“One of the special things about immigrants is they feel like they have to earn their place in the tech world and society. And that brings a special level of drive out of them.”
Rahul Sonwalkar is the CEO of Julius AI. “Our goal with Julius is to empower every single knowledge worker that has data on their hands to make data-driven decisions with just a few simple prompts,” he says. Julius is an AI data analyst. Give it structured or semi-structured data and it returns insights, charts, and visualizations from plain English prompts. “Our ambition is pretty big. We want to build something that replaces tools like Excel and Tableau.”
Before the company, he worked as an engineer at Uber and Facebook, where he saw how much everyday decisions ran on data science. As AI models got good at writing code, he wanted to put that power in the hands of every knowledge worker. San Francisco made the team possible. “We found our design engineer in Germany. We found some engineers in Canada. And we were able to bring them to the US,” he says. The city, to him, attracts the most ambitious people in the world, the ones who want to try the crazy ideas.
He is direct about what immigrants bring. “One of the special things about immigrants is they feel like they have to earn their place in the tech world and society. And that brings a special level of drive out of them,” Rahul says. They run through walls, take more risks, and make things happen, and he thinks the country should encourage more of it. America, to him, is the land where you can build great things and get them into the hands of the masses.