Engineering Founders

Finding opportunity in areas w/ poor implementation, shaping tech innovation into products & creating fast time to value w/ Gaurav Oberoi @ Lexion.ai


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Gaurav Oberoi, CEO & Co-founder @ Lexion shares about the research / EIR path from the Allen Institute for AI to founding Lexion. We talk about finding ideas in areas with poor implementation, how to actually shape “cool tech” into products, and tactical actions you can use to measure progress. Plus how to go from idea to action & optimize for fast time to value. Gaurav also shares how he defines “done” for products, creating a culture of velocity and strategic thinking & why happy customers are engaged customers.

ABOUT GAURAV OBEROI

Gaurav Oberoi is the CEO and co-founder of Lexion. He started his career as an engineer at Amazon, before moving on to found and sell two startups (BillMonk, and Precision Polling), and build a $20M+ ARR business from $0 as a VP of Product at SurveyMonkey. Gaurav co-founded Lexion as the first EIR at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He thrives on building products that customers love, with diverse teams that enjoy working together.

"We met with a team and when we asked them what intake forms they need, they had really long meetings and it slowed down the whole process and we're like, 'Gosh, we need to kill the intake form. You don't need an intake form.' Like, that shouldn't be a blocker to them getting value. That kind of narrow focus on "time to value needs to be really fast" is something that we've imbued across the whole company. So it's not just product and engineering, but it's also customer success. It's also sales. It's also our marketing materials right up front so that the value of the whole product ties in, all the way to pricing.”

- Gaurav Oberoi   

ABOUT LEXION

Lexion is a powerfully simple operations workflow and contracting platform that helps teams get deals done faster. Lexion streamlines and centralizes the end-to-end contract lifecycle with intuitive email-driven intake and workflows, simple no-code automation, best-in-class AI, and more. Lexion was one of the first AI companies to leverage LLMs in building production-quality applications. The company was founded in 2018 at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is backed by an iconic Silicon Valley law firm, and recently raised a $20M Series B with support from top-tier VC firms. Learn more about the company at https://www.lexion.ai/

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SHOW NOTES:
  • Gaurav’s experience @ the Allen Institute for AI & how it kickstarted his founder journey w/ Lexion (2:06)
  • Research process strategies that helps founders identify business insights (5:50)
  • The iterations that led to Lexion’s current product offering (8:23)
  • What gave Gaurav the insight to say “no” to ideas (10:39)
  • Lessons learned that Gaurav infused into the strategy for developing Lexion (12:56)
  • Small, tactical actions to help founders measure progress (15:55)
  • Navigating the transition to actually building an idea & taking action (16:48)
  • Understand the accolades your product can help customers receive (19:24)
  • Designing your org to think strategically & drive insights like a founder (23:59)
  • Determining which features to build first in order to achieve PMF (26:20)
  • Strategies for identifying / confirming the next big feature opportunity (29:33)
  • How to synthesize your learnings & research (32:19)
  • Implementing metric tools to analyze insights / confirm hypotheses (34:37)
  • What it means for a product or feature to be “done” (36:33)
  • Why a happy customer equals an engaged customer (39:24)
  • Creating a culture of velocity within elements of your organization (42:32)
  • Encourage empathy for customers within your org to fuel velocity (46:43)
  • Rapid fire questions (48:45)
LINKS AND RESOURCES
  • Organizing eng by strategic themes / complete units of value & consensus building to drive velocity w/ Emad Elwany #159 - Our episode with Gaurav’s co-founder Emad Elwany!
  • goberoi.com - Gaurav Oberoi’s essays on technology and startups.
  • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein’s tale of the rebellion of a former penal colony on the Moon against its masters on the Earth.
This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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Engineering FoundersBy The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)