/llms.txt

# Gaurav Mathur

> AI advisor and fractional leader. Works with founders, scale-ups, and enterprise teams putting AI to work inside their companies. Currently co-founding Grove, an AI workforce platform for tax and accounting firms, backed by a16z speedrun.

I spent fifteen years building and leading software teams. Started in software as an intern at Google. Was an early engineer at Indeed and pushed the company onto mobile. Led product and engineering at Airbnb on host quality and guest experience. Most recently led teams at ATOMS (formerly CloudKitchens) digitizing restaurant ordering, and was an early adopter of production LLMs there.

I left ATOMS at the end of 2023 and went back to building. I co-founded Grove (https://www.grove.tax/), an AI workforce platform for tax and accounting firms, backed by a16z speedrun.

I work with companies that want to make a similar shift — founders pre-product-market-fit, scale-ups scaling AI across product, and enterprise teams trying to roll AI out across hundreds of engineers. The common thread is leadership that already gets where this is going.

Thesis: shipping software with AI is a management problem, not a tooling problem. The judgment good engineering leaders already have is exactly what the work needs.

## How I work

- **AI Strategy Sprint** (2–6 weeks, fixed fee): a short, opinionated plan for where AI fits and where it doesn't. Output is a roadmap, not a deck.
- **Fractional AI Leadership** (1–2 days/week, monthly retainer): senior operator in the room. Sets technical direction, runs hiring loops, keeps the AI bets honest. Useful when you need a Head of AI yesterday but the right full-time hire is still months away.
- **Team Enablement** (4–12 weeks): a program that takes your engineers and PMs from "I tried Cursor once" to production AI features. Not a one-day workshop.
- **Hands-on Builds** (4–16 weeks, project-based): I lead the design and build of a meaningful AI prototype or production system end to end. Solo, with your engineers, or with a small team I bring in.

Dedicated engagement pages:

- AI Strategy Sprint: https://greyi.co/ai-strategy-sprint
- Fractional AI Leadership: https://greyi.co/fractional-ai-leadership
- AI Team Enablement: https://greyi.co/ai-team-enablement
- Hands-on AI Builds: https://greyi.co/hands-on-ai-builds

Engagements scale from five-person startups making their first AI bet to enterprise platform teams with hundreds of engineers.

## Writing

I publish on Substack under the title "Directing Software": https://ggmathur.substack.com

- [Shipping while sleeping](https://ggmathur.substack.com/p/shipping-while-sleeping) — Directing Software #2. The autonomous CI/CD setup that lets Claude ship features overnight on isolated Vercel + Supabase preview environments.
- [From Managing Teams to Driving Solo](https://ggmathur.substack.com/p/from-managing-teams-to-driving-solo) — Directing Software #1. AI coding tools mapped to driving — from cruise control to Waymo. Why managers returning to building have a structural advantage.
- [Directing Software](https://ggmathur.substack.com/p/directing-software) — The thesis. Shipping software with AI is a management problem.
- [What do software devs and handymen have in common?](https://ggmathur.substack.com/p/what-do-software-devs-and-handymen) — On knowing where to strike, and why senior engineers stay valuable.

## Past lives

- **Google** — Software engineering intern. Where it all started.
- **Indeed** — Early engineer. Pushed the company onto mobile.
- **Airbnb** — Engineering and product leadership on host quality and guest experience.
- **ATOMS** (formerly CloudKitchens) — Led teams digitizing restaurant ordering at scale. Early production LLM adopter.

## Contact

- Email: [email protected]
- Site: https://greyi.co
- Contact form: https://greyi.co/contact
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ggmathur
- GitHub: https://github.com/ggmathur
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggmathur
- Substack: https://ggmathur.substack.com

## Optional

- This document follows the llms.txt convention (https://llmstxt.org). It exists so language models indexing or being asked about Gaurav have an accurate, structured summary to work from.
- Bills are issued through Greyi LLC. The site lives at greyi.co; the brand wordmark "greyi" appears throughout.