While growing up, siblings usually spend more time with each other than anyone else. That’s a pretty good foundation which can be leveraged for life, like starting a company together. In fact, it would have felt “riskier” to do this without his younger brother, says Cluep CEO, Karan Walia.
Walia teamed up with his younger brother Sobi Walia and teen programming whiz Anton Mamonov to start Cluep in 2012 while they were still in school. The trio wrote an AI algorithm that can serve ads based on what people publicly say and how they feel on social media. Fast forward to today, Cluep’s patented AI technology is used by brands like Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify, BMW, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Red Bull, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s.
Here's what Walia had to say on what it’s like to be in business with his brother. “For me, being able to work with my younger brother has got to be one of the greatest gifts I could have asked for. The odds of you succeeding alone as an entrepreneur are super low. Especially, if you are trying to build something novel from scratch. I think Cluep would have failed had my brother not joined me along for the ride. I know, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He goes on to explain the importance of Sobi’s contribution by recalling their early days of working on Cluep. “When Anton and I were improving and retraining our AI algorithm, Sobi was the one labelling and building out a high-quality dataset for each of the eight feelings that the algorithm was supposed to detect. Sobi helped us settle on Dr. Plutchik’s eight wheels of emotions — Happy, Loved, Excited, Hopeful, Scared, Sad, Horrible, and Angry. So, if you give our AI algorithm a keyword that it’s seen before, regardless of context, it should be able to classify an entire sentence it hasn’t seen before into one of these eight feelings. This played a critical role in our ability to land paying customers,” Walia concludes.