Perspectives: AI has changed how we consume information
The co-founder of Turbo AI shares his thoughts.
This week’s Perspectives is an interview with Sarthak Dhawan, co-founder of Turbo AI, a notetaker and study tools app for students. In 2025, Sarthak and his other co-founder, Rudy Arora, dropped out of college to focus on Turbo AI full-time.
I’ve written a lot about AI and its impact on work, so it was interesting to hear Sarthak’s perspective as an “industry insider” working for an AI company.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ABY: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you ended up starting Turbo AI.
Sarthak Dhawan: I started coding in elementary school because my brother got me into it. I got a lot of joy from building things and seeing people use them. It slowly evolved into creating random projects. I met my co-founder, Rudy, in middle school.
When I was going into 9th grade, my school had this portal that students would use to check their grades. But it was really slow and didn’t work half the time. I said to myself, “This seems like an opportunity for me to go ahead and build a nice, pretty mobile app for students to check their grades.” I did that, and it ended up going pretty viral, just by word of mouth. I remember going to my school, seeing people use my app, and they were liking it!
I got into Duke University, and Rudy went to Northwestern. We started Turbo AI with $300 we had saved up from an internship, and used that to create the LLC.
About eight months ago, we chose to drop out of college because the business was doing so well. We have over 8 million signups and are earning more than a million dollars per month.
ABY: What was it like, making the decision to drop out of college and focus on this full-time, rather than finish your degree?
SD: The first time I mentioned dropping out to my parents, they had a terrible reaction. Like, “What are you thinking? Duke is a good school. We’re paying so much in tuition. You worked so hard to get to this point. Why not just finish and do the startup stuff later?” At the time, I thought, “You know what? That makes sense.”
It was only when we were making a sizeable amount of money, growing the team, and needed more employees that I couldn’t justify the amount of time I was spending on school. It wasn’t like I said, “Hey, I think this is going to be big. Let’s drop out.” It was more like, “This is already big.” It was a natural progression. And when it came to that point, my parents realized that their kid was going to be ok.
ABY: What was the transition like from “this is my side hustle” to “this is my full-time job”?
SD: Mentally, there was never really a transition, if I’m being honest. I wake up every day because I find this work enjoyable, and I want to grow the company.
One of the biggest reasons I didn’t want to leave school was actually the social environment. Duke is awesome. When we formed the company, we decided to make the social part a priority.
ABY: When you think about creating a work environment for your team, what’s important to you?
SD: When I think about hiring and building a culture, I think the most important thing is having autonomy in what you do. No one wants to be told, “Do this task,” and be micromanaged the whole time. That makes it painful.
We’re very small for the scale we’re at. When we’re hiring someone, we want them to own that sector of the business, whether it’s an engineer or a marketing person — so they feel like they’re making decisions and having an impact. I think that’s what people derive value from.
With the actual logistics of things, we’re very flexible. If you want to work some days remotely or choose your own hours, it’s fine. I’ve never really understood why that matters. I’m of the perspective that if the work gets done and it’s high quality, I don’t care what you do.
ABY: What do you see in your users’ adoption of AI — mostly students — in how they approach trying new things or how they include AI in their work?
SD: We’ve had a rapid shift in the past few years where people’s attention spans are smaller and smaller, because of social media. That shortened attention span is affecting people in all areas of their lives.
So we’re seeing a problem in the usage of our application where students’ attention spans are so short that even if you take a 100-page PDF and put it into our tool to make four pages, they’re not willing to sit down and read those four pages. Four pages are still too much.
AI is catalyzing this even further because instead of reading a 10-page article, you can ask for a summary and read a few words. It’ll give you exactly what you want.
The awesome part about consuming information before AI was that you were forced to consume a lot of information and synthesize it yourself. And the process of consuming information you don’t necessarily need is really valuable. In this world of AI, you’re not consuming any extraneous information. It’s sort of like tunnel vision that’s been exacerbated by social media being exacerbated even more by AI. What we’re trying to do with Turbo AI is make learning more fun, more enjoyable, and more interactive.
ABY: How do you think about AI’s impact on the workforce as a whole?
SD: When I look at AI from two years ago, when it wasn’t nearly as good, compared to my productivity now, it’s maybe 100 to 1,000X. I think it’s very complementary. We’re not at the stage where AI can autonomously do things. You need a human utilizing these tools.
Historically, when the Industrial Revolution came around, jobs were lost, but many new jobs were created. There was a lot of technology early on replacing jobs that people didn’t necessarily want to do.
The problem we’re seeing now is that AI excels in areas that are highly intellectual. For example, right now we’re seeing that AI is amazing at coding, math, and physics. When jobs at the higher end of desirability start to get taken away, I don’t know what sort of macroeconomic shifts that would cause. It’s a little bit concerning to me, but hard to say.
ABY: What would you say to someone who is uncertain about the job market right now?
SD: Knowledge across the board has never been more democratized. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to understand certain concepts or improve your job prospects, you might have to go to a prestigious college. But now, AI levels the playing field in terms of how fast, how easily, and how cheaply you can upskill yourself.
So the bottleneck is just, are you willing to put in the time to learn something? But that’s a solvable problem, and very realistic.
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