I have been building engineering teams and AI applications for the last decade, as a programmer, entrepreneur (albeit failed) and startup tech lead. I have launched marquee cutting-edge products for ThoughSpot over the last 5 years - SpotIQ, Monitor and Sage. I write to share my lessons from being a technical leader in a startup, working on high-risk high-reward unsolved engineering & ML problems, and more recently building with GenAI.