Venmo’s First Engineer on Startups, AI, and Selling to Google: Shreyans Bhansali

Shreyans Bhansali was the first engineer at Venmo, the founder of Socratic, and later joined Google when Socratic was acquired, then was a co-founder of Maven. In this episode, we talk about what Venmo was actually like in the early days, we get into the story behind Socratic, how the Google acquisition happened, and what changed after moving from a startup into Big Tech. Later, we talk about AI, software engineering, and why Shreyans thinks the current AI moment feels similar to the early 2010s startup wave: obvious in hindsight, but still full of unsolved problems.