Do you remember what life was like before the cloud? What was life like before the AI revolution? Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder and CEO of Atlan, sat down with the team at Found to discuss the evolution of data management.
She knows firsthand how things have changed: She and her co-founders started SocialCops and helped build India's national data platform and the United Nations. “We were a data team for clients, trying to solve these big world problems,” she said, citing healthcare and education as examples.
But then something happened that led Sankar to launch the product that would eventually become Atlan, a workplace that improves collaboration between business, analysts, and engineers. “That phone call, I felt like two years of trust disappeared,” she said of the moment that everything changed. But she and her team were able to bounce back.
Today, Atlan has raised over $200 million at a valuation of $750 million. The company also comes at a time when a new AI revolution is sweeping the world. Sankar detailed how Atlan is helping its clients become AI-ready and AI-adaptive. When asked about bias and AI, she reiterated that humans will still play a very important role in developing and governing AI. And indeed, AI is currently in a bubble… well, sort of.
“Is everything we know about the world going to change dramatically in the next few years, five years, seven years? Yeah, that's probably true,” she said. “There's a lot of hype, so it's going to take a cycle for all of this to come to fruition.”
Elsewhere in the interview, we talk about the importance of empathy, why the company hit a wall while growing, and, of course, Taylor Swift's fundraising announcement music video. The video is called “The Tortured Data Department,” a play on Swift's last album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” As for what Sankar likes most about “Era,” you'll have to listen to it (hint: it's not TTPD).