I'm pumped to have you on. We'll dive in. The first question I have for you, Lavanya, is what's the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?
So I started programming when I was 10, and I started doing that because I was all the way back in India at the time, and I was also very into Harry Potter, but I couldn't find any Harry Potter fans to talk to around me in India. But then I saw all these kids online who were building these fan sites And I was like, I can do that. How hard is it to build a website? So I built my first website. And at first, it was just like a static text HTML thing, nothing fancy. But then I was like, that's not good enough. So I taught myself how to code. And I remember the first time I wrote my first line of code, it was such a magical feeling. Like, my brain was instantly in love And I know it sounds silly, but it was almost like, you know, when you meet the love of your life, you're like, all right, this is it. This is what I'm doing for the rest of my life. That's the feeling I had. And every time I go to this state, I have that sense of wonder and the sense of anything is possible. So I guess what my experience taught me is if something excites you, chase it. It doesn't matter if you're too young, too old, not in the right country or whatever. Don't let anything stop you from chasing your fantasies.
Yes, I love that. What's the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?
I'm a machine learning engineer, and the biggest thing I've learned from being a machine learning engineer is that all of life is essentially an optimization problem. As a machine learning engineer, we train models where we first define our error functions, which means what is our goal here, what are we optimizing for, what error are we reducing? And then we do something called gradient descent, where we take a look at where we are right now and where we want to be to achieve our goal. And then we just take a small step in the direction of our goal. And if you do that enough times over a few iterations, you get closer and closer to your goal. And that's exactly how you optimize your life. So you forget what's important to you as a person, and you forget the delta between where you are right now and where you need to be. And then you just take small steps and course correct. So that's what I've learned, essentially. All of life is an optimization problem.
And what's your best piece of overall business advice and not necessarily like industry specific?
I would say be very useful to the people who matter because being successful isn't just about what you know or who you know. It's more about what the people who matter know about you. And if they know you as someone who is genuinely interested in seeing them succeed and then helping them out, you make like a genuine connection and then they'll start looking out for you and they'll start sending you all these opportunities that'll take your career to the next level. So I'd say investing in building genuine relationships and being very useful to the people around you and the people who matter.
And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?
I'd say learn to ask the right questions because a large part of being great at what you do is the ability to see a problem very clearly. And if you can ask the right questions, you can understand the problem clearly. And if you can understand the problem clearly, most of the solution, most of the times will become very obvious to you. So ask the right questions and understand things very deeply and question all your assumptions.
And in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?
I love this question. I think it's people, 'cause I think building a tribe of people who understand you and who love you unconditionally, people that you can laugh a lot with, those are the people— that's the key to happiness. And especially right now with social media, our generation spends so much time crafting these personas to get likes, but likes don't make you happy. But optimizing for genuine relationships and unconditionally loving the few people you choose, that'll make you the happiest person in the world, I think.
And what's the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?
So my favorite book of all time is Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. And in it, David Feynman talks about the importance of curiosity and maintaining a sense of wonder about the world. And I think he's right because, like, if you go about your day with a sense of wonder, the world will give you a lot of things to be excited about and you'll find yourself going down these interesting paths in life and just like living a richer life.
And what's your favorite quote and why?
I love that question too. I would say it's a A ship is safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are built for. Because I think that summarizes the entrepreneurship mindset very well. And you know this more than anyone else because you hustle like, oh my God, I don't even know. I mean, this guy's putting out 4 podcasts a week. I can't even believe it. But I feel like we all started companies not because it's the easy path. We do it because that's where the adventure lies. And if we do it right, Hopefully, we can live a life that will mean something greater than ourselves, and that quote kind of encapsulates it.
Yes, I love that quote, Lavanya. And the last question I have for you before we let you go is, where's the best place for people to find you online?
So I'm fairly active on Twitter. It's @lavanyashukla, which is just my first name, last name. And I tweet mostly about machine learning, and I live in the Bay Area. So if you have any questions about Silicon Valley or machine learning, hit me up. Awesome.
Thanks again, Lavanya. We loved this episode.
It was great to be here.
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