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Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Karan Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, a company pioneering the use of state space models (SSMs) for AI applications. Karan shared his journey from pursuing a PhD at Stanford to co-founding Cartesia with Albert Gu — taking their academic research on SSMs and turning it into a product that is initially focused on voice applications. Karan explained how SSMs differ fundamentally from transformers, offering a more efficient, memory-based architecture that processes information sequentially rather than in batches. This approach enables more human-like AI systems that can remember and adapt to new information in real-time. The conversation also covers:
How SSMs offer significant efficiency advantages for applications like voice agents and on-device AI
Why architecture innovation remains crucial alongside advances in data and training techniques
The challenges and opportunities in the voice AI space
His perspective on the open-weights vs. closed-model debate in AI
Advice for researchers who want to become founders
Chapters:
00:05 Cold open
01:47 Karan’s founder journey
03:45 Transitioning from academia to entrepreneurship
05:17 The art of recruiting
09:22 Karan’s vision for Cartesia
13:36 Innovation in AI architectures
16:33 Advantages of State Space Models (SSMs)
19:34 The false dichotomy: models vs. applications
21:17 Best practices for voice AI
25:10 Thoughts on the broader AI landscape
31:37 Open source vs. closed models
35:00 Karan’s thoughts on fundraising
41:27 Advice for founders building AI startups
46:03 Upcoming trends that get Karan excited