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Build with us in NYC

Friday, November 6 at Starts at 3 PM | New York

You get three hours to learn how to build a voice agent that does one real job on a live phone call. At demo time, a judge calls in and plays the difficult caller. No voice AI experience needed, just a laptop and comfort writing code. Come solo or in a team of up to four. You get API credits, a fast-track interview with Take2, and a shot at pitching Reach. 50 spots, approved by the hosts.

Ruhan Khanna has a startup, a research project, and his high school graduation still ahead of him. He’s a builder first, and his internship at Reach brought together everything he was already doing: researching LLMs, building for athletes and founders, and learning about investing. Two weeks after his interview, he moved from DC to SF, where he spent the summer watching World Cup games and building alongside our team. Today, he takes our questions.

Reach: Now looking back, did your internship expectations lined up with the reality of our day-to-day?

Ruhan: “Maybe it’s a bias coming from the East Coast, but there’s this stereotype of what an internship looks like, where everyone is fighting for a return offer. I thought I’m going to get a sense as to how the VC process works, how the pipeline moves through. But I’ve gotten way more out of it than that, and it’s way more of a friendly, open environment.

Once an investment is made, there’s this support that has to go into all these portfolio companies. I spent a lot of my summer working on this chatbot that helps founders go through this huge database of resources that Reach has. I would never have thought working at a VC would entail building a chatbot trained on data from Zoom recordings and blog posts and PDFs. I also worked with Campus. They’re a revolutionary new community college, and I was building a web scraping flow to build out a database of college counselors at public high schools all over the United States.

One of the things that drew me to this internship in particular is just getting to see the other side of the table. And so seeing what the thought process is behind an investment and being fluent and understanding that, I think that was really important. It’s not like we’re confined to do what our project is. There’s so much more scope. I can introduce the partners to a company and help source a deal, which I would never have expected.”

What was it like moving to San Francisco on your own?

“I’m living alone in this intern housing studio apartment. This is something that I’m not even going to get in college where I’m going to have roommates and be at a campus. Here I’ve had to spend a lot of time by myself, so I’ve gotten time to reflect, and San Francisco is where you want to be as a builder. Coming from DC, I love DC, but it’s not San Francisco. Here everyone is building something.

And the network is just incredible. I’ve tapped into a bunch of alums from my school who are here. They’ll know about Reach and they’ll know about a lot of the portfolio companies. It’s all happening here and everyone is aware of it.”

What surprised you about how investments are made?

“Investing is typically seen as a more quantitative job, in that you’re looking at the unit economics. But it was really fascinating to see how partners really value and see the future of a founder, and how much trust they put into the founder. 

You want to make sure the VC really trusts you to lead it forward, because at the end of the day they’re investing [in] you, not the company itself. 

This is the first time I really believed and have internalized that.”

What’s been the most interesting startup you’ve learned about during your internship?

“Edviro comes to mind. They’re building energy management for K-12. I would have never in a million years thought that would be an opportunity to bring newer, more automated systems to, but there’s a humongous opportunity there. It’s overlooked, but it’s definitely important.

I worked on the market diligence, and my first impression was: the larger players in this space like Siemens could certainly build out what they’re building really quickly, and I had questions around defensibility. But after hearing from them — and I think that was really, really important to actually have an in-person meeting — they really opened my eyes and they showed that in fact what they were building was pretty unique.

Hursh and Tanuj are super smart. They had a remarkable ability to break down what they were building and explain what they were solving for in a way that anyone could understand. That's the first thing that struck me during their pitch and then chatting with them afterwards. I think that characteristic is a great measure of how deeply a founder understands their own work, and it was even more impressive given they were no more than a couple of years older than me!”

What motivates you to build?

“On the surface, it’s any space that I’m involved in and I have a lot of experience in. I typically look for an inefficiency or a problem, and I feel like software and solutions often fit in really, really well. I was a runner for the longest time. I played tennis as well. So I was able to compare and contrast the software ecosystems of the two sports, and I was frustrated that runners were judged on a single PR, with no sense of how much coaching they’d had or where they were headed. Athletes were being overlooked. Small D3 schools being overlooked. I spoke to tens of college coaches and plenty of runners, and started building athletIQ, a college recruiting platform for track & field and cross country running.

As a coach, if you actually have access to all of the training data of an athlete, you have a much more complete understanding of their projection curve, and you can actually get a sense for what their ceiling is. 

Working on atheltIC made me ask: How am I gonna actually fund this? I need grants, credit funding. So that got me interested in venture capital and this research question about what actually constitutes the right match between a startup’s founders and an investor. So we built this model with the School of Data Science at UVA that tried to facilitate matches.

I also love language. Learning Spanish at school, French outside of school, speak Hindi at home. My friend, a big linguist, came to me with this idea to try to decipher this ancient Indian script called Indus script using computational methods.

If you take a step back, a lot of my interest lies in building meritocratic systems and making opportunity more accessible.”

You sit on your school’s honor committee. How is it thinking about the use of AI in schools?

“There’s this very rigid line in education when it comes to the use of technology and AI. At least in schools, cheating is a very black and white thing, while I personally think there are cases where it’s more nuanced.

We have to play by the school’s rules at the end of the day, but I also want to use my position on the committee to push for change.

I think schools need to be way more proactive about showing kids how AI can be a tool to apply learning. Students can build real apps and projects faster and easier than ever before, so having some grasp of that should be a basic skill. Understanding, though, that the line between using AI to apply learning and learning itself is thin. So schools need to have a formalized way of having discourse around which skills are to be preserved in the future. A council made up of students, teachers, and parents is a great place to start.”

Everyone keeps saying AI will replace young developers. Will it?

“I think the most important skill now is going to be creativity, or also storytelling. I don’t think you can just be a rote programmer and just try to execute off of what someone tells you.

To push the frontier and have new revolutionary ideas, that’s going to have to come from us. Differentiating, having your own voice, I think that’s really important.”

Ruhan is now back in DC for his senior year wrapping up with early college applications and growing athletIQ: “I've been working closely with coaches to build new prediction modeling for small schools, and we have continued deploying at schools across the board, from D1s like UNC to small D3s like Lakeland and Haverford College.”

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Happy fall,

Valentina and the Reach team

Reach Capital invests in early-stage founders redefining how we learn, live, and work. Our portfolio of 130+ startups includes tools you might’ve used in school (ClassDojo, Desmos, Brilliant) and next-gen, AI-native disruptors shaping how future generations build, work, and thrive (like Replit and GPTZero). 

These teams are constantly on the lookout for talented builders. Share what you’re studying, building, or exploring, and we’ll intro you to projects, people, and paid opportunities for you to build upon.