#186 - Surbhi Rathore, CEO of Symbl - on how seemingly subtle product strategy decisions can set you apart in a big way

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to grow the impact we can make by super-powering our communications. My guest is Surbhi Rathore, Co-Founder and CEO of Symbl.

Surbhi is an international tech leader who advocates for Women in AI with a personal mission to inspire more women to work in Data Science. She comes with experience from technical and customer-obsessed roles in both startups and enterprises, such as Nevis Networks and Amdocs. She is a national speaker, an accessibility equity champion, and the ultimate adventure capitalist.

Today, she is the CEO and co-founder of Symbl.ai. With her team, she's on a mission to leverage AI technology to democratize conversational tech to make collaboration effortless. And in line with that, they created a new category of voice tech infrastructure – “Conversational Intelligence as a Service”.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Surbhi to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we communicate and collaborate digitally. We discuss what is required to capitalize on the potential of human intellect by making collaboration effortless. We also address the tough choices Surbhi made in not going with the flow - but instead taking a radically different approach to solving the big problem in the market. Last but not least, we discuss what it takes to build a remarkable software business.

Here are some of her quotes:

When we started the company, it was super crowded. There were so many businesses trying to build automated meeting notes products.

I think we always had the right positioning in our minds.

But as a founder, it's so hard to articulate that and other people. It was hard for us to just articulate our go-to-market motion of the product that we are building the right way. Although we had an idea that what is going to set us apart. But I think it just came over time as we evolved in terms of 'Okay, we want to we want to build a platform that enables businesses to analyze conversation data without building an in house data science team.'

So making it absolutely easy and removing the dependency on data. So there is no data labeling training annotation that goes in the cycle. It's a plug-and-play experience. And that really created a very compelling like aha moment for businesses.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why, to streamline your business and get razor-focused, it's key to get crystal clear on your positioning.
2. That love for the problem is critical to success, but there are some other equally crucial skills to develop/look for in new hires
3. The importance of the role of marketing and content creation early in the lifecycle of your company to establish the foundation for inbound traffic
4. How to prevent investing your newly gained funding on the wrong initiatives

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Surbhi Rathore
• Website Symbl