Ep. 17: Why the Smartest Companies Will Fire SaaS and Hire AI with Surojit Chatterjee from Ema AI

From $50B mobile ads at Google to taking Coinbase public, Surojit Chatterjee has spotted — and seized — every major tech inflection point. Now, as CEO of Ema, he’s betting on “AI employees” to transform how enterprises work.

In this episode: spotting trillion-dollar trends, building AI that works across industries, and why the future belongs to first-principles thinkers.

• (0:16) Surojit’s journey: Google, Flipkart, Coinbase, and the leap to Ema

• (7:20) The “AI employee” vision — and why no one got it at first

• (14:07) Spotting tech inflection points: lessons from mobile, crypto, and AI

• (17:15) Horizontal vs. vertical AI: the case for building broad and deep

• (27:33) Hiring in the agentic AI era: first-principles thinkers over resumes

• (34:44) Running lean: using AI instead of humans where possible

• (39:08) Why legacy SaaS struggles to adapt to AI

• (42:59) Overcoming employee fear and resistance to AI adoption

• (50:03) The pitch to executives: freeing people from “soul-crushing” work

• (52:57) Is 2025 still the year of AI experimentation?

• (55:09) Avoiding plateaus: chaining AI employees for exponential impact

• (1:00:19) The adoption curve: innovators, fast followers, and scaling

• (1:01:19) Decompression and founder mindset: meditation, family, and doing nothing