 Welcome to Entrepreneur India. Today we have with us Jonathan Siddharth co-founder and CEO Turing world's first AI powered tech services company. Welcome Jonathan. So Jonathan tell us about your company. At Turing our mission is to use AI to unleash the world's untapped human potential. We are building the world's first AI powered tech services company. Traditional tech services firms were built in a different era where they would do manual sourcing of talent, manual vetting of technology, manual coding and delivery. At Turing our goal is to use AI to reimagine tech services from the ground up where we can automatically source developers, use AI to vet and match the right developers to the right opportunities, and then use AI to speed up the productivity of software engineers and the teams that we deploy. We actually do three things today at Turing. The first is to deliver projects for our clients. The second is deliver better talent. And the third is we work with foundation model companies to train LLMs to get better at coding, reasoning and advanced problem solving. And we're able to do this pre-alloc on top of our talent cloud of over 3 million developers, many of whom are in India. Led you to venture into AI space. Yeah, I mean, I've always been fascinated by AI like right from freshman year in undergrad. I was fascinated by the idea of a machine that could amplify human productivity. And I was really interested in neural networks in the early 2000s. I used to build neural network algorithms for self-driving cars. And then I came to Stanford to specialize in AI. There I met my co-founder, Vijay Krishnan. I started an AI company before this called Rover which had a successful acquisition. And I would say like for the last 20 years or so, I've been focused on AI. And I've been fortunate to see two very distinct step function changes in AI. The first was in 2012 with the birth of the deep learning era. And the second was in 2022 with the birth of the generative AI era. And fortunately, my company Turing is right in the thick of this. We believe that AI transformation is the new digital transformation. Every company today is an AI company. Every product is an AI infused product. And when I speak with Fortune 500 CTOs, CEOs, CIOs, I keep hearing the same thing that every job is going to be transformed by AI. All right. So how has the journey been so far? Like if you can, you know, talk about it? Yes. So it's been an exciting journey at Turing. Our mission is to use AI to unleash the world's untapped human potential. I started the company in 2018 with my co-founder Vijay Krishnan. And we started in 2018 and when we started the remote work and distributed teams had not fully taken off. And I remember in the early days there were a lot of investors who were still skeptical about the ability for distributed teams to build tech products. We were fortunate to benefit from the world's shift to remote work and distributed teams. The one silver lining with the pandemic, obviously it was horrible. But the one positive that came out of it was it opened the eyes for people to realize that you can hire world-class talent from all over the world and operate as a distributed team. Companies shifted their mindset to look for the best talent in the world versus the talent that happened to live near the office. And for individuals, they now had access to opportunities from all over the world not just jobs that they could drive to in a car. So I would say in our journey, Priya, there are two moments that stand out to me that was sort of very, very memorable. One was when the pandemic hit and everything shut down. There was just so much uncertainty even for Turing at that time, like in 2020. And the thing that I found fascinating was despite everything shutting down, we just kept on growing throughout that period. We kept on growing and we became a unicorn in late 2021. Most recently, we've been raising at a 4 billion valuation cap. So the company has raised about 140 million from investors like Westbridge Capital, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital. And lots of execs from Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc. So our journey has been really exciting. And a big part of what gives me energy is being able to change the lives of incredible developers from all over the world and all over India with our platform. Wonderful. Also, you mentioned somewhere in the media that the leaders should scale their skills ahead, two years ahead of the time. You still hold that view or your views have changed? Absolutely. So I'm a big believer in continuous improvement. I want to make sure I'm continuously improving every single day. Every day I want to wake up a little bit better than I was the day before and so on. So to do that, you have to be very intentional about what your growth goals are. And my goal is to make sure that I'm scaling at least two to three years ahead of phase of the company. And you do that by having really good mentors, really good advisors. I think of them as Yoda figures from Star Wars for different aspects of company building. So if you look at company building, there are a few things you have to get right. You have to be great at building a great exact team. You have to be really good at fundraising. You have to be really good at execution and making sure the company hits the plan. You have to be really good at sales and so on. So there are a few elements that you have to get right. And I try to make sure that I have great mentors who have done that successfully who are at least a few years ahead of phase in terms of where we are. As the head of the leading AI company, what advice would you like to give to the companies who want to leverage AI? We live in the age of AI. I'm fortunate to meet with Fortune 500 CTOs, CEOs, CIOs from companies like Disney, Dell, Pepsi, Coinbase, OpenAI, many, many more that we work with. My first piece of advice is to really focus on the problem that you're solving for your customers. AI is a tool and a potential solution for certain types of problems. It's important to be customer-led and problem-led first. GenAI has opened up certain unique capabilities where we can solve a very specific set of problems, 10x better than we could in the past. So to do that, I would first make sure that executives understand what are the new technical capabilities that are unlocked by LLMs and then apply that to their business. One way to do this is to make sure you have at least 10% of your R&D energy spent on tinkering to find different use cases for GenAI in your business. When companies come to us, usually there are two different ways to think about how GenAI could help a business. The first is, can you deliver specific wow experiences for your customers with GenAI? And the second is, can you make your internal operations a lot more efficient with some of these AI co-pilot tools? But the first thing to do is to really understand what are the new technical capabilities that have become unlocked by GenAI. GenAI is not a magic wand that can solve every problem. There are still several categories of problems where the best approach is to use supervised machine learning and in some cases it's not even AI. Maybe you need data analytics or data science. So either you need the right expertise inside your company or you're working with a company like Turing to figure out what problems can you solve for your customer a lot better today thanks to GenAI and large language models. Alright, thanks Jonathan. We wrap up here. It was wonderful meeting you and talking to you.