Trisha Kothari

I co-founded Unit21 in 2018. We build software that banks and fintechs use to fight fraud and money laundering. I ran it as CEO for 7+ years and now serve as Chairman. Before that, I was one of the first engineers at Affirm. I studied computer science at Penn.

These days I'm thinking about what to build next. I'm particularly interested in technologies that change what ordinary people can do.

Businesses that run themselves. Could one person build a $1M, $10M, or even $100M ARR company while spending just fifteen minutes a day running it? I'm very fascinated by the future potential of self-healing companies.

How children learn. In Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, a little girl learns from a book that adapts to her. I keep thinking about that. AI tutor apps miss the point. The goal of education is to foster independent thinking, and I'm interested in how education can be redesigned around teaching people to think for themselves.

Industrialization. I think it was a grave mistake to let China accumulate so much of the world's manufacturing capability. Most products manufactured outside of China have just the final assembly in those countries. I'm interested in what it would actually take to rebuild this capacity.

Flying cars. We have spent billions of dollars in funding over 10+ years and flying cars isn't a reality. The tech behind eVTOL works. But no company has been certified successfully by regulators. What would it actually take?

Ambient memory. With AI, we'll be able to search our memories in a way we couldn't before. Memory is nebulous in nature. What happens when it becomes a fact you can retrieve and verify? What does that do to law, discrimination, trust, and our relationships?

Scams. I've spent years studying how scams work. Grandparent scams, romance scams, bank impersonation. We've come a long way from Nigerian princes. AI can mass parallelize highly believable and personalized scams. Along with my work at Unit21, I spend a lot of time thinking about how AI will shape the future of scams and what we can do to protect people.

Religion. I now think religion is the reason we didn't kill each other and wipe out civilization. I am interested in what life will look like as religion fades and resurrects over time.

Gender norms. In Western societies, men and women have increasingly similar access to education and opportunity, yet their lives often diverge in remarkably predictable ways. I'm especially interested in how seemingly small choices made early on in life compound over decades.

Meditation. I did a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat before starting my first company. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life. I came away with what I still think is the most valuable lesson I've learned: This too shall pass.