EP:34 Ex-Meta Engineer Turned Founder: Inside ScaleBuild Al with Ujwal Roy

Yeah, sure.

So first of all, thanks for having me here.

And great to be in the AI in NYC pod.

So I'm Ujwal.

why i started scale build ai is i need to talk a little bit about my background what was it doing before that so i worked for companies like meta micron intel mostly focused on the hardware side of things so i was in the enterprise cloud division where we were serving like the top hyperscalers in the world So when I worked for Micron and Intel, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, most of these top internet companies that were building data centers at very, very high speed, we used to put them in the bucket of hyperscalers.

So Micron and Intel was supplying the compute and memory chips, or memory and compute chips, right? So Micron was the biggest supplier of DRAM and SSD, or is the biggest supplier of DRAM and SSD in the US.

The only bigger companies bigger than Micron is SK Hynix and Samsung, but that's located in Korea.

So in the US, we had the biggest responsibility of delivering these storage and memory chips to the hyperscalers.

When it came to compute, then at that time when I was working in the corporate world, Intel was still the category leader.

So Intel was delivering tips like Intel Xenon scalable processors to the hyperscalers over here.

And working in the enterprise cloud division in both of these companies, and then later on working in Meta for OCP, Open Compute Platform, which is again their data center hyperscalar division and it's an architecture that Meta has now open sourced on which they're building all of their own data centers, AI clusters, things like that.

One thing that I quickly realized is that this AI thing is taking off and I had an early view in the data center business and also in the workload.

What exactly are these data centers processing? And I could see that AI is going to be like electricity pretty soon, where every company in the world, they cannot say that, yeah, we don't need electricity to operate.

Like electricity touches them one way or the other.

And then later on, when the internet came 30 years ago, now internet is touching every company in one way or the other, right? Like whether it's a...

banking and finance or healthcare education, like you name it, whatever, whatever vertical you talk about, electricity has touched them.

Internet has touched them.

And I could see that AI is actually going to be touching every company.

And just like in the.com boom or the.com era, you could see that the first thing that every company needed was a website, right? Like a.com website.

And that's how they entered the internet.

And then later on they created portals and things like that where their customers or their employees could interact and work on the company on the digital layer on the internet.

So I could actually tell that every company in the world now will need AI and there has to be AI system integrators that actually delivers AI to them because AI was so brand new and it was created by few select groups of people in the world.

that we didn't even have enough people to actually just deliver AI or basically a company XYZ could not just go out in the market and open the position of AI engineer or AI system integration engineer and then hire out because that role didn't exist, the training didn't exist.

So that's why I started ScaleBuild AI to fulfill that gap that was created immediately in the market after these model companies started coming out with APIs.

We were one of the first system integration company that were integrating OpenAI APIs to the companies that already has large amount of historical data or they're generating a lot of data on a daily basis.