Why Most Startups Die – Even With Brilliant Founders

Ever met a guy who politely told Google and Twitter, Thanks, but I’ll pass? In this episode of Tie Talks, I’m Prantik, I sit down with Vijay Krishnan—my fellow IIT Bombay alum who swapped a Stanford PhD track for back‑to‑back startups. He shares how a non‑conformist streak led him from a personalised search engine exit to co‑founding Turing, the remote‑first unicorn matching global developers with Silicon Valley teams. We talk candidly about turning down big‑name buyouts, why the diameter of the planet is his hiring radius, and the real gaps AI still can’t bridge. If you’ve ever wondered how to pick the right market, build an all‑star distributed team, or say no to safe bets, Vijay’s story will hit home!

Discussion Topics: Why Most Startups Die

• Ever wondered if entrepreneur DNA  is just a myth?
• One habit Vijay swears built his billion‑dollar mindset.
• Flashback: tinkering with AI before it was cool (or useful).
• IIT vs Stanford—my guest’s brutally honest scorecard.
• How do you look Google in the eye and say  nah ?
• The day we realised we were up against Netflix—and laughed.
• I camped in a recruiter’s office; here’s what I saw.
• Your hiring radius is the planet —bold claim, or proven hack?
• AI still can’t copy‑paste… yes, really.
• Remote work wars: Vijay’s take on the RTO backlash.
• Rapid‑fire secrets: favourite book, hero—and a community he trusts.

Our Guest: Vijay Krishnan 

Vijay Krishnan is a Founder & CTO, at Turing.com. Turing.com enables foundation model companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and many others to improve their capabilities in areas such as reasoning, coding, function calling, multimodality, factuality, safety, frontier STEM knowledge and more through expert human data for Evals, SFT, RLHF, and DPO. Turing also helps large enterprises like Pepsi, Disney, and J&J strategize and execute various AI solutions to create outsized business value. Turing achieves both these through its talent pool of over 3 million software developers, data scientists, and other knowledge workers spanning 100+ countries, all automatically vetted through 100+ tests of skills and expertise. Founded in 2018, Turing became a unicorn in 2021.