He grew up in a small town in Assam, once scored a zero in mathematics, and went on to study at IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad.
What Srikanth Velamakanni said
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Srikanth Velamakanni, cofounder of Fractal, discussed his company's journey from a 2010 crisis to a recent IPO. He described losing a quarter of his team to resignations after cofounders left, and how he rebuilt Fractal's culture on humility after recognizing his ego contributed to the problem. He explained Fractal's business model: using AI to optimize decisions for large enterprises, serving about 150 clients meeting his '10-20-30' criteria (at least $10 billion revenue, $20 billion market cap, 30 million end customers). He discussed the IPO's impact on his mindset, shifting to think from shareholders' perspective. He traced AI's history from Alan Turing to ChatGPT, predicted full-fledged AI agents as co-workers within 2-3 years, and expressed optimism about AI ushering in a post-scarcity world in 5-10 years. He recommended books including Cialdini's 'Influence' and Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning.'
Key takeaways
Fractal grew 100 times in size from $4.5 million revenue in 2010 to serve about 150 of the world's largest companies.
Fractal serves five of the 'Magnificent Seven' biggest tech companies in the world.
Velamakanni predicts full-fledged AI agents will work as co-workers within the next 2-3 years.
He believes AI will usher in a post-scarcity world within the next 5-10 years.
After the IPO, Velamakanni shifted to thinking about the business from shareholders' perspective, prioritizing net income.
23:13Investors absolutely but even people your own team like no everyone starts to mistrust yeah because you just seen a catastrophic explosion happen right?
25:30So how does one how did you and how does one deal with ego?
30:42... right you put in 21 years before you got there and reach unicorn status so how did you deal with your ego or manage your ego and the second is did that push you further to deliver or was there a sense of okay now it's come to a good point?
36:12And what are some of the companies that you work with?
Buy out their shareholding and then Fractal was set up to succeed in 2010. So 3 years lost but good news is that from there onwards we started growing really nicely. We were just 4.5 million in revenue in 2010 and from there we are 100 times the size in the next 15 years.
Okay. So three questions. The first one is when this kind of a not hostile but aggressive shift happens investors lose faith. How was that navigation for you? Especially because now you're in a CEO position. You're answerable. You're the be-all and end-all of all the answers. Investors absolutely but even people your own team like no everyone starts to mistrust yeah because you just seen a catastrophic explosion happen right?
There was a day I was in Bangalore when all the resignation spirit of resignation started coming in. I was in a meeting with another guy who had just sold a company I was trying to get some advice from him on how to raise capital in Fractal and suddenly I see him on my Blackberry like two resignations on my Blackberry and I said Ganesh something is going on and then a few minutes later there were like three more resignations and suddenly I realized that something was shifting beneath my feet. I told Ganesh I'm very sorry I have to head back to Mumbai. I came back to Mumbai there were 13 resignations by the time I returned and a quarter of Fractal had just quit Fractal on that day because they had lost faith. They going with the other.
Exactly. But then others the 60 other people who were in Fractal also started to lose faith in Fractal. So resurrecting that faith telling them that our future is bright, great things are going to happen. We are in a great space. We have great clients etc. was.
So it was three years of hell and this was not just this right even your family members everyone is telling you that oh this has been a catastrophic mistake on your part and you've just wasted seven or eight years of your life you're back to zero and you have to build this all over again do you really want to do it. So keeping faith while such a thing was happening was very hard but thanks to my wife who was very supportive through this entire period she was helping with all the various legal things we had to handle so we managed this crisis and we went forward.
And the second question is you've spoken about ego and you said that certain decisions were driven by ego. How do you feel about that now? And how can one identify that? Because for people watching, you can figure it out looking backwards. But in the moment, if you kind of pick up on it, it can save you years of heartbreak or years of regret, right? So how does one how did you and how does one deal with ego?
In general? Entrepreneurship is an exercise in ego destruction. I'm sure you will relate with that because you realize right after you set out to do something. You have to convince the whole world that what you're doing is not a waste of time. And that is worth doing. Whether you have to convince people to join you, investors, clients, everyone is telling you that this is not worth it because you are essentially climbing uphill. It's always that hill climbing that is involved in any entrepreneurship. So in that process unless you cut your ego to size it's very difficult to succeed.
I did not realize that for the first six seven years but after the founders quit I realized that here's here's my part in this game which is these guys elected me as a CEO. They gave me this mandate. Obviously they had the right intent in place. So what happened in 6 months that they lost faith in me? So what did I do wrong? And I realized that maybe my aggressive way of how I was trying to manage this business or I was dealing with them. Maybe I didn't respect them enough. I realized that my ego was an important part of that.
So I went and apologized to them and I think I sort of built a Fractal culture which is built on humility after that. But it started with a lot of ego. Even then in the next 15 20 years also I've realized that every so often I realize that this ego is again getting out of hand and I have to cut it back to size in order to succeed.
Yes. Success you know success is the biggest problem right when you succeed suddenly you start feeling that everything you've done so far has been right and therefore I'm always right. That's the mindset that you get into to realize that no, you've been successful in spite of some of the terrible decisions you've made. In spite of all your weaknesses, because of a few strengths and because of the people around you, you have succeeded. Then that keeps you in check that you're not the be all and end all of everything. You don't always have the right answer and so on.
I read philosophy. I when I was going through a very difficult time during my undergrad days, I had started reading Vivekananda. So I read the whole complete works of Vivekananda some eight books eight volumes I read most of it so I was quite inspired by that and it really impacted me quite deeply. I felt that I found the answer to life and everything at that time. So since then I've been interested in critical thinking in philosophy. I did some courses on philosophy, western philosophy, eastern philosophy and so on but not very religious in some ways.
24 more exchanges in this transcript
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Velamakanni, S. (2026, July 8). How to Build an AI Company? - Srikanth Velamakanni on Starting Up, Leadership & Ego | Karishma Mehta [Interview transcript]. Humans of Bombay. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1071570/
MLA
Srikanth Velamakanni. "How to Build an AI Company? - Srikanth Velamakanni on Starting Up, Leadership & Ego | Karishma Mehta." Humans of Bombay, 8 Jul. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1071570/.
BibTeX
@misc{velamakanni2026_1071570,
author = {Srikanth Velamakanni},
title = {How to Build an AI Company? - Srikanth Velamakanni on Starting Up, Leadership \& Ego | Karishma Mehta},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Humans of Bombay. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jul},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1071570/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
