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.
Web: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cockroach-labs/
CEO Pod: https://www.venwise.com/
CEO coach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markteitell/
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:
Web: https://www.private-ai.com
Blog: https://www.private-ai.com/blog/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/private-ai/
At Dawn we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
Contact us at forward@dawn-gv.com
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.
https://anchor.fm/forward-by-dawn/
0:00 - What challenges Tom faced as a sales leader, that led him to start Jiminny
3:29 - Jiminny’s capabilities
09:41 - What does success look like with Jiminny’s implementation
14:20 - Customer success function as a massive differentiator
16:12 - Building a product that loved by customers
19:20 - How to stay focused on the customer as the organization scales
25:40 - Jiminny’s origins
28:49 - Getting first customers
30:50 - How to pick the right features for your MVP
34:22 - AI capabilities
38:17 - Fundraising seed vs. series A
44:31 - Tom’s vision for Jiminny
Links:
Web: https://jiminny.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomlavery7
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomlavery7/
At forward we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
Contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
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:
Web: gorozen.com
Letters: http://gorozen.com/research/commentaries
US geological survey: https://www.usgs.gov/
Twitter: @GoRozen
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/goehring-&-rozencwajg-associates-llc/
Video on the history of energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz75yScqPpQ
At forward we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
Contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
We caught up with Tomas Vykruta (founder at EvolutionIQ, ex. Machine Learning @ Google) to talk about GPT-4 & Plugins. We discuss vision, input vector size, plugins, and the path to fostering a competitive environment with multiple options of foundation models for developers to choose from.
0:00 - How GPT-4 is different from previous generations. What changed and what stayed the same.
6:40 - GPT-4 vision
9:00 - Expanding the size of the input vector
12:50 - ChatGPT Plugins
20:25 - Data storage
22:45 - GPT-4 alternatives
Links:
Codex: https://twitter.com/mckaywrigley/status/1638011552401096705
Alternatives: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/21/googles-bard-lags-behind-gpt-4-and-claude-in-head-to-head-comparison/
At forward we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
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:
Web: https://www.closedloop.ai/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/closedloop-ai/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/closedloopai
Health Outcomes Challenge: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cms-selects-winner-and-runner-artificial-intelligence-health-outcomes-challenge
At forward we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
Contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
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:
Web: https://www.plotlogic.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/plotlogic/
Andrew: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewtjob/
At forward we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
Contact us at forward@dawn-gv.com
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
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dipanwitadas/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dipanwita_d
Turing test of summarization: https://www.sorcero.com/blog/ai-experiment
Sorcero and OurResearch Partner to Bring Open Access Scientific and Medical Content and Patient-Centric Publication Metrics to Life Sciences: https://www.prweb.com/releases/sorcero_and_ourresearch_partner_to_bring_open_access_scientific_and_medical_content_and_patient_centric_publication_metrics_to_life_sciences/prweb19134162.htm
At forward we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
Contact us at forward@dawn-gv.com
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
Twitter: https://twitter.com/close_factor
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/closefactor/
Careers: https://closefactor.com/company/careers/
At forward we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
Contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
We sat down with Deci’s Yonatan Geifman to discuss applying AI to build better AI - at the edge and in the cloud and boosting inference performance by 3x-10x. We also talked about NAS, dealing with uncertainty in AI, how 22-23 environment is better for AI startups than 21, recruiting design customers, and more.
The audio version is available everywhere you listen to podcasts.
https://anchor.fm/forward-by-dawn/
Yonatan is the CEO and founder of Deci. Deci enables deep learning to live up to its true potential by using AI to build better AI. With the company’s end-to-end deep learning acceleration platform, AI developers can build, optimize, and deploy highly accurate and efficient models for any environment, including cloud, edge, or mobile.
With Deci’s platform, developers can increase deep learning model inference performance by 3x-10x, on any hardware, while still preserving accuracy. This translates directly into enabling new use cases on edge devices, substantially shorter development cycles, and reduced compute costs by up to 80%.
The platform is powered by Deci’s Automated Neural Architecture Construction (AutoNAC) technology, a neural architecture search engine that empowers AI teams to build hardware-aware models that deliver optimal accuracy without sacrificing speed, based on the specific use cases and device.
Deci achieved a record-breaking 11.8x accelerated inference speedup on Intel CPUs at MLPerf Industry Benchmark and has been named to the CBInsights top 100 AI companies.
Deci is backed by Jibe Ventures and Insight Partners among others.
0:00 - Applying AI to build better AI
5:15 - Evolution of NAS
12:10 - Developing a way to assess model performance without actually running them
13:40 - Expanding from NAS to a bigger platform
16:30 - Customer and use cases
22:35 - Optimizing video generative model efficiency 3x
26:10 - Pushing the models to the edge
32:40 - Biggest challenges Deci had to overcome to build the product
37:00 - How to figure out the direction for your startup
39:40 - Recruiting design customers
43:36 - Dealing with uncertainty in AI
53:13 - How the way we build AI systems will evolve
1:01:10 - SuperGradients
Links:
Web: https://deci.ai
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/learnaitogether
Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deciai/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deciai/
SuperGradients: https://github.com/Deci-AI/super-gradients
At Dawn, we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
With questions about Forward contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
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
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fiddler-ai/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/krishnagade
Join Fiddler: https://www.fiddler.ai/careers
At Dawn, we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
With questions about Forward contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
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
0:00 CGPT advantages over the previous generations of LLMs
3:30 RLHF as the optimization method behind CGPT
7:13 Products to expect
12:55 CGPT challenges
18:33 LLM landscape
21:43 Will the number of parameters continue to grow
24:25 The future of transformer architecture
29:00 Opportunities for startups
CNet discovers errors in more than half of its AI-written stories:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/25/23571082/cnet-ai-written-stories-errors-corrections-red-ventures
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:
Ellen MacArthur Foundation: https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/greyparrotai/
Newsletter: https://www.greyparrot.ai/stories
Work at Greyparrot: https://www.greyparrot.ai/careers
At Dawn, we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
With questions about Forward contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
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:
Portugal AI Hub - Accelerat.ai: https://portugal.postsen.com/news/159065/Daniela-Braga-will-have-345-million-euros-to-put-Portuguese-AI-on-the-world-map.html
Main website: https://www.defined.ai/
Neevo platform: https://www.neevo.ai/
Daniela on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielabragaspeech/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dbraga51?lang=en
Careers: https://www.defined.ai/careers/
We sat down with Glean AI’s Ankur Patel to discuss managing business costs with AI, running an AI-powered hedge fund, culture at Bridgewater, building the remote-first company, and the future generative AI.
Ankur is a co-founder and head of data at Glean AI. Glean uses natural language processing to deliver vendor spend intelligence within an accounts payable solution. Before founding Glean, Ankur was the vice president of data science at 7Park Data, a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company.
Ankur used alternative data to build data products for hedge funds and developed a natural language processing-based entity recognition, resolution, and linking platform for enterprise clients. Before 7Park Data, Ankur led data science efforts in New York City for Israeli artificial intelligence firm ThetaRay, a pioneer in applied unsupervised learning.
Ankur began his career as an analyst at J.P. Morgan and then became the lead emerging markets sovereign credit trader for Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest global macro hedge fund. He later founded and managed R-Squared Macro, a machine learning-based hedge fund.
Ankur is the author of Hands-on Unsupervised Learning Using Python and Applied Natural Language Processing in the Enterprise, both O’Reilly Media publications.
Glean is backed by Contour Venture Partners, Infinity Ventures, B Capital, Portage Ventures, Amex Ventures, and other prominent venture funds and fintech angels.
The audio version is available everywhere you listen to podcasts: https://anchor.fm/forward-by-dawn/
0:00 - Why start a career on Wall Street
03:55 - Key takeaways from Bridgewater's approach to culture
05:55 - How to build an AI-powered hedge fund
08:25 - Can a data edge be sustainable for a hedge fund
10:35 - Data-driven hedge fund horizon
13:30 - How should an individual investor think about the market and edge
17:10 - How Glean helps organizations manage expenses with peer intelligence
24:10 - Scaling spend analytics
29:00 - Offering Glean functionality as a set of APIs
36:00 - AI technologies powering Glean
40:35 - Solving the “cold start” problem with training data
43:30 - Raising a multi-million seed round pre-product and pre-revenue
48:00 - Managing the growth, fighting the pressure of growth-at-all-costs
52:20 - To build a strong culture focus on what motivates people
56:00 - Adapting the culture to the remote-first environment
1:00:00 - Think about how acquiring data makes a product better
1:05:00 - The future of generative AI and multi-modal models
Company: https://www.glean.ai/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aapatel09
Newsletter: https://www.ankursnewsletter.com/
At Dawn, we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
With questions about Forward contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
We sat down with Aaron to talk about building bots to compete in games, Raising a $4M seed in a week from NEA and A16z, building an AI-powered company, and the future of AI in gaming.
Aaron is the Founder and CEO of Regression Games, a company making artificial intelligence in games and esports accessible and enjoyable for everyone. He was previously an early engineer at Instabase, working on low-code machine-learning products. He received his Bachelors and Masters from MIT, where he helped develop Battlecode, MIT's annual AI gaming competition.
Start competing in Minecraft - Ultimate Collector challenge at https://play.regression.gg
Timestamps:
0:00 - Why let people build AIs that will compete in games
2:10 - Which games to use as arenas for AI bots' competition
8:10 - First tournament - Minecraft Ultimate Collector
10:46 - RG approach vs. other companies applying AI in games
16:40 - The toolset to program bots
18:33 - Leveling the field for players with various programming skills
21:00 - Origins: First robotics, MIT Battlecode, Instabase
31:00 - Applying Natural Language and LLMs to programming bots
35:10 - How to monetize AI bots
38:15 - Starting RG as a solo founder, first steps, NEA, A16z, Roosh
41:00 - Navigating the venture ecosystem as a first-time founder
45:05 - Building initial team
48:37 - Future of AI gaming
52:25 - Advice to founders starting an AI company
57:05 - Future of AI in general, AI as a companion
Links:
Regression Games: https://www.regression.gg
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/925SYVse2H
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RegressionGG
At Dawn, we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
With questions about Forward contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
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
TRIZ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Company: https://formic.co/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/goformic
Open positions: https://formic.co/careers
At Dawn, we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
With questions about Forward contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
Our guest today is Tomas Vykruta, the CEO and founder of EvolutionIQ. EvolutionIQ created the world's first fully AI-driven claims guidance platform for the most sophisticated insurance carriers in the world, making insurance more fair, transparent, and affordable.
They raised more than $26M from Brewer Lane Ventures, FirstRound Capital, FirstMark Capital, and Foundation Capital, among others.
0:00 How does insurance claims guidance help insurers
3:00 Insurance companies served by EvolutionIQ
8:26 Customers' success stories
10:45 AI systems powering EvolutionIQ
15:37 Future roadmap
17:50 Convincing your first customer to share the data
21:26 How can an AI team become experts in insurance
29:22 Starting EvolutionIQ
37:57 Lessons from Google
44:06 Lessons from building EvolutionIQ
55:11 The future of AI in insurance
A Recipe for Training Neural Networks: http://karpathy.github.io/2019/04/25/recipe/
EvolutionIQ: https://evolutioniq.com/
Careers: https://evolutioniq.com/careers/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/evolution-iq/
Tomas’ Twitter: @tvykruta
Tomas’ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tvykruta/
At Dawn, we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com
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.
Website: https://www.amiralearning.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/amira-learning
Careers: https://www.amiralearning.com/jobs
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With questions about Forward contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com
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.
Website: https://www.rhinohealth.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rhinohealth/
Contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com