Ashutosh Garg and the three-month wait

Ashutosh Garg applied for a job at Google and heard nothing for three months. Then he met someone at a social gathering who introduced him to the company. Within weeks, he had an offer. His qualifications had survived the interval quite unchanged. The difference was an introduction.

For a researcher interested in how machines sort information, this was an awkward little experiment. The same candidate had produced two different outcomes. Years later, the experience would help him explain why he wanted to build Eightfold AI. Somewhere between a person’s abilities and an employer’s attention, useful information was getting lost.

“Give me a problem and I’ll work on it,” Garg has said. This particular problem had the advantage of being personal. It also had rather more at stake than a disappointing set of search results. A missed match could change a career.

By October 2026, the company he co-founded in 2016 had reached a transition of its own. Joe Korngiebel became CEO on October 13; Garg became chairman. That gives his story a useful vantage point: a decade spent trying to make an introduction less necessary, followed by the decision to hand someone else the chief executive’s chair.

A small town, then a much bigger dataset

Garg was born and raised in Haldwani, in what is now Uttarakhand, India. He describes a family culture in which education offered a route to opportunity. Getting into IIT Delhi was a defining experience. The journey that followed took him from electrical engineering to the mathematics of learning machines.

He graduated from IIT Delhi in 1997 and moved to the United States in 1998. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he earned a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering, concentrating on machine learning. This was years before a conversation about AI could be relied upon to interrupt almost any dinner.

He dates his first exposure to machine learning to 1994, during his undergraduate studies. His training therefore preceded the present rush by decades. It helps explain why he tends to discuss AI through problems of prediction, relevance and learning, rather than treating the latest interface as the beginning of the subject.

IBM Research and Google followed. His published work and inventions became substantial parts of his professional record: Eightfold’s leadership biography lists more than 30 papers and more than 50 patents. IIT Delhi recognized his entrepreneurship with a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2024. The student had returned to the institution’s attention as a company builder.

Learning what someone might do next

At Google, which he joined in 2004, Garg worked on personalization. The questions were practical: what might someone buy, which news article might interest them, what should a recommendation put in front of them? There were enormous collections of documents and enough computing infrastructure to explore them.

He remembers using weekends to run his own MapReduce jobs and make sense of the data. There is something revealing in that picture. His playground was a collection of machines, and the activity was asking whether a pattern could tell him something useful about the next action.

He left Google in 2008, as the financial crisis made starting a company an unusually bracing career choice. Early ideas did not all work. In 2009, he co-founded Bloomreach with Raj De Datta, applying search technology to the problems of digital marketers and online commerce.

As CTO, Garg helped build a business around making products and content easier to discover. The recurring subject was relevance: understanding enough about a person and an available choice to put the two together. Later, the available choice would become a job, with consequences a shopping recommendation seldom has.

The résumé has a tense problem

Eightfold grew out of a contradiction Garg kept encountering: hiring managers said they could not find people, while capable people said they could not find jobs. Both complaints could be sincere. The machinery connecting them could still be inadequate.

His co-founder, Varun Kacholia, brought experience from Facebook’s News Feed and Google’s YouTube search and recommendations. Together, they had worked on systems that inferred relevance from behavior at scale. Employment offered a related technical question and a different human responsibility.

A résumé records what has already happened. An employer needs to decide what could happen next. In conversations with Josh Bersin, Garg describes looking at how skills develop across successive years, using that history to understand what someone might learn. The object is to consider a person’s capacity to develop alongside their existing qualifications.

That approach also applies inside a company. Someone who appears settled in one department may have skills relevant to another. An internal move can be hard to imagine when the organization knows an employee chiefly by a title. Eightfold’s work extends across hiring, development and movement between roles.

There is a considerable difference between proposing this and proving every recommendation sound. Garg’s ambition gives the technology a purpose; the people using it still need to exercise judgment. A career deserves more care than simply accepting whatever appears first on a screen.

A detour, and the discipline to come back

His account of Eightfold’s early development contains a useful embarrassment. Coding began around September 2016. Paying customers arrived within months. After an encouraging start, sales slowed, and Garg changed direction. The team began selling a different product connecting enterprises with recruiting agencies.

Eventually, he returned to the original matching product. The detour complicates the tidy version of a founder who identifies a problem and proceeds directly to success. Even with experience and initial customers, it was possible to mistake a pause for a verdict.

That episode makes his advice about listening more interesting. He has had to distinguish between new evidence and the understandable desire to make something happen quickly. A founder can become so determined to respond to the market that he turns away from customers who already liked what he built.

By June 2021, Eightfold announced a $220 million Series E led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, at a $2.1 billion valuation. Those figures describe a financing event at that time. They also mark how far the company had traveled from the temporary Sunnyvale office where the founders rented a couple of cubicles in 2016.

First, make the pitch make sense

For someone with a research doctorate, Garg has a notably practical test for an idea: can a customer understand why it matters before there is a product to demonstrate? He calls this “pitch market fit.” It asks the founder to make the problem and proposed value intelligible early.

His advice to entrepreneurs is to speak with prospective customers and watch the response. A complicated demonstration can conceal a weak explanation. An interested buyer, by contrast, gives the builder something worth investigating. The engineering can follow a clearer understanding of demand.

“Maybe fall in love with the market.”

Ashutosh Garg, in conversation with Amit Somani, 2022

He has also made room for a longer explanation. In 2019, Garg and Eightfold colleague Kamal Ahluwalia published What’s Next for You: The Eightfold Path to Transforming the Way We Hire and Manage Talent, with a foreword by John W. Thompson. The book addresses employers and candidates, placing both sides of a hiring decision in the same conversation.

Its premise is easy to recognize in Garg’s own career. People change. Their usefulness cannot be described entirely by the job they happened to hold when someone last checked. Asking what comes next is a reasonable habit for a recruiter, and evidently a difficult one for a serial founder to shake.

Two Ashus and another beginning

There is a small comedy in Garg’s network. Foundation Capital investor Ashu Garg shares his name and also attended IIT Delhi. The investor has written about the confused introductions. When the two began discussing digital twins, the coincidence supplied its own joke.

The new company was Viven, co-founded with Kacholia. Foundation’s account describes weekends spent at a whiteboard and on long walks, discussing how to make an employee’s knowledge available to colleagues. The question widened from preserving expertise when people leave to helping teams access it while people are still there.

Viven emerged from stealth in October 2025 with $35 million in seed funding. Its proposed digital counterparts draw on workplace knowledge to answer questions and support collaboration. Garg was identified as co-founder and CEO. The familiar concern with understanding people had moved into another part of working life: how much a team depends on getting the right person’s attention.

Another chair, the same unfinished question

In October 2026, Garg handed Eightfold’s CEO role to Korngiebel, whose career includes Workday and Dayforce, and continued as chairman. His announcement looked back over ten years of building the company. A founder’s next step had become a public example of the career changes his business tries to understand.

The opening Google episode still offers a useful way to read the whole journey. Garg knew what he could do. An employer eventually agreed. Between those two points sat a social introduction, doing work that a formal application had failed to do.

He has spent the intervening years asking how to make that passage work for more people. The question remains wonderfully ordinary for something requiring so much mathematics: who deserves a conversation, and how do we notice them in time?