Saurabh Chauhan

Sure.

So I'll start with my journey at McKinsey first.

McKinsey was from 2013 to 15, when I was advising Fortune 500 clients on strategy and operations.

So that's really the place where I saw enterprise dysfunction at scale, but from the chair of a consultant.

So I think during that time, it was immense exposure to problem statements, but not necessarily

something where we could deliver impact beyond client recommendations so i think at some point i wanted to operate not advice and that's what essentially took me towards rocket internet which was my second scheme so

I ran a few ventures for them, the most notable one being Deraz.

So Deraz is a South Asian e-commerce marketplace that was acquired by Alibaba for $200 million in 2018.

So I ran the company in the Sri Lankan market for two years from 2015 to 17, built some, you know, essentially a headcount of five to 60 member team through the revenue 3x year over year.

for multiple years.

And honestly, I mean, what I greatly learned over there was managing 60 people was that we were essentially paying for judgment and getting it about 20% of the time.

The other 80% went to execution.

Lots of manual stuff happens when you're scaling e-commerce marketplaces, like chasing on invoices and reconciling spreadsheets and buying up on customer tickets.

It's the valuable part of every employee was being squeezed into essentially 20% of their day.

I took that learning from Rocket, and that's when I met my co-founder, Dimitri.

He's a PhD in artificial intelligence.

And honestly, we agreed that the next generation of software should not help humans do the work faster.

It should do the work and let humans manage it.

So that's what took us to Piclo.

We founded it in January 2021, went to Y Combinator in winter 2022, then moved to Google AI Accelerator.