Ep 20 - On FHE, Zama, and New Internet Standard

Hi. This is the podcast, and I'm your host, Saurabh. Before we begin, views expressed here are personal opinions. None of this is any kind of advice, let alone financial or legal. It's a conversation about things we find interesting. Welcome to episode number 20. Our guest today is Rand Indi, CEO and cofounder of Zara. Zara recently raised an impressive $73,000,000 round led by Multi Coin Capital. This is to continue pushing the boundaries of AI and cryptography. We dive deep into the world of fully homomorphic encryption known as FHE with Rand in this episode. His journey in AI began over 2 d

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Right. Before we get into all the technical stuff, what Zama does and FHE I mean, while I was researching for the episode, I realized that you have playlist that are public on Spotify, and I saw interesting overlaps with what I listen to. So I saw a few songs by Panditra Vishankar and Legends of Indian classical. So, yeah, I mean, let's just start there. How did you get interested there?

Yeah. Okay. I mean, so when I was 13 years old, that was back in 1998, I was already coding. I was already a nerd, but I also loved music. And I started DJ ing at the time. So, you know, I basically got some vinyl decks, started, you know, playing around some some stuff like that. And I've always had this very strong attraction for organic Indian Arabic type of electronic music. And so, you know, when you listen to these kind of electronic musics, you also get interested in original versions that don't have the electronic beats behind them. And I find that extremely soothing. So, you know, I I

Right. Interesting. No. I mean, I asked you because that's my go to stuff. Typically, when I'm writing long form research, like, that's in the background more often than not. And Yeah. Exactly. Like you said, it helps you soothe okay. Yeah. I mean, let's get into your background. What got you interested in AI in the first place?

Wow. So I guess besides, you know, DJing and music stuff that I just mentioned, I've been coding since I was 10 years old. Built my first company as a teenager in the nineties. It was social network at the time. And then eventually got into AI my first year in college when I got into computer science because, you know, I mean, I had been coding for a few years, and I was kind of bored that I wanted to learn something new. So I started picking up on machine learning. This was back in 2003, so, you know, over 20 years ago now. How new was machine learning back then? Machine learning is not new p

Okay. So 2003 machine learning.

2003 when I was 18. Loved it. And to me, at that point, I realized that the world and computers in the future would no longer be programmed. They would be taught to do things. So I started diving deep into that and eventually did a PhD in machine learning applied to biology. You know, things like analyzing your DNA to predict x, y, z potential future disease, something is called bioinformatics, which was one of the early applications of machine learning. So my interest has always been at the intersection of AI, health care, data, and things like that, which eventually led me to get interested

Can you just give some snippets of what the report said back in 17? So