Afif Khoury, founder and CEO of SOCi, joins Eric to share the inside story of scaling one of San Diego’s hottest unicorns. From the “dark era” of customer rejection to becoming the operating system for enterprise marketing, Afif reveals the hard decisions, pivotal pivots, and leadership lessons that turned chaos into a category-defining company.

In this episode of Chaos to Clarity, host Eric Weiss sits down with Neal Bloom, Managing Partner at Rising Tide Partners and one of the most influential connectors in the San Diego startup ecosystem. From co-founding Portfolium to launching Interlock Capital and now building Rising Tide, Neal shares his journey from aerospace engineering to angel investing and how he has helped shape San Diego’s startup community over the past decade.

This episode continues the conversation with Jason Corso - Professor of Robotics and EECS at University of Michigan and Co-Founder/Chief Science Officer at Voxel51 - a Series A AI software company that enables machine learning and computer vision scientists to rapidly curate and experiment with their datasets in order to build higher performing machine learning systems.

Jason is a builder by nature. During his academic career he started to ask himself - “can I have a bigger impact on the world?”, which led him to meet his co-founder and start Voxel 51. Both of them had a passion for machine learning and an ability to write code - which is how his transition from academia to consulting began. In the early days they received a grant which worked out well and funded them through the process of building their first service.

Eric and Raj discuss the implications of openly available AI. On one hand, a ton of good will be brought into the world. On the other hand, every new technology comes with its caveats and even the simplest things like booking a flight online can lead to malicious actors scamming people out of their hard earned money.

In this episode, Eric is joined by Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore - a Series F startup that provides a cloud-native database built with speed and scale to power real-time applications. Raj speaks on their journey of finding the problem in their market. They saw how inefficient it is to navigate between multiple data platforms and that data is often too fragmented to ensure quality due to there being too many points of failure.

In 2024, fundraising is a hot and complex topic. Shaun has raised $8,000,000 in capital so far, and he recalls that SEO was a big reason why they secured their initial round of funding. The mindset of the investors was to research existing companies that solve this problem and figure out if it makes more sense to build this type of service from scratch, or to invest in a company that’s already a few steps ahead. They evaluated GoShare and a few competitors and chose to go with Shaun's company. This took about 6 months of relationship building to close the first lead investor, which led to a $1.2 million round.

Shaun’s entrepreneurial journey began when he started a house painting business with a few friends from college. One of the biggest challenges he had at the time was making sure that materials were delivered to the painting site. At the time he wished for a service that ultimately became GoShare - a way to have heavy things delivered on-demand.

Systematic self improvement and self reflection are two aspects of entrepreneurial development that often get glossed over, and historically don’t exist outside of engineering teams. Bringing these Agile principles into other departments has helped Eric’s clients reach outcomes that previously seemed unattainable.

Something that most entrepreneurs learn through trial and error is the importance of leverage and efficiency. While it’s completely normal to attach yourself to every process in your company at the early stages, it’s highly inefficient to do so and will often lead you off the growth path. The sooner you learn how to apply leverage and successfully deleage, the quicker you’ll get on a sustainable path of growth and prosperity.

JJ took an unconventional path to entrepreneurship. He’s an art and design graduate who noticed a market gap in early tech back in the 90’s. Early in his career, JJ had to train school employees how to use video bulletin software, which is when he realized that the true problem behind why people use software inefficiently is an issue of design, not an issue of user intellect, and that’s the first problem he went on to help solve.

Many founders build their technology and only then try to figure out what industry it’s best applied to. In the case of Davit, they had 24 different use cases they were trying to present to the market, which caused them to struggle with their business model.

Krisp has grown significantly throughout COVID and beyond. They saw a huge market opportunity with call centers where the issue of noise cancellation is truly prevalent and expensive, which helped them grow through word of mouth. Throughout this growth spurt they’ve been able to add a plethora of new features, and now they’re moving into the lucrative meeting assistant place. The next feature they’re working on is accent translation, which automatically translates the speaker's accent to the listeners accent to help break through accent barriers.

Davit’s background is in engineering. If you asked Davit if he plans to become an entrepreneur a year prior to founding Krisp, he would have said - no way. But when he took the plunge, it didn’t take long for him to fall in love with it and unlock his hidden calling.

During those two episodes, Eric and Jan discussed what it takes to truly grow a platform business. Many founders want to go after a broad market and grow their company into an industry staple. As a startup, the likelihood that you’ll succeed increases if you find a narrow market and focus on an underserved niche.

In the previous part we established the story of how Celigo had to make some hard decisions that were ultimately for the best. In more recent history, they had to pivot to a new product even after they found what was supposedly working. Jan’s reason is simple - the Total Addressable Market(TAM) was too small to fulfill his ambitions, so they started working on a model that would work across a variety of verticals