Granica’s Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Rahul Ponnala, does not have modest goals for his company, but his logic is rooted in math. He wants to “make AI 10,000 times better”—a lofty aim for the rapidly developing industry, but he didn’t pick a random number to just make a point. He has a plan.
“If you can make data 10 times better, your computer is going to be 10 times better, your models are going to be 10 times better, your agents and the users that are actually consuming those things get 10 times better,” he said on the Great Entrepreneurs Podcast with RJ Lumba last year. “And if you multiply all of those three or four things together, you get 10,000.”
The key, he says, is doing all of these things while maintaining a baseline of security; expansion for expansion’s sake rarely works well. It’s imperative to make sure that the inputs you use are of the highest quality information, because bad data will have corrosive consequences down the line.
Ponnala uses a poker analogy to describe the process: “A poker player essentially becomes great by looking at the number of hands, by dealing hands. And if you feed that poker player with bad hands, what do they learn? They learn bad poker. Computers and models are similar, where you have to make sure that the data is actually good.”
In short, bad data in means bad data out. What you feed AI is critically important, and Ponnala only feeds it the good stuff.
It’s that clarity of vision that propelled the Indiana State University graduate to the top of the industry after 10 years of various engineering experiences, including two years at enterprise data company Pure Storage. His entrepreneurial spirit has been obvious since he was a child, when he sold cookies to help get by: “I came from very humble beginnings where my family kind of struggled to make ends meet, to be quite honest,” he said. “And one of the people that I gain a lot of inspiration from is my mother. So she was extremely resilient in terms of, hey, here's what we want our kids to be.”
His mom got what she wanted, and now Ponnala is trying to pay that support forward, helping companies use Granica’s resources to get off the ground. Despite all that, he says that the company is still in the “first inning” of its existence. Play ball.
