The most successful AI company you’ve never heard of | Qasar Younis

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You decided to join Twitter recently. You put out your first tweet. Marc Andreessen quote tweeted it and said, This is the best AI CEO nobody knows.

**Qasar Younis** (0:08)
Our best work is done alone and quietly. Every minute you're writing something for public consumption, you're not focusing your very limited time that you have on your customers and your product.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:16)
You're building a lot of the future that we're going to be living in. What does the next couple years look like?

**Qasar Younis** (0:21)
Us solving some of these impossible problems like cancer are directly going to be related to this AI boom. Net suffering in humanity overall should go down significantly.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:32)
A thread that has emerged on this podcast is that AI is coming just in time to save us.

**Qasar Younis** (0:36)
The real impact of AI in the next five to ten years really is going to be in farming, mining, construction. These industries, they need autonomy, and it couldn't come soon enough. If you look at farmers, the average age of a farmer is in their late 50s. What does that mean in ten years from now?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:53)
There's a lot of anxiety about what AI is going to do to the world.

**Qasar Younis** (0:56)
The core root of fear is misunderstanding. If you at home are very anxious about AI, the best thing that you can do is spend time to understand, and you will quickly see the limitations. Get to know it, then actively make the technology be used for good.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:15)
Today, my guest is Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition. You've probably never heard of Qasar or Applied Intuition. This is the most important under the radar AI company and CEO that I've ever come across. It's a $15 billion company that has been growing quietly over the last decade. What they do is they add AI to vehicles, like cars, tractors, planes, submarines, mining rigs, and a lot more. 18 out of the top 20 automakers are customers, as well as the biggest global construction, mining, and trucking companies, also the Department of Defense. They're basically Waymo or Tesla, but without the hardware. Qasar himself was born on a farm in Pakistan, grew up in Detroit, started his career as an engineer at GM, and then at Bosch. He then went on to start a couple companies before starting Applied Intuition. I love everything about this episode, and I am so excited to bring it to you. Don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Omni. Many product teams today are in the process of debating how to ship AI analytics. The hard part is obvious. Having an LLM guest at SQL in production is a huge mess and just a bad idea. Omni takes a different approach. They have a semantic layer built in so that when you embed their analytics, the AI actually knows your business definitions, not just your raw tables. You can test queries, validate the reasoning, and lock down permissions before anything hits production. If you want AI analytics in your product without building the whole stack from scratch, check out omni.co. Lenny for a free three-week trial. Companies like Perplexity, DBT, and BuzzFeed use Omni to ship analytics their customers can trust. That's omni.co. Lenny. My podcast guests and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? Sock 2 That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry-leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first Sock 2 or ISO 27001 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's Trust Management Platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you could win bigger deals sooner. The result? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny.
Qasar, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Qasar Younis** (4:09)
Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:10)
You're basically building a lot of the future that we're going to be living in and people may not even realize this. And there's two sides to this. On the one side, let me ask you this question. If things go really well, what does the next couple of years look like for people with the emergence of AI, with physical AI? What's a vision of the future?