Ajay Kulkarni, TigerData CEO on Postgres, AI Agents and Data Infra

Grace Gong (0:02)

Hi, Ajay, welcome to Venture with Grace. Thank you for having me. Thank you for whispering.

I'm just kidding.

Ajay Kulkarni (0:11)

I do want to point out the almost matching Shore mics.

Grace Gong (0:14)

Yeah.

Ajay Kulkarni (0:16)

I had to buy mine. I'm not sponsored like some other people.

Grace Gong (0:19)

But it's not like, well, technically, so I win this as I were, so I was the second place. There you go.

Ajay Kulkarni (0:25)

Well, I still had to pay money for mine, and it doesn't have these cool colors. But anyway, good to see you.

Grace Gong (0:30)

Thank you.

Super thankful for you. I want to give a quick shout out to an amazing sponsor before we dive into the show. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the ultimate claw for AI innovators. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support are matched by hyperscalers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify, and Higgsfield are dependent with Nebius to run their AI workloads. Plus, venture-backed startup can save up to 150K on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startup to learn more. Also use code grace, you may get a surprise discount.

So Mike was on the show and obviously, I feel like he talked about a lot of stuff and I want to start from your side of the story. So you guys met a long time ago. Maybe we start with the founding story and I feel like we could talk about all things AI Infra.

Ajay Kulkarni (1:26)

Yeah. I mean, Mike and I met nearly 30 years ago. Of course, we met at MIT. It's funny, I remember the exact moment that we met. It was like the first week, across the lunch table from each other. I think it was parents' weekend, parents were visiting.

Yeah, man, we did class projects together. We were in the Boston Marathon together. We were roommates.

Grace Gong (1:45)

Boston Marathon.

Ajay Kulkarni (1:48)

Yeah. Of course, Mike being Mike, he always got better grades than me. I always did fine, but he always got better grades than me, and he beat me in the Boston Marathon. So that's a little snapshot of who he is. Now, we've been friends for a long time and ended up teaming up a decade ago to build what has become TigerData.

Grace Gong (2:12)

So basically, you have started a different company and then got acquired in 2011 What would you say was the core lessons there that you took to start it?

Ajay Kulkarni (2:23)

Yeah. So we built this thing called Sensobi which was at that point in time, the leading address book for BlackBerry devices.

It was 28, 29, 2010, 2011, I think. It came out of second class at Techstars Boston. We got Aqua hired by this company called GroupMe, which was then acquired by a company called Skype, which was then acquired by Microsoft and all three of them happened in six months.

I actually ran into one of the GroupMe co-founders last week, and so it's nice to see them again. My biggest lesson is that we were the leading address book on BlackBerry devices, but that was a little bit like being the tallest person on a sinking ship. It doesn't matter how tall you are, you're still going down with the ship. Oh my God. You know what I mean? It's not like make sure you're building on the right foundation because you could crush it and still go under.

Grace Gong (3:19)

I really like that lesson. I feel like it is something that people don't really realize until you're already there.

I guess I want to start with the whole thought about AI infrastructure. Nowadays, I feel like everyone, we're joking at our conference. I hosted my own conference last week, and then an investor were saying that, so we have an AI Infra panel for a lot of VCs, and then one of the panelists was asking, should we start addressing what is AI Infra for the audience? And then the other VC said, nowadays, what is not AI Infra? So basically, in the Silicon Valley landscape, I feel like everyone's doing AI Infra for a company. But maybe we can start with what is AI Infra, and where is TigerData plays in that space?

Ajay Kulkarni (4:16)

That's a great question, also very relevant to your sponsor, Nebius.

Well, let's start with the basics, right? So AI is the biggest thing since the internet, maybe since the computer. If you ask my dad, who was also a tech entrepreneur, he'll say, AI is the biggest thing since fire. And I'm like, dad, that goes pretty hard. That's a pretty solid quote. Anyway, the biggest bottleneck in AI today is infrastructure, is our ability to build the data centers and power the data centers. And as a result, AI infrastructure has put a huge strain on the physical world, anything infrastructure related. TigerData, we started off in the IoT world.