The AI moment is not just another tech cycle — it’s one of the best openings founders have seen in years.
That was the message from Sudheesh Nair, a longtime Bay Area tech leader and co-founder of enterprise web agent startup TinyFish, speaking Thursday at a Seattle Enterprise AI Summit event hosted by OneSixOne.
“There is no better time to start companies than now,” he said. “It’s just magical.”
He believes the AI boom could produce the same kind of lasting infrastructure and category-defining companies that came out of earlier economic and technology shifts. Nair said this wave may be as significant as the internet, and possibly even bigger, because “for the first time, reasoning can be on tap.”
He added: “The way I think of it is, completely be constrained by your imagination — but nothing else.”
Nair previously helped scale Nutanix and ThoughtSpot. In 2024 he launched TinyFish, which raised $47 million last year to build infrastructure for AI agents to operate across the web. “I couldn’t stand on the sidelines,” he said.
He likened today’s moment to a gold rush, noting that most of the enduring outcomes from 1849 were second‑order products and infrastructure: durable jeans, safer elevators, modern banking systems. He said these were built not for the gold rush, but because of the gold rush.
Nair pushed back on the instinct to wait for clarity in a fast‑moving market where even frontier AI labs are still figuring out how their models behave. “No one who knows what the heck is happening,” he said.
But Nair also was careful not to romanticize startups. He said company-building is not for everyone, and noted that some people are better suited to join startups or build inside larger organizations. His broader point was that the tools, the pace of change, and the raw opportunity around AI have created a rare moment for people willing make the startup leap.
“If you just happen to have a pickaxe and shovel, the best thing might be to just jump in,” Nair said.
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