Zero Shot

0.0 (0)
TECHNOLOGY
UPDATED WEEKLY

Join Brady Ng, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, and Rohin Dharmakumar of The Ken as they discuss the big ideas in artificial intelligence. You’ll get the macro view, explore their experiments in practical applications, go deeper than the news coverage you’ve seen, and hear about the implications of the latest developments. Nothing is off the table.

21 HR AGO

The AI wearable market is full of dead devices. NeoSapien thinks India can turn the tide

What is the market for AI wearables? And what does they do that a phone already doesn’t? These were the two main questions we asked Dhananjay Yadav, the co-founder and CEO of NeoSapien, a startup that makes an AI-powered pendant that “transcribes in real time, summarises what matters, and reminds you to follow through”. He calls it a “productivity tool” that will change how we interact with devices. But the AI wearable market is tricky. Remember Humane? The AI pin company? It raised $230 million, shipped fewer than 10,000 devices, and permanently bricked every single one of them on February 28, 2025. And Rabbit, the other AI wearable startup that made a big splash, sold 100,000 units and watched 95% of its users disappear within five months. Then there was Friend, a $99 AI pendant that listened to your life and sent you encouraging messages. It died quietly too. And yet here is Dhananjay who is building a pendant in Bengaluru, telling us India can win the global AI wearable race. And the product, he says, will be used by regular people: small business owners, real estate agents, and even journalists. Tune in! ____ This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Cymasonic productions.____ Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears! Recommended Reading: NeoSapien What Anthropic’s Mythos can hack in hours, Indian banks take months to fix Note taking app Plaud Can a Note-Taking AI Bracelet Really Make You More Productive? I Tested One to Find Out.

50 min
29 APR

How Presentations.AI went from $0 to $5M in revenue with zero new hires

Most AI startup success stories start in November 2022. For the story of Presentations.AI, however, we have to go back to 2005. That year, Sumanth Raghavendra, who is also the co-founder of The Ken, started his first venture. It was called InstaCall. The idea was to build an online office suite in Bangalore with a team of six engineers. They ended up cracking the product, but had no way to market and sell it. In 2012, when the iPhone opened up the App Store, they dropped the full office suite and bet everything on one slice of it — presentations. That became Deck, a mobile-first presentation app. Deck’s thesis was that users came to a presentation tool knowing what they wanted to say, and just needed help saying it visually. But that assumption fell apart really quickly. People would land on the first slide, type a title, and freeze. This insight sent the team down a years-long road of trying to solve presentations with traditional machine learning tools. Then ,GPT arrived. And Deck rebuilt itself entirely, changed its tech stack, and cracked its unit economics. It reinvented itself and launched as Presentations.AI in 2023. It hit one million users in 84 days and soon surfaced at the top of every search for "AI presentation maker". It survived and rode the AI wave. Sumanth tells you the story of how that panned out. Tune in!____ This episode was produced by Vidhatri Rao and edited by Cymasonic Productions. ____ Zeus, the mascot of Zero Shot, was generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken. Write to us at Zeroshot@the-ken.com. We are all ears! ___ Recommended Reading: Your Startup Is Probably Dead on Arrival AI and the end of SaaS playbooks https://presentations.ai https://aiboomi.org

58 min
31/12/2025

Taking aim for 2026

It’s the end of 2025, so we don’t have a full episode of Zero Shot for you today. This podcast launched in September, and we’ve produced 14 episodes for you so far. We’ve covered a wide range of topics, and our conversations—between Praveen, Rohin, and Brady—only work because you’re willing to sit with the complexities we wade into. We know artificial intelligence will move fast in 2026, so we’ll keep asking the questions that matter in this AI hype cycle. We’re glad you’re coming along with us. So, thank you, and we’ll be back next week. As always, if you’d like to get in touch with any or all of our hosts, please drop us a note at zeroshot@the-ken.com. We respond to all messages. The cover art of Zero Shot is generated by AI. Everything else is made by humans, just like all articles, columns, newsletters, and other podcasts created by The Ken.

2 min
23/09/2025

Introducing Zero Shot

Join Brady Ng, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, and Rohin Dharmakumar of The Ken as they discuss the big ideas in artificial intelligence. You’ll get the macro view, explore their experiments in practical applications, go deeper than the news coverage you’ve seen, and hear about the implications of the latest developments. Nothing is off the table.

2 min

See All (34)

Join Brady Ng, Praveen Gopal Krishnan, and Rohin Dharmakumar of The Ken as they discuss the big ideas in artificial intelligence. You’ll get the macro view, explore their experiments in practical applications, go deeper than the news coverage you’ve seen, and hear about the implications of the latest developments. Nothing is off the table.