Engineering Possibility: Vasusen Patil on Startups, AI, and the Power of Choosing Your Own Playbook

Vasusen Patil is the Co-founder and CEO of Donobu, an AI product helping dev teams automate post-launch validation. With over 12+ years of experience across engineering, product, and leadership roles, he has worked at the intersection of AI, SaaS, and consumer growth tech. Before Donobu, Vasusen served as Senior Director of Engineering at Coursera, where he led the Consumer engineering teams, directly impacting millions of learners globally. Before that, Vasusen built and led the API team at WePay (YC S09), leading to an acquisition by J.P. Morgan. A proud Duke MEM alum, Vasusen brings a unique blend of technical depth and product strategy, drawing from his journey through large tech, startups, and now entrepreneurship. 

How did Vasusen’s experience at Duke influence his current career path? 

Vasusen wasn’t initially seeking to pursue a master’s degree in engineering. He believed that many tech skills could be self-taught, and the MBA route never truly appealed to him. One day, out of curiosity, he Googled, “Engineering + Management education” and that’s how he discovered Duke. 

What followed was a multi-disciplinary curriculum beyond his expectations. Courses he assumed he’d never use—like Intellectual Property, Business Law, and Marketing—turned out to be invaluable. Early in his career, when he filed patents, or shipped products in strongly regulated fintech, that foundation proved instrumental. The accounting course continued to be useful whether managing a 70+ engineering org’s budget or raising funding for his own startup. What stood out to him was how every subject was framed through an engineering lens. He believes Duke’s MEM program is one of the best steppingstones to becoming a product-savvy engineering manager or tech founder. 

Yet the greatest value wasn’t academic, it was community. The diversity of backgrounds among students led to the kind of peer learning that textbooks couldn’t replicate. Many of those classmates are now close friends, with around 10 still living within 20 miles of him in Silicon Valley.  They’ve supported him through career changes, tough decisions, and moments of self-doubt. It’s the kind of support you won’t find in any syllabus, but it may be the most valuable thing he took from Duke. 

One course that continues to influence his thinking is Competitive Strategies with Professor Greg Hopper. The lessons from that class remain so relevant that he still applies them—literally, as recently as yesterday. 

How does he stay motivated as a startup founder, and how does he motivate his team through high-pressure cycles? 

Vasusen stays motivated by regularly stepping back to think ahead: one to two years for work and ten years for life. Visualizing the long-term helps him focus on what matters most in the short term. 

He encourages his team to do the same. Stay sharp in the day-to-day, but take time every few months to reset and realign. 

Emotional highs and lows are constant. One day there’s a great customer call, and the next, a competitor is shipping faster or the team hits a technical wall. For Vasusen, perspective is key. His startup matters deeply,  
but it does not define his entire identity. That mindset helps him stay balanced.

He also finds perspective through regular conversations with people at very different life stages, from retired professionals to early-career newcomers. These cross-generational dialogues help him reflect, reframe, and keep going. 

As a leader, Vasusen sees his team as an ecosystem. Everyone is driven by different motivations, and his role is to align people with what inspires them, challenge them meaningfully, and ensure they have a strong team and culture around them. 

For him, sustained motivation comes from this broader alignment, where work, life, and leadership are in sync. 

What’s one thing he wishes he knew before graduating and entering the workforce? 

Before formally entering the professional world, Vasusen interned at Sun Microsystems in Bangalore, India where he got an early glimpse into how large companies function. It showed him that while career paths may shift, they can still be fulfilling. 

If there’s one thing he wishes he had deeply understood back then, it’s this: people matter more than anything else. More than job titles, company names, or credentials. 

Early in his career, he was extremely task-focused and saw casual conversations or relationship-building as distractions. But over time, he realized those unstructured moments often shape the strongest relationships. 

In his startup now, he and his co-founder eat lunch together daily, no matter how busy they get. That small ritual fosters trust, which then allows for radical honesty and candor. 

He wishes he had embraced the power of those rituals and relationships sooner. 

What led him to start Donobu after an amazing experience and tenure at Coursera? 

At Coursera, Vasusen saw a recurring challenge. Teams were spending hours checking whether features worked, stayed compliant, and looked right across thousands of pages. 

One project stood out: a large-scale rollout where key translations were missed. Manual QA couldn’t keep up, so his team used AI to scan and catch the issues. It saved days of work and sparked an idea. 

Leaving a great job to build a startup is always a risk. But for him, the bigger risk was the opportunity cost of not trying. He had spent years building the skills to pivot if things didn’t work out—and this felt like the right time to bet on a problem he deeply understood. 

With Donobu, he’s building the tool he wished they’d had—AI agents that scan websites, catch issues, and write reliable tests. He sees AI’s real potential in taking the tedious, repetitive parts of work off people’s plates so teams can focus on more fulfilling parts of work. 

How should students approach today’s job market, especially with AI rising and roles shrinking at large tech companies? 

Vasusen’s advice is simple: don’t just read about AI, use it. Tools like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini each have their strengths, but you only figure that out by building with them. You learn by experimenting, breaking things, and seeing what actually works. 

He sees the months before graduation as a golden window. Even small projects, if shared thoughtfully, can go a long way. Write about what you’re learning, post demos, and show your thought process. It’s not just about skills. It’s about initiative, agency, and taste. What you choose to build, how you solve problems, and how clearly you communicate that thinking is what sets you apart. 

The job market is tough. Big tech hiring is flat. So instead of just refreshing job boards, he encourages students to reach out to people who are actively hiring, ask for feedback, and explore paths others might overlook. 

If everyone has the same résumé, what makes you stand out is how you think and your willingness to show it.