Growing Kognitos with Binny Gill

Prateek Mathur
July 23, 2024

In the episode of How I'm Building This, Prateek interviews Binny Gill, the founder of Kognitos. Binny shares his journey from being a computer science enthusiast to starting his own company. He discusses the need to change the language of programming to make it more accessible and eliminate the bottleneck of developers. Kognitos aims to combine generative AI and logical reasoning to bring the power of AI to all enterprises. Binny emphasizes the importance of connecting the people building the product with the users and continuously iterating based on customer feedback. Kognitos uses various methods to find customers, including outbound emails, LinkedIn outreach, salespeople, and event participation. Their inbound strategy includes blogging, podcasts, website content, SEO, and advertisements. Binny emphasizes the importance of solving customer pain points and not focusing too much on technology. He also discusses the importance of founder mental health and staying optimistic. Kognitos plans to continue scaling by hiring more people and focusing on computer literacy. Their goal is to make AI safer by allowing natural language review of AI-generated instructions.

Takeaways:

  • The language of programming needs to evolve to make it more accessible and eliminate the bottleneck of developers.
  • Combining generative AI and logical reasoning can bring the power of AI to all enterprises.
  • Connecting the people building the product with the users and continuously iterating based on customer feedback is crucial for success.
  • The accessibility of an automation tool can greatly impact its adoption and effectiveness.
  • Understanding and addressing the pain points of customers is essential for building a successful business. Learning from users is important in the early stages of a startup
  • Various methods can be used to find customers, including outbound emails, LinkedIn outreach, salespeople, and event participation
  • Inbound strategy can include blogging, podcasts, website content, SEO, and advertisements
  • Solving customer pain points is more important than focusing on technology
  • Founder mental health is important, and staying optimistic is key
  • Scaling can be achieved by hiring more people and focusing on computer literacy
  • Kognitos aims to make AI safer by allowing natural language review of AI-generated instructions

Sound Bites: 

  • "The language of programming has to evolve rather than forcing humans to learn the language of machines."
  • "The only reason developers exist is because the language the business speaks and the language that the machine understands is different."
  • "We are living in the dark ages of computer science where the language of programming has a literacy rate of only 0.5%."
  • "Learning from your users is very important initially"
  • "If the message that you have actually talks about a pain point, people will, I mean, we were getting around 0.5% response, like people asking for a meeting"
  • "There's no one thing that you should do, especially in an early startup, you should try everything and then double down on what works"

In this episode, we cover:

00:00 Introduction and Background

05:20 Discovering Entrepreneurship

07:05 The Birth of Cognito's

12:52 Finding Investors and Believers

15:43 Kognitos Mission and Pain Points

23:39 Making Automation Tools Accessible

25:04 Finding Customers

27:57 Inbound Strategy

30:18 Outbound Strategy

34:11 Scaling

38:46 Founder Mental Health

45:57 AGI Safety

Where to find Binny:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/binnygill

Kognitos: https://www.kognitos.com

Where to find Prateek:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateekmathur

Activated Scale: https://www.activatedscale.com

Prateek Mathur

Before founding Activated Scale, Prateek spent the last 20 years selling for and building sales teams at startups and public companies. He has won numerous awards and recognitions over his sales career. Over the last 5 years, he has advised a number of startups on their GTM, sales hiring etc. Prateek has intricately seen the pitfalls that startups face when scaling their business and hiring sales talent. With Activated Scale, he aims to make sales hiring easier by connecting companies with experienced US-based sales talent fractionally. Prateek is fascinated by the drive of a startup founder and loves their passion, vision and mission to reimagine our world.