Insatiable Curiosity

Deap Ubhi '97

Deap Ubhi '97 has a passion for technology, entrepreneurship, and food. His upbringing, deeply rooted in the family restaurant business, instilled in him the value of hard work, lifelong learning, and the importance of family. After graduating from MA, Deap pursued a successful cross-continental career in startups and technology.

What are your most vivid memories of your time at Marin Academy? What specific classes, teachers, or events had a lasting impact?

My most durable memories of Marin Academy revolve around the friendships I cultivated—both with students and with teachers—that are still very much intact today. I remember my varsity basketball experience with the late Coach Jesse Haskins and appreciate his focus on tenacity and high standards, my three years of theater with Phoebe Moyer, whose talent as a teacher and a performer I was always in awe of, and how could I ever forget Vision Quest—now known as Wilderness Quest—where I pulled a Salmon tarot card and had the same recurring dream for three consecutive nights.

You've had an impressive career in technology including some interesting start-ups. What values influence your approach to work and leadership?

I am still very much a work-in-progress, but I have picked up on some valuable lessons around guiding principles along the way. First and foremost, I place an emphasis on transparency and truth-telling in everything I do at work, even if this means having difficult conversations. Tell it how it is, precise and concise. In the long run, your peers will value this approach. Also, I've always enjoyed building a performance-driven culture. We still live in a world where results matter, even though, at times, it feels like we're losing the courage to emphasize that as a core discipline.

Themes of food, technology, and entrepreneurship pop up throughout your life. Tell us about your interests there, particularly your family's restaurant and your startup, Burrp!

I am a restaurant kid. Growing up, my dad was a waiter, and my mom worked at a small pizza parlor in Sausalito. That's when two blue-collar jobs could sustain a middle-class lifestyle. Not so much anymore! Then in 1989, my parents had saved up enough and convinced family friends to loan them enough money to start Avatar's in Sausalito. Nearly 40 years later, it remains a cult classic. I grew up folding napkins, deveining shrimp, bussing tables, washing dishes, and then doing my homework at the lunch counter or in the store rooms. It's very much a part of my upbringing, and when Yelp! started to explode here in 2004, I saw a chance to arbitrage the opportunity for a nascent yet fast-growing market in India. That was my very first taste of what it's like to start a company, grow a company, and ultimately build something that a lot of people found value and joy in using.

You have worked in many locations, from Silicon Valley to D.C. and Mumbai. How have those experiences shaped your approach to collaboration and communication in different cultural settings?

What cuts through any cultural nuance and holds its value is clear and concise communication, honesty, transparency, and being able to articulate your ideas in written form exceedingly well. These tools have traveled with me and have proven their value over and over again.

As a founder of Flip AI, a large language model for engineering teams, you are at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI). What is it like to build a company in this rapidly evolving landscape?

The biggest lesson I can take away from how I functioned in each of these uniquely beautiful environments is pretty simple: honing my ability to process information very quickly, which means being a very intent listener, not just of the words that are coming out of someone's mouth, but the way the overall system behaves to different inputs. The way to dialogue and debate with a 3-star General in the Department of Defense is very different from how to convince executive leaders at Amazon to pursue some strategy or another. The more you invest in deeply understanding the cultural nuances of different systems, through listening, observing, and processing a lot of information faster than others, the more effective you can be at the art of persuasion.

It's a bizarre juxtaposition between sheer joy, excitement, and exultation for the work we're doing and a hyperbolic craze around generative AI in Silicon Valley right now. We're in the very early days of a pretty compelling technology, but I think we've also fallen prey to an unreasonable messianic zeal, to pseudoscience, and flat-out chicanery. We love what we do at Flip AI, because we firmly believe we've found a very compelling real-world application of large language models (LLMs) and domainspecific language models (DSLs). We have wonderful investors and customers, and we're very focused on our journey.

You've chosen to raise your family in Marin. What aspects of life in Marin are most meaningful to you and your family?

Family. It all comes down to family for us. My mom still lives in Sausalito, and for the kids to have an on-demand grandma, it's priceless. My brother Gopi Ubhi '99 lives in Danville, and we're very, very close, so the kids have also been able to build tight bonds with an uncle, an aunt, and cousins. Also, having lived in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Washington D.C., you come to realize how special a place Marin is, largely because of the natural beauty we're surrounded by.

What are your hopes for your daughters as they navigate their own educational journeys? Are there any specific lessons or values you're most eager to impart to them?

A timely question, as my elder daughter is beginning to navigate her high school application process and is hoping to be a Wildcat soon! My hopes for them are not unlike what most parents probably hope for their children navigating their schools—that they find supportive environments that understand the value of social-emotional health, learning for learning's sake, and environments that put an emphasis on kindness and reject "othering;" those that teach the value of hard work, those where my children have the potential to make lifelong friends; and ultimately environments where my girls can continue on their journey of self-discovery. The biggest lesson I am trying to impart to them is to simply be insatiably curious—curiosity is the birth of all real learning, of inspecting the world, and finding your place in it.

Last year, you spoke with MA seniors about your journey. What message were you most hoping to convey to them, and how was that experience?

I was so impressed with the group I had an opportunity to hang out with. What I remember most was their curiosity—they asked such great questions—and the key message I hope I conveyed and would continue to convey, is to value your curiosity. It's an asset in any environment they'll find themselves in. If they ever find themselves in an environment or system that suppresses their curiosity or penalizes them for being curious, run for the hills.

How do you stay connected to the Marin Academy community as an alum? What does that connection mean to you?

I stay connected to MA through my friendships. I am on text threads with a small group of my basketball friends, my theater friends, and a few others. We are just as close today as we were as young teenagers who had our whole lives ahead of us. When given the opportunity, I really enjoy participating in specialized alumni programs, like the one last year around entrepreneurship. At least three times per week, my urban jog takes me to the MA campus, where I'll take a break, sit down at a bench, and stare at that familiar, majestic redwood tree.