Jack Singh

Jack Singh, J-A-C-K, S-I-N-G-H. That is the American version of my legal name. I came to this country August 31st, 2001, so right before September 11. And at my first job, the CEO of the company, who's now my mentor, anointed me Jack Singh, because I was answering phones in sales. He's like, "Nobody's going to be able to pronounce your name. This is it. This is what we're going to call you." And it just stuck.

The first casualty of it, who was a Sikh, was in Milpitas at the time, which is a town over from here. And I used to have a turban at the time. So I remember my relatives here would call my parents. I was 18 years old. They were like, "We've got to cut his hair. Otherwise his life could be in danger." And I still remember the conversation between my parents, my mom and dad, and my grandmother, where she was aligned that we've got to go do this, and my parents were against it. And there were a couple of days of back and forth and deliberation of, hey, should we do this or not?

Yeah. So I won't call myself religious. I'd say that I believe in a higher power, just in general. So I was never tied to the physical aspects of it. I still believe every religion is just a human being's version or understanding of teachings, and at the end of the day, the crux of it is all very similar.

Exactly. And I think everybody's got a moral compass. I say this a lot. As long as you hold true to that moral compass and live by the basics of do no harm to others and do as much right as you can in the sphere that you live in, you're living a good life.

Very true. I was having this conversation two days ago with somebody, and they were asking us, do we see ourselves shifting our focus? Right now, the majority of our customer segment is startups and SMBs. And then some of it is enterprise, where, just as any company matures, we're going up-level, but I don't want to go away from our roots. And the conversation was, why is that? And the answer was the headwinds and the tailwinds. Working with startups in the early days, we take the first brunt of every level of innovation, every level of regulation that you see impacting AI. So by the time we've gotten burned, we've gotten the experience, and by that time is when the mass adoption is happening. So we've already learned the best practices to mitigate a lot of these harmful things. And that's where enterprises are leaning on us pretty heavily, to ensure that we coach and guide them on those pitfalls that they haven't come across just yet. Right? And I equate it to us being a doctor, where you call on them for brain surgery or for a child being delivered. That's their job. They do it day in, day out, so many times that they've possibly seen everything that's out there and then some, to advise their patients in the best way possible. And that's who we consider ourselves to be. We've come across a lot of these situations and areas already in some form or fashion. How do we inform our customers to avoid those pitfalls and get them to their end results in a safe, fast way?

Exactly.

Yeah. So the company name is Avahi, A-V-A-H-I dot A-I. We are an AI-first company. I founded the company in June of '22, after spending about five years at AWS running their partner sales teams. I've always had this affinity towards startups. So when I joined AWS, I was tasked to figure out the partner sales motion for what everybody knows as digitally native businesses. So these are born-in-the-cloud businesses, right? And then there was a wave of machine learning. Not AI as much just yet, but machine learning was the first wave, which then translated to AI and then gen AI over a period of time. We were seeing a lot of new startups being formed where machine learning was becoming their core. And as this segment was being formed, I raised my hand at the time within the AWS ecosystem to say, "Hey, let me figure out the partner motion for these startups, because they will need a lot of help too, to bring their visions to life."

A bit of both, right? If you just look at the cloud history, AWS is still very much the market leader, and was the first company to move the needle there, to bring public cloud to the masses. And they have quite a mature ecosystem, and their mentality is that we want all the startups to build on AWS from day one, because we've generally got all the tools to solve their problems. And with that philosophy, what truly holds true... I know that there are a bunch of schools of thought around, specifically, Amazon.com and what happens with the wages and the worker conditions. I wasn't involved in that aspect of the business, but within AWS, man, I have seen customer obsession play out day in, day out, where it isn't just their leadership principles. They talk about showing customer obsession on a day-to-day basis. I have personally been on calls where we've called out leaders: "Hey, I don't think our teams are showing customer obsession here to begin with." And that's when you use principles in that context. It's the grounding mechanism for everybody: "Hey, this isn't personal. We're stating the facts, what we're observing, and we can all do better." So when I started my journey with Avahi, it was like, "Hey, I want to go and do the same thing, but outside of AWS: show customer obsession and provide services to customers to bring their visions to light." So that's where Avahi came up. The logo is a Penrose triangle, which is an optical illusion. It's something that you cannot do in real life. And the thought process behind that was that a lot of customers will come up with ideas that might seem impossible, but because of our technical chops, we'll bring them to light. And when the company started, the basis of the whole company was bringing customers' visions to light through our technical chops. We don't want to be coming across as a sales organization. And the areas of focus for us from that very point, and it has held true over the years, are migrations, data analytics, and AI/ML. The way things are right now, the data and analytics piece has been clubbed into the AI and machine learning piece, but our go-to-market is still very much holding true.

That's a good question, because our mandate right now is to hire 60 more people in the next 90 days. I think between now and the end of the year, we'll be about 200 employees.

So we're not a staffing company. They're all full-time, and then we deploy them as pods, rolling off one customer project to the next one. But we don't do staffing. What we do is sign up to deliver outcomes for the customers. So customers have got specific outcomes. We will come in and scope what it would take, how much time it would take, how much work it would take to deliver that business outcome for a customer, and then we'll work backwards from it.

Exactly. So it's more starting with the advisory and coming up with a plan together, rather than a customer coming and saying, "Hey, this is what I want," and we're just doing it. When you talk about software shops, to me, in my mind at least, they're what we call app dev shops. That's one thing we don't do. We don't do app dev. What we do is play within the AWS ecosystem, and we have now matured into OpenAI and Anthropic partnerships as they're coming along, and ElevenLabs, where we're seeing some. But it is very much solutions that customers want around those ecosystems to drive a business outcome.

Very much so. I think the FDE term is the new in thing right now. It's all marketing. But yes, very much so. And that's where you will see a lot of consulting companies come back and say, "Yes, we're now tailoring to the market," and start calling a lot of their pre-sales teams FDEs. But that's the motion that we've been doing for about the last four years, from day one of our genesis: go in, understand the customer's environment, and then come back with a consultative approach to the solutions that they're looking to deploy. Why? What are you trying to drive, from a business standpoint? We call it PPT, right? People, process, technology. How do you bring it together for a solution?

True. But I'd say, understanding that aspect about startups, you call them cheap. We have moved out of the startup phase. We're no longer worried about the sustainability of our growth or profitability at this point. But we still keep very much in mind, man... I say this quite often, that the mentality is, at times you have to sell your lunch to buy dinner. And we keep that very much at the forefront engaging with startups, where we feel like we've gone through that journey. We feel you. And we won't be doing justice if we price gouge, or just come up with price points that the McKinseys of the world are charging. That's just not in tune with being a startup founder myself.

You have to be. How can you not be empathetic to other co-founders in the same space who are trying to walk the same journey, and in some variants of your journey are there with you, right? They're going through the same challenges. I was talking to somebody, and I was telling them that the very first thing I do every morning when I wake up is check my mental health, because nobody checks the CEO's mental health. But it's the CEO's job to check everybody else's, everybody that's working for them, their mental health, on a regular basis. So the first thing I do is check my own mental health every morning: hey, are you doing okay? Sometimes I wake up at 3:30, because all the decisions that you take weigh on you at some point. Whether they're the right ones. Are you making the right choices for the business, for the individuals? Not every decision is easy. And you really do feel for other founders in the same way. And that's where I never want to pull out of the startup segment, because I feel our teams understand what working with a startup is. Because we are one. We're maturing, but all of the people have those wounds of battle, where everybody understands wearing multiple hats. Sometimes we call it work-life harmony, right? There are days where people are working 16 hours, and there are days where people are done in four hours. But that's startup life. And you've got to be able to understand that to make other startups successful.

Man, so I just sit. My regular wake-up time is about 4:35 in the morning. And for the first 20 minutes, I will just sit through it. I'll do a physical check: hey, how's my body feeling? And then I'll go to my mind and say, how am I thinking? What's my mood? Is it positive? Is it negative? And I'm generally a glass-half-full guy, always. So that question is very important for myself. The day I tell myself, hey, I'm not in a positive mood, I have to pause and I really have to dig into why. Then the question of why, why, why comes in, and I try to untie those knots mentally and prepare my day: okay, this is something that's festering. I've got to go dig into this specific issue or address this head on, up front. Otherwise, I'm not going to have a good night of sleep.

I feel the other way, right? You've got so many people looking up to you that you have to remain calm no matter what the outside world is, and have a steady hand, so that your team has the faith and the perseverance to go through anything that's hard. Sometimes you get on a call and nobody's got an answer, and they look at you, and you don't have an answer. But in that moment, you really have to look at how to behave, how to act, and there's no right or wrong answer. You just don't know. It's like parenting. Nobody's given you a rule book that says, hey, this is the right way of doing parenting. This is very much the same thing. There's no right or wrong way of running a company. Sometimes it's EQ. Sometimes it's business intelligence. I don't know if you've read the book Ikigai, the harmonious middle. Right? How do you get there? And sometimes all of your decisions are driven through that.

Best call at the time. I go a step further, and I end that exact same thought. I'll get there in my own way, but I'll end it with this: just remember, yesterday's solutions are today's problems that we are solving. So what we're choosing right now might be the best choice now, but six months from now, this could be a problem as well, and we need to be cognizant of that. And it's a cycle, right? You just constantly go back and forth and evolve.

Twice. I couldn't have said it better. Yeah, absolutely.

You're right. There are so many things happening, and that's where it's: how do you cut the noise and really focus on what's next? I think it's a healthy balance of both, especially for us as a company. And I'd give you an example where a lot of it is becoming real for us as a company. When I say company, I say this all the time: a company isn't a name. It's a collection of people under it. It's the humans under it that make it a good or a bad company. It's not a company's action. It's not an entity on a piece of paper that's good or bad. It's the people under it that make it good or bad. If I've got good people who are making the right choices, it's a good company. If we've got people who are making the wrong choices, we call it a bad company, because we tend to disassociate ourselves. And it's just an easier conversation than saying, "Hey, Jack is a bad person," or "Jack's a good person," versus, "Oh, why is he good or bad?" Right? It's just an easier thing to say, even as a conversation. We struggle with this within the AI space with some of the customers that come to work with us as well. I'll give you one example, and I'm not trying to not answer your question. I'm trying to answer it through a live example. Hopefully it gets the message across that you're looking for. We had a customer where they were developing some systems, and our engineering teams would have to design a decision-making process where a remote-controlled device could... It's a go or no-go kill situation. And ethically, it's a very simple thing to do. Like, "Hey, we will not do that as a company." But somebody's going to go do that work, because there are systems in place where people make that choice to take that work on.

Yes. That was one of the places where I felt happy that as a company, our culture showed itself. We didn't realize that that was the case initially. As we went through the discovery process, the customer... I think it wasn't his or her first rodeo; they'd gone through a couple of companies like us. And when it came to us, over the course of the discovery, in the tail end of it, when we were trying to understand the scope and the scale of this thing, the customer was pivoting towards the money that we would make. And in that, the hidden message was, "Oh, but you need to be able to design this thing for us." The moment that decision-making line became clear, that, "Hey, we are going to be the ones who will be deciding the fate of people, whether they get killed or not," it was an easy call for everybody in the company to come to, and make the call that this isn't something that we will take on. And we informed the customer, "Hey, this isn't something that we are okay doing, and we're going to pass." Again, small scale, we're trying to do the right things. Look, I think in our very initial conversation, I brought this up: I personally don't think that there are people who wake up every morning and say, "I'm going to do evil shit." It's just people's circumstances. Sometimes that will make them do things that aren't right. And it was good to see that we have good people within our company with the right mindset and the right ethics to have some form or semblance of that check and balance at our level that we can bring to this AI space.

That's a fair point. And I would say, what was the line that you and I talked about earlier, that you become the villain if you... Which one?

To see yourself become the villain. I think that's where we are. I will say this: with the shift from coal production plants to cleaner energy production, we saw a lot of people be hesitant and fight for, hey, we still want the old-school plants, because it's going to make people lose their jobs. There are still very much two schools of thought there. I'll take a side here and choose a side, which is that we need to help. That's an obsolete way of generating electricity where we are today, but that doesn't do anything for the people. It's our job as a community around them to help them up-level and upskill to the cleaner ways of generating energy, and help them find jobs, right? It's not, hey, leave the people behind because that industry is obsolete. And that's where I feel AI is today. With adoption of AI, if people think that they're going to go push back on it, there is a lot more risk to the future there than in being part of figuring out what's the right way, the right mechanism, to use AI. And what's the right way to educate people to use AI? I think if the conversation shifts... the amount of energy that's being put on, hey, we don't need AI here, we don't need AI there, versus why do we need AI in these places? It's just a slight change of the question, which will help you get to the same outcome, in my view, but in a more positive manner. I think that's where we feel like we are helping, one step at a time. Look, nobody's got a crystal ball and can predict the future, but you can do your best to make that future a good place and worth being in, whether it's five years from now or 10 years from now. And how do you do things to manifest that ideal future? And I agree, man, your version of the future could be very different than my version of the future. Again, not to bring politics into it, but even if you look at the divide in this country, there are multiple versions of how people want to see this country in the future, and they're on the extreme ends of each. So the hope is that with a lot of voices in it, you drive to the right future, versus a lot of voices sitting on the sidelines and saying, hey, no, I'm just not going to go play this game.

Very good question. I don't think I'd be genuine if I said I've got all the answers. I don't. Right? Things are changing, to your point. Things are changing on a weekly basis. I don't think anybody can adapt as fast as things are changing within the AI space right now. What we are doing is putting enough checks and balances in place, and enough resourcing in place, for people to learn in a safe environment, so that when they're in front of customers, they can make the right choices with the limited set of knowledge that they have, which is more than what our customers have. Right? We get early access to some of the models. We get to play with them. We get to look at their strengths, their pitfalls, their weaknesses, and tailor solutions around that before some of these things come to market. That gives us the opportunity of educating our team. So we've got a learning and development department where we are spending a lot of our own money to train our resources on all of the things that are changing in the industry constantly. I mean, look at how fast Anthropic and OpenAI have grown. Anthropic, at the beginning of the year, I think it was February, announced where they were in terms of run-rate business for the year, which blew past everybody's expectations. And then the second thing they announced was that they're setting aside 00 million for go-to-market efforts with partners. That was in February. They then announced their partner ecosystem right after, and they had like five people in it at the time. Right? So even they are maturing slowly. And then within the last 60 days, they came up with an initial set of certifications for people who wanted to build something around Claude. And in the last 45 days or so, they've come up with new certifications, new courses that you could take to get better at solutioning around Claude. But it's fairly new. So when I say experts, that's doing a lot of heavy lifting, even for our resources, right? You've got to understand some of this information is a couple of months old. They are just learning it as much, but they have the industry background to digest it and have opinions because of their experience. And I say there's no compression algorithm for experience, for the work that they've already done in the industry, right? So it just helps them get through the learnings faster. And then you have the sandbox to play in before you go in front of the customers. And then we're having these conversations... on average, each of my sellers is talking to four to six new customers every day. So now think of the sheer volume just at our scale. We're going to be about a 200-person company by the end of the year. So even at our scale, the number of customers that we're touching on a daily basis is a decent-size customer base. What does that mean within a month for these people? How many different customers, how many different use cases have they seen? And then that is the experience: the culmination of even a 30-day experience. Across, let's say, five days, five customers, that's 25 customers. You've got a hundred customers that we have touched in the AI space in a matter of 30 days. What does that bring to the hundred-and-first customer? That is the experience.

So, very interesting take. And that's an observation which we struggle with. I'll give you an example. I don't know if I have a good direct answer for it. Again, I live by examples. So in our company, our AI bill is going up like clockwork, month to month. And this is a question like, hey, so we're spending from zero to this X dollars on a monthly basis. What's the ROI? Where are the benefits of it? So forget about ROI for a second. Are there other benefits other than just ROI? So it's productivity, right, which will ultimately be ROI. But in what areas are we truly seeing AI... like, there is spend. Is it bettering the quality of our people, in what form or fashion? Is it bettering the quality of our outputs to our customers? The funny thing is, when I asked this of our CTO, it's like, well, directionally, the data is telling us that we're doing better. But can we quantify it just yet? The answer is no. And is that impact being felt by individuals in their daily lives? Because your question sort of has two aspects. Like, hey, personally, I'm using AI and I'm seeing improvements in my life, because I don't have to do a lot of operational shit, which used to take me three, four hours, like we were talking about editing just before. Now with AI, you could do a lot of it in maybe half the time, who knows, right? But do you see the indirect impact of it? As humans, if I'm not seeing a direct impact in my life, I sometimes feel nothing is changing. There's a lot of indirect impact that's happening, right? We just don't see it as relevant to us. But think of small things. I'm going to give you just quality of life. You said you came here Wednesday. You went to the airport. I don't know if you've got TSA PreCheck or TSA Touchless. Man, I have flown with CLEAR and TSA PreCheck Touchless without my ID. Not on purpose, I've just forgotten it at times, and I've been able to go through, right? Your facial recognition, you are there, and it's done. There are positives to that. Now, the negative of it is what you see happening with immigration today, right? With the debate and discussions around Flock cameras. Where do you draw the line? But I see those incremental improvements happening in an indirect fashion. You're seeing drug research being accelerated, because now you don't have to do these trials manually. You can run a lot of these through machine learning models and come to a stage where, by the time you get to actual trials, you've fine-tuned it so that your rate of success could be higher, right? All of these things... again, AI is so new and so early, you're going to see a lot more impact of it. We're still in very nascent stages of it.

Different people, different answers, man. I'm the glass-half-full guy. I feel that as long as there are people who have the right intentions, it is a net positive. I do sit with it and think about it, interestingly. I think it's net positive for the businesses, because they will do better. And when I say better, it's not for the businesses, it's for the people in them. I'll give an example. I say this line to the folks that we hire: look, we're paying you a salary. Shame on me to expect you to do any more than what you're getting paid for, and shame on you to do any less. We've tailored a job description that outlines what we expect you to do, and we're paying you what you agreed to. So do the job, right? As long as we do the job, we're going to get the outcomes that the company has outlined. Now, the people that we have who are leveraging AI are pretty much on a track to over-perform their own commitments, which, in terms of the person themselves, is helping them get promoted faster, make more money, that kind of thing. And you look at the downstream impact on the economy from there. It's a positive, right? The negative of it... we have all seen the reports of the brain scans of people who use ChatGPT for just basic things versus people who don't, who still stimulate their mind to think through and go through the process of elimination to get to a decision, right? The different brain scans. What scared me was my son. He's turning 10 at the end of September. He and his buddy were sitting upstairs on an iPad, and the iPad's got my wife's ChatGPT logged into it. So they were asking a question: how do I get out of karate with my dad, because my friend's over? And she's seeing this conversation play out on her phone on ChatGPT, and she brings it to me. She's like, look what these guys are doing. And now they're asking ChatGPT, okay, I went and talked to my dad, it didn't pan out. And ChatGPT is giving them a couple of scenarios. Like, no, no, no, but there's only three minutes left. What do I do now? Right? So you're looking at the behaviors of the next generation also changing and getting impacted. And I don't know if I feel that's the right thing or the wrong thing.

That is my take on it as well. Hey, we grew up with the Googles and Yahoos of the world. Maybe these guys will grow up with the Anthropics and ChatGPTs of the world.

I am the journey guy. My wife's the destination person. She's like, hey, I just care about getting there. I don't enjoy the destination part. And me, I enjoy all of it. I enjoy the journey and I enjoy the destination. And I think that is why, when people ask me, hey, you're running this company and you're growing, how are you managing it? Are you doing okay? I'm like, man, I'm enjoying this, right? I genuinely am. It's the cliche that work isn't work if you're enjoying it and you truly are having fun. I don't feel like I'm working. I'm having fun. I'm enjoying that we're impacting the right things for our customers and for the employees that we've hired. And it's an amazing thing to see how the impact is happening. I'll give an example. We've got a customer where we implemented a solution for roadside emergencies. You've got a roadside emergency, you call, and for the person who answers the phone, we've helped them enable AI so that you can get the right level of service in a faster manner. Now imagine how many lives in life-threatening situations that could save. When you sit down and you hear those stories of how your customers are impacting those things, you feel proud that, hey, we were a small part in making the world around us a better place.

And I don't think... look, we're still in such nascent stages. We talk about six degrees of separation. I don't think we truly quite comprehend the impact of it at six degrees, let alone the first or second degree. You can see what's in front of us, right? You can say, okay, this is a downstream immediate impact. But what is the impact beyond the first surface level, the second level? I don't think anybody's spending the time on that right now. I feel like that is also the cause of fear, because any time there's ambiguity, there is a lack of clarity. People will take advantage of that and create FOMO. And that leads, at times, to what I feel is the radical aspect of it: hey, we want to take AI completely out of schools, or certain things. Man, growing up, I remember this happened in my journey, just through my schooling. At one point, calculators weren't allowed. At one point, calculators were an okay thing. Now, if you talk to students, they're like, what is a calculator? There was a post on Reddit where somebody posted a picture of one of those scientific calculators, like, what is this thing? I felt old, man. I was like, holy shit, they don't have these in schools anymore. And now people are using iPads. They're taking laptops in there, where we were told, hey, no laptops, no computers allowed in certain classes. It's just that evolution. But nobody knows whether what we're marching towards is the right thing or the wrong thing. But we've gone through that journey, right? You are sitting here, we're doing okay, man. I mean, we survived. Since we were born, there were times we thought this was it. Remember 1999 to 2001? Oh, it's doomsday, the clocks are going to stop working, computers are going to stop working. We're still here. Nothing catastrophic happened, and shit's moving. And I feel like change is constant. Whether it's AI today, 10 years from now it's going to be some other technology that's bringing on a change. But change is constant, and that's what AI is doing to us. It's just doing it at such an accelerated pace that it has never happened before. And that's where a lot of the anxiety comes from. That's why we're having these conversations, because we've never seen anything like this. A lot of us have not, right? How many people do you know who, in our lives, have had this level of groundbreaking things happen at such a clip? There was a study released earlier this year showing that since the advent of AI, you are seeing the most businesses being created in the history of business. Why is that a bad thing? People are coming up with ideas. People are becoming entrepreneurs. For the longest time, I felt like the world was saying, hey, we need more entrepreneurs, we need more people to think and do the right things for the world. Now, certainly that's happening. Now we're questioning, hey, are the people who are doing these things doing the right things for the world or not? We don't know that yet, and that's a fair question. But we've got to walk the walk to find out the right answers. I still have faith in humanity, man, that we'll do the right things.