How NVIDIA, Meta & Dropbox Taught Me to Build Great Products | Vasanth, Founder-Featurely

Jun 27, 2025

Krishna (Vasanth) Namasivayam, founder of Featurely and ex-AI product developer at NVIDIA, Meta, and Dropbox, shares invaluable insights into product design. He reveals that half of all features go unused and emphasizes the need to address real problems accurately. Vasanth discusses the elitism in tech and the importance of simulation with synthetic users to enhance decision-making. He also contemplates the future of AI agents and their role in understanding human behavior, making products truly user-centric.

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ANECDOTE

NVIDIA's Allure in 2015

Vasanth joined NVIDIA in 2015 attracted by Jensen Huang's visionary leadership and futuristic culture.
NVIDIA was already pioneering semiconductor advancements for AI and crypto mining before its mainstream AI fame.

INSIGHT

Meta Tackling Complex Social Problems

Meta's integrity team tackled polarization, misinformation, and social crises, revealing product limitations.
Complex social problems have no clear right or wrong product solution.

INSIGHT

Dropbox's Struggle to Reinvent

Dropbox struggled to reinvent due to tough market and execution challenges despite multiple strategic bets.
Creating new unicorn business lines independently is rare and difficult for many companies.

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50% of products and features built are never used.

To build the right product, every founder must answer two questions:

Are you solving a real problem? And are you solving it the right way?

Technology has rarely been democratic, it’s often elitist. So at times, it ends up solving made-up problems that don’t really exist. Yet, some companies have built truly great products.

What sets them apart? Do they share any similarities? Are there lessons for entrepreneurs?

We have with us Krishna (Vasanth) Namasivayam who has previously worked on AI products at NVIDIA, Meta, and Dropbox.

Vasanth is founder of Featurely.AI. Featurely is fixing how products get built. It does it by simulating users — not as bots, but as human-inspired digital twins.

0:00 – Trailer

02:10 – Why I chose NVIDIA in 2015?
03:55 – Working on integrity at META
04:23 – Rethinking AI for Dropbox
04:51 – NVIDIA builds for the future
05:45 – People loved working for Jensen

08:16 – What makes META so special?
10:57 – Decision-making at META was democratic
11:41 – Dropbox was once the most VIRAL product
12:55 – The power of founder-led companies

14:28 – Tech is Elitist, Build for a Few
16:43 – Silicon Valley trend of Solving Made-up problems
19:27 – A magic wand that Finds the right problem
22:17 – Synthetic users vs. perfect AI agents
25:00 – Why synthetic users can fail (and why that matters)
25:35 – What is the Future with AI agents & synthetic humans?
26:30 – Why openAI can’t/won’t choose User research
27:16 – The simplest explanation of LLMs
28:36 – Why ChatGPT succeeded like no other
31:04 – Bite-sized Info for 6-second attention span
31:37 – The Next Frontier in AI: Predicting Human Behavior
33:55 – Uses of Synthetic Humans from Product to Policy
35:55 – The biggest surprise of building a startup
37:00 – One Mistake Product folks make
38:24 – One emotional truth about startups
39:04 – What does Featurely do?
42:51 – How Featurely will measure success
46:36 – All future software will be hyper-personalized
50:24 – 3 AI companies to admire (one not built yet)
52:28 – How will Work be in 2025?
53:59 – How AI gets things (almost) right every time
57:02 – Why Featurely chose Neon Fund
01:02:51 – What the Bay Area does differently
01:04:54 – Learnings from Fundraising
01:06:49 – The vision to Build a Category defining Company

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This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.

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