Premal Shah on leadership
From VOICES - Premal Shah · · THEWELLBEINGPROJECT
“When my board chair said 'we're not gonna be able to go with you' I was sad — I was devastated; I went from feeling special about having nurtured Kiva to feeling very worthless.”
On , Premal Shah, Cofounder at 6sense, spoke about leadership during VOICES - Premal Shah on THEWELLBEINGPROJECT.
About Premal Shah
Premal Shah, co-founder and head of engineering at 6sense, discussed the company's technical evolution and current AI initiatives in a February 2024 podcast. He stated that 6sense, founded in 2013, originally focused on predictive analytics for B2B sales and marketing and has since become a large intent data provider. Shah described the company's infrastructure, including a migration to Kubernetes, the use of Hive and Spark for big data processing, and the adoption of SingleStore to address data fragmentation. He noted that 6sense is experimenting with generative AI and RAG, building an internal Slack bot for support that performs RAG-style searches over a knowledge base, and relying on external LLMs such as OpenAI rather than building and hosting models internally. In a 2019 interview, Shah reflected on his earlier career, including his time at PayPal and his role as co-founder and former president of Kiva, the online lending platform. He recounted his initial belief that Kiva was the right approach to combining PayPal and microcredit, and his disappointment when the board chair told him he would not be able to continue as CEO. Shah said he felt "very worthless" and "angry" after that experience, and that he later applied to a well-being project. He described a subsequent "rebalancing of life" toward family, health, and connection with others.
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