Before They Were Founders, They Were Engineers: What Would They Tell the Next Generation?
Every Engineers' Day, the familiar tributes return: engineering breakthroughs, college memories and tributes to Sir M. Visvesvaraya. But engineering itself is changing fast. AI can now write code. New tools and frameworks arrive constantly. Companies have access to more data and computing power than ever before. Yet many of the problems engineers need to solve are still very human. People are overwhelmed by information. Businesses have powerful technology they struggle to use. And new systems do not always solve the problems they were built for. For Engineers' Day, StartupTalky spoke to engineers who went on to build companies. We asked them two questions:What should the next generation of engineers focus on solving? And if they were engineering students again today, what would they do differently? Their careers have taken them through software, enterprise technology, AI and digital products. Their answers come from different experiences, but point to a common idea: knowing how to build technology is important. Knowing what is worth building matters just as much. ForRonsley Vaz, Founder of Amplify AI, the journey began with software. Vaz completed a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science at Karnatak University in 2001 and a Master of Software Engineering at Griffith University in 2006. He worked as a software engineer before moving into businesses in hospitality and podcasting. In 2022, he founded Amplify AI. Its product, Friday, is an AI Chief of Staff that helps founders delegate recurring work, prepare decisions and produce content in their own voice. His journey across engineering and entrepreneurship changed how he looks at technology. For Vaz, the real test is not how complex a system is, but how much unnecessary work it removes for people. That is why he believes the next generation should focus on cognitive overload: the constant remembering, switching and repeating that takes up people's attention. As the technology industry focuses on making AI more capable, his point brings the focus back to the user. The question is not only what AI can do, but whether it can make people's work simpler. Sameer Narkar, Founder and CEO of Konnect Insights, sees another gap from his experience working with large businesses. An Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering graduate from Pune University, Narkar worked in the finance software industry before founding Konnect Insights in 2016. That experience gave him an understanding of enterprise technology, data systems and how large organisations make decisions. Konnect Insights is an AI-powered omni-channel customer experience platform. It brings together social listening, ticketing, CRM, analytics, publishing and AI-powered customer intelligence. The company says it is used by more than 500 enterprise brands across over 35 countries. After years of working with enterprise data, Narkar believes the bigger opportunity is not simply to make AI more powerful. It is to make it useful to people who are
Original source: StartupTalky