Don't fall in love with your product, fall in love with its market, Ashutosh Garg, CEO & Founder of Eightfold

In the latest episode of Prime Venture Partners Podcast, learn about Eightfold's story from its CEO & Co-Founder, Ashutosh Garg, starting with enterprises - the approach and insights, and the role of AI. 

A researcher turned serial entrepreneur , Ashutosh left Google in 2008 and began his entrepreneurial journey with BloomReach, an e-commerce personalisation platform.

"I started Eightfold later that year(2016) with the primary focus of helping enterprises better manage talent. Our mission is to enable the right career for everyone in the world. So we grew up to solve for employment. And we are using AI to understand people's potential better, their capabilities, what they have done, what are the skills they can quickly acquire next and using that to better match them to the right opportunities," Ashutosh says. 

Starting with the enterprise side

When it comes to large enterprises, the processes involved legal reviews of documents, the security review, the contracting data, etc. seem intimidating. That's why new founders go with SMBs to start with. 

"On the flip side, sometimes I say that if the problem is hard but not too hard, maybe go after that because that becomes a competitive moat as well. What everyone else is scared of, I think of that as a key advantage," Ashutosh says. 

So, painful large enterprise integrations can be your competitive advantage. This mindset, combined with where the deepest pain pointcan lead ubeing able to sell to large enterprises.

Identifying a real problem and getting early PMF

Whether you want to launch an SMB or enterprise, finding a macro trend, is very important. In this sense, it is important to  look at  building a company for the next 10-20 years rather than the next two or three years. . As far as your product goes- don't fall in love with your product, maybe fall in love with the market. 

"In our case, in the first one, it was the e-commerce market. In the second case, it is the HR market. Fall in love with that market. What specifically you are building will keep on evolving over time, versus I'm going to force fit my product, my idea, my innovation and technology into this market," Ashutosh shares. 

Another piece  of advice Ashutosh has for entrepreneurs is to try and find the pitch market fit instead of the product market fit. Call say fifty customers and pitch them your idea if they resonate with it, build that product but if they don't, there's no point in building that product.  

Learnings on using AI 

AI is the ultimate human scaler with its ability to map human emotions consistently in a uniform manner. For a company that is focused on offering a professional nirvana, scouting talent requires a systemised, analytical approach. 

In a time when everything is constantly evolving and what you have studied years back goes outdated, the metrics of how you look at talent change with it too. 

"In this new world, if we keep looking for people who have done the work, you'll never be able to find enough people for that. Instead, we have to identify the people who can do the work, and who can learn that quickly. And that is where AI comes in," Ashutosh explains. 

When it comes to the candidate - say as an employee at a company, AI can help you decide which career path to choose, what projects you should work on simply by looking at every other employee in that company and finding the ones like you and studying their career paths.  

You can listen to the full episode here