Akhil Mantripragada, co-founder of Mercury Fund portfolio company, Pie, joins Alex Gras to trace his journey from coding without a computer in eighth grade India to building a $1M+ revenue AI-native marketing platform for SMBs. Akhil shares how changing seven schools growing up forced him to become adaptable, why he spent hours writing multiple code versions on paper with only one hour per week at a computer lab, and how selling his first ed-tech company to UTSA funded grad school at Columbia.
The conversation reveals why Pie's first three hires were designers instead of engineers, his controversial belief that chat is the "lousiest way to interact with AI," and how meeting users where they're at - not where you want them to be - became the core design philosophy that lets three engineers do what used to take thirty. Plus, the framework for building modular systems where perfection lies in the architecture's inputs and outputs, not the code inside the black box.
