Inside The Garage SF with Nikhil Pai

Reflecting on my journey, I've always owed a debt of gratitude to my time at Northwestern University for kickstarting my entrepreneurial adventure. The people I met, the support I received, and the classes I took all played a pivotal role in shaping my path. From the Garage and Farley teams to my classmates and the Nuvention program, I learned invaluable lessons that still resonate with me today. One of the most important things cemented in my mind during this time was that building a company takes a community, and there's always a lot to learn from each other.

Since graduating from Northwestern, I've spent the last seven years building Hearth, a Series B vertical SaaS company in the home improvement space. The early years of building Hearth in the Bay Area were incredible, and I frequently tapped into my Northwestern network for support. For instance, I hired my teammate from Nuvention, Zak, as our VP of Engineering and sought advice from David Nguyen on scaling our business.

At the end of the pandemic, I decided to move away from the Bay Area and eventually step back from Hearth to explore new ideas. This led to the founding of Chronicle in 2023, an AI-powered vertical SaaS company for social security disability lawyers. Talking with SSD lawyers, I realized there was a gap in the technology needed to manage and review evidence, something that advancements in AI would be perfect for.

For my second startup, I chose to be a solo founder and attempt to fill roles using AI. However, I knew the importance of having a community to fall back on with the ups and downs of building a company. That's when I learned about the EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) program at the SF Garage. It allowed me to reconnect with a community I'd relied on for years and meet new alums working on similar challenges.

To continue the tradition of learning from others that I cherished at Northwestern, I proposed hosting lightning talks when Keyaira was looking for event ideas. It would be short talks on any topic related to growing a business. The goal of this format was to lower the barriers to entry and allow folks to engage in a less formal setting. I enlisted my friends and fellow alums, Sonia Nigam of Change and Lakshman Mody of VirtualStaging.Art, to speak, and we ensured there was good food to accompany the event.

We hosted our first set of lightning talks on June 26th, which was a great success. In the short hour, we covered two topics: the four fits needed to build a $100m business and the various marketing channels you could use for acquisition. The group of 15 people could ask questions and learn from each other. We also had some great learnings for the next time we host the event, like the number of speakers we can fit into an hour and that food should be ordered a little earlier.

We plan to host these lightning talks monthly and cover more topics useful to the community. If you are interested in learning more or speaking at one of them, reach out to nikhil@chroniclelegal.com