Founder & CEO at Layerpath
Vinay Chandrasekaran
I've spent 20 years asking one question: did they actually get it? Not did they watch it - did they understand what to do next? I built product mockups for 300+ startups, then spent 10 years in GTM at Zoho as it scaled from $200M to $1.5B. Same pattern every time: the product was good. The understanding wasn't. Now I'm building Layerpath. Aspiring triathlete. Based in San Francisco.
Questions & Answers
Why are you excited about your company/product?
Most software is hard to understand - not because it's bad, but because nobody has solved the gap between what teams know and what users actually get. I've watched this pattern for 20 years across industries. The product is fine. The understanding isn't. What excites me about Layerpath is that we're closing that gap from both sides at once: the creator shouldn't have to manually structure knowledge, and the viewer shouldn't have to navigate to find answers. We started with interactive demos because that's where the gap is most visible and most expensive - but the opportunity is everything in between.
How is your team uniquely positioned to solve the problem you're tackling?
I spent a decade at Zoho as it scaled from $200M to $1.5B, building partner programs across 10+ industries. I've seen product understanding fail at scale from the inside. Our CTO led AI initiatives at Gen AI Labs, Agoda, and Scientific Games. Our CPO holds patents in conversational AI. We have the technical depth to build AI that actually understands products, not just retrieves text. But the real edge: we built the interaction layer first. 10,000+ signups ($0 CAC), ~1,000 active customers, real usage data on how people navigate product knowledge. We're not building from a whiteboard.
What problem or opportunity inspired you to start your company, and how has your vision evolved since then?
I spent 10 years at Zoho watching one pattern repeat across thousands of companies: the product was good, the understanding wasn't. Prospects couldn't self-navigate. Customers needed repeated training. Docs were outdated the moment they were published. We started by fixing the most expensive version of this - the "Book a Demo" bottleneck. The vision evolved when we realized demos were just the symptom. The real opportunity is an AI layer that sits between complex software and the people who need to understand it - something that knows the product deeply and can explain it to anyone, instantly.
