At the Life After Berkeley: Through an Entrepreneurial Lens event, I spoke with Saurabh Tangri, the Founder & CEO of ARAMAS.ai and former Chief AI Architect at Intel, and our conversation really reshaped how I think about entrepreneurship. I asked him how he decided to leave a secure, senior role in big tech to start his own company, and he explained that it wasn’t a single impulsive leap but a series of small, deliberate experiments he ran on nights and weekends to validate that there was a real, urgent problem worth solving. He described treating his own career shift like a startup: forming hypotheses about potential customers, talking to them directly, and only increasing his level of commitment as the signals got stronger. Saurabh also emphasized how much he continued to lean on the Berkeley and SCET ecosystem for advice, credibility, and early connections, which made the move feel less like “jumping off a cliff” and more like crossing a bridge he built over time. What stuck with me most was his point that you don’t need to wait for the perfect idea or perfect timing; you just need a problem you care about and the willingness to test it in small, concrete ways. Walking away from the event, I felt like entrepreneurship was less about being a natural risk-taker and more about being disciplined in how you learn, iterate, and use the resources around you, especially while still a student.
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