Forward

We sat down with Cockroach Labs’ (last valued at $5B)  Spencer Kimball to talk about the value of the CEO coach to a startup founder, the key factors making this relationship effective, and why being honest with your team is critical for the company’s success.

Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the most highly evolved, cloud-native, distributed SQL database on the planet. Helping companies of all sizes — and the apps they develop — to scale fast, survive failures, and thrive everywhere. CockroachDB is in use at some of the world’s largest enterprises across all industries, including some of the most recognized companies in banking, media & entertainment, retail, and technology. Headquartered in New York City, Cockroach Labs is backed by Altimeter, Benchmark, Greenoaks, GV, Firstmark, Index Ventures, Lone Pine, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and Workbench. 

We sat down with Patricia Thaine to talk about the current state of the privacy space, identifying PII with high accuracy, generating synthetic personal information, and what’s the right culture for building a privacy-focused company.

Patricia is the co-founder and CEO of Private AI. Started by privacy and machine learning experts from the University of Toronto, Private AI’s mission is to build the privacy layer for software. 

0:00 - The state of data privacy

2:16 - Private AI approach to remove private information

11:48 - Generating synthetic personal information

14:00 - Case studies

20:30 - Optimizing NLP models to run efficiently and annotating data

23:57 - Starting Private AI, recruiting customers, raising funds

34:20 - Acquiring the initial dataset to train the models

36:50 - The culture for the privacy-focussed company

42:30 - The future of the privacy space

Links:

We sat down with Jiminny’s Tom Lavery to talk about building a product loved by customers (Jiminny is rated 4.7), applying AI to analyze sales calls, customer success as a key differentiator, mortgaging a home to fund the business, and why it makes sense for the CEO to spend 60% of your time talking with your customers.

Tom is the CEO and founder of Jiminny. Jiminny is the conversation intelligence platform that records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls to help teams coach at scale, win more deals and smash targets. With Jiminny, teams take the next step toward quicker ramp-up time, enhanced pipeline visibility, higher win rates, and ultimately more revenue for the business. Jiminny raised $19M to date.

The audio version is available everywhere you listen to podcasts. 

In this conversation with Adam, we managed to combine 3 of my favorite topics - AI, energy, and investing. We talked about applying AI to solve the oil wells’ productivity surge puzzle, building an ML system in the environment of an investment firm, Adam’s views on the solar, wind, and nuclear, as well as the future energy supply breakdown in the US, Europe, China, and India.

Adam is a Managing Partner of Goehring & Rozencwajg. Goehring & Rozencwajg (G&R) is a fundamental research firm focused exclusively on contrarian natural resource investments with a team with over 30 years of dedicated resource experience. G&R is an SEC Registered Investment Advisor. 

0:00 Goehring & Rozencwajg Profile. Lessons from 30 years investing energy and minerals

12:26 Applying AI to the fundamental research & Solving the doubling of oil wells’ productivity puzzle

37:26 Global fossil fuels supply picture

47:10 Solar & Wind as sources of energy

54:29 Nuclear energy

58:56 The future global energy landscape

Links:

We sat down with Dave DeCaprio to talk about predicting preventive interventions in healthcare, designing for explainability, bias and fairness, as well as building a domain-specific language to operate the platform, working on the human genome project and the forthcoming healthcare data revolution.

Dave is the CTO & Co-founder at ClosedLoop.ai. Purpose-built for healthcare, ClosedLoop is a data science platform built specifically and exclusively for healthcare that combines an intuitive automated machine learning platform with a comprehensive library of healthcare-specific features and model templates. Customers use ClosedLoop's Explainable AI to drive clinical excellence, operational efficiency, value-based contracts, and enhanced revenue. 

Example applications include predicting unplanned hospital admissions, recommending palliative care, predicting total utilization/cost, preventing ED over-utilization, reducing out-of-network utilization, avoiding appointment no-shows, predicting chronic disease onset or progression, improving clinical documentation and reimbursement, and dozens more.

ClosedLoop raised $50M and is backed by Greycroft, .406, and Telstra Ventures among others. 

Timestamps:

0:00 - Healthcare Data Science Platform

05:58 - Population health and other use cases powered by ClosedLoop 

13:35 - Value-based care in the US

19:40 - AI systems powering ClosedLoop

28:20 - Designing for explainability

35:15 - Approaching bias and fairness

40:20 - Starting ClosedLopp

49:52 - How to think about your company mission and the team you bring in

53:17 - Convincing first customers and getting access to data, fundraising

1:00:54 - Winning an AI Health outcome challenge - the largest AI health competition ever sponsored

1:05:52 - Healthcare data revolution

Links:

We sat down with Plotlogic’s Andrew Job to talk about mining industry challenges, strategic reserves of key green metals, mixing advanced sensors with AI to boost mining productivity, and extending the life of existing mines.

Plotlogic has taken the mining industry by storm over the last 12 months - signing four of the world’s top five mining companies, completing a $25 million capital raise backed by BHP (its first investment in a mining tech company) and well-known California-based venture capital firm Innovation Endeavors.

Plotlogic was started by Andrew Job, a 20-year mining industry veteran, while he was doing his Ph.D. at the University of Queensland. Its technology uses a combination of advanced imaging and artificial intelligence to characterize ore in real time. It is much more accurate than traditional mining methods and enables mines to operate far more efficiently, with less wastage and environmental impact.

The tech can extend the life of existing mines and is also helping revive industries like the tungsten industry which has lain dormant in Australia for more than three decades because of the exorbitant costs involved as well as environmental legacy issues. Plotlogic has rolled out its tech with Australia’s only operating primary tungsten producer EQ Resources where it is starting to scan the mountains of tailings enabling recovery of tungsten and the clean-up of the previously moth-balled site.

The company is constantly innovating and recently achieved a significant breakthrough with iron ore producer SIMEC - managing to reduce assay turnaround time from seven days to less than 24 hours. With the timely return of drilling results a major problem particularly for junior explorers, this is an industry game changer.

0:00 - Four big challenges of the mining industry: fossil fuels, green metals, environment, productivity

12:57 - Fighting mining productivity decline with better tools, sensors, and AI

20:00 - Case studies. 20% uplift in mining performance and increased turnaround time

33:53 - AI technologies & sensors deployed by the company

41:00 - Collecting data for initial training

49:00 - Andrew’s journey: Mining, Ph.D., starting a company

53:00 - Principles over paradigms, and the two other pillars of the Plotlogic’s culture

1:00:00 - The future of the mining industry

Links:

We sat down with Sorcero’s extraordinary Dipanwita Das to talk about working with T-1 Pharma and early-stage biotechs, building the largest open-access scientific literature database, 10x-ing productivity, and surfacing strategic signals with the medical analytics platform powered by the latest advances in NLU.

Dipanwita Das is the CEO and founder of Sorcero. Sorcero is on a mission to improve patient outcomes by empowering life sciences experts to dramatically increase productivity, decrease literature monitoring time, and increase tracking of portfolio products.

Sorcero raised $16M and is backed by City Rock Ventures Partners, Harmonix Fund, Rackhouse, Mighty Capital, Leawood VC, Castor Ventures, and Worldquant Ventures among others.

0:00 - Medical analytics platform for life science companies.

09:13 - Case studies: Increasing productivity by 10x, reducing costs, unifying internal and external data, surfacing strategic signals

14:00 - Getting to insights faster with the help of AI

18:24 - AI technologies powering Sorcero: LLMs, Summarization, MLOps

33:45 - Dipanwita’s pass to founding Sorcero: starting a consulting firm, falling in love with healthcare

38:01 - Benefits of reading science fiction

40:40 - Building the team for Sorcero as a recent immigrant, without a huge network

45:52 - 0-to-1 people vs 1-to-100 people

51:00 - Building a culture of mastery, humility, collaboration

56:30 - The future of medical analytics at Life science companies / medical affairs transformation

We sat down with CloseFactor’s Leena Joshi to talk about boosting GTM efficiency with tailored data sources and machine learning, partnering with Sequoia Capita (seed/A), doubling LaunchDarkly reps productivity, and building a team at your startup.

Leena is the CEO and co-founder of Closefactor. CloseFactor is the world’s first GTM operating system for revenue teams. Using machine learning to automatically curate unstructured information about companies and extract meaningful insights that go-to-market teams can act on, CloseFactor identifies your best customers, empowering sales and marketing teams to hit their goals.

Closefactor raised $20M from Sequoia, Vertex, and GTMFund among others.

The audio version is available everywhere you listen to podcasts.

https://anchor.fm/forward-by-dawn/

0:00 - Why does a company need a GTM operating system?

3:38 - Customizing Closefactor to the customer needs: datasets, GTM motion

9:08 - Using Closefactor: talking to the right people about the relevant ongoing challenges

14:25 - Case studies: Faster ramp times, 2x reps productivity, increased visibility into the market

16:20 - Implementing Closefactor

21:51 - What’s the best engagement strategy for a sales rep?

23:49 - Starting Closefactor: from enterprise GTM exec to a founder. Finding first customers.

29:00 - Partnering with Sequoia Capital

33:35 - Building an effective team at your startup

38:20 - Leena’s vision for CloseFactor

We sat down with Fiddler’s founder and CEO Krishna Gade to talk about explainable AI, lessons from Microsoft, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Bing vs. Google, raising $45M and what should entrepreneurs building in AI today focus on.

Fiddler is a pioneer in enterprise Model Performance Management. Data Science, MLOps, and LOB teams use Fiddler to monitor, explain, analyze, and improve their solutions and build trust into AI.

The unified environment provides a common language, centralized controls, and actionable insights to operationalize ML/AI with trust. It addresses the unique challenges of building in-house stable and secure MLOps systems at scale.

Unlike observability solutions, Fiddler seamlessly integrates deep XAI and analytics to help you grow into advanced capabilities over time and build a framework for responsible AI practices.

F500 companies use Fiddler across training and production models to accelerate AI time-to-value and scale and increase revenue by connecting predictions to business context or providing visibility into model performance and behavior.

Fiddler is backed by Bloomberg Beta, Amazon Alexa Fund, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Haystack, and Lux Capital, among others.

0:00 - Will we ever be able to explain AI?

8:33 - Getting a better understanding of why AI system acts the way it does

20:00 - Fiddler’s customer profile & success stories

27:50 - The mechanics of data perturbation

33:20 - R&D breakthroughs powering Fiddler

39:21 - Lessons from Microsoft, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook

44:31 - Bing vs Google

47:55 - Founding Fiddler: building team, fundraising

57:20 - Specialized types - a group of ex-Twitter engineers

59:20 - Advice to entrepreneurs building an AI business today

We caught up with Ankur to talk about all things ChatGPT.  

Ankur’s note: https://www.ankursnewsletter.com/p/nine-chatgpt-products-we-can-expect 

Mikela is the co-founder & CEO of Greyparrot, the leading AI waste analytics platform for the circular economy on a mission to increase transparency and automation in waste management and unlock the financial value of waste. Greyparrot’s vision is to create a world where every piece of waste is valued as a resource.  Greyparrot is recognized as one of “Europe's 100 Hottest Startups” by WIRED in 2021 and “100 most promising AI companies” globally by CB Insights.

Greyparrot is backed by Una Terra, Unreasonable Group, Speedinvest, Closed Loop Partners, TI Capital, and Plug and Play, among others.

0:00 The state of the waste management industry

6:14 Waste contamination, waste purity

9:01 Major challenges of the recycling industry

12:45 Greyparrot’s material monitoring system

18:00 How much is our waste worth?

19:34 Waste management market structure in developed economies

21:50 How to measure the success of Greyparrot’s implementation

25:14 Computer vision systems powering Greyparrot

34:34 Why apply computer vision to waste management

37:04 Finding product/market fit and recruiting design clients

45:32 Raising capital - creating a system around fundraising

54:25 Greyparrot’s culture: culture fit vs culture add

01:01:47 The future of the circular economy

Links:

Our guest today is Daniela Braga, the CEO and founder of Defined AI, the world’s leading online marketplace, where AI professionals can commission, buy, or sell AI training data, tools, or models.

We sat down with Daniela to talk about building the largest data marketplace in the world, GDPR, China/US vs. the rest of the world, raising $80M+, partnering with IBM, working with IBM, Microsoft, and a “Cupertino-based company”, Working on the US Govt Taskforce to democratize AI, and building an AI hub in Portugal.

0:00 - Defined AI - the largest marketplace of data

09:25 - Is there a competitive advantage in data

12:20 - Leveraging marketplace strategy to double customer count, 6x revenue in a year

14:05 - Simulated vs synthetic vs live data

18:40 - How to crowdsource high-quality data

23:52 - The future of simulated data

28:03 - Challenges of using real data

32:35 - Powering IBM Watson, working with Microsoft and a “company based in Cupertino”

36:00 - From majoring in literature and linguistics to building AI systems and entrepreneurship

47:00 - Living in the US/Portugal/China

54:00 - What language is closest to math

55:30 - Working with the US Govt Taskforce to democratize AI

1:01:00 - Building an AI hub in Portugal

Links:

Our guest today is Saman Farid, the CEO and founder of Formic. Formic is accelerating the adoption of automation across small to mid-sized U.S. manufacturers and boosting productivity by removing the risk, complexity, upfront capital, and expertise that typically exist as barriers to onboarding this technology.

The company’s “Robotics-as-a-Service” model delivers customized robots at a low hourly rate, with guaranteed uptime. With a full-service offering that includes everything from planning and deployment to maintenance and upgrades, Formic is creating an innovative and accessible competitive advantage for small and mid-sized factories to ensure they stay relevant and thrive in any economy.

0:00 - Manufacturing in the US

4:15 - Why labor shortages

7:52 - Robotization in the US, China, and Korea

13:47 - Opportunity for the US manufacturing automation

19:08 - Formic’s hardware, software, and financing services

24:44 - Types of customers served by Formic

30:55 - Collaborative robots

33:15 - Case study: auto parts manufacturer

39:15 - Learnings from 10 years as a VC

46:56 - How to incubate a business

54:44 - People at Formic

1:02:12 - Future of robotization in manufacturing

Our guest today is Mark Angel, the CEO of Amira Learning.  Amira is the first intelligent reading assistant that listens, assesses & coaches to accelerate reading mastery. Proven to double the pace of learning, Amira helps K-3 students become motivated, masterful readers.

The company recently debuted StoryCraft - a new reading game app for kids ages 5 to 10, which uses artificial intelligence to deliver personalized reading tutoring from the comfort of home.

Students have read more than 1 billion words to the software, with recent usage hitting 2+ million minutes per month, spanning nearly a million students in all 50 states.

Our guest today is Ittai Dayan the Founder and CEO of Rhino Health.  Rhino Health provides AI/data-science developers and medical researchers with a platform that unlocks data collaborations without sharing data or compromising data privacy. The Rhino Health Platform is powered by Federated Learning and distributed computing technologies and uniquely adapted to deal with 'Real World Data' from clinical data systems.

In this episode, we talk about the challenges AI innovators face with gaining access to healthcare data, the tradeoffs of different approaches, and the opportunities of federated learning. We also talked about harmonizing the data from different institutions and avoiding the “data black box” while ensuring data protection.

Our guest today is Pawel Osterreicher, the CEO and founder of ReSpo.Vision. ReSpo.Vision disrupts sports with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Their Computer Vision algorithms capture detailed 3D positional data from sporting events and turn it into practical insights & visualizations, providing sports clubs, and sports media with an unmatched depth of knowledge. They work with elite football clubs such as Paris Saint-Germain; as well as the top Media Companies. Before founding ReSpo Pawel was Chief Revenue Officer & Board Director of Deepsense.ai; before that, he spent 7 years at The Boston Consulting Group.

In this episode we talk about the evolution of sports analytics in a relentless pursuit of excellence, new powers enabled by AI, and ReSpo breakthrough work in computer vision.

Our guest today is Ganesh Gandhieswaran, the CEO and founder of ConverSight. ConverSight offers a conversational intelligence platform that uses Natural Language Processing and machine learning to converge the distance between humans and data. ConverSight’s AI business assistant, Athena, connects distributed databases (ERPs and CRMs), delivering on-demand insights to direct your next move through three key functions: Information on Demand, Proactive Insights and Dashboards, and Recommended Actions.

In this episode, we talk about Conversight’s journey to bring visibility to siloed enterprise data and bring the AI-powered analytics assistant to every employee in the organization. We also talk about why healthy arguments between co-founders are important to the company’s success and why starting a company reminds Ganesh of jumping into a well.

We sat down with Eldad to talk about boosting sales teams' win rates with real-time AI guidance, approaching 200 sales leaders to build the product, and lessons from the Israeli Navy. Real-time guidance is the future of professional communications and Winn is an excellent case study on starting a vertical AI company.

Eldad Postan-Koren is the CEO and founder of Winn AI. Winn offers a real-time AI assistant that helps sales teams win more deals with less hassle. The Winn.AI real-time assistant acts as an extra pair of hands during meetings, giving salespeople the freedom to focus their attention entirely on the customer. For account executives, this means a stronger, more authentic conversation with their prospects and less administrative hassle. For sales leaders, it means more passionate AEs, stronger brand voices, faster onboarding, and, most importantly - increased sales.

Before starting Winn with his co-founder Bar Haleva, Eldad was the COO of DreaMed Diabetes, responsible for the company’s initial commercialization efforts, and worked at OurCrowd - a company enabling accredited investors to invest in startups. Eldad also founded two NGOs (Shavot and The Sky is the Limit) and is a proud veteran Naval Officer.

In this episode, we talk about Winn’s approach to helping sales teams win more deals, and make salespeople happier. We also talked about how reaching out to 200 people for customer development before starting Winn helped Eldad in unforeseen ways, and what lessons from the Israel Navy he currently applies as a founder.

Our guest today is Naveen Rao, the CEO and founder of Mosaic ML. The MosaicML Cloud makes it easy to train models of any size on any number of GPUs, helping teams achieve more accurate results faster and seamlessly scale workloads with distributed training methods. Naveen previously built the first AI-chip company Nervana Systems, which was acquired by Intel in 2016. He then joined Intel and started and ran Intel’s AI division.

What we discussed (with timestamps):

8.12 It really came down to, I want to find my purpose in life, in this world… - on returning to academia.

9.50 I came with a focus, I didn’t meander. - on completing a Ph.D. ahead of time while having one of the most amazing times of his life.

15:15 We started seeing hints that this was something much bigger than just a new toy. - on Neural Networks.

17.01 Entrepreneurs and founders are zealots. -  on the difference between the founders and professional managers.

19.50 He made this company an AI company by his sheer will… - on Nvidia’s Jenson.

24.01 I was like, man… that’s having your back - on venture investors.

24.47 It hurt, it felt like I got dumped by my girlfriend… as a young engineer, when this stuff happens to you, it leaves a mark - on living through the dot-com bubble.

28.03 We came in and it was like, we’re on pause. - on building at Intel.

33.23 Oh shoot, they’re going to kill us - on Nvidia’s reaction on Nervana's acquisition by Intel.

35.44 I think they tried to reach too far… and couldn’t hit it. - on Intel vs. TSMC.

42.00 The H100 - it uses 2x the power, has 2x the performance and it costs 2x the price. We’re not seeing More’s Law. - Why focus on efficiency at Mosaic?

56.52 - You get something that performs way better - on training a model on PubMed and testing against the Medical Licensing Exam.

1.02.13 - Do I want to be in the foxhole with this person? - on partnering with a co-founder.

1.04.00 - I’m not doing anything, just thinking about this problem… - on getting a term sheet from LUX.

1.09.07 - You have to be irrational! - on building a team

1.17.26 - Trying your best to not have to fire someone should be what you really looking for… - on hiring execs.

1.23.36 - There will be a thing, where you generate stuff for various industries… and it’s completely untouched! - on opportunities in AI today.

1.33.46 - Building synthetic intelligences capable of processing vast amounts of data is how we’re going to make future scientific breakthroughs. - on the future of AI.

Links:

Twitter: @NaveenGRao

Twitter: @MosaicML

Our guest today is Pierre Baqué, the CEO and founder of Neural Concept. Neural Concept uses Deep Learning to provide industrial companies with lightning-fast numerical simulations and radically innovative designs. Where traditional physical solvers would take days or weeks to evaluate a single design, their neural network-based predictive models allow engineers to test and optimize design ideas in real time.

Pierre received an engineering degree in Applied Mathematics and a Master's degree in Operations Research from Ecole Polytechnique in France. Before co-founding Neural Concept he worked as an optimization and machine learning engineer at Credit-Suisse in London, and as a researcher at the Computer Vision Laboratory at EPFL.

In this episode, we talk about the evolution of simulation techniques in industrial design, and how the design cycle can be completely transformed with AI-powered simulations and design generation. We also talk about the future of human-machine collaboration in design and how to break world records with AI.

Our guest today is Amit Ben, the CEO and founder of One AI. One AI is an API-first Language AI service built for developers. Their product-ready APIs, no-code Language Studio, and vertically pre-trained models allow every developer to deliver the power of NLP inside their applications in no time.

Amit’s passion for language technologies started at age 5, coding on an XT machine. Since then he’s been on a mission to make human-level language AI accessible to all. Amit co-founded NanoRep, sold it to LogMeIn (LOGM), and then joined LogMeIn to lead its AI lab, developing the AI tech that powers products such as GoToMeeting and LastPass. When Francisco Partners acquired LogMeIn it was time to hit the entrepreneurial road again and continue to fulfill his mission to make Language AI integral and natural in everyday life, founding One AI.

In this episode we talk about the evolution of Natural Language Processing, the impact of the transformers on the field, the challenges of building enterprise-ready AI systems, and the importance of understanding the limitations of modern AI when applying it in critical areas.

Our guest today is Rakesh Yadav, the CEO and founder of Jarvis ML. Jarvis ML’s mission is to be the most accessible and easy-to-use end-to-end machine learning platform. As a fully managed MLaaS solution, Jarvis ML enables companies to deploy a revenue-generating intelligence engine to their businesses and products within minutes.

Before founding Jarvis Rakesh led Machine Learning Operations platform development for Google Ads and Payments. Jarvis is funded by Dell Technologies Capital, SHAKTI, and more than a dozen veteran Silicon Valley technologists and business leaders.

In this episode we talk about boosting revenues at ecommerce and hospitality businesses, applying the lessons Rakesh learned at Google, building a horizontal platform vertical by vertical, and combining deep learning with other techniques to maximize business results.

We also talk about the reasons why Jarvis' team is spread across the globe, and why finding time to paint is important to Rakesh.

Our guest today is Casper Wilstrup, the CEO and founder of Abzu. Abzu was born in 2018 in Barcelona and Copenhagen when seven co-founders set out to challenge the paradigm of traditional black-box AI. Today, Abzu has customers among the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, biotech enterprises, and academic institutions.

Casper is an AI researcher with 25 years of experience building high-performance systems for data processing, analysis, and AI. At Abzu, Casper applies his passion for advanced data analysis and adaptive systems to achieve his dream of revolutionizing artificial intelligence.

In this episode, we discuss Abzu's ability to address use cases generally considered unsuitable for modern AI - where data is scarce or causality must be established. We also talk about their work with life science and healthcare organizations, how to teach the machine System 1 and System 2 thinking, and Abzu's path to general artificial intelligence.

Our guests today are co-founders of Nuclia. Eudald Camprubí, the CEO of the company and Ramon Navarro, the CTO. Nuclia is an easy-to-use API service to build AI-powered search engines capable of processing every type of data in multiple languages. Eudald and Ramon have been working together for more than a decade, and Nuclia is their third company.

In this episode, we talk about the breakthroughs that happened over the last few years and enabled organizations to build much more powerful search engines - both for internal needs and commercial products. We also talk about how their approach to building a business changed over the years, and what excites and concerns them about the future of the large language models.

Our guest today is Adam Oliner, the CEO and founder of Graft. Graft is a cloud-native platform that empowers organizations to leverage the most advanced AI techniques to unlock the value of text, images, video, audio, and graphs. 

Before co-founding Graft, Adam was a Head of Machine Learning at Slack and Director of Engineering at Splunk. Before that Adam co-founded Kuro Labs, which commercialized battery analytics technology. He was a postdoctoral scholar in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, working in the AMP Lab, which specialized in cloud computing and Big Data. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and a Master of Engineering from MIT, where he also earned degrees in computer science and mathematics.

In this episode, we talk about Modern AI and how Graft empowers organizations to build AI systems in a way it is done by the top technology companies, cutting the time to value from months to days or even minutes. We also talk about what to look for in your future co-founder, why failing is an essential part of entrepreneurship, and how generative AI will change the way we treat video content on the internet.

Our guest today is Chris Sestito, the founder and CEO of HiddenLayer. HiddenLayer helps enterprises safeguard the machine learning models behind their most important products with a comprehensive security platform. Chris is a certified ethical hacker and worked in various senior roles in threats research and data science, before co-founding HiddenLayer with Tanner Burns and Jim Ballard.

In this episode we talk about rapidly growing threats organizations face from attacks on their AI systems. We discuss different types of attacks, and how to address them.

We also talk about how Chris became interested in cyber security, what kind of people he’s looking for when building his team, and how poker skills can be applied to fight bad actors in cyberspace.

Our guest today is Mike Elashoff, the co-founder and CEO of Cornerstone AI. Cornerstone’s goal is to give everyone the data science superpower of clean data, without the manual work it takes to get there. They are focused on empowering the healthcare industry by using machine learning to convert raw data into analysis-ready data. The vast majority of healthcare data is either human-generated or human-entered and prone to errors. Incorrect data leads to mistaken insights and often adverse consequences. Cornerstone’s platform yields higher quality data than the manual approaches data science teams employ today, and it does so an order of magnitude faster, compressing months to days and days to hours or even seconds.

Before founding Cornerstone with his co-founder Andrew Howland, Mike worked at several biotech companies, including CardioDx, where he developed the Corus CAD test, the first blood-based molecular diagnostic for coronary disease, and Medidata, which has the largest clinical trial database in the world. He previously founded a machine learning startup called Patient Profiles which was acquired by Medidata. Mike was also a reviewer and a team leader at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. He received an undergraduate degree in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Biostatistics from the Harvard University School of Public Health.

In this episode, we talk about the challenges healthcare organizations face managing their data, what new requirements to data are introduced by AI, how Cornerstone applies machine learning technologies to address these challenges, and what best practices organizations can implement to improve data management.

We also talk about their work on COVID-19, why off-the-shelve ML models do not work for them, how to put together a great founding team, and why self-reliance can be treacherous.

Our guest today is Dr. Yehuda Elmaliah, the founder and CEO of CogniTeam. CogniTeam is based in Petach Tikva, Israel, and has been developing artificial intelligence technologies for robots for over ten years, working with world-leading companies on mapping, navigation, and autonomous decision-making. Over the years CogniTeam developed a unique set of Robotic AI software working with Intel, Amazon, Mitsubishi, Siemens, and other blue chip companies. They have recently packaged this set of technologies in Nimbus, bringing a unique cloud-based robotic artificial intelligence solution in one easy-to-use platform.

Yehuda holds a Ph.D. in computer science specializing in multi-robot systems and is a leading expert on algorithms for robot autonomy. He spent seven years as a Dean of the computer science school at COMAS before starting CogniTeam with his co-founder Dr. Nachum Kaminka.

In this episode, we talk about why it takes many years to get an autonomous robot to market, how to speed this process up, what Cogniteam learned about building robots from their work with Intel, Amazon, and DARPA, and what is the next big step for autonomous robotics as a field. We also talk about why having happy team members is important for Yehuda, and what makes him feel like a dolphin.

Our guest today is Gonca Gulsar, the co-founder of Quin AI. Quin is an Audience Engine that understands real customers, their needs and their intentions, Quin helps merchants to drive conversion and increase revenue. E-commerce is an industry rich with real-time data, but processing it efficiently remains a significant challenge. Quin leverages behavioral customer data to deliver targeted actionable insights and the strongest possible conversion to the merchants. Gonca studied Organizational research at the London School of Economics and worked as a data scientist at various organizations for 20 years before starting Quin with her sister Gulsha. While running Quinn, Gonca still finds time to work as a part-time instructor at Bogazici University.

In this episode we talk about the challenges e-commerce merchants face when leveraging their data, and how applying machine learning models can boost their performance by tens of percent in weeks; what is hourly seasonality and why it is important; how COVID became the trigger to start Quin, and how 20 years of work experience instruct Gonca’s approach to designing the company’s culture.

Our guest today is Chris Ake, the founder and CEO of Sidekick AI. Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sidekick helps people manage their meetings by augmenting the process with AI. Scheduling a meeting can be a frustrating experience, and Sidekick aims to streamline this process with natural language processing.

Chris is a serial entrepreneur and built several companies before starting Sidekick with his co-founders Jon Butler and Nathan Jean. In this episode, we talk about the challenges of building an AI assistant, why it is critical to get to market early and iterate, what was the most challenging time for Chris on his entrepreneurial journey, and what makes a great team of co-founders.

Our guest today is Lucas Bonatto Miguel, the founder and CEO of Elemeno AI. Elemeno provides an industry-leading ML-Ops platform that allows dэtэ science professionals to accelerate and automate their machine learning life cycles. Elemeno products and services are used by industry leaders, including Americanas, Shoptime, and Submarino.

Lucas is a software engineer by training and has experience working in a wide range of industries, including finance, retail, and crypto. He built several companies before founding Elemeno in 2021.

In this episode, we talk about the challenges organizations experience when building deep learning systems; how implementing effective MLOps leads to a step change in organizational abilities to deploy AI; the advantages of the modular approach and interoperability; and why open sourcing the code is a win-win for a vendor and a client.

We also talk about Elemeno's quite distinct set of company values; how having a design client from day one affected the product's roadmap; what differentiates highly efficient teams; and what worries Lucas about the recent rapid progress of generative AI systems.