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Hello Reader,
AI has totally blown up in the last couple of years! But honestly, there's been some super cool, groundbreaking stuff happening behind the scenes for the past two decades that didn't get the spotlight it deserved. So, I convinced my friend Bhaskar Ghosh to step into a guest host role and chat with an engineering leader who's been a key player in building the next-gen AI platforms at LinkedIn. Get ready to tune into a podcast episode with a fun twist. It's a deep-dive conversation between two absolute tech geeks, the brains behind the solutions you use every single day. If you’d like to learn how artificial intelligence evolved since its early days, you won't want to miss this!
I'll be at the Sierra Ventures Emerging Manager and Seed VC Summit on Mar 11 in San Francisco! Find me at the event if you plan to attend.
– Gopi Rangan, Host of the The Sure Shot Entrepreneur podcast
Startup Corner: Lumber
Lumber has grown from zero to 70+ employees with 5× annual growth in two years. Shreesha Ramdas has designed the company so he can't become the bottleneck.
"The team should be running the company, not me. I work on what will matter a year from now." - Shreesha Ramdas He codified this into the EOE system: Energy, Ownership, Experimentation. The ownership piece is bold. There's no adult supervision. You take the ball and run. When executives tried escalating conflict resolution to him, he refused. Not from indifference, but because teams that outsource conflict resolution never develop real trust.
On AI, Shreesha draws a hard line: "If you think AI can be a referee or a coach — no." AI scales work but doesn't replace human judgment.
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New Podcast: AI Will Not Save You. Reinvention Will.
Bhaskar “BG” Ghosh guest-hosted our podcast to chat with his old colleague Kapil Surlaker. The two highly respected leaders helped scale LinkedIn from 50 million to over 550 million users, which today has 1.3 billion+ members.
Kapil's most striking insight? "AI can write all the code you want, but you still own the pager."
Think about that. We're all excited about Claude Code and Cursor making building seem trivial. But you're still the one getting woken up at 3 AM when something breaks. You still own the maintenance, the debugging and the evolution of that code, whether you wrote it or AI did.
They also reflect on LinkedIn's existential crisis in 2010. Running entirely on Oracle, the platform was literally creaking under growth. They had to commit the "cardinal sin" of software engineering – building their own distributed database from scratch. They built Espresso and it worked. Would Kapil do it again today? Absolutely not. "Use PostgreSQL or cloud solutions," he says. Back then they built to survive. Today, you only build what's absolutely core to your differentiation. Reinvention or extinction are our only choices in the AI era.
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Connected Insights: The Geometry Framework
My guest in episode #173 Bhaskar “BG” Ghosh. He shared his brilliantly practical "geometry framework" for evaluating enterprise startups:
- Persona Geometry: Who uses your product versus who signs the check?
- Product Geometry: Where exactly do you fit in the existing enterprise stack?
- Budget Geometry: What are companies already spending in your area?
Applying this to Gen AI, BG sees huge opportunities in knowledge graphs and semantic layers because "AI agents don't go to data directly – they go through semantic layers." The orchestration layer is another goldmine, especially with innovations like MCP emerging for agent interoperability.
Another one of BG's insights is about "intentional networking." He splits it into two types: the strategic connections you need for business, and what he calls networking that "puts gas in your tank" – your personal board of directors, your Saturday soccer group, et cetera.
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Community Involvement: Society for Arts and Culture of South Asia (SACSA)
BG is involved with the Society for Arts and Culture of South Asia (SACSA), which supports women's and children's health education in India while promoting sacred music that transcends boundaries.
It beautifully captures BG's philosophy: "The spirit of service is the constant." Whether building LinkedIn's infrastructure, investing at 8VC, or bringing communities together through music, it's all about service.
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