Welcome to South Asian Trailblazers! 👋🏼 I’m Simi Shah, and here, I dive deep into the journeys of trailblazing South Asians. Listen to the podcast that inspires this newsletter on Apple, Spotify, or any major podcast platform. Follow us for updates on our events and more on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, & TikTok.
🗓️ Next Week: Our Live Podcast Event with SEC Director Grewal in NYC
Next week, we will host a live podcast conversation with Gurbir S. Grewal, the esteemed Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.
This event is proudly hosted in partnership with global law firm, Morrison Foerster and The South Asian Bar Association of New York (SABANY). SABANY is an organization devoted to the needs, concerns, and interests of lawyers of South Asian heritage in the New York Metropolitan Area.
The Trailblazers Agency
At South Asian Trailblazers, we’ve long been dedicated to elevating extraordinary leaders. Our new initiative, The Trailblazers Agency and Expert Network, marks the next step toward fulfilling that mission. Our partners to date: Tanishq, Flatiron Health, and so many others.
If your organization is looking for fresh, diverse leaders to speak at your next Summit, Conference, or Event, or to represent you in your next Brand Campaign, reply here — especially as AAPI Heritage Month approaches! If you're looking for specific expertise on a project, reach out and we can plug you into our Expert Network of Trailblazers across industries.
Amol Shah, Go-to-Market Team at OpenAI
For our Season 7 Finale, we catch up with Amol Shah from OpenAI, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies and the creator of ChatGPT.
Amol's career spans roles at tech giants like Facebook and TikTok, and more recently, he served as the Chief Revenue Officer for blockchain startup QuickNode. Before his foray into the tech c-suite, Amol served as the Head of the US Disruptor team and Founding Sales Leader at TikTok. Between 2015 and 2019, he led platform sales at Facebook.
Amol began his career in the investment banking and principal investment divisions at Goldman Sachs and got his start in tech in 2013 at RocketFuel, an ad tech company. He entered the sector after graduating with his MBA from Harvard Business School. He holds a B.S. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In October of 2023, preceding a period of immense controversy at the company, Amol joined OpenAI's Go-to-Market team — driving partnerships with the company's largest customers to advance OpenAI's mission of bringing the benefits of artificial intelligence to all of humanity.
Read on for episode excerpts, which we’ve edited for clarity and brevity. 👇🏾
Simi: Emergent technologies like ChatGPT are incredible and becoming foundational in people's everyday lives. However, with this widespread use, concerns about overuse, misuse, and various criticisms of AI have emerged. As a leader at OpenAI, what concrete actions do you believe your team and you are taking to address the skepticism surrounding AI and ensure it remains a safe technology for humanity?
Amol: With any technology, there are applications that are for good or for bad, right? And so when the TV came out, right, there were people who were really excited because they could see the moon landing for the first time. But at the same time, people were concerned in terms of it brainwashing their kids. In the same way, there are other technologies that have come out where there is huge potential in terms of advancement. But then people are also thinking about, well, what is the potential harm that can come out? The rollout of ChatGPT is one where I think we were really measured in terms of just how we think about the deployment of most technology.
We are doing things in a really measured and thoughtful way. We're giving society time to adjust and we're incorporating and taking in that feedback as we go through with safety baked into the mission. So, the model that we've started to see really kind of see more uptick is around this idea that ChatGPT is a co-pilot for any knowledge worker in their life. It helps you with ideation, but at the same time, right, you still need a human element to edit, to change, to adjust, to reshape your thoughts. And so it helps you in terms, it's not the final product itself. It's not a replacement for humans. That to me is a much more optimistic and hopeful view of where we might be going and the potential of this technology.
Simi: As a South Asian man in the tech industry, a field where our community is generally overrepresented, I'm curious about your experiences navigating your multifaceted identity, as a queer person of color. How have these aspects of your identity influenced your career trajectory and experiences?
Amol: When you think about your identity, there are some parts of it that everybody can see, such as being Indian, which was always very visible. Being gay, for example, is one of those things that not a lot of people knew immediately before I came out. It shapes an identity, but at the same time, it's not all of who you are, yet it is a core piece of how you think about yourself as a person. I grew up in Pennsylvania, in the suburbs of Philly. There weren't many Indians in my community, and definitely not a lot of gay Indians.
Those different labels don't define how you view the world, but at the same time, they do shape it. Having empathy with someone who's part of a minority is something that I carry with me in how I operate and how I work.
Join us for a conversation about Amol's role sitting at the controversial yet cutting edge of AI, his pivot from finance to tech sales, and the impacts of his identity as a queer South Asian man in industry and beyond. Hear more about his journey on Apple, Spotify, and our website!