ashu garg

You shouldn’t have to sell 7% of your company to join a top accelerator. That's why FC Build is completely free. We take zero equity and charge zero fees. And we’re currently recruiting for our next cohort of technical founders at the earliest stages. You get: → $1M+ in startup credits → Direct access to our investment team → A small, highly selective cohort of exceptional founders → Hands-on support, workshops, office hours, and SF office space Interviews for FC Build are already underway, don’t wait to apply. Applications close November 20: foundation.typeform.com/fcbu…

AI leaders should pay a tax every time they make a prediction that doesn't hold up. “Jobs will be gone in 6 months because of AI.” “Half of entry-level white-collar work will disappear in the next few years.” Predictions like these cause real fear and anxiety. Too often, their confidence outpaces the evidence. It’s not the first time the industry has made bold claims that failed to materialize. In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton argued we should stop training radiologists because deep learning would soon outperform them. A decade later, radiologists are more in demand than ever. But people listen. These predictions shape what they study and which careers they pursue. Computer science enrollment is dropping because young people doubt that there will be jobs at the end of it. Those choices have lasting consequences, yet the people making the predictions rarely face any accountability. AI is changing our world in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable. That makes it all the more important for leaders to acknowledge what they don’t know, and be willing to answer for what they get wrong.

Founders - Painful sales cycles are your moat. Whatever is easy to sell is also easy to substitute. Customers who make you go through a long and painful sales process typically have very specific needs - security reviews, certifications, complex deployment requirements, or multiple layers of approvals. They’re not being painful for the sake of being painful. If you can meet those needs and still deliver something of value, you end up being deeply integrated into their workflows. Any competitor who wants to replace you must also navigate the same process. Painful is good.

AI Founders - Anthropic’s IPO means 2 things for you: 1. The IPO is huge validation of the AI market. Anthropic is planning to raise $100 billion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history. Validation like this in the public markets bodes well for AI adoption in enterprises. But like any stock, there will be troughs. And no matter what we’d like to believe, private markets follow public markets. When public tech stocks fall, private valuations fall much harder. So shore up your cash base. Tougher times will come, and you want the runway to get through them. 2. Post IPO, Anthropic will get much more aggressive about expansion. Training new models is very expensive, but building applications is relatively cheap. So post IPO, I anticipate Anthropic will become more and more of an application provider. Which verticals and use cases is still unclear. If you’re building an application company, expect Anthropic to become a direct competitor. Your best defense is being deeply integrated with your customers. Find customers that have specific needs - security reviews, certifications, approvals from internal stakeholders. Getting through all of that takes months. If you’re able to navigate those unique needs, and sell them something of value, you’re much harder to replace. Any competitor who wants to swap you out has to start the whole process again.

@ramkris and @ajkrish95 are building AI agents that do the work of a full finance team. We’ve backed what they’re building at @HyphenateAI since their seed round, and last week they announced their $45M Series A. In this month’s B2BaCEO, I share their story and how it aligns with our thinking on the opportunity in AI apps. In verticals like finance, where mistakes are costly and the work is heavily regulated, a smarter model alone won’t get the job done. We believe the winners will be engineers like Ram and Ajay, who know their customers’ work deeply and are building their apps with the technical depth of an infra company. More on how they got here: foundationcapital.com/ideas/…

We were scared of plenty of technologies before AI. Take PlayStations. In 2000, Japan put export controls on the PlayStation 2 amid concerns that its chips could be used for military purposes. Sensationalist stories spread that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling 1,000s of consoles, wiring together chips into a supercomputer to simulate missile guidance. Consoles kept getting more powerful, and those fears faded. I hear a version of the same argument about AI today: the models are too powerful to release, and the safe thing is to keep them closed. Some of the concern about AI is fair. But a scary story is a bad reason to keep a technology closed. We need to be specific about what could go wrong and how to prevent it. That starts with separating what a model can do from what we allow it to do: what systems it can access, which actions need human approval, and where deterministic rules take over. The risks are real, but they’re product and engineering problems we can solve. We shouldn’t underestimate how much agency we have to get this right.

2026 is the year of Enterprise adoption of AI. With the $ANT IPO imminent, model performance/model companies valuations are the talk of the town. But models are increasingly inter-changeable. What matters is trust and security. AI security and AI Data Governance will create the next trillion dollar company!

“Wait until you see a forest fire, then start a company.” That’s how @munjalshah sold his first company to Alibaba and his second to Google. His point is that most of the time, founders have to wait for a gap in the market - a patch of sunlight where a big tree fell. As soon as your tree grows, it runs into the ones still standing around it. But once every 7 to 10 years, a technology shift burns the whole forest down. It happened with the internet, mobile, and SaaS. Now the opportunity is here again with AI. I’ve known Munjal through all three of his companies. It was a pleasure to have him on B2BaCEO to talk about his latest, @hippocraticai, and his advice for fellow founders. We cover: - When to hold your product back, and when to ship - How to size and structure a founding team - Why he believes vertical AI apps will win - When being 2% better as a startup wins the market, and when it doesn’t - Whether to build on open or closed models Our full conversation here: youtube.com/watch?v=dI9rT1rk…

Isn’t every IIT graduating class like the HRT mafia 😜

Huge congrats to @ramkris and @ajkrish95. When @JayaGup10 and I first met them, it was “love at first sight”. We already had a prepared mind on Finance Automation and by the end of the dinner, we were completing each others sentences. No CFO loves their ERP. And no company of consequence is going to rip out their ERP. Instead, they will wrap @HyphenateAI around their ERP and automate Finance Work. Customers are already spending more on @HyphenateAI than on their ERP. And we are just getting started🚀

Great to see merit play a bigger role at @Harvard!

@HyphenateAI has raised a $45M Series A! When @JayaGup10 and I first met Ram and Ajay, our “quick meeting” quickly turned into a 6-hour dinner. Ram and Ajay first crossed paths at IIT Madras, a year apart. Ram graduated top of his class and sold his first startup before finishing college. Ajay was an ACM-ICPC world finalist - think the Olympics of coding. Each year, a Microsoft VP flew to India’s top IIT colleges and hand picked 2 graduates to bring back to the US. In 2016, it was these two. After nearly a decade at Microsoft, Ram partnering with enterprises like Walmart and Coca-Cola and Ajay rebuilding the company’s internal billing platform, they found the problem that would become Hyphenate. Finance stacks are full of systems that don’t talk to each other: ERP, payroll, billing, CRM. Finance teams spend their days stitching together and reconciling in Excel. Before Hyphenate, companies had two half-fixes. They could buy a patchwork of point solutions or hire a vendor whose engineers build agents for you. Ram and Ajay saw a third option: one platform that learns how a company’s finance team works, from its own spreadsheets, emails and system logs, and then does the work across the whole function. Finance has some of the most risk-averse buyers in enterprise software. Every number has to be 100% accurate. That’s exactly the kind of hard engineering problem these two love. So in 2024, they left Microsoft and started Hyphenate. At that dinner, Jaya and I were drawn in by their clarity of thought, technical depth, and firsthand understanding of the problem. Ram is the son of a CFO of public-company in India, and Ajay helped rebuild how Microsoft bills its cloud customers. We led their seed round. With founders like Ram and Ajay, it was impossible not to. Proud to be back for their Series A. Congratulations to @ramkris, @ajkrish95, and the entire Hyphenate team.

Fellow IIT founders, Applications are now open for Foundation Capital's next FC Build cohort. We've worked with 70 IIT founders in the Bay Area through our Build programs, and we're looking for the next group of ambitious IIT builders. Our founders have gone on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. We keep FC Build intentionally small, with a less than 1% acceptance rate, so we can work closely with every founder. And the best part? It's completely free, and we’ll give you $1M+ in startup credits to get started. → What is FC Build? Foundation Capital's free accelerator for technical founders at the earliest stages. → Who should apply? IIT alumni and students who've recently started a company, or are seriously thinking about starting one this year. → What do founders get? $1M+ in startup credits, a small cohort of exceptional founders, hands-on support from our investment team, office hours, workshops, SF office space, and more. → What's the catch? There isn't one. No fees. No equity. Applications close November 20. Apply here: foundation.typeform.com/fcbu…

At McKinsey, I was 27 when I got a 50-year-old COO fired. It was fall of ‘97, and I was a year into the job. The client was the founder CEO of a large public company. McKinsey had helped him with go-to-market strategy. He’d asked me to stay on behalf of McKinsey to run the implementation. I was responsible for reorganizing the sales team. Moving territories, people and managers around. It was a lot to hand a kid a few years out of grad school. Halfway through this, the CEO invited me to his house for dinner. He said he wanted to chat through my thoughts on the team. I thought we were just brainstorming, so I was open. I told him the truth: The COO was the root of most of the sales team’s problems. The next morning I walked into the office and the COO had been fired. Before that moment, I didn’t fully appreciate the gravity of the conversation I had the night before. My opinion had consequences. It was true at McKinsey, it’s true as a partner to founders today. When you’re a trusted advisor, your words carry weight and that is a privilege and a responsibility. It’s not to be taken lightly.

IIT is MIT on steroids. No other school matches the rate IIT graduates become founders, CEOs, and CTOs. The entrance exam is one of the hardest math, physics, and chemistry tests in the world. Over 1.4 million people take it every year, and most score zero. Roughly 1% of the people who take the test get in. The average MIT student wouldn’t get into IIT. The test measures 2 things: extreme intellect and extreme grit. Performing at the top level requires years of disciplined preparation. Raw academic talent alone isn’t enough. That’s why IIT alumni punch so far above their weight, especially in startups. A material number of them end up in Silicon Valley as founders, CEOs, CTOs, and VPs of engineering. - Sundar Pichai (IIT Kharagpur) → CEO of Alphabet - Vinod Khosla (IIT Delhi) → Co-founder of Sun Microsystems - Aravind Srinivas (IIT Madras) → Founder of Perplexity And in the founders I’ve backed too - @ashutoshg and @mohitaron studied at IIT Delhi and @krishnanvijay studied at IIT Bombay. I try to meet as many IIT founders as possible. When a founder has passed IIT’s filter, I already know two things: top 1% intellect, top 1% grit.

Huge congrats to @venkyganesan @mmurph @shawnvc on @MenloVentures 50th anniversary. Key to a great firm is a great partnership! PS: I was the black sheep at the Black Tie event:-)

Context Graphs in action!

When cars first arrived, there were no stop signs or speed limits, and few paved roads. We built all of that over the following decades, and now most people drive without a second thought. Electricity was the same. The outlets in your kitchen and bathroom have a small reset button because water near power makes a short circuit more likely. We added extra protection where the risk is higher. AI needs the same kind of safety work. The companies building it and the people using it each have to decide how much risk they’re willing to take, what they let it do, and where the safeguards go. If you’re nervous about an AI agent, don’t give it your credit card. If you run a startup, decide which systems it can touch and put the controls in place before you need them.