Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs
“I want to create, and I want to create in a way that makes the most sense for where I am in my life and for my family,” Kabir Shahani said. (Photo courtesy of Kabir Shahani)
It’s been nearly three years since Kabir Shahani stepped aside as the CEO of Amperity, the Seattle-based customer-intelligence startup he co-founded.
The longtime founder and entrepreneur admits he’s a little “out of the business” of posting on social media about his latest startup endeavors.
But that changes a little bit with the release of a new episode of the “Shift AI Podcast,” where Shahani discusses his backstory and what’s ahead, including what led to success at Amperity, why he left, and what he’s building now.
Shahani got his entrepreneurial start with Appature, a health marketing startup which sold to IMS health in 2013.
He co-founded Amperity in 2016 alongside CTO Derek Slager — his co-founder at Appature — to help companies fine-tune targeted marketing campaigns by connecting fragmented data sources about individual customer habits via emails, purchase history, mobile app usage, website traffic, physical store visits, and more.
The enterprise software startup earned “unicorn” status in July 2021, reaching a $1 billion valuation after raising $100 million.
Shahani abruptly stepped down as CEO and a board member in 2022.
Amperity, which has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in the past few years, just hired Salesforce and Oracle vet Tony Alika Owens as its new CEO.
And Shahani is now helping build new companies, as founder of Amp It Up Ventures, which supports high-growth software businesses.
“Learning and relationships are the two currencies of life, in my opinion,” Shahani said in conversation with “Shift AI” host Boaz Ashkenazy. “It’s been a fascinating journey to discover my love for creation and creating companies.”
Listen below, and continue reading for highlights, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe to the Shift AI Podcast and hear more episodes at ShiftAIPodcast.com.
Building partnerships with customers
“Customer-driven development is everything. It’s all about creating businesses that understand real problems for customers and work with those customers to solve this problem. We really did, at least in my little world, kind of invent that at Amperity where we were able to work really closely with these customers. And we said, ‘Look, we know you have this problem. We know it’s unsolved and it’s really difficult to solve technically. And so we can go on our own and do it in a vacuum, or we can do it with you. And we think if we do it with you, not only will we create a better product and a better solution, and we’ll solve it in a more durable way faster, but we’ll also do it in a way that is really valuable to your business and the pain that you feel today.’
Developing the relationships with those customers creates the environment to be able to innovate and create extraordinary software and understanding what has to happen around the software. Business is not only the product. It’s how do you deliver the product? How do you service the product? How do you build that community of customers that make a living, breathing organism that becomes the company?”
Priorities, and stepping down as Amperity CEO
“It was a hard time. Even deciding to start a second company was a super hard decision. And certainly, in hindsight, I should have taken a lot more time, and I should have been more thoughtful.
That being said, I don’t regret starting the company and creating that business and the extraordinary customers and the extraordinary people that I’ve had the opportunity to build that business with, and continue to have the opportunity to build that business with. … I’ve had to go through a lot in my own life, and I’ve had to go through my own struggle and go through my own pain to be able to land in a view that gives you that liberty and the ability to say, I want to create, and I want to create in a way that makes the most sense for where I am in my life and for my family, which I, candidly, didn’t always prioritize. And I’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs listening can relate to that.
It’s really hard when you’re in that hyper growth and you’re as focused as people like you and I are you sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture. And so I got that reminder, whether I like it or not, and I think I couldn’t be more grateful for it, and being able to take that and say, ‘All right, well, by God’s grace, I have some space to be able to really think about how I want to spend my professional time and what I want.
For me right now, my impact has to be with my family, and I certainly want to have a professional expression and Amp It Up Ventures, I think has become the thing that I feel like gives me professional expression. I think it’s become the thing that allows me to feel like I’m doing positive things for others, which I care a lot about.”
What is Amp It Up Ventures?
“We don’t know what the hell we are. And we’re figuring that out. So I’ll tell you what we’re not. I don’t think we’re an incubator, even though I’ve co founded both of these companies (Adora and Avante) with these extraordinary innovators and CEOs.
The reason I say that we’re not an incubator is my impression of an incubator model is that you want to put a lot of bets out there. And you want to create a bit of a pipeline and throughput of companies, so some of them become winners, understanding that you want everything to win if you can, but that’s not statistically likely.
The reason we’re not that is we’re not going to work on anything where we’re not going to win. We’re not investors or venture capital, because we’re not deploying a fund, although that’s certainly in our headspace. But we do work hand-in-hand to get the companies funded. We’re not private equity because we’re not coming in and sort of buying a business the way you think of traditional private equity. However, what we are doing is really running very specific playbooks. We’ve got opinions and strong points of view, and we’re asking for partnership and saying, ‘Hey, in terms of partnering to build this company together we’re going to ask you to do things a certain way.’”
Describe the future of work and future of AI in two words
“Paradigm and enablement. Not to reference a polarizing figure right now, but … in 2013 I went and bought a Tesla, and there weren’t a lot of Teslas around. And the paradigm shift was so significant. When you free yourself of the paradigm of an internal combustion engine, that just sort of changes the game. AI is that on steroids. I’ve talked to lots of friends and entrepreneurs that built companies in the ’90s very successfully. And some of the conversations that really stick with me is hearing this is bigger than the internet. The paradigm shift is so significant when you think about the underlying capability of what we’re seeing out of core AI and large language models. And the reason I talk about enablement is there are so many tools and so many use cases in terms of how you function day to day as a human being, and of course how your businesses function. Using AI is not only a competitive advantage, if you don’t do it I think you’re going to get left behind.”
