Business
If Toucan can, you can too! Arjun Devarajan and Vishnu Menon, Co-founders at Toucan AI, sit down with Braxton Madison to talk about how to actualize your dream of becoming an entrepreneur. While in undergrad Devarajan and Menon worked on a side project with some friends, creating a chat bot powered by Artificial Intelligence to answer students’ questions when a teacher is unavailable. After graduating from Duke University with degrees in Computer Science in 2018, they took this project to MIT’s summer accelerator, Play Labs, to expand their network and to begin fundraising to turn their project into a successful startup. Now working out of Atlanta’s ATDC Incubator, Toucan AI has found their niche as the sales bot revolutionizing e-commerce. With its instant setup and ease of use, Toucan AI makes the power of artificial intelligence accessible to even the smallest e-commerce businesses. Devarajan and Menon are young, but they bring incredible insights into starting a company, revealing the secrets of the Startup Dorm Room. Here is just the tip of the iceburgh of the fantastic questions they answer for success: Research project turned startup, how to conduct customer discovery? How to pivot based on customer demand? What is AI anyway? How to communicate technical solutions to nontechnical investors? What do investors care about? (the market, the problem, and the impact + KPIs) How to build a high tech solution with two people? What resources does Duke have for Startups? How to prepare yourself to start a company? Does college have more value in a high tech startup? Why network? How to raise funding? Is raising possible as a college student? Why join an accelerator/incubator? Should you keep back up plans or burn the ships and go all in on your startup? How to find the perfect co-founder? Book Recommendation: Startup Myths and Models, the very practical nuts and bolts of starting a company, a how to guide for getting started. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/startupdormroom/support