Samriddho Ghosh is a conversational AI expert and the founder of two startups, which he later exited. He has been an entrepreneur since he was a teenager and is now at the forefront of AI development at Oracle.
As he progressed in his career, he became adept at identifying problems he wanted to solve in the service of humanity. He also refused to tie himself to a single discipline
“Design must serve human reality, not technological novelty,” Ghosh says.
A Teenage Entrepreneur
Ghosh started his entrepreneurial career in his teen years, utilizing his innovative ideas to address India’s water crisis. He was only 19 when he founded a deep-tech clean water startup to help those Indians who only had access to unclean drinking water. He built a $1 water purifier and started a “Water as a Service” (WaaS) model. This water service delivered 500k+ liters of purified water in containers to customers.
“Building a deep-tech company in a country like India wasn’t easy back in 2019: bureaucratic friction, lack of institutional support, and not building in a ‘hot space’ made success delayed and extremely hard-fought. While tackling these problems, I learnt just being true to your craft compels you to convey ideas with undeniable authority that overlooks your age,” Ghosh says.
In 2023, he exited the company he founded to move on to other endeavors.
A Worldview Based on the Sailor’s Mindset
Ghosh had an unusual childhood that helped shape how he sees the world. From the ages of 6 to 13, he was raised on a merchant navy ship with his parents. As he explains it, he wasn’t home-schooled; he was ship-schooled. He watched his father work on problems that seemed impossible to fix, but his father never gave up.
“A lot of my worldview is shaped by my father’s mindset, aka the sailor’s mindset, for me, it roughly equates to ‘You never lose, if you don’t quit.’ I started tinkering with technology at a very young age, seeing him take care of massive engines on the ship. That was the whole inspiration to be a ‘maker’ first,” Ghosh explains.
During the pandemic, he built a location intelligence platform to connect patients to medical resources. In 3 months, over 100K people used the resource. Ghosh gave the platform to the government for free. Additionally, he consulted with the government, delivering data-backed insights that helped officials make important decisions on handling the pandemic.
Shifting to AI
Ghosh has applied his sailor’s mindset throughout his academic and professional journey. He co-founded an AI startup that built AI agents for sales, and it was later acquired by a large publicly traded software company.
“I started my journey as an architect, built life-saving consumer hardware as a design engineer, studied design, HCI, and CS at Berkeley, built an AI sales enablement company and sold it to one of the largest software companies of our generation, and now I lead Conversational AI efforts at Oracle,” Ghosh says.
He has approached each stage of his life and the challenges presented by addressing one problem at a time.
Having exited both the startups he created, his “hunger for enterprising” continues. He is presently focused on building “the best conversational AI” infrastructure at Oracle.