Venmo’s First Engineer on Startups, AI, and Selling to Google: Shreyans Bhansali

So yeah, I'd love to hear about first your take on working at a startup as one of the first couple engineers and how you see that.

Venmo was my first startup experience.

It was my first tech experience.

And it was the first time I worked where it didn't feel like work.

It just felt like playing.

And from the first months of that, I knew that was the kind of thing I should always be doing.

I'd been a strategy consultant before that.

And I was terrible at it.

Mostly because I didn't really feel the problems.

Like, you know, an agribusiness in Indonesia is like so outside my world and something that I could feel like I could control that when I joined Venmo, I could control so much of it.

I could make a thing and put it in people's hands and work directly with the two other people that were doing it.

And it just felt more me than anything I'd done.

And which is why I've kept doing it.

How was this founding team at Venmo? Were they technical? Was the product the same? What was that like when you joined?

Yeah, the founders are both engineers.

We were all in computer science together at Penn.

That's how I knew them.

And it was very much an engineering company, engineering led.

I mean, it was very product minded as well because we were the users of it.

We were the best users of the product and we used it way more than anybody would use it for many years to come.

So we understood the problem.

intimately, but it was an engineering led company.

We had to solve a lot of pretty difficult engineering problems to make it happen.

The product, when I joined, interestingly, I mean, I joined six months into the company.

It was almost fully formed.