Sharbani Roy

Chances are, you’ve used tech that was in some part engineered, brought to market, or scaled by AI Fund Fellow Sharbani Roy. From Amazon Alexa to OSS and internal Core AI/ML frameworks and services at Google, these recent notable accomplishments stem from a career evolving from physics researcher, to data scientist, to product and engineering leadership, to end-to-end product strategist and operator for consumer and enterprise products.

AI Fund founders benefit most from Sharbani’s advice and significant tech experience with starting, seeding, growing, and scaling products and programs. “Coming to Google and running services that much of the world runs on, it’s pretty big scale. But I’ve also been in the trenches, starting things from scratch. I’ve led the zero to one, the one to 100, and the 100 to many across my career,” says Sharbani.

“I’ve rolled up my sleeves and tried on most of the functions I’ve managed,” continues Sharbani. “It’s partially to help the team wherever I can, but has a nice second-order effect of building empathy for the role of other teammates.”

Good humored and people centric, Sharbani values the Kaizen mentality of “trying to get better every day at everything that I do” tempered with compassionate accountability for herself and others. This is seen clearly in her hiring advice to founders. 

“When you’re a founder, you are really good at many things,” says Sharbani, “but you can’t be good at everything. It’s hard to show your vulnerabilities and to be really open and courageous about what you can’t do and asking for help. That’s when you can fall into the potential pitfall of ‘I’m going to hire people who think like me’ when what you need to do is complement your thinking. You need to have a clear vision for your people just as much as you would for your organization.”

Sharbani can “geek out on the tech” while maintaining focus on deeply understanding the needs of the end user. She advises her mentees that AI is no longer the differentiator it used to be, and founders need to be “crisp and clear about what you’re doing and what you’re not doing” she says. “I love value creation,” she says, “but you also have to capture that value. The best way to do that is to understand the deeper human element behind customer needs.”

Sharbani holds degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Chicago and an MBA with a focus on entrepreneurship and product development from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Sharbani has a deep passion for health and wellness and is an active public speaker and mentor. She lives in Seattle with her husband and three children.