Not Where You'd Expect a Silicon Valley Founder to Land
Picture Monik Pamecha in a service center in Oklahoma. It's 2024. He's not there for a tune-up. He's there because a car dealership owner called him up and said, "we are drowning in phone calls" - and Monik needed to hear exactly what that drowning sounded like before he wrote a single line of production code.
The path to that Oklahoma service bay started much earlier. Monik began coding around age 11 or 12, taught himself machine learning, published a guide to RNN-LSTM on Medium in 2016, and built one of the first conversational AI agents that same year. He didn't study computer science at a famous institution because someone told him to - he studied it because the alternative was going to waste.
By the time he arrived at Uber, then Turing.com (which he joined when it had about 10 employees and watched grow to a ~$4 billion company), then Braze, he had developed an unusually clear framework: "If there is any specific thing that you do that does not require creativity, it should be automated." Simple. Radical in practice.
His first real founding attempt after Berkeley was Skindex - an AI-powered skincare product discovery platform built as his MIMS capstone project - which was later acquired. Then came the startup that preceded Toma: a dietary management tool for patients with chronic conditions. The team got banned from Reddit and Facebook communities while trying to find users. Six months of nothing. So they made a Google Sheet.
Ten ideas. Two weeks each. The third or fourth: a horizontal voice AI platform. They prototyped it over a weekend and dropped it in a few online forums. Within three days, 200 demo calls were booked. Healthcare folks called. MLM people called. Construction companies called. And then - a car dealer called. And then that dealer recommended them to his "20 group."
"The car business chooses you," Monik said later. "You don't get to choose."