Founder Spotlight: Anvisha Pai

The Intro

Mike: Cool. Well, Anvisha, why don't we start from the beginning? Tell me about who you are. Tell me about what you're building.

Anvisha: Yeah, for sure. So I'm Anvisha. I'm currently the founder and CEO of a company called Moda. Moda is an AI creative teammate that helps everyone, including non-designers, to create really high quality slides, social graphics, ad creative videos, whatever you might need. And we just launched a few months ago. We have tens of thousands of teams using the product, including some pretty big name companies. And we are backed by General Catalyst, Pear, founder of Dropbox, and many others. So that's what I'm working on right now. Prior to that, I started a previous company called Dover. We went through Y Combinator, scaled that company. We raised $23 million in funding, had thousands of customers. We were in the recruiting space, so worked with a ton of startups. And maybe some of the people reading this recognize Dover at least. So, yeah, that's a little bit about me.

The Origin Story

Mike: Amazing. Tell me about how you came up with the idea for Moda.

Anvisha: Yeah. So at my previous startup at Dover, I was the technical founder. So I was like the CTO, and then I led product and engineering and design. And for us, we had an in-house design team, right? We had some product designers, but they were always super busy just working on product stuff, didn't have any time to work on brand, marketing, sales, like all the other things that need design. And so I, as the CTO, got personally involved in the design for all of those teams.

Mike: You were really wearing all the hats.

Anvisha: I was definitely full founder mode, getting in there, you know, like helping design launch videos, helping design ad creative, like reviewing sales decks before they went out, things like that. And so when I phased out of Dover and I was thinking about what to do next, I was kind of ideating on some different sort of startups. And I was like, okay, AI exists now. So this is like a solved problem. Like design is going to be so good. It's going to be easy. And I realized that it just wasn't. Obviously, part of that is that it's AI, everything's going to look the same in terms of what it makes. The quality has certainly gotten a lot better in the past year since when I started this company. But the bigger problem that I saw was that these AI products were focused on just giving you an output. It was very hard for you to then take that and iterate on it at all.

And the thing about design is even if you're working with the best designer in the world, there's almost like zero chance that the first thing they give you is going to be like perfect, right? It's such a subjective thing. You're going to want to iterate on it. And that's kind of where the idea for Moda came about, where I saw like tools like ChatGPT and Google giving you these images that you couldn't edit. It was just like a static screenshot, and then if you wanted to change anything, you had to reprompt it, right? I was like, that doesn't make any sense. Like, what if we just do the design and give it to you fully editable, like a Canva or a Figma file, right? And then you can kind of take that and iterate on every individual piece of it. So that's how the idea kind of started.

You know, fast forward now, obviously there's been more entrants into the market and more changes and things like that. But that's kind of the fundamental belief behind what we're building, which is like, AI, no matter how good, is not going to give you a one-shot perfect design. No one is. Let's make it such that you can actually iterate and work with this to get to a really great outcome, to help you close deals, build brand awareness, get customers — like really focused on getting you good outcomes for your business.

The Taste Problem

Mike: That's so interesting. There's been so much talk about like AI slop, for lack of a better term, and how AI design, it's the average of everything you see out there. Since you are building an AI design company, how do you incorporate that missing element of like taste? How do you make it so that a Moda can do things that are still unique and interesting?

Anvisha: Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, it's generally hard to do that. And there's a couple of things that we do. First and foremost is, I think the way that we position our product, we don't say we're trying to build like the world's best design agent. We say we're trying to build a personalized design agent, meaning it can take everything about like your company — like Roger, that you're working on — take Roger's stuff, for example, and really learn everything that you've created, what you like, build up a kind of understanding of that, and then use that brand world to build additional stuff, right?

So that's kind of how you solve that problem. Whereas now, if you go to any AI model, if you go to Claude and just ask it to make something for you, it's going to kind of use the same color scheme that it uses for Claude and the same fonts. And so the way we solve that is by scaffolding a lot of that off of your stuff. So when you sign up for Moda, the very first thing we do is go and pull down a lot of stuff from your website. We encourage you to upload PDFs. We put a lot of effort and care into importing and extracting all that stuff so that we can give you stuff that's more unique, more personalized.

And then the second piece is we've kind of built this pretty sophisticated system where we now have tens of thousands of users. And so we're constantly tracking like what they're exporting, what they're thumbs-upping, what they're not liking.

Mike: Interesting. Okay.

Anvisha: Because of the nature of our product, right? Like you generate something and then you can go back and edit it. So we know where our initial one-shot is breaking down. So we're able to kind of take those signals basically and have built sort of like a self-learning system for our agent. So that's kind of how we continue to get better in a more automated way.

Mike: That's interesting. So it's not about building the best AI design, because what is the best design? It's all subjective. It's more about being the most personalized and then being able to iterate the fastest or the quickest or the best. I don't know the right term, but it sounds like that's what the trick is.

Anvisha: Exactly. And again, going back to the same analogy, if you got like the best designer in the world, you drop them into your startup, you're like, okay, day one, it's going to take them at least a month to onboard and ramp up and understand everything — the style of the company, style of the founders, like what they want to put out into the world, or just even develop a new brand, right? So same deal here, where we're trying to, both at like an individual level and then at a general level, build up our agent to sort of be better. Especially in design, it's kind of zero sum. It's kind of like marketing or sales, right? Like if everyone is doing the same sales thing, it doesn't work anymore.

Mike: That's true.

Anvisha: Design is very, very similar, where there's this notion of trends. You kind of need to be evolving. And so Moda, we were kind of making the bet that we can sort of evolve and be personalized and move faster than an underlying model can.

Building the Canvas

Mike: Got it. That's so interesting. I'm iterating on a website right now with Claude, and it's so frustrating because it all looks the same. But you bring up a great point. You pick the best designer, but you put them in the wrong company or for the wrong product, it doesn't fit, right?

Anvisha: This is the kind of idea where you go to somebody like, hey, would you pay more to have better design? Sure. They would be like, yeah, sure. Show it to me. Prove to me that it works. So it was kind of like an undeniable market need, right? And Canva had shown kind of the size of this market, right?

Mike: Right.

Anvisha: So the first thing was, can we actually prove that it works? So we spent like a few months actually building a full Figma-style canvas, right? And our agent is very unique. So if you actually look at it — you either have the ChatGPTs of the world where they're using image generation to create a static image, or you have like Claude Design where it's just writing code. So if you go to Claude Design and you're like, hey, give me a postcard, it's generating code to make a postcard for you. Does that make sense? It's all HTML or it's writing code or whatever, right?

So we're not doing that. Our thing is totally different, where our agent is actually doing design. They're drawing text boxes, drawing shapes, etc. So it was a pretty difficult build. I think maybe Figma is now doing it this way. I'm not really sure how they're doing it, but it's hard to do it that way. It took several months. Once we had that, alongside a couple of friend customers, if that makes sense — you know how it is, people are just for free using it. We hired some graphic designers to help them create stuff too using our tool. So it was very much sort of like, use humans, do things manually.

Mike: You dogfooded it yourself, it sounds like.

Anvisha: We dogfooded it, yes, by making designs for other people.

Mike: Got it. Oh, you hired your own graphic designers to use your tool.

Anvisha: Correct.

Mike: And then you took their feedback. So it's almost like you made your own feedback.

Anvisha: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you kind of have to do that, I think, the first few months.

Leaving Dover

Mike: So that is so clever. Wow, that's really interesting. That's a great hack. I'm going to switch topics a little bit. Anvisha, I'm super familiar with Dover, been to your guys' office with you and Max a million times. I don't think I ever caught up with you. If you're open to sharing, help me think through why you decided to kind of leave Dover. How was that process?

Anvisha: Yeah. So I worked on Dover for six years, which was a great journey. We started the company out of our apartment in SoMa in San Francisco where Max and I were roommates. And then our third co-founder, George, would—

Mike: I did not realize you were roommates. So you guys are close.

Anvisha: Yes, we were roommates. I moved out because, you know, I got engaged, and so on. But yeah, we were roommates, so it's a long history. And so much change, like for us professionally and personally over those six years. And our third co-founder, George, as well. We all moved to New York together, the three of us. Max and I at least were roommates again in New York.

Mike: Wow.

Anvisha: Yeah. So yeah, we ran it back. We had an incredible journey. I think for me, it sort of came down to Dover underwent a very large pivot as a business. We started out — and you know, every company evolves over time, I think Dover evolved a lot. But we started out as an automated sourcing product, and we scaled super fast, because we were basically one of the only, at the time in 2019, actually automated products that was actually using AI. Like we trained our own models to do sourcing. And then in 2021, 2022 kind of timeframe, obviously ChatGPT came out, right? And there were pretty significant changes after that, where a lot of competitors could then bring in AI into their products. So the automated sourcing was no longer sort of a big differentiator at that point.

Mike: Yeah. That makes sense.

Anvisha: And there were kind of market headwinds as well. But essentially, we sort of repositioned the business into more of a services-oriented recruiting marketplace. We had these recruiters on the platform. Like the business changed a lot. And we had to make a bunch of tough decisions to make the business profitable as well, which it did become profitable. And it's actually growing now really, really well.

Mike: Amazing.

Anvisha: A lot of it thanks to George, who is now the CEO of the company. But yeah, I mean, along that, I kind of stayed through a lot of those transitions and ultimately was very excited for what the business became, but it felt like a little bit less of my personal calling. And I wanted to kind of go back to building something that was more aligned with what I was passionate about. And it just also felt like it was time for the next thing, honestly. I still talk to George and Max a lot. And I'm no longer roommates.

Mike: Oh, no. Oh, gosh.

Anvisha: Yeah. I have a kid now. That's the other reason. I had a kid, and this kind of felt like a good time to take a step back and think about what I wanted to do.

The Second Time Around

Mike: Yeah. Take a step back and become a founder again, which is the most stressful job in the world.

Anvisha: Well, it is a really good time to build right now. It's very fun.

Mike: I'm curious. What are you doing different the second time around? What are the things you learned from Dover that you said, hey, we're going to change those things at Moda?

Anvisha: Yeah. You know, there's a lot there. I think one thing definitely is — this is more like a mentality thing, but I think with Dover, I had a tendency of getting very stressed out about everything. Like a lot of first-time founders feel, everything feels existential, you know?

Mike: Yeah, I know.

Anvisha: And now I'm kind of like — well, you know, when COVID hit, a lot of Dover's revenue — we were like past $1 million in annual revenue when COVID hit. And all of our revenue basically went on pause. Every single customer paused their contract. We were like, okay, it's over. Like company's dead, you know, like we're done. So we started working on other shit. Like we just kind of, let's do something else. And then like a month later, everything changed and we grew from 1 to 4 million ARR in like less than a year.

Mike: Holy moly.

Anvisha: Yeah, it kind of goes to show, you know, a lot of things happen and then you just have to sort of roll with the punches. No one can predict what's going to happen in the future.

Mike: Right. Life is unpredictable. Founder life is especially unpredictable.

Anvisha: And especially now that we're in this sort of AI singularity, or whatever you want to call it, period. It's like a lot of new stuff coming out. It's very stressful, but I think you kind of got to remind ourselves like why we're doing this. It's because we like to really bring new things into the world and we like to have ownership over what we're doing. And so I think that personal mentality and mindset is probably like the biggest difference, you know, Dover versus now.

I think the second thing is hiring. I definitely feel like with Dover, because we were growing fast, we just sort of at times definitely hired people that maybe we didn't feel like full conviction on, but we sort of just needed to fill that slot. And I'm taking a very principled decision to not do that anymore. I think culture is super important. I think team is super important. I'd rather have like a smaller team than hire someone that I'm not 100% excited about.

Staying Grounded

Mike: Yeah. Anvisha, I've made both of those mistakes before, still probably making them now. But what you're saying is resonating with me. I'm curious, do you have any tips and tricks to stay calm, grounded, sane, even when some things might still feel existential?

Anvisha: Oh, that's a good question. I think it kind of helps to just sort of remind yourself, and maybe look back over like other businesses, right? A lot of them aren't linear.

Mike: Yeah, right. And I don't think any of them are linear. Even though that's the way people like to tell the stories now.

Anvisha: Exactly. So I think this is just sort of taking a step back and reminding yourself of that. I also think it's super important to not lose yourself in all of it. I think it's a little bit, in some ways ironically, like having a family makes it a little bit easier because you have this grounding, right? Like when you're with your kid or something like that, or with your partner, you're forced to sort of reposition your brain into something that's not related to your startup. So it's kind of like a cool cheat code to not lose yourself in like the thing.

But I think if you're just like a younger founder, you know, you're single, whatever, trying to find what that thing is for yourself where you could just not base your entire identity off your business is pretty important whenever things get really hard. Because then you kind of make bad decisions. That's the thing. Like even if you're ready to sort of think about just your company 24/7, you will make suboptimal decisions out of desperation. I think desperation is often not a great place to be in, personally, is what I think. Obviously, motivation and ambition and having the fire to do things is great. But I think it's nice to sort of take a step back sometimes and think bigger picture.

The Kid Question

Mike: Right. That's interesting because that connects to your other lesson, which was about the hiring, you know, in a way, right? Like making decisions out of desperation as opposed to out of that actual conviction typically leads to suboptimal outcomes. That makes sense.

I'm going to ask you a totally personal question. We can cut it out. It doesn't have to stay. I am more curious. I think I had a daughter a little bit over two years ago. I think you had your child around the same time. Am I crazy?

Anvisha: Yeah. My son. Yeah, like around the same time.

Mike: And what's his name? I'm just curious now.

Anvisha: Well, I don't want to put it on the recording.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no worries. I'm really curious — one thing I was worried about before having my daughter was like, oh, I am really ambitious, I want to work really hard. How is my life going to change? And one thing you typically hear with parents who are also founders is like suddenly the time compresses and you may not have as much time, but you're able to get the same if not more done. I have actually personally found that to be true, crazy enough. I'm just curious how your experience has been.

Anvisha: You know, I'm going to be a little bit contrarian here. I wouldn't say that's been my experience. I think that it is like, you just have less time.

Mike: Yes.

Anvisha: Right. Like no matter how you want to slice it, you have less time. And like, yeah, maybe you're a little more productive in the time that you have because, you know, you have to be, right? But that's like fine. I think you just kind of have to realize that you need to leverage yourself more, you know. And so for me personally, I think that one big benefit is what I told you, right, like a reset, right? Like I'm going home. I'm like not thinking about my company as much. And I think I'm just kind of forcing myself to be more leveraged than I was before.

Mike: Right. Yeah. You just find ways to get stuff done, even though you've had less time.

Anvisha: Yes. Yes. And you know, I guess my maybe hot take is like, it's okay. Like, you know, maybe on net, you're like one hour less productive than you would be normally or whatever. But like, you also have this other amazing thing in your life, right? So yeah.

Mike: But I think the storyline is all connecting to this idea of being more grounded, being a little bit more — trying to stay sane, even though there's insane things going on. Just having that foundation just allows you to perform better and stay more mentally clear.

Anvisha: Yep, for sure.

The Ask

Mike: Cool. Anvisha, I'm curious, in terms of Moda, is there anything that people can do? Is there any big need, anything that someone that might be reading or listening to this, how they might be able to help?

Anvisha: Well, we're hiring, so I would love to plug that. But only the best. If you've heard everything that I said and you think you fall into that category, please reach out to me. We're hiring on like engineering and go-to-market. And yeah, I mean, try the product. We'd be happy to set up like a promo code or something for people who read the newsletter. And yeah, it was great to chat with you about it.

The Founder Hack

Mike: Amazing. Okay, awesome. Well, hey, thank you so much. That's the newsletter, potentially podcast. We will splice some of the stuff out. There's a separate, very short section. We're calling it like founder hacks.

Anvisha: Okay.

Mike: So if you have any hacks that you feel you're willing to share, anything that's interesting — like dogfooding the product with your own graphic designers is a great version of that. Another founder hack was for fundraising. This was a consumer founder, but he had all of his investors actually buy and use the product beforehand. That was like a requirement before you could get a meeting with them. And it just self-selected for people that actually believed, you know, it made his fundraising journey a lot easier. So I'm curious, do you have any growth hacks, any fundraising hacks, any hiring hacks? Could be a technical hack, a new tool you found that you just love. Could be like a meditation technique. Just like, hey, this is something that you found really helpful in your life as a founder.

Anvisha: It's a good question. I'll throw out a couple things and let me know what you think is most helpful. I think one thing is a lot of founders don't just launch stuff. I think if I'm just even looking back to even Moda, I kind of made the same mistake. We were in private beta for a long time and we got very few users during that time, and if we did, it was like pulling teeth because it was just friends that I convinced. They didn't necessarily have the need, you know?

And then we launched a waitlist, which was very low effort. I got a video done which was not super expensive, it's just like a motion graphics video, and I just posted it on LinkedIn and talked a little bit about my story, and we had like 2,000 waitlist signups just from that. That was a great list to then go and mine, right? And I was like, I should have just done that at the beginning. It's a waitlist. Like even if the product's not ready, it's okay, right? So I think my advice to founders would be just do that at the minimum.

If you end up not launching the product that you made a waitlist video for, no harm, no foul, right? Like it's a waitlist. No one's paying money for it. So I definitely think it's much easier to attract than chase when it comes to your earlier customers, especially if you're doing like a more general SaaS or a general product. Rather than like a vertical-specific where you might have like a really small set of large enterprise targets or something, then obviously it's a little trickier. You don't want to burn through those and stuff like that. But if you have a large TAM, then just do it.

Mike: Are you secretly a LinkedIn celebrity? How did you get so much engagement with your LinkedIn posts? Like what else did you do for this launch?

Anvisha: That's all, like, seriously, for the waitlist launch. I mean, when we did our big GA launch, I did a lot of stuff. And maybe that's a different founder newsletter guide or something. But yeah, I didn't do it for the waitlist. I just posted it. I asked like some of our investors to reshare, many of them. I didn't even really want to ask them for that much, to be honest with you, because I was like, it's a waitlist launch. And people just — everyone is very excited to try new stuff. And then you have to obviously put effort and thought into what you say.

Mike: Yeah. Okay. Amazing. Just launch. Just get out there. Just launch a waitlist. Just start doing things. That's like the YC way.

Anvisha: Yes. Just launch the waitlist.

Mike: That makes sense. Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much. That's all we got.

Anvisha Pai is the founder and CEO of Moda, an AI creative teammate that helps anyone - including non-designers - produce high-quality slides, social graphics, and ad creative. Launched a few months ago, Moda is used by tens of thousands of teams and is backed by General Catalyst, Pear, and the founder of Dropbox. Before Moda, Anvisha was the technical co-founder and CTO of Dover, the Y Combinator–backed recruiting startup she spent six years building, which raised $23 million and served thousands of startup customers.