Discover why Praveen Pendyala (CEO of Omnivision Solutions) chose to create a 99% accurate transcription product (https://transcript.lol/), what his new hiring criteria is, and when he realized that not keeping secrets from employees is a leadership strength (14 minutes).

CEO BLINDSPOTS® PODCAST GUEST: Praveen Pendyala.

Since leaving big tech, Praveen founded Omnivision Solutions to build SaaS apps that solve pain points for power users (such as the 99% accurate transcription product called transcript.lol). Praveen and his team build bespoke software solutions for clients and also run their own collection of SaaS apps. Omnivision apps are only a few months old and already serve over 30,000 users!

Praveen ranked #1 out of 1,400,000 students in the highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination, did his masters in Germany, with short stints in the US for an Internship at Rice University. 

Praveen is obsessed with building products and is a big open source contributor. He built over 50 apps (https://github.com/pkpio), tools or websites since he first started coding. During his stint in academia, he published over 9 research papers in top conferences and journals (and his work has since been cited by 167 papers) https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=tYbRkmYAAAAJ&hl=en).  

Praveen's professional experience includes working at Google and Microsoft where he shipped apps to over 500 million people every week, and proposed and implemented a novel (patent pending) format for 3D assets that work efficiently on Mobile.

For more information about Omnivision's SaaS products;

Transcript LOL - ⁠⁠⁠https://transcript.lol/⁠⁠⁠ - 99% accurate transcripts and insights for any video, audio, or meetings. 

Plan Trips AI - ⁠⁠https://plantrips.ai/⁠⁠ - An AI travel planner. 

For more information about About Praveen Pendyala;

https://pkp.io/about



CEO Blindspots® podcast host: Birgit Kamps.

Birgit's professional experience includes starting and selling an “Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Company” and a “Best Company to Work for in Texas”, and serving as a Board Member with various companies. She is able to help investors and executives quickly discover blind spots holding their organization back, and accelerate leadership effectiveness.

In addition, Birgit is the host of the CEO Blindspots® Podcast which was recognized by Spotify for having the “biggest listener growth” in the USA by 733%; ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.ceoblindspots.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

To ask questions about this or one of the 200+ other CEO Blindspots® Podcast episodes, send an email to⁠ ⁠birgit@ceoblindspots.com⁠⁠

Hello, and welcome to the CEO Blindspot Show, where leaders lead leaders.

And today's guest is Praveen Pandyala, who is the founder and CEO of a SaaS company called Omnivision Solutions.

And He's the creator of very useful apps like Plantrips.ai and Transcript.lol.

In fact, due to Transcript's 99% accurate results, which saved me a ton of time, I am now 1 of Praveen's 30,000 satisfied clients.

Thank you, Birgit, for having me on the show.

I've listened to a lot of your podcasts and it helped me a lot in a lot of my decision making as a CEO.

And I'm very excited to be here and having this conversation today.

And when I read about you, I heard that you believe in being a lifelong learner.

So, you know, I I'm always looking to see What are the clues for why a leader has been so successful?

It seems to me that 1 of the reasons you've succeeded as a leader is because you're always learning.

But, you know, I think it helps also that you're really, really smart.

If I got this correctly, you ranked number 1 out of 1,400,000 students.

Your papers have been published and cited in, I think, over 167 articles.

And you've also lived in different places, India, Germany, even where I am, Texas, and now the UK.

But why don't you tell me, what are some of the reasons you think you have succeeded as a leader?

For me, a lot of my success, I believe, comes from just being curious.

Like if you're a naturally curious person, that would put you on a path to be on a continuous learning path.

You see something new, your first instinct is to understand how this works or what are the things that you don't understand about it and then go deeper and deeper into this.

So just being a naturally curious person, I think that helps a lot.

And I think this is a skill that you can also attain to practice.

You can force yourself to be more curious in some way.

Or at least you can force yourself to be continuously learning and you can always monitor whether or not you're learning new things on a regular basis.

This is 1 of the key aspects when you're working in a fast-paced industry like tech, SaaS areas, the industry is constantly changing, new technology comes along very quickly.

Not only is it that it's fine if you learn things fast, but at the same time, you get new information.

Are you quick enough to change your mental models and also change your business structure or change your products based on the things you've just learned?

Is it worth making this call at this point in time.

So a lot of skill comes into play, whether or not when is the right time to make the change.

But being agile plays into play, plays a big part in being a successful leader.

Being agile, being curious and constantly learning sounds like are some of the reasons why you've succeeded.

I am curious though, you've worked in leadership roles at Google and Microsoft, and then now you're also an entrepreneur and which includes, right, you learned from a venture that was with blockchain that didn't work out and you recovered from that.

So yeah, I think there's, there's a lot more to learn when something fails than when it succeeds.

A lot of confusion that you have with success is you're always unsure whether the success came from pure luck or because of some clever decisions that you've made.

1 of the first Android apps that I ever built suddenly received 25,000 downloads in 1 year.

But in actual fact, I had no idea how people just found out about this app.

I didn't learn a lot from that success, so to speak.

But failures, on the other hand, can teach you a lot of valuable lessons.

But, Praveen, when I look at your track record, you've had pretty much nothing but successes, it looks like, other than the blockchain, which was kind of because of the FTX situation.

And then how did that impact leading the people that you were leading?

So sometimes you could make all the right calls, you could work with the right people and everything, but there are, there is always certain negative externalities that you can't really control.

And this FTX situation was a negative externality in the business we are in.

When we were trying to raise our funds, that's when the situation happened.

And just before we closed our round, this thing happened.

So the way we went about it was, we were very transparent with all our employees at the time that this is what we're trying to do.

And we are actually doing this in 1 of the hardest times in this space, because, well, speak to anyone in the space, they would, they would confirm that we are actually trying to do the hardest thing possible.

And at the hardest times you can imagine.

When we got out of that crisis, we were very clear with our employees, everyone who is working with us, whether it is through contracting or as an employee, that this is the situation we're in.

We are trying to raise money and this is how...

We are always constantly updating them about where we are in talks with our investors and what place we are in.

And so at least it didn't come as a shock to anyone when something like that happened because we kept everyone in the loop.

So it sounds like 1 of your leadership tips on how others can make it through crisis is to be transparent and to keep, to communicate often and keep people in the loop.

And in any crisis situation, it's also very important that we are thinking with a clear mind Because when you talk about crisis, it's essentially you have to make a lot of critical decisions that affect your business and you have to make this decision very quick.

So it doesn't help if you're making all these decisions, very important decisions without a clear mind.

So when I'm in crisis, I make it a point to make sure I'm refreshing my mind, like playing sports or working out or doing something to clear my mind so that when I'm coming back to make these decisions, these critical decisions that I have a clear mind.

Well, I can see how brilliant your mind is by everything you have created and all your successes and how you recovered from this.

And I am curious though, how did you first learn how to lead others effectively?

Did you go through any courses previously or was it just from learning the hard way by trial and error?

I think it was a little bit to trial and error.

And some of it also comes from my very personal instinct, so to speak.

So when you're not being transparent, you would have to keep up 2 stories going.

A story which is actually what's happening and a different story, which is a fabrication of what's happening, right?

Like, I naturally tend to be an open book.

So it became a bit of a natural thing to do for me that I decided to be more transparent than not.

And As I kept being transparent, I've noticed it's actually a strength.

It's not a weakness that you can't keep many secrets.

So then was there ever a moment where you realized you had a blind spot as a leader, whether someone quit or told you, I don't like your style or something like that?

Couple that really comes to my mind when we talk about blind spots and based on what people gave me feedback about.

1 of my first blind spots was estimating people's strengths and weaknesses.

So when you're working with a lot of people, you would have a lot of tasks that keep coming along and you would have to delegate these tasks or assign tasks to people.

So if you assume everyone is equally capable, you would tend to just give out tasks to who is the next available person.

As you can imagine, in retrospect, that doesn't feel like the right thing I should have done.

Some people are naturally better at doing 1 task or enjoy doing 1 task over the other.

Like, so Understanding what a person enjoys, what a person's strengths and weaknesses really help you assign the right kind of tasks to each person.

And also it plays into your own mental model around estimating how quickly can this team deliver on these things, right?

Estimating strengths and weaknesses of each and every person in my team.

That's a skill to harness and learn iteratively.

What happened that made you realize that?

So I would give these tasks to people who would take days to finish the task.

And then I noticed that they haven't made any progress.

And not only have they not made any progress, in order to make some progress, they're taking the time of this other employee who is actually good at doing this task.

So not only are they not making progress, they're actually taking up more and more of companies' resources to get the same thing done.

And the other person could have done it in a shorter period of time.

So it's really just noticing that where is this time going and being mindful that just because you helped another colleague, you shouldn't be overworking to deliver on your own stuff, right?

Yeah, really just noticing where time's going and also...

Being surprised probably by someone not meeting a deadline.

I think this, this is another blind spot that really fits into it is I'm very restless when I'm really hooked onto an idea.

There are days where I would go till 4am because I couldn't stop.

Other blind spots for me is expectations.

People tend to hire people, including myself, based on skills and talents.

But when you're a relentless person, you quickly notice that not everyone has the same level of desire to get things done fast.

So bringing this additional parameter into my hiring process around not only do I want people of at least certain skill, but I also want them to be motivated by themselves so that I don't have to constantly push them.

Do you use a tool now or do you just take more time to talk with them?

It's hard if you purely go by what goes on in the interview because sometimes people will kind of tell you what you want to hear, right?

For me, you can gauge a little bit of it by looking at their past experiences, like what have they done in the past?

A motivated person would go beyond the task they were given.

And then they do, if you ask them X, they would do X plus 20 or something.

So that's the signal of motivated people.

And at the end of the day, with experience, you will gather a bunch of these signals.

What is the level of attention they paid to different things in the past projects?

You have different sets of signals that can imply the same thing.

But at the end of the day, you only notice them when they start working, whether or not those skills are actually being used here.

So you can be a very motivated person outside this job, but not so motivated about this job.

So it's really also comes down to how they're performing within the job itself.

Well, I can definitely see how motivated you are by all the results you have already produced.

So in fact, I, I canceled my, it's a different app I use to transcribe things because that app would not be very, I mean, it would be good till about 70%.

And then I'd have to have my assistant clean it up.

And to your point, right, then it's taking even more time of someone that could be using their time better.

So your app, your transcript.lol is 99% accurate and I tested it and it's fantastic.

So I know that, you know, 1 of the things that you seem to stand for is creating, or as you would say, creating cool tech that makes a difference.

I'm glad you've noticed this 99% accuracy because a few months ago, when we were deciding which model to use, because should we go for 70, 80% accuracy or really get the best we can?

We noticed that if you go for a lower accuracy, we can get things done faster.

It would keep our costs down and everything.

And I consciously made this choice that I'm sure there's going to be a lot of tools which do this.

We want to keep the best accuracy possible, even though it is technically a harder problem to solve, we would rather solve the harder problem and distinguish ourselves to the best accuracy.

I'm really glad to see that you noticed this, and I thought we put into it.

And I also noticed I can also do a search.

It's like an AI tool that I can search for.

Where's that word that I was looking for?

And, and that's 99, no, that's a hundred percent accurate.

So, you know, I'm really, really grateful that you do what you do, that today you were willing to share your leadership tips with other leaders and if anyone wants to know more about it, they can go to transcript.lol and I'll put that in the description.

But thank you again for, you know, being open and sharing some of your insights as a leader.

Thank you, Birgit, for hosting this podcast.

I'm a huge fan now, since I started listening to the last few episodes.

I think there's so much more for me to learn from this podcast and thanks for having me.


Speaker 0: Hello, and welcome to the CEO Blindspot Show, where leaders lead leaders. I'm your host, Birgit Kamps. And today's guest is Praveen Pandyala, who is the founder and CEO of a SaaS company called Omnivision Solutions. And He's the creator of very useful apps like Plantrips.ai and Transcript.lol. In fact, due to Transcript's 99% accurate results, which saved me a ton of time, I am now 1 of Praveen's 30,000 satisfied clients.

Anyway, welcome to the show, Praveen.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Birgit, for having me on the show. I've listened to a lot of your podcasts and it helped me a lot in a lot of my decision making as a CEO. And I'm very excited to be here and having this conversation today.

Speaker 0: Well, thank you. And when I read about you, I heard that you believe in being a lifelong learner. So you just proved it by what you said. Yeah. So, you know, I I'm always looking to see What are the clues for why a leader has been so successful?

And 1 of them, you just confessed. It seems to me that 1 of the reasons you've succeeded as a leader is because you're always learning. But, you know, I think it helps also that you're really, really smart. I mean, you've got so many awards. If I got this correctly, you ranked number 1 out of 1,400,000 students.

Is that right?

Speaker 1: Yes, it is.

Speaker 0: Wow. And you've got several degrees. Your papers have been published and cited in, I think, over 167 articles. And you've also lived in different places, India, Germany, even where I am, Texas, and now the UK. But why don't you tell me, what are some of the reasons you think you have succeeded as a leader?

Speaker 1: For me, a lot of my success, I believe, comes from just being curious. Like if you're a naturally curious person, that would put you on a path to be on a continuous learning path. You see something new, your first instinct is to understand how this works or what are the things that you don't understand about it and then go deeper and deeper into this. So just being a naturally curious person, I think that helps a lot. And I think this is a skill that you can also attain to practice.

You can force yourself to be more curious in some way. Or at least you can force yourself to be continuously learning and you can always monitor whether or not you're learning new things on a regular basis. And the second 1 is being agile. This is 1 of the key aspects when you're working in a fast-paced industry like tech, SaaS areas, the industry is constantly changing, new technology comes along very quickly. Not only is it that it's fine if you learn things fast, but at the same time, you get new information.

Are you quick enough to change your mental models and also change your business structure or change your products based on the things you've just learned? And also making a good call. Is it worth making this call at this point in time. So a lot of skill comes into play, whether or not when is the right time to make the change. But being agile plays into play, plays a big part in being a successful leader.

Speaker 0: Yeah.

Speaker 1: In my opinion.

Speaker 0: Being agile, being curious and constantly learning sounds like are some of the reasons why you've succeeded. I am curious though, you've worked in leadership roles at Google and Microsoft, and then now you're also an entrepreneur and which includes, right, you learned from a venture that was with blockchain that didn't work out and you recovered from that.

Speaker 1: So yeah, I think there's, there's a lot more to learn when something fails than when it succeeds. A lot of confusion that you have with success is you're always unsure whether the success came from pure luck or because of some clever decisions that you've made. 1 of the first Android apps that I ever built suddenly received 25,000 downloads in 1 year. But in actual fact, I had no idea how people just found out about this app. So that was through pure luck.

I didn't learn a lot from that success, so to speak. But failures, on the other hand, can teach you a lot of valuable lessons.

Speaker 0: But, Praveen, when I look at your track record, you've had pretty much nothing but successes, it looks like, other than the blockchain, which was kind of because of the FTX situation. How do you see that? And then how did that impact leading the people that you were leading?

Speaker 1: Yeah. So sometimes you could make all the right calls, you could work with the right people and everything, but there are, there is always certain negative externalities that you can't really control. And this FTX situation was a negative externality in the business we are in. It's a bad timing for the market. When we were trying to raise our funds, that's when the situation happened.

And just before we closed our round, this thing happened. So the way we went about it was, we were very transparent with all our employees at the time that this is what we're trying to do. And we are actually doing this in 1 of the hardest times in this space, because, well, speak to anyone in the space, they would, they would confirm that we are actually trying to do the hardest thing possible. And at the hardest times you can imagine. Yeah, yeah.

When we got out of that crisis, we were very clear with our employees, everyone who is working with us, whether it is through contracting or as an employee, that this is the situation we're in. We are trying to raise money and this is how... We are always constantly updating them about where we are in talks with our investors and what place we are in. And so at least it didn't come as a shock to anyone when something like that happened because we kept everyone in the loop.

Speaker 0: So it sounds like 1 of your leadership tips on how others can make it through crisis is to be transparent and to keep, to communicate often and keep people in the loop. Is that right?

Speaker 1: Yes. And in any crisis situation, it's also very important that we are thinking with a clear mind Because when you talk about crisis, it's essentially you have to make a lot of critical decisions that affect your business and you have to make this decision very quick. So it doesn't help if you're making all these decisions, very important decisions without a clear mind. So when I'm in crisis, I make it a point to make sure I'm refreshing my mind, like playing sports or working out or doing something to clear my mind so that when I'm coming back to make these decisions, these critical decisions that I have a clear mind. So, yeah.

Speaker 0: Well, I can see how brilliant your mind is by everything you have created and all your successes and how you recovered from this. And I am curious though, how did you first learn how to lead others effectively? How did you know to be transparent? Did you go through any courses previously or was it just from learning the hard way by trial and error?

Speaker 1: I think it was a little bit to trial and error. And some of it also comes from my very personal instinct, so to speak. So when you're not being transparent, you would have to keep up 2 stories going. A story which is actually what's happening and a different story, which is a fabrication of what's happening, right? Like, or omission of what's happening.

And these stories are hard to keep up. Like, I naturally tend to be an open book. So it became a bit of a natural thing to do for me that I decided to be more transparent than not. So that was 1. And As I kept being transparent, I've noticed it's actually a strength.

It's not a weakness that you can't keep many secrets.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Yes. Very good. So then was there ever a moment where you realized you had a blind spot as a leader, whether someone quit or told you, I don't like your style or something like that?

Speaker 1: Yeah, lots of blind spots. Couple that really comes to my mind when we talk about blind spots and based on what people gave me feedback about. 1 of my first blind spots was estimating people's strengths and weaknesses. So when you're working with a lot of people, you would have a lot of tasks that keep coming along and you would have to delegate these tasks or assign tasks to people. So if you assume everyone is equally capable, you would tend to just give out tasks to who is the next available person.

Right. As you can imagine, in retrospect, that doesn't feel like the right thing I should have done. Some people are naturally better at doing 1 task or enjoy doing 1 task over the other. Right. Like, so Understanding what a person enjoys, what a person's strengths and weaknesses really help you assign the right kind of tasks to each person.

And also it plays into your own mental model around estimating how quickly can this team deliver on these things, right? Estimating strengths and weaknesses of each and every person in my team. I think that's a skill. That's a skill to harness and learn iteratively. So that's 1.

Speaker 0: What happened that made you realize that?

Speaker 1: So I would give these tasks to people who would take days to finish the task. And then I noticed that they haven't made any progress. And not only have they not made any progress, in order to make some progress, they're taking the time of this other employee who is actually good at doing this task. So not only are they not making progress, they're actually taking up more and more of companies' resources to get the same thing done. And the other person could have done it in a shorter period of time.

So it's really just noticing that where is this time going and being mindful that just because you helped another colleague, you shouldn't be overworking to deliver on your own stuff, right? Your help comes in the company time. Yeah, really just noticing where time's going and also...

Speaker 0: Being surprised probably by someone not meeting a deadline.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yes. I think this, this is another blind spot that really fits into it is I'm very restless when I'm really hooked onto an idea. There are days where I would go till 4am because I couldn't stop. I move fast.

Other blind spots for me is expectations. People tend to hire people, including myself, based on skills and talents. But when you're a relentless person, you quickly notice that not everyone has the same level of desire to get things done fast. So bringing this additional parameter into my hiring process around not only do I want people of at least certain skill, but I also want them to be motivated by themselves so that I don't have to constantly push them. Right.

Speaker 0: And how do you know if they are that? Do you use a tool now or do you just take more time to talk with them?

Speaker 1: It's hard if you purely go by what goes on in the interview because sometimes people will kind of tell you what you want to hear, right?

Speaker 0: Right.

Speaker 1: For me, you can gauge a little bit of it by looking at their past experiences, like what have they done in the past? A motivated person would go beyond the task they were given. They would actually enjoy doing it. And then they do, if you ask them X, they would do X plus 20 or something. So that's the signal of motivated people.

And at the end of the day, with experience, you will gather a bunch of these signals. What is the level of attention they paid to different things in the past projects? You have different sets of signals that can imply the same thing. But at the end of the day, you only notice them when they start working, whether or not those skills are actually being used here. So you can be a very motivated person outside this job, but not so motivated about this job.

Right. So it's really also comes down to how they're performing within the job itself.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, I can definitely see how motivated you are by all the results you have already produced. And thankfully I get to benefit from it. Right. So in fact, I, I canceled my, it's a different app I use to transcribe things because that app would not be very, I mean, it would be good till about 70%.

And then I'd have to have my assistant clean it up. And to your point, right, then it's taking even more time of someone that could be using their time better. So your app, your transcript.lol is 99% accurate and I tested it and it's fantastic. So I know that, you know, 1 of the things that you seem to stand for is creating, or as you would say, creating cool tech that makes a difference. So thank you for making a difference.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much. I'm glad you've noticed this 99% accuracy because a few months ago, when we were deciding which model to use, because should we go for 70, 80% accuracy or really get the best we can? We noticed that if you go for a lower accuracy, we can get things done faster. We can give you the results faster. It would keep our costs down and everything.

And I consciously made this choice that I'm sure there's going to be a lot of tools which do this. We want to keep the best accuracy possible, even though it is technically a harder problem to solve, we would rather solve the harder problem and distinguish ourselves to the best accuracy. I'm really glad to see that you noticed this, and I thought we put into it. Thank you.

Speaker 0: Yes. And I also noticed I can also do a search. It's like an AI tool that I can search for. What did that person say? Where's that word that I was looking for?

And, and that's 99, no, that's a hundred percent accurate. So that's really amazing. And the summary it provides. So, you know, I'm really, really grateful that you do what you do, that today you were willing to share your leadership tips with other leaders and if anyone wants to know more about it, they can go to transcript.lol and I'll put that in the description. But thank you again for, you know, being open and sharing some of your insights as a leader.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Birgit, for hosting this podcast. I'm a huge fan now, since I started listening to the last few episodes. I think there's so much more for me to learn from this podcast and thanks for having me.

See all CEO Blindspots transcripts on Applepodcasts

Praveen Pendyala, CEO of Omnivision Solutions; "Be Curious and Agile!" (14 min)