Anvisha Pai, Moda CEO on AI Design Assets Eliminating "AI Slop"

**Grace Gong** (0:01)
Hard to talk, okay, we are live.

**Anvisha Pai** (0:03)
Okay, awesome.

**Grace Gong** (0:04)
Welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Anvisha Pai** (0:06)
Hi, thanks for having me.

**Grace Gong** (0:08)
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Anvisha, I want to start with you are a multi-time founder, so you started a company called Dover, and before that, it was Stop. Maybe what were some core lessons that you've learned early on in your career kind of shaped you into who you are today?

**Anvisha Pai** (0:57)
Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah, so a little bit of background on myself, I guess even before those companies that you mentioned, I grew up in India, moved to the US to study at MIT. I studied computer science, and then I did after MIT what every kid graduating at that time did, which is I moved to Silicon Valley. I started my career at Dropbox, where I feel a lot of the initial learnings were from there. Then after Dropbox, we went on to be a co-founder at Slab, and then Dover, and now Moda. I think in terms of what I've learned from those first couple of opportunities, there's so much, I don't even know where to begin. I think my overall biggest takeaway, especially since Dover, I think I can talk about that for a second. With Dover, we were very early to the AI recruiting space.
We went through YC, and our YC demo day pitch was, Dover is the first fully automated recruiting agency. This was in 2019 This was before LLMs were a thing. Even back then, we were like, we're going to build a fully automated recruiting agency before LLMs were a thing. We were definitely early, but we still were able to do a lot just with traditional machine learning methods and just a lot of brute force automation. Then Dover as a company grew really fast. At YC demo day, we were already doing 1 million ARR. Company grew to double digit million ARR within a few years, 100 people, I was the CTO, and then went on to lead a lot of different departments outside of that.
My biggest takeaway from that ride of going, really, really fast, finding product market fit, scaling, and then getting hit with this wave of AI, and both building on top of it, maybe getting disrupted by it a little bit, all that stuff is I think that at the end of the day, as a founder, you have to just take leaps of faith. When you start your company, you're taking a really big leap of faith because you have basically nothing. Then every single stage, like when you're raising a big Series A round, you're committing to the next phase of the company, you're taking a leap of faith at each time. With AI, those leaps of faith just have to happen more frequently and faster because things are changing so much.
When I started Moda about a year ago now, it definitely was a really big leap of faith and I think it does end up paying off.

**Grace Gong** (3:33)
For sure. I want to start with, obviously, I think both this time at Moda or Dover, you have great experience of raising funding. I want to start with maybe we can start with the product itself. Since you guys are focusing on design and essentially, you are tackling the market of maybe Canva, Gama.
Maybe we can start with why do you feel like you want to choose design this time? Since back in time, you guys did amazing startup about hiring, which is one of the most popular area now with AI, and many of the company have been raising huge runs. I guess this time, why design?

**Anvisha Pai** (4:23)
Yeah. Moda is a graphic design agent built for non-designers. What that means is that we've basically built a technology where someone without a really detailed design background, like a marketer, a salesperson or a founder, can come in and create really beautiful designs and slides, and everything that they need for their business. But everything that Moda makes is editable. It's pretty different than ChatGPT, where you're getting back a static image, or something like Claw Design, where you're really just creating code. Moda actually does design on a canvas the same way that a designer would, and so it's very easy to collaborate, it's very easy to edit, it's very intuitive. Then the second degree to that is brand alignment. We know that brand alignment is important to people, we know that taste is important to people, and so we've tried to capture that in our agent as much as we can.