Tanmai Gopal built Hasura into infrastructure most founders dream about - an open-source engine with 600 million downloads, running underneath half the Fortune 500. Then ChatGPT made him decide his own company was an existential risk. If AI can write the code, what's the point of a tool that helps you write it faster? So he ran the same company through three lives in eighteen months: Hasura the GraphQL engine, then PromptQL the enterprise "AI analyst" that raised a $25M Series B and a $100M Series C on the way to a billion-dollar-plus valuation, and now after moving his own team off Slack in February and living through what he calls three weeks of "AI psychosis" — a multiplayer AI workspace pitched as the thing that kills Slack. In this episode, Praveen and Brady talk to Tanmai about why there isn’t an analytics agent yet. And according to Tanmai, code is portable but data isn't. The moment you point AI at a company's real numbers, you hit two problems that took him years to appreciate: Context i.e nobody in a big company actually knows everything, and definitions rot faster than you can capture them, to the point where Instacart had six different, all-correct definitions of a single metric and leadership didn't know who knew. And security : the instant you make AI multiplayer, every person you pull into a thread becomes a new way to leak data. Hasura had spent years solving exactly that access-and-permissions layer, which is Tanmai's case for why now, finally, he thinks he’s found the right product market fit. Tanmai walks us through the 30-day "tournament sprint" that produced the current product and what it feels like on the other side, when ninety percent of your DMs vanish and no word you say goes unacted-upon. He believes that we are at the precipice of a fast takeoff and predicts layoffs "the size of which we've never seen" within six to nine months, with only the people who own context surviving. Along the way Tanmai also makes the case for why the form factor you launch with is the one you're stuck with, why Cursor struggled to become a coding agent, and why Slack, even if it wanted to, can't simply become PromptQL. As always, like most episodes of Zero Shot, there’s a lot of disagreements, and challenges, but that’s that makes this a must-listen. If this episode resonated with you, we’d love to hear from you and also see you at our sixth live event on how professionals, companies, and India keep their edge as AI gets more powerful. It's on August 1 at the Bangalore International Centre in Indiranagar. Livestream tickets are available if you can't make it in person and prices go up soon. Here are all the details: https://the-ken.com/events/intelligence-independence/ — This episode was produced by Praveen Gopal Krishnan and edited by Rajiv CN. — 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.
