Most first-time founders believe startups fail because of bad ideas, weak technology, or poor timing.
In this episode, Tarang Vaish, CTO of Granica argues that the real failure mode is far less obvious—and far more dangerous: people risk.
Drawing from his journey across hardware, data infrastructure, SaaS, and AI, Tarang shares hard-earned lessons on co-founder dynamics, solo founding, risk stacking, and founder mindset. He also offers a practical mental model for using AI effectively—by treating it like an intern, not magic.
This conversation is for founders who want to think more clearly about risk, leadership, and what actually determines success in the early days.
🔑 Key Topics & Takeaways
Why people risk is the most underestimated startup risk
Why solo founding is exponentially harder—especially fundraising
How first-time founders accidentally stack too many risks at once
Why technical brilliance rarely saves a startup on its own
The importance of co-founder complementarity, not similarity
What “realistic optimism” really means for founders
Why being transparent about founder ambitions can build trust
Lessons from building across hardware, storage, SaaS, and AI
Why data and security remain evergreen startup categories
How to use AI effectively: treat it like an intern, with structure and feedback
About Granica
Granica is an AI research and infrastructure company building reliable and steerable representations for enterprise structured data.
The rarest thing in enterprise AI is durable access plus trust. Crunch is how we earn it: a policy-driven physical health layer that keeps large tabular data estates efficient and reliable, safely and reversibly.
On top of that foundation, we’re building structured intelligence using Large Tabular Models: systems that learn cross-column and relational structure to deliver trustworthy answers and automation with provenance and governance built in.
About Tarang Vaish
Tarang Vaish is a systems engineer who’s spent his career building at scale—where infrastructure, cost, and reality collide.
Before co-founding Granica, he led core engineering efforts at Cohesity as a Senior Staff Engineer, helping build its distributed storage platform from the ground up. He was also a founding engineer at Armorblox, where he helped launch an AI-powered email security product, and earlier in his career worked on GPU architectures and compute SDKs at Vivante and AMD.
Today, as Co-Founder and CTO of Granica, Tarang is tackling one of the hardest problems in cloud computing: the cost of data. Granica’s real-time data optimization layer compresses and reshapes cloud data at petabyte scale—cutting storage and compute costs by over 50% without changing pipelines or sacrificing performance.
A rare mix of deep systems thinking and real-world impact.
