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Midwest Momentum
Stories from the Midwest Start-Up community.
Midwest Momentum
Community-Driven AI Innovation: Insights from Tushar Kulkarni
Ever wondered how AI can revolutionize entrepreneurship? As we chat with Tushar Kulkarni from Big Kitty Labs about their groundbreaking dual focus on software and physical product development, prepare to be inspired. Tushar shares a new projet that is an "AI Playground" for entreprenuers. This new initiative promises to democratize AI experimentation, breaking down financial barriers and fostering a fertile ground for creativity and innovation is a collaborative effort between government and industry. With the potential for expansion to cities like Cincinnati and an exciting beta testing phase on the horizon, this episode is jam-packed with insights and opportunities for anyone passionate about AI and entrepreneurship.
Time to hustle America, Roll up our sleeves and make dreams happen. Midwest Momentum brings you stories of CEOs, startups, product development and founders doing whatever it takes to make their big idea happen. Midwest Momentum is supported by Big Kitty Labs and produced by GNR Media. Here's Midwest Momentum host, Michelle Gatchel. All right.
Speaker 2:We have another great episode of Midwest Momentum today. I have a great guest, tashar Kulkarni, and he is with Big Kitty Labs. Hey, tashar, thanks for joining me.
Speaker 3:Thanks for inviting me. Thanks for having me over, michelle. Yeah, you guys do amazing work, uh like cover so many good topics and wonderful entrepreneurs.
Speaker 2:So glad to be here so let's tell everybody a little bit about what big kitty labs does we are tinkerers.
Speaker 3:That's how I always saw ourselves. Uh, we, we're constantly, constantly designing and developing fun products. Now again, you also have the business aspect, so you have to do a lot of other stuff that helps to build bigger businesses. So on one side we have our own products that are ideas or pain points we are trying to solve in different domains, and on the other side of the company we work with different friends, clients to build innovative solutions.
Speaker 2:To help their businesses keep going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and so for years I have been part of this journey and for 14, 15 years I've been doing this, Me and our entire team. We have gained that experience in different domains and building all sorts of products, and so we try to leverage that with our client solutions to help them gain a competitive edge or, you know like, scale their business.
Speaker 2:In software and apps. Is that the area?
Speaker 3:That's mostly the area, but we also manifest design and manifest some physical products with some friends. So over the years we have made a lot of friends where they have complementary skills and we work with them, and so we don't really manufacture any electronics ourselves, but we have really close friends who are entrepreneurs like us and so we pair up with them and brainstorm and design and build and we do the software part and they do the hardware part. Yeah, we have ourselves, as we speak, a couple of really cool physical products in the making.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's kind of fun. I didn't even know you did physical products. Yeah, yeah, we do we do.
Speaker 3:They're not as common as the software stuff that we build, but you know there's like it's so interesting. As you start your journey as an entrepreneur, like once a problem solver you're always a problem solver. You start seeing opportunities everywhere and they could be, you know, be something where a solution already exists. But once you have that itch, you constantly start dabbling into different stuff and start driving your friends and family crazy. There should be a solution for this, there should be a solution for that. So, yeah, we do have some hardware products as well.
Speaker 2:Okay. So you know, as an entrepreneur and it sounds like the business that you're in you're kind of always doing something new. But I feel like that entrepreneur spirit is kind of like what you were talking about You're looking for the solutions, right, you're looking for the next. Yeah, yeah about. You're looking for the solutions, right, you're looking for the next.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, constantly looking for the next, and that, I guess, is a good segue into the AI part of the journey of BigQ Labs. So we have always developed products that were kind of like a cutting edge. I remember us dabbling into sentiment analysis and all of that like 15 years ago. I remember us doing some machine learning like 14 years ago and, needless to say, in the last two years the entire industry has pivoted around AI. So we were already suited for that because we had already been doing vision stuff, machine learning stuff, natural language processing stuff.
Speaker 3:So one of the new kind of innovation we are doing, in collaboration with our friends at City of Hilliard and friends at Converge Technologies, is building an AI playground, which I was talking about earlier. So that is kind of a fun thing that has gotten us excited to build this playground where folks can just come in and innovate without having to worry about costs, and we'll provide them all of the tools to help you calculate how much money you'll be spending as you commercialize products and how you will be able to scale your products If you're getting the AI side of things. What is a quick, scalable tech stack you can use. So we're creating this entire affordable playground for companies.
Speaker 2:Because let's talk about that With AI it can be a very expensive starter yeah, yeah and that's what stops people that have the ideas for moving forward with those ideas yeah, and that does happen and that happens for um and again.
Speaker 3:like anything I say is not really absolute, but it's kind of like little eggs. So I know some folks can say, well, you can always, you always have option to get credits, you always have option, but but credits you always have option. But for the most part, what happens is that and this happened with us and we are pretty experienced in this area, so we ended up spending. So, as I said, we've always been tinkerers, so we were tinkering with several AI agents that solved different pain points and we racked up a bill like $30,000 in compute costs which could have very well been avoided. So there's an entire debate around like, well, you could have done like XYZ, you could have put like alerts, all of that. So I'm not saying any of that is not possible. But that's when I started realizing that if you're building anything, it's just more than hosting.
Speaker 3:You're constantly using either OpenAI or any other APIs where you're going to be paying constantly for queries that are being run and after the last build last year I actually mentioned we just had a wonderful panel about this a week ago.
Speaker 2:I saw the article in Business First, very nice.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you, and that's thanks to everyone who made that panel successful. So one of the things that happened was I was talking about this during that panel that we work closely with the Hilliard City team. We work closely with the Converge team. They have their own vision products which you might already know. They do really sophisticated computer vision.
Speaker 2:With their company UbiHere too.
Speaker 3:Correct, correct. Ubihere does a lot of their UbiVision. It's pretty sophisticated and they had run into similar issues. So as we were discussing this, I happened to mention to Dwayne our friend Dwayne, who is a CIO of Hilliard, and Dwayne like this is a legit problem and maybe we can build a playground. That will require some hardware to purchase, but we could probably help on the software side. It won't be as easy, but it is doable.
Speaker 3:And we're just brainstorming, just like every concept, right, like you meet your friends, you're talking about it, like, yeah, this should exist, why not? This should exist. And next thing, you know, like you know, this is what I love about the tech ecosystem that once you know the like minds, people get together. And so Dwayne sent me an email and we started talking about it and another good friend of ours he said, yeah, it's possible, let's develop an architecture around it. And next thing, you know, this thing became a reality and we're talking with a couple of different cities that are trying to do something similar. So all of the learning we're gaining now it's the first time doing it was. There was a learning curve and we did announce to everybody we're not building next Azure, we're not building next AWS. What we're building is something, an area where you can go in and tinker and play and all of that.
Speaker 2:A lab, literally a lab.
Speaker 3:Exactly exactly. You get it right away, yeah, so a lot of folks, a lot of different townships are interested in it. So we're trying to repeat, rinse and repeat and our entire goal is to really, really like make it so simple that anyone can come in and play and build stuff without getting penalized for it, like without having to. You know, oh yeah, like I got to right now and you know, funny thing is that we already have like four or five different applications for AI companies and we're we're actually going to we're still a month ish away from being ready and they are already interested on using it.
Speaker 3:So that actually actually going to, we're still a month ish away from being ready, yeah, and they are already interested on using it, so that actually that actually gave us a little bit of hope that, oh, wow, maybe we might, we might have something here, we might be solving some problem. Yes, but uh, yeah, constant tinkers and uh, that's why four hours of sleep every night.
Speaker 2:I don't advise that for entrepreneurs, however.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a healthy lifestyle, for sure, you know it. You wear like four different hats.
Speaker 2:Well, so you know, with this new collaboration because, like you mentioned, ai really is touching every part of every industry right now. I mean just from office work to specific work on a product it's amazing to me. I mean, I met a guy who's creating recipes for beer with an AI machine learning system he created and I was like I never would have thought of that, but what a great idea.
Speaker 3:By the way, we definitely need to meet him for sure, that would be, cool.
Speaker 3:But yeah, it is definitely, and I know that there's a lot of like warnings about, like the speed with which everything is evolving, but I think, I think it will definitely. I'm an optimist, I keep thinking that it will have a lot of positive impacts in our life and I would love to see more and more applications in health care, which I think we've started to see quite a few. Actually, we're actually friends with quite a few entrepreneurs who are doing some really, really sophisticated stuff that would help in prevention of diseases and better treatments and everything.
Speaker 3:So I think it is definitely impacting. Uh, like you said, everywhere from I'm seeing it in every domain, like I I again like not speaking in absolutes, but uh, I would generally say that, like, if you're in a domain where you think it's not gonna impact us, I I think you might have to revisit that twice because odds are it is impacting. It is impacting everything you're doing right, and these are tools. So I genuinely believe that we just leverage this tech to make our lives better, make our business more successful.
Speaker 2:So will the lab or the playground the AI playground basically be equipped with giant servers so people can try out their AI models.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I would avoid getting too technical on this one, because that architecture is in place, but it's still getting tweaked a little bit. But, yeah, you're right, so you could have your own partitioned area where you can use it. Yeah, so we purchased some serious projects horsepower, having hardware and build a essentially a kind of like a cloud there where you, you would. So you apply. Um, it's really apply as in, just like you said. Yeah, I'm interested.
Speaker 3:This is my concept. It's not a fancy application expected at all. Like uh, I, uh, our friends are here, actually they I love how they say it like the only requirement is that it cannot be more than half a page. We don't, we don't, we don't like to read hundreds of pages. So just apply and and assuming you know it's a serious thing uh, yeah, like they get the keys to log in, uh, they have, uh, uh. And then let's say we'll work on onboarding them and kind of help them to go through the learning curve. We're not saying it won't, like you won't have to code or something, but uh, we'll try to make it as painless as possible so they can just do their job. We provide them with a technical framework, with a token, calculators, with slew of stuff that they're gonna need yeah nice, um so literally they don't even have to have an office space here.
Speaker 2:They can can do it from anywhere.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but I think so Short answer is yes, but they need to have an office address or Hillyard, because this is an association.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And they will, but it's really not that stringent. So they can apply and they can apply and they get just a small vetting process and they can start to use it and yeah, that will be. And then they can see like if their concept has legs, and let's say, they also. There's also other perks that they can, so they might also qualify for some of the grants and stuff that Hilliard has.
Speaker 2:So tell me this is an AI playground, for instance, if I have an idea for an AI concept, right yeah, but I don't have any technical background to make that coding happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Does the AI playground help connect me with people that might?
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. It depends on how intense things are, but that is absolutely the goal. So if you have a concept, you have a concept. Somebody tells you that you know better, be careful, it might get expensive, it might all of that. So that's a great start because once you submit your application, within a week you can very well get access to the Playground, which is not just the hardware, not just the software, but you'll also get other resources.
Speaker 3:For example, if it's related with vision, I'm sure the team at UB here would be more than happy to provide some vision libraries that you can leverage or something like that. Or if it's like some basic coding stuff, I'm sure even our team can just like oh yeah, don't worry, like we'll get you started with this. And then, of course, you as an entrepreneur have to put some sweat equity in it and make it better and make it bigger and line up more resources. But that's the entire. Goal is to minimize the learning curve, get folks up and running and give them a little bit of advice on okay, like what do you have here?
Speaker 3:Like do you have? You want to create an agent that reads your email and writes a response for you? Okay, so you're going to need, like you know, just a small space XYZ. You can pretty much like spin all of this off by using these out of the box, you know, like software. Or let's say you want to go like a very, very custom route, then you can follow this guide or talk to this person and so forth. So you mentioned getting them set up, creating an account, getting them up and going and providing them all kind of like in-kind resources, a little bit of like tangible resources, to get them off the ground.
Speaker 2:So tell me, it sounds like you're creating a community of AI entrepreneurs with this? Yeah, Very much Will they ever be able to meet each other and talk about their ideas?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and so right now, that's one advantage folks have is that CityLab is a playground, so it all began as a. What began as a idea to produce costing evolved into exactly what you're saying. Like I know the ecosystem word is a little bit overused, but it is like an ecosystem because you'll get kind of like a broader support for your concept. Like you'll get broader support because now again, like, if there's like a thousand companies that apply overnight, that might slow that thing down because it's still evolving. But however, that's the goal is that because multiple groups came in together to build this, because they all saw the pain point and they all have their own specialty, like, for example, hilliard has their own resources, their offices, they give grants to companies. They also have their own network.
Speaker 3:Similar the same stuff goes for Converge UB. Here, all of that, we're also part of it, so we have connections in the ecosystem ourselves. So whoever's coming in through the doors, needless to say, all of us are there just to make it successful. You know, funny thing is that, michelle, like we constantly get asked, and Duane and I were laughing this happened again like about a week ago, where folks thought there must be some catch, there must be something we got to pay. There must be something like If it's still going to be true, Tashar.
Speaker 3:At. There must be something. We got to pay. There must be something If it's still going to be true, tushar, at least for now I don't think there's anything they have to do Now. Tomorrow, like I was joking that let's say a thousand companies suddenly flood or have those resources, then I don't know, we might have to come up with some process around it. But right now it just started as an experiment and it kind of spitballed into this thing where several folks are coming together.
Speaker 3:Actually another good friend of ours, it's a team called Aloy Dev. They're based out of Cincinnati and even they loved it. They're like you know what, maybe we should do something like this in the Cincinnati side of things. So they actually visited us last week and we all sat down and we were kind of talking about like okay, if we have to do this in your building, what do we need to do? Like you have space, you have hardware, you have XYZ, you have, you know, because there's some energy costs, there's some. One advantage Helio has is that they have fiber running, they have like all kind of basic infrastructure in, so that helps.
Speaker 2:But yeah, but right now we actually have all of those.
Speaker 3:all of those pieces somehow miraculously came together, so we should be able to at least provide the basic, basic playground.
Speaker 2:Even before you guys got started, you're helping others.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that we, that we. That's a. So that's that's where the roots lie, because we all started our journey in at one of the first startup weekends. That happened in 2008. And that's where, in those days, we didn't really have as many here. Like you know, the running joke is that every day in Columbus there's like four events, and how do you stay on top of that? But that wasn't the case in 2008, or at least I didn't know about that. So the first one that we attended, that's where a bunch of us, like you'll run into quite a few folks. They all got there together at that one startup weekend. At least that's how I perceive it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like I can actually name 10 people that are close friends of ours and we all met there and formed some company or another. Yeah, so since then, we've been very active in that startup ecosystem because there's so many cool ideas, there's so many, so it helped to democratize, you know, this entire like innovation, Like everybody, it's not the only big companies can come up with cool ideas.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:But you know, because of some of this and so we're very, very ingrained into that, at least in Ohio, so that helps us to stay fresh. So that's why we're constantly like, if somebody says that's a great idea, like yeah, let's sit down, talk about it and see if it's feasible. Or at least we can share our experience. Again, like, everything is feasible if you have the right amount of focus and resources.
Speaker 2:So this is actually going to open for the public to apply next month.
Speaker 3:No, I would think I would say like kind of like close to end of July it will start to, I think, our first few beta users will go on. So there are like four companies that are already lined up. Few beta users will go on. So there are like four companies that are already lined up and coincidentally they, they are getting ready with their development, development, uh, life cycle, around that time frame as well. So by july, and it will be properly better tested and it will be a go yeah nice all right.
Speaker 2:So if people want more information about this, or maybe even to apply. How do they contact someone now?
Speaker 3:Well, they can always contact me, tushar, at Big Kitty Labs, or they can also go to this. I think it's a. I think it's a here. Here's a link. It's a HilliardOhiogov slash city dash lab and I'm posting's here. Here's a link. It's hilliardohiogov slash city dash lab and I'm posting it here. So they're definitely like. Folks can always like, so I'm typing like yeah, they can always. They can always like contact us, but City Dash Lab.
Speaker 3:Yeah, city Dash Lab. Or always like, go to even they can even go to Big City Labs and do the contact us and say, hey, I just heard about this. Yeah, or help with it Like we. Yeah, I'm sure we're going to need some help. So, yeah, anybody who wants to collaborate, like, let's make it a fun experiment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sounds awesome. You know, in general, I really feel like Ohio is on a growth trend. And I'm not even sure where that growth has taken us, which I don't care because I think it's a fun thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the more experimentation we will do do, the better it is for everyone. So we're I'm glad like, uh, because I so, you know, because of our work, we're fortunate enough to we get to go to akron, we go go to, we get to go to cleveland, cincinnati. Um well, like you know, we were in the hamilton city, we were everywhere. And the more we travel, I realize this is amazing. There's activity everywhere. There's activity everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you hear about Intel right now, which is going to be great for. Central Ohio and the entire state to be honest.
Speaker 3:Very true.
Speaker 2:But there's so many other avenues. Ai, a big part Companies are. You know affordability to live is a big part and have a business is a big part of people choosing. You know you need that infrastructure and Ohio is starting to make that possible.
Speaker 3:I was just reading about the trains and I think I could be be wrong, but I thought I read an article this morning that there will be a bill to vote on the the fast train from Cincinnati to Columbus to Cleveland.
Speaker 3:I didn't know if they were talking about that route, but there's some bill that's going. We definitely need some of that as well. Uh, although I do not know, like maybe maybe by then we'll probably have like really really working full self driving everywhere, but uh, but that will definitely come handy because for especially folks like us, like I, I visit cincinnati like four times a week, I visit cleveland two times a week and uh, oh boy, because a lot of driving. Yeah, because, like I, I agree that virtual meets really, really helped us, but there's nothing like being in person somewhere and meeting somebody, because, like I joke that like one in-person meet is like 10 virtual meetings. Like you meet somebody, you have a coffee with them, you have lunch with them and that bond you develop and as an entrepreneur, you need that. But yeah, but going back to your original point, oh boy, ohio is bustling, bustling with cool tech.
Speaker 2:Great place to be right now for an entrepreneur.
Speaker 3:Amazing, like bustling with cool place to be right now for an entrepreneur. Amazing like I and I at least I was I wish, I wish, like whoever's who is like, say listening to it like they should definitely, definitely attend some of these events, like we're having, all of these cool things happening like we have. I was talking to you about the of the AI events that are happening.
Speaker 3:You get to meet so many cool problem solvers. So, yeah, I'm really fortunate to have that exposure and in many ways, it's also a huge gift for all of the young generation that are trying to get into the entrepreneurial lifestyle. I think this is a great time for them to get in and disrupt.
Speaker 2:You know, and this is going to, I really feel like COVID and the solving of the problem of COVID, where all these doctors had to come together and work together, the problem of COVID, where all these doctors had to come together and work together, like kind of opened up, going from a world of people kind of protecting all their information to themselves to collaborating with others.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 3:I wonder, if I do not know, if there's any uh, actual um uh, you know like uh statistics around, but could be that, like you know, many people were at home during COVID and they probably started tinkering because you know you couldn't go outside. So you're at home and maybe you're with different ideas and concepts and you're trying to execute them, because maybe that could have happened that folks are home a lot more than they usually were and and more businesses were getting created. But it did help technology, though, like we, um, I remember, um, you know march 2020, um, I, uh, I panicked a little bit. I was like, oh boy, like what is happening? Like everything's shutting down and um, and, and, yeah, and and, contrary to what I thought, it was a big boost to tech, because a whole lot of investment went in, because being virtual became the most important thing and, um, we actually grew a lot during that time and and yeah.
Speaker 3:So, like you're saying, like I think there was definitely something happening around COVID time that absolutely benefited the tech ecosystem. I think the investments and stuff also probably slowly started going up. Yeah, and now the emergence of AI is kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy, crazy good, yeah, crazy good. I keep joking that this is like whoever missed out on the dot-com boom. This is the second opportunity, yeah, second opportunity for all of us, totally.
Speaker 2:Well, Tushar, thanks so much for joining me on Midwest Momentum and filling us in on all the amazing things you guys are working on.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you so much. And and and detail, like likewise, yeah, like I, I see you, you know and creating the entire entire like you entire entrepreneurial ecosystem. So much by interviewing them, bringing them in front of all the folks. Thanks for doing all of that. Generally appreciate it, michelle. You guys are doing amazing stuff.
Speaker 2:Tell people Big Kitty Labs website.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that earlier. Bigkittylabscom BigKittyLabscom just like a big cat, like BigKittyLabscom. Yeah, please reach out to us Any concepts, cool ideas we all we love to hear that and we will see like how we can all collaborate and make it successful.
Speaker 2:All right Well, thanks again, Tushar.
Speaker 3:Oh, thank you, Michelle, and have a wonderful day.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Midwest Momentum on your favorite podcast site and great radio stations across Ohio like 92.9 in Franklin, licking and Delaware counties and WDLR Heard in Delaware, union and Marion counties. Now let's hear what's coming up next week.
Speaker 2:Coming up. Next week we're going to hear from Lee Mosbacher, the co-founder of Serenis, about a new app they're coming out with with a goal of connecting ideas to potential funders. Wait till you hear about it, and many of you are going to probably want to use it. That's coming up in our next episode of Midwest Momentum.