In this episode of Berkeley Startup, host Aish Venketeswaran speaks with Ishan Sharma, a serial entrepreneur, and Haas School of Business alum. Ishan shares his journey from childhood inspiration to managing multiple ventures, including Memory Labs, Boxlet, Daily Dropout, and his current company, SellScale.
Drawing from experiences like the Lightspeed Summer Fellowship and roles in consulting, Ishan breaks down key lessons in startup development, customer discovery, and building scalable systems. The episode also dives into fundraising strategies, finding co-founders, and the emerging role of AI agents in transforming the workplace.
Episode Quotes:
On Prioritizing Customer Validation: Ishan highlights the importance of understanding customers before building a product.
The first thing our mentor told us was, “You are not allowed to code. Hands off the keyboard. All you should be doing is talking to customers and figuring out how to make your first sale.” This is a lesson I have taken with me even now at SellScale. To make the first version of a prototype, you really should be using low-code tools. You should be using the fastest route possible. You should be hacking stuff, and you should be talking with people and describing it to them at a high level. And if they liked the idea, then that is a good kernel for an initial startup. You don’t need to be building for a very long time.
On Building with Limited Resources: Ishan emphasizes the power of starting small and iterating fast.
Your job as an operator is to stress the engineers. When you first start your business, your job is to say, “Okay, what can I do with all the tools that I have?” And I don’t have to code to get a bunch of different customers, to be able to show someone, “Hey, this is something that people are paying for, and, you know, this is how a version one of the app or the idea could look like.” And that’s enough. Now you have a right to be able to build some sort of an app.
It also applies to even later-stage companies. If you build version one, then you should get more customers to test it as an operator and come up with a bunch of bugs and fire back to the engineering team to say, “Hey, these are some of the stuff we have to fix.” That’s kind of the playbook, especially if you want to start a business.
On Finding the Right Co-Founders: Ishan shares his framework for choosing co-founders.
I would put values as probably the number one thing that I would look for when looking to work with people. Then I would look for, how gritty are you? Then, I would look at is actual skill. So, I look top-down from that. Values, you want somebody who’s honest.
On the Future of AI in Business: Ishan discusses the transformative potential of AI agents in sales and beyond.
I think agents are going to take over the workforce. They can do a lot of mundane tasks that people otherwise would not want to do. And I think it’s going to reshape the future of the workplace for the next 10, 20 years. Honestly, for the better because it’s going to make orgs more efficient, and it’ll keep humans on strategic work. And so I’m super excited for the future about agents and how we build them.