Text By the Bay 2015: Business of Text Panel Discussion

Text By the Bay 2015: Business of Text Panel Discussion

Recording: Text By the Bay 2015: Business of Text Panel Discussion

welcome everybody to the closing panel of text by the bay hope you enjoyed the last two days of the first ever text by the Bay who wants to have another text by the Bay next year awesome so we hope you have fun this is the first one so there's a lot of interesting things happening with figured out how this whole thing works with with gvan eyes and I think we'll next time we'll have a even bigger show for you with uh workshops probably one request was to have you know two three hour tutorials uh for some of the talks so folks can follow along and actually learn what uh what is being presented hands on right so this is certainly something we're going to add we had two trainings this year we're going to add probably more trainings if if you still want to learn NLP after all these days uh we have a training with Gabor me tomorrow uh which is Introduction to NLP for engineers who who work in it but did not have uh you know formal training ination Linguistics so if you tasked to build another sentiment analysis engine for lexalytics and you did not really you know take any new courses in in compation in linguistics before but you know how to write excellent uh code then uh after tomorrow you could actually do that on Monday right so um that's the purpose of tomorrow um now uh so we have a panel uh entitled business of text and uh yesterday we had a panel called the science panel so there there are two I think uh pieces of uh of this conference which were in evidence I think in almost every talk on the one hand we use uh highly involved technical uh systems which uh try to approximate human Intelligence on the other hand we uh we we live in the real world and this this social technical system systems which are our companies are operated by selling products to customers and having customers support us and we figure out what is it they want to understand and then we build it right so there is this interesting feedback uh and uh by which this technology propagates throughout the world and this is one of the high most technical aspects right we have NLP uh people go to school to to do a PhD in it and we have many in the audience uh and uh the advantages or disadvantages of some of these Technologies are hard to gauge even for the professionals and uh if you compete in the market if you propose better solution it's it's pretty hard to to explain it and uh uh show the value so uh today we have the co panel we have folks uh who either are currently CEOs of uh companies in the space or we CEOs of companies in the space uh and uh they basically face uh these uh problems uh regularly so uh I'll let the folks introduce themselves uh then we'll have a conversation on the panelists uh and uh about halfway through the time we'll open it to uh the audience and the way it's going to work I'm going to place the mic in the holder here and you can form a line uh on the left side so you can basically form a line from this speaker and then we'll just let folks ask questions in sequence and you can address either individual panelists or the panel as a whole then you guys can jump at it you know in in in some in I think developer first strategy is actually a very common strategy open source companies use and uh a lot of companies buil by technologist for instance data bricks right spark finds gigantic enthusiasm among uh engineers and and then there is a bottomup approach and it did gather with the momentum such that the Enterprise now want spark right so but it's it's very unusual um in that uh in in this case yeah the main difference is uh depends who you're selling to if you're selling to brands or consumers then underlying technology doesn't matter and uh nobody needs to know about the code if you're selling a solution uh to a business problem to someone who is not a technology company or is involved in different kind of Technology then then yeah you need finished product you need a solution to an existing problem if you are selling a middleware technology that enables compan is to build products then you need to go to developers uh we call that segment B2 B2B where we sell to businesses who sell to businesses um thanks uh then I I'd like to uh kind of Zoom a little bit in on this um again this Paradox right so on the one on the one hand I know Nikita you're you're a developer yourself right and you enjoy writing call yourself uh right and that's that's what you you would do daily right if you would create yourself an opportunity and and that's a lot of a lot of uh you know folks becoming serers they're missing this right then you have to sell the products you have to watch the bottom line uh so um and basically so you have two constituencies you need you know you need to inspire your developers you need to be passionate about technology on the other hand you need to be disp passionate about the technology and and uh think about the solution right if you if you frame it this way so I mean I mean how do you avoid sped personality how do you how how do you do that if if you are the technologist question for all right um well that's a looted question um so how do I peel it off if you ask me from a kind of coo standpoint how do we me or we as a you know group of Executives you know split out time and manages this um for me developing sales and developing Market markting developing product is exactly the same it's Engineering Process um yeah developers write code uh marketing people come up with campaigns and strategies how to talk about a product and sales people come up with you know the same programs how to sell it so the difference are not that dramatic uh you're definitely dealing with the different types of people and it's like hurting the cats that's typically what you do so uh I don't really see it differently as long as you you know seen it and you have certain maturity and understanding how business works you just do it um but I think another aspect of your question was you know I mean if I'm a you know and if I'm a technical F or NCO how do I inion sales I would hate to sell to myself I don't buy anything as a developer I use a lot of open source and I and I can pinch every dollar so that's why you know over the years I try to avoid situation where I have to sell to people like me because I if I'm a developer I don't control a single dollar I organization uh and if you ask anybody Enterprise sale practically all of us here in the panel we will tell you that yes we have to talk to developers but then we have to navigate to somebody else within organization to sell somebody who has the budget and it's kind of cool you know there's a whole Paradigm of kind of 50 miles riders in Silicon Valley we have very specific you know type of companies here in the Bay Area which skewes our perception dramatically the rest of the world operates very differently it's kind of cool to sell you to V funded company of 10 people and you can bypass everything and sell to engineer but then you quickly discover that this your entire Market is Silicon Valley you move out and you face the reality where Engineers don't buy anything and as much as we believe that Engineers starting to have an effect they don't most of the time they do not have any effect on purchasing decisions they may choose technology or to uh and when it comes to Pure middleware pure development tools they may have certain way of saying uh for any other tools that go upstack they have very remote influence if at all and you have to engage them because they're good for marketing for product marketing they're pretty talkative and in know pretty nice focus group of constituency for you but you know anybody Enterprise business and that applies by the way to all local companies look at Cloud there look at hord networks look look at data Stacks from spark uh you think they sell to Developers absolutely not uh they use developers to get to the accounts but from from a point of view of selling somebody sending their PO for your software they sell into very different folks in those organizations and that's that's absolutely correct because again we as a developers we don't really buy anything um well I I'll have to make a confession I haven't written a line of code in my life so I'm not a developer and uh we moved to Silicon Valley from Boston and Montreal so we kind of have the outside view to to the market um our trick is simple have have the whole Dev team route and say they want your software and the VP will sign the PO we do events we make developers like how easy it is to integrate we we take them out we literally go down to where they are take them out spend have our Geeks talk to their Geeks and uh and then we go talk to VPS but VPS just don't have a second line in their choice there's only one got an interesting Journey as well I'm a non-technical co-founder but I have been teaching myself to code so I can better interface with my programmer and I think that one of the big things that I've learned about my products and engaging customers in any in any kind of venture you have to be able to tell a story that relates to them and you have to be able to engage them with exactly the kind of background and education and knowledge set that they have and I think that what we're finding as we expand Beyond Silicon Valley is that there is a a great opportunity to be able to meet people at a variety of different levels of understanding and being able to really get to the Simplicity and to U meet those needs of the customer and also build trust um and kind of continuing to Foster those relationships over a long term is something that I've I've also noticed as being useful yeah so so the question about how um technical Founders can convince technical people to pay I think that's kind of the umbrella question there um I think um being one of them actually helps in spreading the message being um I think just Nikita said Engineers don't want to be sold to um but same with our customer segment is actually data scientists um most um NLP researchers MLP ml researchers um they're very Hands-On they actually don't like to be lied to right so uh truth and marketing comes out almost real uh being open and open source kind of really helps there uh but we spend a lot of time with customers in meetups uh it's off their hours it's really non salesy situation it's pretty neutral they came to the Meetup on their own so the last two years we actually spent um two nights every week so roughly 150 meetups in the Bay Area Across the Nation and creating a movement in a community community is your brand so so customers are a Subs subset of your community so building a strong Community is kind of your real world or real Mo because anybody like Amazon can come along and say we're not going to do machine learning or some new company bigger company would want to acquire you and the more you have to your business is customer support customer success but really the community and the belief of your community in in you the founder um that you're going to lead them for a long time right so and listen to them for a long time younger companies listen much more um uh effectively and act more effectively than bigger companies that's our advantage so that helps be more agile and come up with more um Immediate Solutions to these problems that customers have as opposed to let them wait for the next big um rev in the product so it's really product Ren um and because of Internet because of corsera because of YouTube people can learn about your technology or your competitive technology just as rapidly as you could and sometimes I challenge my team I say in open source the customers sometimes know more about my product than I do or our companies do uh because you have now suddenly 10,000 users banging it every day as opposed to 100 QA or 10 QA or 5 QA people you can hire or or so being absolutely passionate about your product is still the only Mantra um now um there is different ways to get the dollars from right so um and and actually um asking for um like I said as I said as I started asking for cash is still important you need to continue to uh ask the customer hey how do I sustain a business and uh the interesting Nuance is customers are spending money um software companies never or software companies because of developers but even Corporate America has had never had so much cash reserves as this time in the in the era right so in the overall scheme of things so there is cash out there there is it's outlaid for different businesses so solving real business problems and aligning your data scientist to most data scien are part of a big business organization but aligning yourself to Big movements like big data is a movement and every company has a big data organization and so your dollars could come from Big Data your dollars could come from risk your dollar can come from the CFO if you're fighting fraud if your dollars and especially in NLP you see a lot of fraud um your dollars can come from marketing organizations CMOS are being completely Quantified so going into these higher level business functions and having a story that can resonate with those business functions which says you saved $5 million last year in predicting vehicle battery failure so you need to pay me 50K so kind of really making it a 10x or 100x gain from what you have given them uh is always is always a way to um get further so um being an engineer has not hurt this process I think the process is about being honest because if you're going through the developers developers customers demand Excellence um and if the product's not good they're not going to pay and it's just like yourself I mean an outside Silicon Valley situation is also interesting because outside Silicon Valley 100K you can actually buy a home sometimes right so you you're really your software is as expensive as someone's home so you really want to make sure it's as good as as as a home right so really want to give that sense of um sense of parity for some of these people um and developers are becoming more and more influential um there's definitely no um second to that I mean all big phenomenons Linux is a big story right it's a great story of Open Source where developers have pushed large Giants to their knes like HP Sun all of these companies are no longer selling Unix so really developers have become really critical but it's more than developers it's the ecosystem of developers data scientists and devops right which is where had really sits is in the devop situation spark is in the developer space and then now you're seeing a growing economy of machine learning and smar application Builders and I think that'll be very fun to watch that Revolution thanks sh uh so I think one important questions uh where we see this interface of business technology is marketing right and uh we had Seth redmore uh speak from lexalytics earlier is Seth round so the the so then I'll tell a little story about Seth because he cannot you know dispute it uh so uh so basically we we had an opening and the program uh at the last moment and uh and uh basically asked uh lexalytics to to do a talk and Seth uh was coming anyways right and he said You know here are some interesting technical topics and I knew already because I interact with him as as V of marketing so he sent some some some subjects and I basically said this is a great one and I asked you know who who is presenting it so he said I'm presenting it right and I'm like well this is a developer conference right so we have Engineers here we have uh you know NLP specialists uh uh you know um I sure you know you can you can talk about it and he said well you know I I have 12 years of experience I I let the group developing I'm in marketing now uh but you know I fully understand this technology uh I am a very good speaker and uh and I okay you know as as long as you can personate an engineer right as long as you can answer questions without saying I'm just a marketing guy right I'll have to you know defer to my developer you know as long as you you know do not do that you'll be fine and and so I went to his talk and and it was an excellent talk he delivered on All Points uh right because you know this is developer conference I need to make sure that the all the talks are on par and uh it was really really good talk and and so it struck me it was clear that he interacted with customers many many times he digested uh piece of technology in very kind of beautifully done animations uh which are not kind of you know the Glamorous PowerPoints but actually present the technical uh points clearly right and and so this really struck me that you know this is the marketing guy any of the companies here could use so uh I wonder uh from your C perspectives how do you go about finding vpf marketing how do you see marketing how you direct it how do you interact with it giving you feedback uh and we can go in order again it's a good question um in my experience fighting the good VP marketing was probably the number one problem in any business especially here in the valley marketing is a key what you learn that's kind of interesting problem for the audience is that thep marketing doesn't do anything it's a management position the V marketing manages other people and um to get that person is extremely important uh what's also equally as important is to get the rest of the team properly because again uh in today's marketing which is extremely Quantified and there is dozens and dozens of programs you run continuously in the business and campaigns and whatnot um one person never can do it and therefore you end up with having you know two three or four guys in a team very early on and um I would say from my perspective for the companies that I've run and um I will start in the future potentially the marketing is the probably number one function in a company uh development is important but I can give you examples for the next hour where products were shitty but marketing was great and the company was successful and I can give you equal amount of examples where products were awesome and marketing was bad and companies shut down so if I ever choose between great marketing great development I always pick marketing um but that obviously uh don't get me wrong uh the products are important too typically in the for the company to be successful truly successful you have to have all three functions the sales marketing and the product development to be in excellent shape but for us for technical Founders that sounds counterintuitive we all tend to think that the better the product the more successful the company um I got burned couple of times because of that and you tend to over concentrate on products you tend to deconcentrate on sales and marketing and that bite you in the ass very very quickly so uh I'm not saying we have to completely over rotate and concentrate on marketing only uh but especially in today's economy especially if you're in the Sass business especially where you know things are quantifiable and there's a plenty of metrics around you um most of you probably heard that when you know when you describe your architecture your product a lot of people ask what's your marketing stack what's your marketing automation stack it was you know about four or five years ago I first time heard that term people L ask what should stack for your software like what you're using like programming languages or libraries and app service and whatnot people ask what's your marketing automation stack how do you track every move every action in your application how do you move it back to the the entire final of marketing from top to bottom how it's all connected to Salesforce how do you guys track the entire you know um life cycle of one click leading to opportunity living to lead living to closed sale so that's what's changed literally in the last 5 to 10 years I think it's a very healthy change that you know for a lot of companies and for me for my companies as well marketing automation development integration with sales force and everything else including thebi and Reporting is all product there's no difference between quoting something in scolar and making integration with you know hops spot maretto or moving that in Salesforce for me that's the product that's a one product and multiple teams you know interact with different facets of that got to just say Nik nailed it um we invested in our first Market automation um product Oracle eloqua back then it was just eloqua in 2008 and that was probably second biggest budget in the company uh after actually building the product since we won bunch of awards from Oracle and stuff like that so kuros um I have a little trick though how to hire the best VP marketing possible hire your own customer nobody understands customer problems and can articulate them better than your own customer and I guess that's why Seth was good he came from Cisco which was a customer so one of the things we're earlier along in our business than than these other ones but I think that there's been a common theme that we've found and that's why should I care the customers really want to know why should I care and the attention span has decreased tenfold and there are billions of apps out there so we're n undated with all these different kinds of technology and most of the time people just need to know what works for them right now uh in the simplest possible way and so I think kind of a better produ a better technical product doesn't necessarily mean a better uh higher customer engagement and so that's something that we've learned is how to just kind of offer various levels of Simplicity for people and my co-founder is the author of The SSL standard so when he first kind of went out to to secure that as his um as the as the ports that were going to be used out of beating out ma MasterCard and Visa I think that the marketing around that was that it was clear that people needed to be able to have secure experiences online and the experience of having those secure transactions go beyond just money was enough of a marketing experience to persuade the the direction of that and I think similarly if you can do sales as an experience and really kind of meet people with what is relevant to them then you would get them engaged in the product and then if you can provide different tools adaptive metrics that allow people to really feel like there's a customization that's involved that's another I think way of continuously marketing um and then open source as well being able to to have that be built upon and and remixed and iterated upon by other companies can be helpful in in the marketing excellent question something we're actually trying to solve the problem so um Nikita nailed it as as did um as did O um the key piece is um Community marketing is one part of it um so open source kind of really helps where you you can actually get a lot going and in open source you can track a lot most products these days have uh something like segment iio or Google analytics so you can actually really track how the products really growing um so that's one part of uh quantification uh for at same or when we started our H2 World um we were looking for a lot of product use cases and product marketing and product Tex we just recruited seven of our customers to go on stage and talk and they basically created text for us for the rest of the year um so customers not just hiring from customers but even asking customers to be on your uh conferences can create really good marketing material much more rapidly than um classic training of of the marketing team um but last time I found a good marketeer I made him a co-founder because it's much getting good marketing is really hard um marketing is kind of the soulle of the company um and great marketing can make sales obsolete right so if you think about how the Apple products people line up for it because really great marketing makes sales obsolete um and so so truly good marketing is hard to get um it's actually much uh the quantifiable side of it the demanding side is actually well understood Engineers quickly latch on to that but the creative side of it is really hard to get the connections the the the social context of of AR and PR and being connected with the entire um creating the story around your company and thought leadership in the space all of that's really um really unique talent and I think it's one of those um one of those most difficult hires in any startup I would say um and we we have probably for example a very good engineering machine that's delivering great product great sales machine and a phenomenal Community marketing but we still are in search of that great markete ear so it's it's I I will tell you the answer when I solve that problem abut uh so at this point I would like to take some questions from the audience if you guys uh have questions uh if you have a question please come here and uh we'll go in sequence while you're thinking whether you have a question I'll ask another question then uh so uh so there are couple startup likes uh startup like companies here so I think at linga and H2 is further along but uh it was very important for you guys to get or think about getting pilot customers right so I think a lot of startups here the model is you you have this great technology right you need some validation and you go to VCS and say I have this a great idea they say well do you have 100 customers you have to have at least 10 customers or just a single customer to to prove us first of all you have a team which can do something and secondly this team is social enough to engage at least one customer right and so I think this is a classic story now that you know the traction that's why you know traction became such a such a word uh so how do you go about gate and pilot cers of talk got Netflix which is a well-known company right and they use I think for attribution so this is I think this is a great feat for any company netx so I wonder how do you go about it and you know what advice you can give to to kind of young startups in search of the pilot customers so um obviously I mean I want to hear what Nikita and have done as well but the first customer we actually had a customer in place or wanting to play with the product before we had investment so that was the was the other way around sort of from the same days we started playing with the customers time um we started playing with our time first and time is your enemy as a startup right so time is the only non- rable resource period right so you don't get it back no matter how much money someone will pay you so pick things that you're passionate about regardless right so so as we we started trading it uh we are our own first uh internal customers because cuz we actually like to use data and try to predict where to do the next meet up um but having a very big um customer really tease the product out and be beat it up to 15 pieces we actually had GE uh Nuna also one of the earliest users of the product we had Netflix and Linkedin to degree PayPal all these early customers really um made the product great and one led to the other of course the net promoter score for some of the early adopters uh is not just the dollar in which they paid it's how many customers they introduced you to so that led to like much more viral adoption uh Trulia we actually spend a lot of time at uh presenting using their venue as our Meetup venue and that eventually the they truly themselves got convinced that they can use our product and so that was another approach we would just look as a startup you're you're really the starving artist or starting entrepreneur trying to build um really Bridges between companies between uh cultures and you're also selling your culture to your customer right so they have to believe that you're going to be in it for a long time investment or not right and that's actually what gets customers more excited uh they really do have problem data scientists were suffering they were they had five hours for every run for a random Forest we made that 5 seconds and that was a real change in their lives and so they would then find ways to tell their bosses to pay for the product so we can then go uh build a larger community so I think it was really a matter of um getting them engaged from a personto person basis because it's a data scientist on the other side and we are building a solution to solve the problem this side uh NLP has the same problems I mean you're working with a customer um they're trying to do disambiguation right so you're trying to do whether PE is pulmonary embolism or pulmonary edema it's a real problem for for that medical uh business and they are trying to make money out of that right obviously and so it's a real problem and you could try to build a morim that can actually um kind of freely build a morphological way of solving that problem using deep learning um now they've heard of deep learning but they never could use it in Practical uh ways so what we've done from Tiano to us that the big difference is they could actually without getting into too many uh feature uh instead of feature engineering they could apply deep learning without having to tune deep learning to work for them so I think that simplification the grow simplification which actually in the end save time for the customer that's what he was willing to really spread the word on so I think the Crux of it is it's still a solution there a pain it's easier to sell painkillers than vitamins and I think that's kind of the Crux of how we how we made sure we I mean obviously many of these product ATMs would fail right and all those failures taught us to build the product made made the product better made uh taught us not to pick up things we can't solve pick up things we can solve and which are which are actually useful for the customer so I think over all was a very good customer and because of the open source nature there were a lot of jerus people could go online and and give us a lot of feedback on what to fix and what to fix that would save them more time and in the end it it build we built a product that was had a good Market fit because the market defined the product for a long time so really like what you said about the uh the analogy of easier it's easier to sell painkillers than it is to sell vitamins and I think that in my startup Journey we are actually in the middle of another kind of marketing push for our newest applications in the first round of customer feedback was or the process that we went through was initially that we needed the tool ourselves and there was a strong desire between me and my co-founders to build this tool because it was something that we would be able to use my co-founder is a teacher and he uh does online courses I've had a background in nonprofits and storytelling so really in education and so figuring out where that intersection was and then also finding out what the pain problem for the the markets that we were going for and and really listening to what they had to say uh and that therefore drove different iterations of the product and then being able to essentially have evangelists people that are really excited about what you're working on and really excited about the potential and the directions that they're moving in I think that that's something that is useful for any kind of product or company being able to have people that are on board with your story and we have people all over the world that are kind of using the product and I think again being able to to do something where there's some sort of experience where people are seeing something firsthand rather than having to listen to or read a bunch of text and um and so I think that that the the the the journey for any kind of startup that wants to gauge to gain a lot of customers before they go to raise funding or to to do anything else is really to feel like they've truly understood the the space in which they're working in the audiences that they're working in and the different pain points and then also being able to essentially forecast for what what the different problems down the road or the different features down the road that these new audience and and communities will be really interested in um I think that that's kind of both pre and future planning for how you can gain more customers I still remember the first the day when our first customer actually signed that paper holy bananas that was quite something so what do you do when you don't have a product which is where most of people are when they're just starting out and they're asking VC for money you need another eight month of development to have something working right now you kind of have a prototype maybe an algorithm an idea and uh very excited eyes how do you sell that how do you sell that to customers uh well I kind of found a way I guess you sell a story and you sell a relationship you have to tell them hey guys this is how it's going to look once you help me succeed at building it and trust me since you're the first ones you I will be there for you and things won't go down at 4:00 a.m. in the morning but if they do I'll wake up so that's kind of how we got our first 10 15 customers they were True Believers and uh the first one ever we have a nickname for him he is our serial buyer he bought us four times so he sold his first startup started another one bought us again sold it to a huge company stayed at a huge company until they bought bought us left that company and then bought us at his third startup so that's that's a relationship yeah again that's a in my opinion you know Prett loaded question and how do you get the customers right what else do we care in our startups uh I'm going to answer very quickly uh the best way to learn that is to follow folks like Steve blank and Mike Schuster from upfront Ventures on Twitter and read everything those guys write um read about Lean Startup and lean analytics just Google this if you haven't heard about it if you read those couple of books you'll know pretty much what every everybody else today in the valley is doing you know look at growth hacking when they interested in marketing it's another term that's pretty popular right now so I guess yeah it it we can spend you know the whole conference on ways how to acquire customers when you don't have once or what you do when you have just an idea so I guess it's just a couple of pointers for all of you guys um that's you know High I learn it many years ago so kind of works do we have any questions from the audience excellent thank you I actually have a follow-up question to this and I've always wanted to ask to at least one CEO of a company and now there's four of you and that's awesome so the question is this uh when you have a product that's that you or an idea let's just say an idea that you think is awesome otherwise you wouldn't be trying to sell it um usually it goes something like this it's either completely new and no one else is doing it or it's somehow different than someone else in some important way and so my question is and you partly answered it uh but not entirely is why if someone says uh well you do this and uh if this is new and it's important why is anyone else already doing it uh if this is so important and if it's so different again like how is it so different why should I do it and how do you face this how do you tell that story convincingly usually to more than one person um yeah I will I will leave it there who wants to answer well typically um most of the startup stories are completely unconvincing uh they typically look like rubbish and most people don't believe I mean there's a famous story when U you know Google guys were raising money 70% people said you guys crazy idea is stupid to no we're not going to do it and they they they raised some money initially and um idea was not that bad but it's the same story I mean it's very it's you guys have to understand this when we hear all this in know glamorous stories about you know the latest great company in the unicorns uh they all started with you know barely making it barely finding some money uh making in know 20 pavots internally before one gets public and um most of the companies never survive so don't think that you have to have any kind of you know dramatic story or dramatic in development some sometimes it happens but very rarely believe me look at any company look at whatever and you know look at I don't know Twitter look at Uber whatever else is hot right now most of them started you know Twitter was completely different idea in the beginning the whole idea of pavots actually the ter terminology for this change in Direction came from this because almost every goddamn company starts with some idea and literally says no this is this is piece of share we now going to have to move something else otherwise not going to survive so now we have a turn for this it's called be uh so again it's a longer topic again I would say caution yourself on an expectation to have something great typically ideas are very I wouldn't say boring but you know good ideas and I you know I had plenty of interaction with Venture Community you know and typically best ideas are fairly boring in what they do not really no look I mean there's a there's a great difference and that's a funny thing when you talk to youc is both both sides of the table lying we're lying about you know what we see they lying you back to you as far as you know that's how great the idea is and what not so you ask any Venture Capital they tell the same story um I haven't heard the peach for Uber for example but I guarantee to you it was pretty you know pretty audacious and you know in the same time kind of you know are you guys crazy to take on Taxi industry yeah good luck go talk to somebody next but you know eventually somebody like the idea and say what lets Risk by the way keep in mind that most of the early stage investment it's a it's a massive risk you know people if you get funded it's not that you know somebody believed in you so much it's just basically the the risk calculation came you know somewhat more positive for you than for any somebody else um as obviously most investors will lose most of the bets early on and that's okay because some of them like those companies we all know will go up pretty big so it's not that you know you have some wonderful story to tell a lot of the you know we now you know digress into the investment story side but I want to keep it you know more of an more of an idea so again back to my original you know thesis is that I'm a strong believer that idea should be fresh enough boring enough and executable rather than the you know flambo and everything else actually have a quick pointer that served me really well for the past several years um I had a lunch with Tom Chi he's the founder of Google X the guy who was on the product team for self-driving car for glass for Project Loon Etc and he told me about his rule of thumb in any idea he is looking for magic moments an idea that's going to work needs to have at least one Magic Moment ideas that go to billons have two or three magic moments in customer experience remember the first time you called Uber and you just tapped on your phone screen and there is a card just shows up to a person who is not technical that's magic that's a magic moment but then you you you took a ride and you arrive to your destination and you start pulling out your your your wallet and the D is like no no it's it's all taken care of it's Uber and you're like holy hm that's another magic moment right there so if you point these magic moments out in your idea to to investors they'll bite it that that's kind of what has guided me through I can almost guarantee to you that the original pitch from Uber never had any of those points that's true just to be clear I mean I would love to see the pitch guarantee this will be absolutely different story I mean something to do with the cars but none of that was there it comes with execution it comes with a lot of customer Discovery it's the process to get those things done not the originally yeah I think Nikita you touched on on some really key points that are important when you are facing the why why does it matter and why are you different from the 10 other people that I saw with that same idea earlier today uh I think that it comes down to a real understanding of the problem and some real clear ability to understand what the best approach is obviously there's a lot of Merit that people have found in simplifying their approach and being able to offer kind of the minimal viable product and I think that the iteration that happen with those meetings and with the kind of development of the product are um are key in in how you uh continue to move forward and I think that something that's stuck with me in my personal Journey with being told no or you know this is interesting but is it valuable I think that there's a lot that has to say for passion and if I am also suffering the same problem then I know that my customers will will agree with this if my co-founder and and the community members that we've already reached have experienced a satisfactory feeling or a feeling of success in a short amount of time then that's a little win that's a magic moment on a on a small scale and I think that as you continue to gain more of momentum of meaningful experiences and also being able to show bottom line execution how do you how do you just add a uh meet stakeholders needs um for for return uh that's also something that's key to be able to show so I think it's navigating that balance being able to show enough of a they're there um and it it really depends on the team too it depends on the people that are running it the people that are behind it there's a lot uh there are a lot of products out there and there are a lot of products that aren't great and so being able to can have continuous iteration feedback from UI feedback from developers other people that are engaging with the product is it's a really holistic approach it's funny um great panel here and great question um I think my tweet this morning was it was it all unique cons have magic but um but the for the rest of us execution is still not cheap right so um I mean execution I that was literally the TW tweet this morning so like I think um the magic part is apart I think the uh talk is cheap I mean there's a lot of products out there a lot of noise out there because I mean earlier question about how do customers confuse your product because of the noise because everybody says they do everything that the customer wants to hear so I think uh and same with the investors obviously they know that people will say what they want to hear I mean you can figure out by um I mean think of the typical um entreprene they meet as as straight A from all the all the IV leagues so they know what the questions will be right sort of in sense of it so to that degree I think they really know that talk is cheap so you can persever and your actions will speak loudly uh over time that will resonate with the why why are you doing this is going to be a question that resonates every day or you're living that startup it's not just for the VC it's not just for the customers it's not just for your own people your own families um startups are journeys and you need to be constantly self-learning obviously and you're learning by making mistakes obviously and and hopefully you're making new mistakes and all of that's painful and so you need to know why you're doing this all the time and you'll be self you'll be aware of that by virtue of all the things you face anyway so the why of it the bigger M of why should I spend 10 years or 7 years or five years through this journey should will be very evident through each moment you live in it especially if you're aware of it and if that's going to lead to bigger change because the change you want to see in the planet is probably why you're doing this and that's the only reason you should be doing this it doesn't matter most great ideas as Nik put are are considered dull ideas like machine learning was a very dull idea four years ago and nobody wanted to fund any the valley never even still hesitates to fund math as a startup and so you will find that people will eventually believe in what you want to believe if you can make that happen it's almost The Matrix so you are the one if you're the founder and you're pulling it through you are the one you make the reality happen around yourself and many ways yourself grows as you build the company and the mov um emerges from your company and from your vision and that mov is what people are chasing and if that moment touches billion people it's a unicorn if that touches a million people in an Enterprise it's not get a big company if it touches 100,000 people it's a company still you've changed the people around you and that's why either you build companies or you join because you're a revolutionary you're starting Revolution you're building that company or you join a revolution and make that Revolution go further so it's kind of really continuous process and if if you fail you're going to pick up someone else journey and continue take it to finish so there is no failure and failure teach really I mean are really the successes because you learn from them more than the successes themselves so to to that degree it's continuous process in Silicon valy you'll see that startups don't die because they the same people come together and start the next big thing so it's a it's a continuous process so in that sense of it it it is no it's not a zero sum game people are watch I mean you are watching yourself grow and that's what leads to better ideas your ability to throw away bad ideas gets better over time so U thank you sh for this uh wonderful answer I think it reminded all of us why we're doing this so really appreciate it so there's this notion that uh technology risk varies inversely with Market risk um um is that something that any of you have I guess considered or has that kind of implicitly entered into your decision to go into a particular kind of business no that's my answer well I was entrant number eight on9 into the market and my decision was based on how can everybody screw up like that so yeah I think that I've seen some correlation though very little in how our technical wiring is uh in place and how our it drives our ability to find customers I think that we've started to on the side explore different um territories and Frontiers with PDFs in particular but um just in building libraries and kind of going down that road of um of technical development but that not necessarily having a direct correlation with the market um markets that we're trying to reach unless we look at the markets that we're specifically targeting that use a lot of PDFs and so um I've seen small correlation I think um I mean for technology I mean really the people you pick uh the physics of software is physics of the team you have uh the physics of markets you can create are also related to kind of people you can uh attempt to attempt to acre over the course of your immediate time and a lot of things happening around you obviously and like kind of like bigger movements such as in memory is become a huge moment so you want to line on those some of those but I mean to some degree uh open source in memory had or or big data and being in that trying to get machine learning to be rebirthed in the context of Big Data that was something that I had to uh make happen because when over the last 10 15 years machine learning was completely unfund um I mean even still is I mean Google search search as an application is very very fundable but machine learning if they whole page rank I'm pretty sure no one will fund them right so to some degree what we are doing is actually build algorithms in a generic fashion um I had to tie that to a bigger wagon that's changing the business which is Big Data so I think trying to put gives you context but you still do what you really want to do and that's kind of the Crux of it you I would have done this part of um this as an innovation whether whether it was um fundable or not right that was kind of when it gets funded really so thank you uh so I think we are a little bit passed our a lot of time so I think uh a oh okay how many of you are um how many CEOs in the audience obviously how many entrepreneurs how many entrepreneurs and and people are beginning to build how many natural language processing uh NLP people text people awesome and and how many of you are are from the area how many you flew away from other parts of the world and got here where from Montreal oh Montreal and Indiana Indiana Bloomington um yeah so thank you for um listening to us and obviously there a this all a journey as some of you have realized and we'll probably have more to learn from the audience than from us from to you but is are shared experiences as you can see there's so much commonality in the thinking you usually zum as founder U that's a lonely Journey but there's a lot of shared experiences so um definitely um send an email or connect with us if he can um inspire you to do bigger things than what we are doing that's that's also part of the same um same ethos so thanks for putting this together Alexi thank you Mar thank you Nikita o and Caitlyn that was a really great panel it's a great way to finish our conference we have a happy hour upstairs we have drinks and so we can continue this conversation uh upstairs thanks guys for