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Rahul Sonwalkar is the founder and CEO of Julius, an AI data scientist.
He takes us inside his epic “Ligma Johnson” prank where he pretended to be fired from Twitter the day Elon acquired the company. He then goes inside his journey of building Julius, sharing lessons learned along the way and his vision for the product.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Preview
(04:16) The "Ligma Johnson" prank
(09:02) Meeting Elon
(13:10) Doing hackathons in college
(14:30) Scraping emails from Hacker News to get internships
(16:25) Using Twitter to learn and meet people
(22:26) Lessons from his first failed startup
(26:19) Taking too long to quit Big Tech & his failed startup idea in trucking
(32:12) Convincing Guillermo Rauch to invest with speed of execution
(34:48) How to avoid analysis paralysis
(36:15) Building Julius, the AI data scientist
(39:25) How COO of a hot tub company uses Julius
(40:40) Professor embracing AI, using Julius to teach his class
(42:47) Iterating on early versions of the product
(44:42) PMF is as much about the market as the product
(45:08) Building dozens of ChatGPT plugins to acquire Julius’ first users
(45:41) Using dev API keys and missing the first paying customers
(49:22) Talking to hundreds of early customers
(50:10) Why customers love when you ship new features every week
(52:14) The power of Julius’ small team
(54:38) Why Rahul gives his number to customers
(57:47) How to avoid idea backlogs
(59:27) Why Julius tests so many models
(01:01:44) Why it feels great when people love your product
(01:03:43) AI will write more code than humans
(01:06:33) Giving an AI a computer
(01:11:05) What happens to all the AI startups?
(01:12:36) Why you have to Ride the Tiger
(01:16:43) How NVIDIA beat 89 other graphics card startups
(01:20:14) Building a moat as a startup
(01:22:50) Rahul’s favorite AI companies
(01:25:11) Why Julius’ changes UI components based on the use case
(01:27:42) Benefits of lifting
(01:29:54) Why Rahul loves SF
(01:31:38) The early days of Microsoft
Referenced:
https://julius.ai/
Guillermo’s tweet: https://x.com/rauchg/status/1773168477957919055
Where to find Rahul:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/0interestrates
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulsonwalkar23
Where to find Turner:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak/
Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/
