Marina Temkin — previously a venture capital and macro at TechCrunch — has found a fascinating ecosystem story. It follows Rahul Sonwalker, an erstwhile engineer who started up the AI data analytics venture, Julius. The narrative takes an ironic twist after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now renamed X, in 2022.
In the wake of Musk’s takeover, reporters encountered two men carrying boxes outside Twitter’s headquarters. One of these men, who introduced himself as a recently laid-off Twitter engineer, turned out to be Sonwalker. At 27 though, it made sense – he’d already spent a number of years honing his engineering craft at Uber’s engineering juggernaut. Then, as a second act, he bravely leapt into the startup world.
Sonwalker founded Julius just about two years ago. Since that time, the platform has continued to receive rapid momentum and crossed over two million registered users. Julius has a focus on the analysis and visualization of large datasets, using predictive modeling features driven by natural language prompts. Its functionality earns it visibility in the same conversation as heavy-hitters like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini.
Reflecting on his entrepreneurial journey, Sonwalker stated, “I wanted to build something that would make data science very accessible to everyone.” His vision taps into a greater market based need for easy to use, highly technical, data analysis tools in the academic and professional world.
Iavor Bojinov, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, has seen the potential of Julius firsthand. He adapted the tool in particular for his new required course, Data Science and AI for Leaders. Bojinov did a deep dive, head-to-head comparison of the many platforms. What he discovered was that Julius beat out all of the rest—including ChatGPT. This endorsement from a premier academic institution adds to the stature of the tool and further demonstrates its effectiveness and relevance in today’s education in data science.
Sonwalker continues to adapt and thrive through the trenches of startup life. He thinks back on what he learned since his unexpected Twitter layoff. He explained, “I certainly felt it in the beginning. To be perfectly frank, it’s not been dampening my entrepreneurial spirit as much lately.”
Temkin’s coverage of Sonwalker deepens the backstory to the story of tech layoffs and the innovation and geniuses they later unleashed upon the industry. Many professionals within the tech sector are finding new opportunities amid adversity, leading to a wave of startups aiming to address pressing needs in various fields.