The trade-offs of running a high-growth AI startup

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Shantanu Gangal

CEO at Prodigal

November 6, 2025

Running a high growth AI startup means

⚖️ balancing sales today with research for tomorrow

🏋 deferring current comfort for probabilistic risks and

🪄 trading tangible cash for intangible IP.

Even then when I picked up Morgan Housel's latest, "The Art of Spending Money",

little did I expect that the Universe would bless our spend with a token OpenAI plaque (rather 10B+ tokens) 😅

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