#320 - Ruban Phukan, CEO Goodgist - on creating business resilience

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to redefine the way we learn and solve the growing skills gap. My guest is Ruban Phukan, CEO of Goodgist.Ruban is a serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience building technology products that solve real-world problems. He's written books about AI and holds several patents in this field. He was part of Yahoo's first data scientist team, collaborating closely with co-founder David Filo to use data to address complex business problems. In 2005, he co-founded Bixee.com, India's first vertical search engine employing patented technology. This company then merged with market leader MakeMyTrip and DataRPM, a pioneering Enterprise AI platform for industrial IoT, which was then acquired by Progress Software in 2017.In 2019, he co-founded GoodTrade.AI, an asset management and investment analysis platform centred around Generative AI.Most recently, he co-founded GoodGist, an AI startup for upskilling and research that tackles the challenges of scaling corporate skill development. Their mission: To organize the world's knowledge and make it universally accessible, conversational, and digestible in bite-sized chunks on demand.Their belief is that this creates a significant moat for their clients against competitors in today's fast-paced landscape,And this inspired me, and hence I invited Ruban to my podcast. We explore the challenges of continuous learning in today's fast-paced technological environment. He explains his first principles for making his strategic bets and why he opts to take a platform approach rather than a point solution approach. Last but not least, he explains his lessons from niching down and verticalizing his GTM approach around the platform. Here's one of his quotes:We don't try to build a custom solution for a custom problem. We try to look at the problem and say, 'Okay, so we are not trying to only solve for a gas turbine failure, how do we build that technology, so that now instead of just only solving for data coming out of gas turbines, it can also look at data coming out of smart cars? How can it also handle data coming out of smart televisions? So, the focus has always been in trying to understand the problem and try to generalize, so that it can solve more business use cases, without having to recreate something new every single time. During this interview, you will learn four things:How he's accelerating traction by packaging his horizontal platform around highly valuable & business-critical problems.How he goes about successfully serving the mid-market and large enterprise companies in their own unique ways.His approach to identifying new value possibilities in the market that are worth building solutions for.How he makes decisions on what to invest in, and what not. For more information about the guest from this week:Ruban PhukanWebsite: Goodgist