Chapter 1: What inspired Ashwin Agrawal to create MobiusEngine.ai?
All of the failure points have been of us not being able to scale fast enough. I've always focused on acquisition and growth, and I've tried to scale that. But every time I've been successful with the acquisition and growth, I've actually seen failure points and cracks on my operations and delivery.
So I think the way I've approached it is to not think too much about it, but let that become a problem and then fix it. So it has guided me to acquire where we can. And then whenever we've had failure points, we step back then. What can we be doing longer term to make sure that doesn't happen?
Chapter 2: How did Ashwin's past experiences shape his entrepreneurial journey?
And how do we scale? My name is Ashwin, and I am the founder of MobiusEngine.ai.
This is CodeStory. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Six months moonlighting. There's nothing on the back end. Who share what it takes to change an industry. I don't exactly know what to do next. It took many guys to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. A company is its people. The teams help each other achieve more. Most proud of our team.
Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, mind you. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology.
Chapter 3: What are the core features of MobiusEngine.ai?
All this and more on Codestory. I'm your host, Noah Labhart. And today, how Ashwin Agrawal is helping you land interviews ten times faster by taking on the soup-to-nuts interview process. Today's episode is brought to you by .techdomains. And this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, I was building my startup and went hunting for that perfect .com and found next to nothing.
So I did what every founder does, settled. Here's what I wish someone had told me. You're building a tech startup, just get a .techdomain. It instantly tells investors and customers what you're about. Don't overthink it. Secure your .techdomain today from any registrar of your choice. This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing.
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Chapter 4: How does MobiusEngine.ai help job seekers transition effectively?
So they make better plans, write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops. If you're running Cloud Code, Cursor, or any agentic workflow, Unblocked is worth a look. Learn more at getunblocked.com slash codestory. This episode is sponsored by Mesmo.
If your team is collecting large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, but still struggling to get timely answers, Mesmo can help. Mesmo is an active telemetry platform that processes and enriches observability data in real time before it's stored or analyzed. That means lower data volume, lower cost, and faster root cause analysis across your existing observability tools.
To see how it works, get a demo at mezmo.com slash codestory. That's M-E-Z-M-O dot com slash codestory. This episode is sponsored by BrainGrid. If you are building with AI coding tools, but your features keep breaking, you need to check out BrainGrid. It is the product management agent for AI builders.
BrainGrid turns messy ideas into clear specs, tasks, and prompts that coding agents like Cursor and Claude can actually build the right way. Ship real software, not fragile prototypes. Start free at braingrid.ai. Ashwin Agrawal came to the US when he was 17 to Rochester for school.
He now lives in the Bay Area and admits he misses his friends on the East Coast as they all stayed on that side of the US. That said, he does not miss the winters. He has been building his current venture for three to four years and prior to that, he was at Google for a decade, a part of Google Cloud's huge growth trajectory.
Outside of tech, he has a family with two middle school sons with whom he likes to spend a lot of time with, hiking or eating good sushi. Ashwin was laid off from a few jobs in the past. After experiencing this, he vowed to build a solution that would help people going through this sort of experience. After the last layoff, he formed his company at 4.30 a.m.
in the morning to help anyone at point A wanting to go to point B. This is the creation story of Mobius Engine.
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Chapter 5: What challenges has Ashwin faced while scaling his startup?
Mobius is really a solution to making the transition of one job to another really easy, effective and efficient for people. That's the overarching goal. And having been laid off twice, I had felt the pain. And the first time I got laid off, I decided that if I was to ever get laid off again, I'm not going to go back. into trying to get another job.
But I'm going to work on building the solution up. At Google, I got laid off in 2023. And I got laid off, I believe, on January 11th is when I got the email at 2 AM in the morning. And I had just gotten up to get a glass of water. And I saw my phone buzzing. I saw the layoff news. I was reading the TDs. I expected something big was happening on the layoff front. It was still a surprise.
At 2 a.m., I got that email. At 4.30 a.m., I founded my company. And I got going and there was certainly sadness and there was a lot of change. But I distracted myself in building this company and started helping other people right away. And that's how we got started in 2023. And then now we are entering the fourth year of operations we've done.
Chapter 6: How does Ashwin prioritize customer needs in product development?
Quite well, we've come a long way. The overall mission has still been the same, which is for anybody who is in that field, Point A, wanting to go to point B. Either somebody who's existing, who's working currently, who's not moving up, who's feeling frustrated with their current job, or somebody who doesn't have employment, who wants to move into another job.
Anyone who's making that transition, we want to be that solution to help you do that.
Let's dive into what you would consider the MVP for Mobius Engines. That first version of the product you built, maybe it was shortly after that 4.30 a.m. formation. But I'm curious about that first MVP and what sort of tools you were using to bring it to life.
So, you know, when I was at Google, I already had been working with data analytics AI for several years before ChatGPD had come out. I was quite already engaged in the direction in which Things were going, architecture was going, infrastructure was going. And so ChatGPT when it came was a little bit of a surprise, but I had seen ChatGPT at Google in the past with the primitive versions of Gemini.
And the MVP I knew was going to be a combination of humans and AI into an agentic workflow that could do much better than any individual could in the work that's required to go from that point A to point B. So when 2022 and ChatGPT came, 2023 early days, I just learning from my own experience in the past with
other things that I've seen, including cloud infrastructure, the tech stack often changes quite a bit when a new disruptive innovation comes out.
Therefore, I decided to lean more on the human agentic workflows and combine that with a little bit of AI to form an MVP that was doing some of the basic tasks required from going to point A to point B. We picked up, for example, doing job applications or building resumes. So those were the couple of things that we took on. And we offered those to clients and customers regularly.
to just do that much better than what they could do on their own.
This episode is sponsored by Brain Grid. Building with AI coding tools is exciting until the moment things start breaking.
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Chapter 7: What lessons has Ashwin learned from mistakes in building his team?
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If you want reliable features instead of fragile prototypes, try BrainGrid for free at braingrid.ai. That's braingrid.ai. Today's episode is brought to you by Dot Tech Domains. And this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, when I was building my own tech startup, I went on a hunt for that elusive dot com. Looked high, looked low, and guess what I found? Nothing.
What I did find cost me an arm and a leg. So I did what every founder does under pressure. Threw in extra letters, settled for the less than optimal name. And here's what I wish someone had said to me back then.
Chapter 8: What is the future vision for MobiusEngine.ai?
Noah, you're building a tech startup. Just get a .tech domain. Tech startup, .tech domain. It could not be more obvious. It tells investors, customers, and anyone who looks at your website, really, that tech is at the core of your build. And I've kicked myself plenty since, especially when I see the clean and sharp names tech companies have landed on .tech.
Nothing.tech, 1x.tech, Aurora.tech, CES.tech, Ultra.tech, Alice.tech, Neon.tech, Blaze.tech, Pi.tech. You get the idea. So take it from someone who learned it the hard way. If you're building a tech startup, don't overthink it. Secure your .tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. So you've got the MVP and it's working. How did you put together your roadmap? How did you build that?
I'm curious about what sort of criteria process you went through to help you decide that, okay, this is the next most important thing to build or to address with Mobius Engine.
I didn't really build any roadmap. I was bootstrapping the company. As much as I'd like to think that I was in a really good financial place after the severance, I needed the money, right? So I needed to bootstrap and I knew that I had to be very careful with where I invest and how much money I sink in. So there were two guiding principles that I had set for myself.
One was that I'm going to be extremely customer-driven. So instead of me deciding what I want to build, I'm going to build what...
clients and customers are willing to pay for and they want so that was my first guiding principle the other guiding principle that i had was in terms of delivery i wanted to stay cash positive from my first client onwards so i wanted to be profitable right from my first client not wait for that profitability to come and so by putting those two constraints
I think it took me down a path that can actually be very different than what most people think about design thinking or product roadmaps or build and iterate. I just took a very pragmatic business-like approach where I didn't have any money to invest and I wanted to make sure that I'm adding value to my customers and I wanted to make a little bit of money from the very beginning.
So then, you know, how have you built your team? How did you go about deciding that, okay, these are the winning horses to join you to go build Mobius Engine?
A lot of people have come and gone at Mobius as typically would happen in an early stage company, particularly one that is being bootstrapped. I've relied on people who I knew, and I think my board is a group of people who are extremely talented at what they do, They're amazing, but more importantly, they are people who I trust and who trust me.
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