S12 Bonus: Ashwin Agrawal, MobiusEngine

0:00All of the failure points have been of us not being able to scale fast enough. I've always focused on acquisition and growth and I've tried to scale that but every time I've been successful with the acquisition and growth, I've actually seen failure points and cracks on my operations and delivery. So I think like the way I've approached is to not think too much about it but let that become a problem and then fix it, right? So it has guided me to acquire where we can and then whenever we've had failure points we step back then. What can we be doing longer term to make sure that doesn't happen and how do we scale? My name is Asfin and I am the founder of MobiusEngine.io. This is Coast Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. I think six months moonlighting is nothing of the backhand. Who share what it takes to change an industry? I don't exactly know what to do next. It took many goes to get right.

1:02Who built the teams that have their back? The company is it's pitiful. The teams help each other achieve more. Who's proud of our team? Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was up there. Yeah, it's what we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, mind you. It's just a shelf and it's decided off and tried to begin. To ride the ups and downs of the startup line. I need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more on Coast Story. I'm your host, Noah Labhart. And today, how Ashwin Agrawall is helping you land interviews 10 times faster by taking on the soup to nuts interview process. Today's episode is brought to you by .techdomains. And this one hits close to home. Back in 2016, I was building my startup and went hunting for that perfect .com and found next to nothing. So I did what every founder does, settled. Here's what I wish someone had told me. You're building a tech startup.

2:03Just get a .tech domain. It instantly tells investors and customers what you're about. Don't overthink it. Secure your .tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. This episode is sponsored by Unblocked. Unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing. It synthesizes your PRs, docs, slack, and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand. So they make better plans. Write higher quality code, use fewer tokens, and require fewer correction loops. If you're running cloud code, cursor, or any agentic workflow, unblocked is worth a look. Learn more at getunblocked.com slash code story. This episode is sponsored by Mesmo. If your team is collecting large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, but still struggling to get timely answers, Mesmo can help. Mesmo is an active telemetry platform that processes and enriches observability data in real time, before it's stored or analyzed.

3:04That means lower data volume, lower cost, and faster root cause analysis across your existing observability tools. To see how it works, get a demo at mesmo.com slash code story. That's m-e-z-m-o.com slash code story. This episode is sponsored by BrainGrid. If you are building with AI coding tools, but your features keep breaking, you need to check out BrainGrid. It is the product management agent for AI builders. BrainGrid turns messy ideas into clear specs, and prompts that coding agents like cursor and clawed can actually build the right way. Ship real software, not fragile prototypes. Start free at braingrid.ai Ashwin Agrawal came to the US when he was 17 to Rochester for school. He now lives in the Bay Area and admits he misses his friends on the East Coast as they all stayed on that side of the US.

4:06That said, he does not miss the winters. He has been building his current venture for three to four years, and prior to that, he was at Google for a decade, a part of Google Cloud's huge growth trajectory. Outside of tech, he has a family with two middle school sons, with whom he likes to spend a lot of time with, hiking or eating good sushi. Ashwin was laid off from a few jobs in the past. After experiencing this, he vowed to build a solution that would help people going through this sort of experience. After the last layoff, he formed his company at 4.30am in the morning, to help anyone at point A wanting to go to point B. This is the creation story of Mobius Engine. Mobius is really a solution to making the transition of one job to another

5:08really easy, effective and efficient for people. That's the overarching goal, and having been laid off twice, I had felt the pain, and the first time I got laid off, I decided that if I was to ever get laid off again, I'm not going to go back into trying to get another job, but I'm going to work on building this solution out. At Google, I got laid off in 2023, and I got laid off, I believe on January 11th is when I got the email at 2am in the morning, and I just gotten up to get a glass of water, and I saw my phone buzzing, I saw the layoff news. I was reading the TV's right expected something big was happening on the layoff front. It was still a surprise. At 2am, I got that email at 4.30am, I founded my company, and I got going, and there was certainly sadness, and there was a lot of change, but I distracted myself in building this company and started helping other people right away,

6:14and that's how we got started in 2023, and then now we're entering the fourth year of operations we've done. Quite well, we've come a long way, the overall mission has still been the same, which is for anybody who is in that point A wanting to go to point B, either somebody who's existing, who's working currently, who's not moving up, who's feeling frustrated with their current job, or somebody who doesn't have employment, who wants to move into another job, anyone who's making that transition, we want to be that solution to help you do that. Let's dive into what you would consider the MVP for Mobius engines. That first version of the product you built, maybe it was shortly after that 4.30am, you know, formation, but I'm curious about that first MVP, and what sort of tools you were using to bring it to life? So, you know, when I was at Google, I already had been working with the data and direct AI for several years before Charge GPD had come out. I was quite already engaged in the direction

7:15in which things were going, architecture was going, infrastructure was going, and so Charge GPD, when it came, was a little bit of a surprise, but I had seen Charge GPD at Google in the past with the primitive version of Gemini, and the MVP I knew was going to be a combination of humans and AI into an agentic workflow that could do much better than any individual could in the work that's required to go from that point A to point B. So, when 2020 when Charge GPD came 2023 early days, I just learning from my own experience in the past with other things including cloud infrastructure, the tech stack often changes quite a bit when a new disruptive innovation comes out. Therefore, I decided to lean more on the human agentic workflows, and combine that with a little bit of AI to form an MVP that was doing some of the basic tasks

8:22required from going to point B, we picked up for example doing job applications or building resumes, so those were the couple of things that we took on, and we offered those two clients and customers to just do that much better than what they could do on their own. Today's episode is brought to you by .techdomains, and this one hits close to home. Back in 2016 when I was building my own tech startup, I went on the hunt for that elusive.com, looked high, looked low, and guess what I found? Nothing. What I did find cost me an arm in a leg, so I did what every founder does under pressure, through an extra letters settled for the less than optimal name, and here's what I wish someone had said to me back then. Noah, you're building a tech startup, just get a .tech domain, tech startup .tech domain, it could not be more obvious. It tells investors, customers, and anyone who looks at your website really, that tech is at the core of your build, and I've kicked myself plenty since. Especially when I see the clean and sharp names, tech companies have landed on .tech.

9:25Nothing.tech1x.tech Aurora.tech. CES.tech Ultra.tech Alice.tech Neon.tech Blaze.tech Pi.tech. You get the idea. So take it from someone who learned it the hard way. If you're building a tech startup, don't overthink it. Secure your .tech domain today from any registrar of your choice. This episode is sponsored by BrainGrid. Building with AI coding tools is exciting, until the moment things start breaking. You ask for a small change and suddenly three other features stop working. AI gets confused, misses edge cases, and loses track of your intent. The problem is not code generation, the problem is planning. That is why BrainGrid exists. BrainGrid acts as your product management agent. It writes clear specification, maps UX flows, asks the clarifying questions you forgot to ask, and breaks big ideas into engineering grade tasks that AI coding tools can build reliably. It guides cursor, clog code,

10:26replet, windsurf, and others so they deliver features that work and keep working. Founders use BrainGrid to build real AI native SaaS products, without a technical background. If you want reliable features, instead of fragile prototypes, try BrainGrid for free at BrainGrid.AI. That's BrainGrid.AI. So, you've got the MVP and it's working, and how did you put together your roadmap? How did you build that? And here's about, you know, what sort of criteria process you went through to help you decide that, okay, this is the next most important thing to build or to address with Mobiusage. I didn't really build any roadmap. I was bootstrapping the company. As much as I like to think that I was in a really good financial place after the severance, I wasn't, I needed the money, right? So, I needed to bootstrap and I knew that I had to be very careful with where I invest and how much money I sink in. So, there were two guiding principles

11:29that I had set for myself. One was that I am going to be extremely customer driven. So, instead of me deciding what I want to build, I am going to build what clients and customers are willing to be for and they want. So, that was my first guiding principle. The other guiding principle that I had was in terms of delivery, I wanted to stay cash positive from my first client onwards. So, I wanted to be profitable right from my first client, not wait for that profitability to come. And so, by putting those two constraints, I think it took me down a path that can actually be very different than what most people think about design thinking or product road maps or bailed and iterate. I just took a very pragmatic business like approach where I didn't have any money to invest and I wanted to make sure that I am adding value to my customers and I wanted to make a little bit of money from the very beginning. So, then, you know, how have you built your team? How did you

12:31go about deciding that, okay, these are the winning horses to join you to go build Mobius engine? A lot of people have come and gone app Mobius ads typically would happen in an early stage company, particularly one that is being bootstrap. I relied on people who I knew and I think the my board is a group of people who are extremely talented at what they do. They're amazing, but more importantly, there are people who I trust and who trust me and they have been my sort of support system and the people who have been very critical for me in being able to traverse this journey, having I've run small businesses before, but never of this scale, never relying on it for my day-to-day living. I think that group has come from the people who I knew from my network, but more importantly, the people who I really connected with on an interperson level. I think, and I think that sort of has been my guiding principle for everyone I've worked with and everyone who have hired and everyone who have partnered with throughout when you are doing something of your

13:35own which is so much more high stakes than a job. I think I've leaned more on what I feel about the person rather than what I know about the person. Less on the credentials, less on it's more about do I feel like in trust them, do I feel that we they have my best interest and I have their best interest, but very much chemistry based, that's how I have worked with and built this team. And I continue to do that, I think I trust my gut instinct a lot in terms of how will we work together, how will we deal with conflicts or deal with tough situations or more than is this person going to be like the most stellar person at this particular skill set or that skill set. This episode is sponsored by Mesmo. If you're responsible for reliability, performance or platform architecture, you already know the problem. Telemetry volume is growing faster than teams can manage it. Mesmo addresses this by moving observability upstream. Instead of storing everything and asking questions later, Mesmo processes telemetry in motion, filtering,

14:40transforming and enriching logs, metrics and traces before they reach your observability back in. The result is cleaner data, reduced ingestion costs, and faster root cause analysis using the tools you already rely on. Mesmo integrates with platforms like Datadog, Dinotrace, and open source stacks, giving teams more control without adding operational overhead. This is especially useful for platform engineers and SREs supporting complex, distributed systems where context and speed matter. To see how active telemetry works in practice, get a demo at mesmo.com slash code story. That's m-e-z-mo.com slash code story. Okay, let's flip to scalability then. I'm curious about how you've approached scale from the beginning. It could be technology could also be business and people and things like that. How you approached it and other interesting areas we've had to fight scale as you grow. There have been three or four failure points actually for us and all of the failure points have been

15:45of us not being able to scale fast enough. It's been very interesting learning for me that I've always focused on acquisition and growth and I've tried to scale that but every time I've been successful with the acquisition and growth I've actually seen failure points and cracks on my operations and delivery. So I think like the way I've approached this do not think too much about it but let that become a problem and then fix it. Again like I said when my guiding principle has been that profitability and the customer first approach right so it has guided me to just acquire where we can and then whenever we've had failure points we step back in and I've looked back at what were those cracks what were those those seams that burst and what can we be doing longer term to make sure that doesn't happen and how do we scale there have been learnings at each of the

16:47failure points for example the first time that happened it was this aspect about people like how much services and how much technology and so we then started building a lot more tech and reducing reliance on people then another failure point we had was there was a typhoon in philippines philippines has a lot of typhoons so anybody who has operations there realizes that that can be very disruptive I then diversified to other countries so that we could have some failover plans and be able to scale more effectively then other places we've had issues with operations and delivery and there I've built a lot of systems internally and instead of relying on third-party SaaS systems both for cost-reasoned but also for scalability I've built my own home-grown systems to get more of that customer 360 to have more control on exactly what to build less training baggage on the on the on our teams on myself and having more access to data so that

17:50we can be more streamlined I think at this point we have we've done with that journey I think the other thing that has always led me into scalability is the business metric of profitability because you realize that if you're not scalable your margins get extremely impacted and if you're building a business for that is well run and well designed not only are you solving for scalability but you're also solving for expanded margins when you grow so that has been another sort of way that I've always had a reason to think about it because unscatable businesses are often unprofitable so as you step out on the balcony and you look across all that you've built with Mobius engine in particular what are you most proud of I think the best part about the company that I've built is the mission of the company and the proudest part is all the successful stories that we have had

18:58with people not only fighting finding roles but also being able to rethink and regain their confidence in themselves and in their careers and really there have been some cases some stories where people have really gained a tremendous amount from our services and I think that probably is what keeps all of us at Mobius going whenever our clients get interviews whenever our clients get jobs whenever our clients have something positive to say whenever our clients tell us that I am able to take care of my my newborn baby because of your service or I am able to take care of my sick mother because of your service those moments are extremely proud moments for us so I get very driven by that I think even at Google right as a manager like I always enjoyed growing people and developing people it's been nice to be continuing to do that at scale in the thousands now

20:04so I think that's been the best thing I think the other part on a personal front that I have most proud about is being able to create a better balance for myself for being able to spend time with my kids and I think being able to do that right off the layoff I spent so much time with my boys I was being able to do that even though I was working hard at my company I think the flexibility allowed me to spend time with them way more than I would have had I been in a full-time job so I think both those things helping the people helping our clients and then also being able to spend time with my boys I think both those things are very happy things for me to think about let's flip script a little bit tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it I've made a lot of people mistakes I've been both impatient with people and given up on people a little bit too soon and I have also not given up on people soon enough

21:11both those things are mistakes that I've made and I think I continue to learn how to charge but I also don't beat myself too much over it because in a growing company there's just so much happening there's just so many phases of that company that somebody who's right for one phase of the company may not be right for the next phase and that phase in a growing company happens comes very quickly with the first couple of years every three months we were completely transforming though the person who was the right person for that initial phase was just not the right person or not able to evolve enough for the next phase and so I think that those are that's one one mistake I think the other mistake that I have made is signing for long-term contracts with vendors just because it was working out well at a certain time and that was a bit of an expensive mistake I avoided doing that but on one of the platforms we actually spent quite a significant

22:12amount you're getting good ROI and we were basically like told really good stories for the future and I think it was our mistake as well we didn't do enough due diligence and we signed a two-year contract and two months after signing the contract they changed some policies which completely plummeted our ROI and that was a bit of a money sink and so I think I've also learned that long-term contracts can be quite risky so you have to be very careful about that as a young company it's better to pay a little bit premium but it's not great to tie yourself up with anything long-term that can cost you money this episode is sponsored by Unblocked your coding agents have access to your code base maybe you even connected other tools via MCPs but access doesn't mean context agents can't reason across MCPs they don't know your architectural decisions your team's patterns or why the API was shaped the way it is so agents look in the wrong place and deliver bad outputs then you spend time

23:14correcting more loops more tokens unblocked is the context layer your agents are missing it synthesizes your PRs docs slack and tickets into organizational context that agents actually understand so they make better plans write higher quality code use fewer tokens and require fewer correction loops if you're running cloud code cursor or any agent work flow unblocked is worth a look learn more at getunblocked.com slash code story okay Ashwin let's move forward this will be exciting what does the future look like for Mobius engine for the product the company and for your team yeah our vision for Mobius is that we wanted to be the go-to marketplace or platform or anybody who is looking to go from A to B and anybody who's looking to hire there is a there's a huge gap in the market right now of that whole workflow

24:17being very fragmented and broken job seekers or people who are making the transition have a very fragmented ecosystem and there is a lot of dishonesty in that ecosystem in terms of taking advantage of the need of wanting to go from A to B but not exactly providing services with the right intent to add value so some of them are overselling their value proposition and some of them are just not adding any value at all but it's very fragmented right so as as somebody who's making that transition it's very tough and for people for enterprises who are hiring it's a very expensive process right now and it is very slow and so we see a future where there are no middlemen or middle women for that marketplace is a hundred percent smooth between the person who's seeking a role and the person who's looking to hire so that's the world I see whether it's going to happen

25:21in three years or five years but our company is betting on that future and hopefully playing a role in establishing that future where we are really streamlining and we are removing all that friction for both the enterprises as well as the job seekers let's wish you Ashwin who influences the way that you were name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why I think like one of the core values of that I run with as well as the company our company runs with obviously because I'm the founder which I value a lot is the principle of integrity and I think all the way from the way we have designed our pricing to the way we treat our customers to the way we work with our partners and the way we design our services as well as our marketing and promotions integrity is very important and I would say that a big influence in my life on that particular front has been my father and I think I've always carried that I think for

26:24me as the oldest son there's always been this aspect of being like him and so one of the things I've always admired about him is to what lens he would go to maintain integrity and even the perception of integrity when you could be in tricky situations I think that's very important he's been a big influencer I think in terms of the other aspects of running the business I think all the people on my board are incredible they I get influenced by them they are role models for me I respect them a lot and I learn a lot from them they are people who I know on the person front but I think like they they would be the next in line on that overall in my life I learn a lot from my kids I think kids teach you a lot and my kids teach me a whole lot right I think I learn the value of being good right and I think that is a very important thing to learn from them last question Ashwin so you're getting on a plane you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur

27:26who's built the next big thing they're jazzed about it they can't wait to show it off to the world and can't wait to show it off to you right there in the plane what advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit the first advice I would give is that going down the path of entrepreneurship itself whether it is a success or whether it is a failure is an incredible achievement in life often we tend to anchor on the outcomes and often we tend to anchor on will this be successful will this not be successful and it's important we want that to happen but I think it is equally important to recognize that taking that step of entrepreneurship is an incredible milestone in your life it demonstrates courage it demonstrates bravery and taking the chance of yourself believing in yourself working hard taking responsibility taking accountability all those things which I think are really good things in life so as a life decision going into entrepreneurship is an incredibly good decision I've come to realize that through my own jury but that's the first advice I would give

28:31absolutely go and do it and I think when it comes to outcomes I think my sort of main learning and therefore my advice would be follow the need of your customer and be absolutely obsessed with the customer's problem statement and ask yourself every single day are you adding value to that client of yours who's paying you money for it and would you do the same thing if you were in their shoes and I think that is often something I've seen people mess out on because they can get so caught up in the excitement of just building or technology or being very passionate about the idea of how they are used to seeing things or how they are used to seeing the world but it's very important to put yourself in the shoes of your customers who are actually paying you paying you money and I think I'll add another thing I think something that I've spoken to many founders with as well is that try to get to that point early where you can

29:33test if somebody is willing to pay for your product or not prototyping is good testing with testing or testing with alpha testers and beta testers is good but when somebody pays for your service whether even if it's a dollar it's a huge milestone it's much bigger than people think because when you are getting into that transaction and you're paying money you're expecting value back and so it's a great proof point if somebody is willing to pay for your product it's a great proof point that your product has added some amount of value to the other person and you can test that with pricing but it's a non-zero value that you've added so that's a big milestone so I always say that there's something but get it to market fast that's fantastic advice well as when thank you for being on the show today and thank you for telling the creation story of Mobius Engine thank you so much Noah thank you for having me and this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart be sure to subscribe on Apple

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