A high-earning Google employee has walked away from a yearly salary and commission package worth nearly 1 million US dollars (Rs 9.4 Crore) to start his own artificial intelligence business. Yousuf Imran, a 41-year-old tech professional, left his role as an account executive at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters after fears of corporate layoffs and a strong desire to cash in on the current AI boom.
According to Business Insider, Mr Imran, who moved from Bangladesh to New York as a child, spent two decades working in sales. He joined Google in 2020, where his basic salary was around 170,000 US dollars, but heavy sales commissions boosted his total earnings last year to 986,000 US dollars (approximately Rs 9.32 crore).
Despite the massive payouts, he noticed that rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic were offering life-changing stock options that Google simply could not match. He also admitted that recent rounds of job cuts at Google, which saw highly talented colleagues lose their roles, made him realise that corporate job security was an illusion.
During his final years at the company, Mr Imran spent his evenings and weekends experimenting with AI models to build his own software applications. He has now launched Mangosteen Studio, a solo venture that creates specialised AI tools to help sales teams close deals faster.
To fund his dream without relying on outside investors who might take his company shares, he saved 200,000 US dollars for business expenses and a further 150,000 US dollars to cover his personal mortgage and living costs for two years.
He believes that his deep industry knowledge, rather than a degree in computer science, is the secret to his new journey, proving that modern AI tools allow anyone with a good idea to become a tech founder.
