Arnav Mishra, DOSS Co-Founder and CTO on ERP for Modern Industries

**Grace Gong** (0:00)
I'm sorry, I'm like moving, we're live. Sorry, hi Arnav, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Arnav Mishra** (0:08)
Hey, super happy to be here.

**Grace Gong** (0:11)
Okay, to start our show, I wanna give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the ultimate cloud for AI innovators. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, compending reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support unmatched by hyperskillers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify and Higgsfield already partner 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. Maybe use code grace, you may get a surprise discount. Okay, so Arnav, I wanna start with you.
Oh my God, yeah, exactly. You will be offered to a discount next Monday, for sure.
Okay, so I wanna start with your journey because obviously, we tried to be like, you were originally from the Bay Area, and obviously, we both wanted you to buy, and you had such an amazing experience as a software engineer at all the very cool companies. Maybe we could start with also your mentor of built by girls. I love it. Okay, so maybe we can start with what were some core lessons that you've learned early on in your career, shape into who you are today.

**Arnav Mishra** (1:22)
Yeah. Well, obviously, as you said, UIUC is a huge part here, both of us being alumni and that's always fun. But I think I had the benefit of growing up in the Bay Area, as you mentioned, and I think just being surrounded by startups from the beginning. I think maybe not so much a lesson, but just the exposure and knowledge that you have the ability to build what you want to build, when you want to build it, and that is a real career path that people can go down. I think that was always just amazing exposure to have growing up, and then even in the University of Illinois, just a large founder ecosystem around there.
I think post-university, I spent a lot of time at a few different startups. I saw later stage startup at Rubrik, building data management, data backup, tooling over there. Then later on as one of the founding engineers at a company called Siteline, where we were building a billing solution for the construction industry. In these two different places, I got a lot of exposure to the abilities and capabilities you get to have when you take ownership over problem sets that you are interested in and you're passionate about. I think the support and mentorship from the leaders in these different companies, always was driven around the fact that you should come in and contribute in the ways that you can, in the best ways that you're able to.
It doesn't matter if that is in within your job description, it will be rewarded as excellence as part of the business you're in. I think examples of this, at Siteline, there was an era where our biggest problem as a company was actually that we needed to recruit and we needed to hire a bunch of people. I got the support from the founders to go be a recruiter for a month. I basically wrote no code and I was just focused entirely on hiring people and bringing on a recruiter of our own. There was another period of time where I was doing a bunch of biz ops and rev ops work. I think just that ability to take ownership and learn from it and use it to grow myself was huge lessons for myself on how I could do something like that for a broader scale as building a business myself.

**Grace Gong** (3:17)
For sure. I want to start with one of the things that I really always said about contribute in the best way you can because I think that's a must for the startup mentality. I think honestly, it's easy but also really hard to find it. Because it's really hard to test someone's agency.
You can't really vet that in an interview, though people can always made up stories by tragedy or something. But I want to start with, since you have the experience of working for legacy industry and then creating solution for that. Doss is a company that doing the AI version of ERP system. Maybe we could talk about how does ERP system even get started? How does the ecosystem work? Obviously, everybody heard about Oracle and all these OG players, and how is it different in the AI era?

**Arnav Mishra** (4:18)
Yeah, ERP is like one of the probably maybe the largest category of software that like the average person in the tech industry just doesn't really know much about. I mean, I had almost no exposure to it until my previous job. And it's kind of crazy because it's the backbone of how most modern businesses actually run. Like it's like every company in the Fortune 500 has an ERP solution. Oracle and SAP have been dominant players for 40, 50 years now in this category. And how many categories of software are there where a single set of companies has been dominant for that period of time? Like it's almost unheard of. It actually is essentially unheard of.