Intro
I sat down with Ritankar Das founder of Titan Holdings and cofounder of Prentis AI. Ritankar graduated from Berkeley at 18, studied at Oxford, and left his Cambridge PhD to build companies applying machine learning to real-world problems.
His early company was funded with money he earned consulting as a graduate student. We spent much of this conversation on what it takes to keep going through that uncertainty.
Ritankar approaches entrepreneurship as a series of hypotheses and experiments. Your starting idea can be wrong. What matters is how effectively you learn, how honestly you read the evidence, and whether you can use it to find a better direction.
We also discuss his relationships with his mentors Jim Simons and Roy Vagelos, why the people around you shape the quality of your thinking, and where he believes AI is headed as models learn to use computers. We finish with his interest in history, the rise and fall of empires, and the progress humanity could make through better cooperation.
What we cover
Finding your gifts: Why exploration helps you discover what you enjoy, what you’re good at, and where those abilities meet something the world needs.
The emotional work of entrepreneurship: Bootstrapping with personal savings, facing rejection, and holding on to optimism while being honest about difficult evidence.
Learning from Jim Simons and Roy Vagelos: How researchers become company builders, the importance of mentorship, and the story behind “the epicycles pay the bills.”
AI and the next wave of opportunity: Computer use, missing real-world training data, the limitations of synthetic environments, and how value moves from invention to the end customer.
Building something contrarian and correct: Developing insights, cultivating deep relationships, testing ideas in the market, and paying attention to what customers actually do.
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Ritankar Das: https://x.com/ritankardas
Suffiyan Malik: https://x.com/suffiyanmalikk
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Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:05 Finding your gifts and defining success
06:38 What the market will pay you for
10:29 Hard work, luck, and controlling your choices
18:28 Building companies with the scientific method
20:49 Rats, hammocks, and the first office
23:17 Naive optimism and the emotional journey
26:26 Bootstrapping with consulting income
29:34 Putting personal savings into the business
33:29 Why company building can be slower than research
37:50 Research, commercialization, and the AI boom
41:41 Finding the first hospital customers
46:40 Persistence, conviction, and missed alternatives
50:07 Deep relationships and better environments
56:05 Lessons from Roy Vagelos and Jim Simons
1:00:39 Jim Simons and “the epicycles pay the bills”
1:03:12 How the mentorship relationships began
1:05:48 Who captures the value of new technology?
1:09:48 AI’s next frontier: understanding computer use
1:14:08 Real-world data and the limits of synthetic environments
1:17:14 Different founder archetypes
1:20:28 Contrarian insights and relationship building
1:24:30 Turning insight and relationships into a business
1:31:19 Finding the contrarian and correct idea
1:33:33 Customer behavior versus investor signals
1:37:12 Where the Pareto principle breaks down
1:39:32 Research, philanthropy, and the next decade
1:41:11 History, empires, and understanding the present
1:46:39 War, cooperation, and humanity’s potential
1:49:25 Closing
Brought to you by
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