333: How AI Is Transforming On-Call Life — The Future of SREs and IT Ops with Gou Rao, Co-Founder of NeuBird.ai

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Gou Rao is a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of NeuBird, where he's building Hawkeye—an AI-powered site reliability engineer designed to identify, diagnose, and resolve IT infrastructure issues. He previously co-founded Portworx, which was acquired by Pure Storage for $370 million in 2020. In 2024, NeuBird raised a $22.5 million seed extension from M12, Microsoft’s venture arm, following a $22 million seed round led by Mayfield, Stepstone Group, and Prosperity7 Ventures. Gou holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Bangalore University and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Gou Rao’s journey from late-night support calls to co-founding NeuBird and building Hawkeye, an AI-powered site reliability engineer. • Why diagnosing IT issues is 99% of the problem—and how Hawkeye helps SREs move from noise to actionable insight in minutes. • The shift from chatbots to agentic systems—and why reasoning, not just automation, is the next frontier for enterprise AI. • How AI can reduce burnout by eliminating repetitive incident response tasks, freeing teams to focus on creativity and automation. • The importance of transparency, explainability, and human oversight in deploying AI systems with agency. • Gou’s reflections on entrepreneurship, including why “mistakes are an asset” and how jumping into the unknown can lead to your biggest breakthroughs.

Resources:

Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter • : https://aiandwork.beehiiv.com/subscribe • Connect with Gou on LinkedIn • : https://www.linkedin.com/in/gouthamrao/ • AI fun fact article • : https://www.hrdive.com/news/anthropic-report-AI-software-engineers-automation-augmentation/739833/ • On becoming an investor and discovering amazing companies • : https://www.buzzsprout.com/520474/episodes/7446373 •

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