Category: Ideas to Invoices Podcast (Page 6 of 10)

Five years ago, Matt Sanchez founded CognitiveScale, a fast-growing artificial intelligence startup in Austin.

Today, he serves as Chief Technology Officer of CognitiveScale, which has raised $50 million to date and has 150 employees with 90 in Austin. It also has offices in New York, London, and Hyderabad, India.

This week, CognitiveScale held its Cognite2018 conference at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Austin. The conference brings together CognitiveScale’s partners and clients to talk about the practical ways they can apply AI to their businesses. Its customers include USAA, Microsoft, Dell, GE, NBC, and MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Manoj Saxena, formerly general manager of IBM Watson, is the company’s chairman and Akshay Sabhikhi is its CEO. Previously, Sabhikhi was the global leader for Smarter Care at IBM.

During a break, Sanchez sat down with Ideas to Invoices to talk about Responsible AI and the company’s core products. He serves as the company’s principal architect and product developer. He previously served as the leader of IBM Watson Labs and was the first to apply IBM Watson to the financial services and healthcare industries. He also previously worked as chief architect and employee number three at Webify, which IBM acquired in 2007.

Sanchez “earned his BS degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000, has been granted six US patents, and is the author of more than a dozen more,” according to his online bio.

Artificial Intelligence is a board term and a has a history going back to the ’50s and ’60s, Sanchez said. Augmented Intelligence, which is what CognitiveScale focuses on, is when machines help humans and extend their capabilities, he said.

“Augmented is not just predictions and machines telling you what to do, it has to tell you why,” Sanchez said.

For MD Anderson Cancer Center, CognitiveScale created a patient concierge system that helps cancer patients learn the basics of living in Houston and receiving treatment from everything to where to go eat to how to get to their appointments. It also includes information about how to find dentists, best diets to follow and more. It adapts to the user and learns what their needs are and serves up helpful personalized recommendations, Sanchez said.

“It really highlighted this notion of a profile of one – a system that learns about the individual and actually adapts the information to the individual,” Sanchez said.

It also worked to develop other applications for MD Anderson including the cognitive help desk, billing department and finance applications, Sanchez said. In all, CognitiveScale has done nine AI applications for MD Anderson.

In the beginning, CognitiveScale focused on healthcare, financial services, digital commerce but it has since developed a platform that is now being applied to a variety of other industries, Sanchez said.

One of the things CognitiveScale commits to is that AI should be practical, scalable and responsible, Sanchez said.

“The ethical implications of AI have to be considered upfront,” Sanchez said.

CognitiveScale has partnered with the government of Canada to create AI applications that help its citizens, Sanchez said.

When implementing a new AI system, CognitiveScale looks at data ownership, explainability, robustness, compliance and fairness, Sanchez said.

“There are lots of examples of AI gone wild where unintended consequences have occurred,” Sanchez said.

It’s rare and they get hyped but it’s important to look at each case and address it and understand why it occurred, Sanchez said.

The biggest barrier to adoption of AI is data, data ownership, data access, and data cleanliness and readiness, Sanchez said.

“Data needs to be nutritious. It needs to be digestible. It needs to be something you have to understand the nature of it before you can apply these tools,” Sanchez said.

One of the principals of any information system is garbage in, garbage out, Sanchez said. If the programmer is setting up a facial recognition system that only detects fair skin people, then it will fail because of bias, he said. It’s important to detect the bias in the system and bring visibility to them and correct the issues before they are deployed, he said.

For more on the interview, listen to the full podcast:

Cristal Glangchai, Ph.D., was the founding director of the Blackstone LaunchPad and the director of the Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange at the University of Texas in Austin.

She’s also the founder and CEO of VentureLab, a non-profit that runs experiential learning programs in youth tech entrepreneurship. And she is the author of the bestselling book: Venture Girls.

Glangchai recently sat down with Silicon Hills News’ Ideas to Invoices to talk about her book: Venture Girls.

“Venture Girls was based on my experiences as a woman engineer, a women CEO, and a professor,” Glangchai said.

The book helps parents to empower girls to pursue engineering opportunities, Glangchai said.

The entrepreneurial mindset is “about opportunity seeking, persistent and grit, optimism, adaptability, creativity, lateral thinking, redefining failure,” she said.

“It’s a lot of these words that characterize what an entrepreneur is,” Glangchai said.

To be successful, an entrepreneur must surround themselves with others that are smarter than themselves and have strengths that they don’t possess, Glangchai said.

VentureLab’s mission is to spread the entrepreneurial mindset as far as possible and it provides online curriculum and training as well, Glangchai said.

And it’s never to early to start teaching entrepreneurial skills, Glangchai said.

“The entrepreneurial mindset is something we want to be teaching our kids at two or three years old,” Glangchai said.

For more, listen to the podcast.

MONKEYMedia is focused on eliminating motion sickness for people using virtual reality applications.

Today, the company released a developer toolkit for its patented BodyNav technology that allows people to try out the BodyNav technology on existing games and applications available for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Eric Bear, founder, and CEO of Austin’s MONKEYMedia, an award-winning, independent research, and development lab, calls BodyNav a game changer for virtual reality applications.

Motion sickness in VR is estimated to impact between 25 percent to 80 percent of the human population and is reported to affect women four times more than men, according to Bear.

“We’re moving to a future where we are going to have virtual reality headsets on every desk,” Bear said.

Making the technology accessible to as many people as possible by eliminating the motion sickness will lead to wider adoption of virtual, augmented and mixed reality applications, Bear said.

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Bear talks about the benefits of BodyNav. He also discusses his entrepreneurial ventures and how he left Apple to found MONKEYMedia in the ‘90s in San Francisco. The company’s patent portfolio includes in-house inventions that date back to 1992 and are incorporated in more than 184 million movies distributed on DVD and Blu-ray.

Bear has over 30 years experience crafting and establishing user experience strategies for major corporations and is the first-named inventor on over 100 software and hardware patents and patent applications. Products based on his inventions are used every day by millions of people and thousands of companies.

Bear is also a partner at Capital Factory. He is a mentor and investor in Austin startups. He is also the Chief Experience Officer at Curb, a smart home startup that sells and intelligent energy monitoring system.

BodyNav’s technology allows people to be immersed in an application and comfortable viewing it, Bear said. The BodyNav technology replaces hand controls to move throughout a virtual environment. To move, people simply lean in the direction they wish to go.

For more on MONKEYMedia, BodyNav and Bear’s entrepreneurial ventures, please listen to the podcast.

Design thinking is a methodology designers have always used to solve problems, said Doreen Lorenzo, founder of the Center for Integrated Design.

It started in the early 1960s around industrial design and made a comeback in the early 2000s to address a wide range of issues, Lorenzo said, who is also the Assistant Dean of the School of Design and Creative Technology at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Design used to mean just the artifact, the output of something,” Lorenzo said. “It was a visual. But design today means a lot of things. We’ve really expanded the definition and meaning.”

“Really design today, if you take it at its essence is really problem-solving,” Lorenzo said.

Today, people are looking at design to solve problems and make their life easier, Lorenzo said.

Lorenzo discusses the importance of design thinking of the latest episode of the Ideas to Invoices podcast. Before joining UT Austin, Lorenzo co-founded mobile video insights firm Vidlet. She previously served as president of Quirky and Frog Design. She is an internationally recognized thought leader on design and innovation. She is also a columnist for Fast Company Design and Medium.

“Design is still always in the eye of the beholder,” Lorenzo said.

There are still beautifully designed artifacts, but the premise of what people value about design has changed, Lorenzo said. People are seeking simplicity in their lives and design thinking can help them solve problems, she said.

“What is the problem we are trying to solve and who are we trying to solve it for,” Lorenzo said.

Humans have a totally different point of view than people often think they do, Lorenzo said. That’s why it’s so important to talk to the users of your product or service and find out what they really want, she said.

Who would have ever thought couch surfing would become a huge business, Lorenzo said. Marriott probably never saw that coming as a competitor, she said.

AirBnB’s founders talked to its users and designed a product for them, Lorenzo said. A lot of times companies in incumbent industries get so confident in their businesses that they think they know what the customers want, Lorenzo said. Successful businesses and companies must understand what the customer need is, she said. They must pay attention to what people really want, she said.

For more on design thinking, please listen to the podcast. Also, Lorenzo provided this link to a book list for more material on design thinking.

Blockchain technology has the potential to transform businesses and entire industries.

And the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin is at the forefront of this emerging technology with its newly launched Blockchain Initiative.

UT Austin is participating in a new program focused on blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, and digital payments. Ripple, a distributed ledger currency exchange company, is providing the financial backing for the program. UT Austin is among 17 academic recipients worldwide selected for Ripple’s $50 million blockchain research program.

Silicon Hills News recently sat down with Cesare Fracassi, a McCombs associate professor of finance and the Blockchain Initiative’s director, to talk about blockchain technology and the new program on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

“The goal of the initiative is to bring together all of the resources on the University of Texas campus to work on blockchain technology,” Fracassi said.

The Blockchain Initiative at Texas McCombs is focused on providing support to faculty to do research on blockchain technology, Fracassi said. It also provides students with opportunities to learn more about blockchain technology, he said. And it’s the nexus for blockchain technology to work with companies in Austin and San Antonio, he said.

Ever since humanity began, people have been using centralized ledgers to handle data. But in the last eight years, advancements in technology and cryptology have allowed people to create distributed ledgers, Fracassi said. It’s a network of nodes that must come to a consensus to figure out whether a transaction is valid or not, he said. It relies on a consensus algorithm to validate transactions, he said.

Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency and it relies on a distributed network to validate transactions.

“Bitcoin in a way is philosophically revolutionary, it brings control of a system from a central authority to a distributed one,” Fracassi said.

There is a lot of hype around cryptocurrencies right now, but most of them are going to die, Fracassi said.

“Only very few are going to survive,” he said.

Despite that, blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are disruptive technologies that people need to pay attention to, Fracassi said. Philosophically and technologically, blockchain has the potential to really disrupt the way companies do business.

One of the big issues of companies getting together and collaborating has to do with who owns the data, Fracassi said. With blockchain technology, everyone holds the data, and it makes collaboration among big companies easier, he said.

Trust Ventures, an Austin-based venture capital firm has raised an initial $35 million fund, backed by Koch Disruptive Technologies, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, to invest in and support innovative startups facing public policy barriers.

Salen Churi and Brian Tochman lead Trust Ventures. Previously, Churi worked as a law professor and founded the Innovation Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. He also practiced law at Kirkland & Ellis and Sidley Austin.

Tochman was the co-founder, president and chief operating officer of Kasita, an Austin-based startup that builds modular homes and apartments. Previously, he worked as vice president of mergers and acquisitions for Platinum Equity, a Beverly Hills, CA-based private equity fund.

On this edition of the Ideas to Invoices podcast, Churi and Tochman talk about what motivated them to raise a $35 million fund to focus on disruptive technologies and what kind of investments they plan to make.

“For us we saw a huge opportunity in the market,” Churi said. “More and more companies are coming up against public policy barriers that prevent them from bringing new kinds of business models to market. Often times these barriers were put in place 50 or more years ago in a different environment and a regulation addressing a problem came to be. And now many years later, we’re in a different kind of economic state and it serves as a barrier to innovation.”

Their focus is to help entrepreneurs and be a guide for them, in a lightweight way, navigate the bureaucratic barriers that exist for innovators today.

Churi, as a former law professor at the University of Chicago working for the Institute for Justice, knows the problem firsthand. He worked on a campaign in Chicago to legalize street vending.

“So I was helping folks really on the first rung of the economic ladder selling tamales and helotes and in Chicago that was illegal,” he said. The restaurants worked together with the city to fine the vendors up to $1,000 a day and shut them down, he said.

Through that experience he saw the need to do the same thing for high-growth tech companies, Churi said.

“There’s a number of them coming up against these barriers,” he said.

At Kasita, Tochman faced some of the regulatory issues that prohibit innovation. And that brought him together with Churi.

“Everything from regulation that limits the height you can build modular construction at…to RFP (Request for Proposal) contracts with FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), disaster relief housing after Harvey,” Tochman said. “It was a big opportunity for Kasita but for a period of time, it wasn’t even accessible to us. We had to work with a lot of the regulators to find a path forward there.”

It hit home that this is a really big opportunity, Tochman said.

Trust Ventures focuses on a lot of industries, but it doesn’t invest in pharmaceuticals. It concentrates on energy, transportation, financial technology services, insurance, and food and beverage.

“For us, we’re looking for where can we add value,” Tochman said.

Trust Ventures plans to write checks ranging from $100,000 to as high as $3 million to $5 million. It’s looking primarily at investing at early stage investments, Tochman said. When it does make later stage investments, it will leverage its relationship with Koch Industries, he said. Trust Ventures does not take board seats on the company it invests in but seeks an advisory role. The company is looking for big ideas and considers companies that are transformative and have the opportunity to be a $1 billion-plus business.

“We are an investor who has the best interests of the entrepreneur in mind and we’re going to be available as much as possible and that’s both directly internal to the fund with Sal and I and our team and with our partners at Koch Industries and leveraging their capabilities, their skill set, knowledge and network to help drive them forward.”

For more, listen to the entire interview below in which Churi and Tochman talk about how they make their investment decisions, best traits for an entrepreneur and more.

Also, please rate and review our Ideas to Invoices podcast on iTunes and support Silicon Hills News by becoming a patron on our Patreon site. You will get to vote on what we cover in future podcasts and stories.

Morgan Flager, a general partner of Silverton Partners, one of Austin’s oldest home-grown VC firms, is an active investor in early-stage technology startups in Austin.

Flager currently serves on the boards of Aceable, Alert Media, Convey, Outbound Engine, Trendkite, The Zebra, Turnkey Vacation Rentals, SourceDay, and Rollick. Before joining Silverton, Flager worked with FTV Capital in San Francisco and in corporate development for Ingrian Networks and as a product manager at Kintana. He grew up in Santa Cruz, California and earned his B.S. from Stanford University.

Last month, Silverton announced it had raised a $108 million fund, its largest to date. This is the firm’s fifth fund. In this episode of the Ideas to Invoices podcast, Flager discusses the firm’s investment focus and how it decides to invest in an entrepreneur.

Silverton’s offices are located downtown at seventh and Nueces in the historic Joseph and Mary Robinson Martin House, built in 1903, in Queen Anne and colonial revival styles of architecture.

Flager’s office is on the second floor and faces the ever-changing downtown Austin skyline. Flager said in the time he has been there he has seen skyscraper after skyscraper go up.

Bill Wood, one of the founders of Austin Ventures, founded Silverton first as a family office in 2005, but a year later he raised the firm’s first VC fund. Silverton is now on its fifth fund. Just last month, the firm announced it had a $108 million fund focused on investing in early-stage technology startups, primarily in the Austin area.

“We’ve always been an early stage tech investor in Austin,” Flager said. “We really haven’t changed our strategy much since the firm was started in 2006.”
Silverton tends to be the first institutional investor in the early-stage tech startups it invests in, Flager said.

Some of Silverton’s successful investments include Silicon Labs, Sailpoint Technologies, WP Engine, SpareFoot, TK20.

“We’ve had a lot of successful acquisitions lately,” he said.

Silverton has reported five full or partial exits representing an aggregate of more than $1.1 billion in market capitalization since the beginning of 2018.
Silverton typically invests between $500,000 to $5 million, with the average being around $1.5 million to $2 million, Flager said. The firm primarily concentrates its investments within a 20-mile range of Austin, but it has made investments outside the state including one in Utah and another in New York.

Silverton looks at roughly 1,000 investment opportunities in a year, of those, it typically invests in six to eight new companies, Flager said. And then it does following on financing for existing companies so it ends up making about a dozen investments a year, he said.

The biggest focus of the Silverton portfolio has been in software, particular business to business ventures. It also does consumer, Internet mobile investing like Aceable, uShip, The Zebra, he said.

“Most of the consumer stuff we’ve done is marketplaces,” Flager said. “So we feel like we know that area really well.”

Silverton also does some investing in hardware startups, tech enabled services, and consumer packaged goods, Flager said. But those are smaller parts of its practice, he said. The firm does not invest in life sciences, medical devices and pharmaceutical startups.

When evaluating which startups to invest in, Silverton’s primary criteria is the team behind the startup, Flager said.

“We like to back people who we have a high degree of confidence in,” he said.

Silverton also looks at the dynamics of the market the startup is going after, Flager said.

“If we can’t see our way to selling a company for a $100 million plus then generally it isn’t a fit for us,” Flager said.

Being authentic is the best way to pitch the company, Flager said.

“We want to help the entrepreneur achieve the vision they already have in store,” he said.

Flager recommends entrepreneurs don’t artificially inflate numbers in their pitch deck presentations to impress VCs. He also likes to see tangible dates and timelines for when things are going to get done, he said.

Flager sees the best traits for an entrepreneur to be passion, charisma, and self-awareness.

For more, listen to the entire interview below in which Flager talks about how Silverton Partners works with accelerator programs at Capital Factory and Techstars, the hotttest areas ripe for investment in Austin, some industries that are overhpyed and more.

Also, please rate and review our Ideas to Invoices podcast on iTunes and support Silicon Hills News by becoming a patron on our Patreon site. You will get to vote on what we cover in future podcasts and stories.

Jean Belanger is co-founder and CEO of Cerebri Ai which helps Fortune 500 companies find their customers’ voice.

A serial entrepreneur, Belanger has helped launch three software companies starting with Metrowerks, which went public on NASDAQ and later sold to Motorola.

Next, Belanger started Reddwerks, a pioneer in the Internet of Things industry providing solutions to major retailers including Walmart, CVS, and Best Buy.

And finally, Cerebri Ai, founded in January of 2016. It started out as a student run Longhorn Startup Lab company which won the IBM Watson global competition. The company has changed considerably since then. It became a Capital Factory accelerator startup and that’s where Belanger, who holds a master’s degree in finance from the London School of Economics, became involved in the company. He first served as a mentor and investor and later became CEO.

Cerebri Ai is first tackling the automotive and financial services industries with machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to mine customer data for actionable insights.

It has three of the top ten global auto manufacturers in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States and one major bank in Canada as customers, Belanger said. In June, the company will begin work with one of the major credit card companies, he said.

Cerebri AI can crunch its customers’ data to predict when a customer might buy a new vehicle and what they might buy, Belanger said. That allows for more targeted marketing and advertising to select customers, he said.

“Data is the new capital of the 21st century,” Belanger said.

For artificial intelligence to be effective, startups need large data sets to crunch and mine for insights, Belanger said. And large companies increasingly need AI to better serve their customers and use AI to make their businesses better, Belanger said.

“This technology innovation is going at the fastest rate anything has ever happened before I think,” Belanger said.

AI helps companies make better business decisions, Belanger said.

“If you can understand the customer behavior, you’re way ahead of your competitor,” he said.

Cerebri Ai is one of three Austin-based artificial intelligence startups working with Ben Lamm’s Hypergiant startup, which came out of stealth mode earlier this year. The other companies are Clearblade and Pilosa.

The company, which has raised $9.5 million in funding the last two and a half years is about to announce a Series A funding round in June with a major strategic partner. It raised $4 million in seed stage funding and the latest funding is about $5.5 million for its Series A, he said. Cerebri Ai, currently based at Galvanize, is moving to bigger offices in the Omni Building in downtown Austin. Cerebri Ai has also hired several graduates from Galvanize’s data science program now has 42 employees. It also has an office in Toronto, Canada.

For more, listen to the entire interview below where Belanger shares his advice on what it takes to scale a successful startup and more discussion on the advances of AI and machine learning.

Also, please rate and review our Ideas to Invoices podcast on iTunes and support Silicon Hills News by becoming a patron on our Patreon site. You will get to vote on what we cover in future podcasts and stories.

Jose Ancer is a tech and venture capital focused corporate partner in the Startup and Emerging Technology Group of Egan Nelson and the firm’s Chief Technology Officer.

He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and his Law Degree from Harvard.

He represents early-stage companies across a variety of tech-focused industries and in multiple cities.

Ancer is also the author of the hugely popular Silicon Hills Lawyer blog. He writes blog posts on core startup law and finance concepts and aggregates useful resources for entrepreneurs. In this episode of the Ideas to Invoices podcast, Ancer talks about some of the issues facing early stage entrepreneurs and how a lawyer can help them navigate them.

Ancer created Silicon Hills Lawyer blog because he always enjoyed writing. When he attended the University of Texas, he switched from pursuing an honors business degree to philosophy.

“It kind of started out as an experiment to put my thoughts down on various issues to see who would read it and over time it evolved to this interesting way to get info out to clients and prospective clients,” Ancer said. “And perhaps say things that I think the market needs to hear but people who usually control the microphone won’t let you say it.”

Ancer writes the Silicon Hills Lawyer blog in a way that a business person can understand.

“I try really hard to make it accessible to the people who don’t have law degrees,” he said.

Austin-based Egan Nelson is a “small, top-tier law firm, that can just like top startups, out-compete firms 100 times their size,” according to Ancer.

“All of the lawyers that practice at our firm, or the vast majority of them, came from larger firms, the marquee names, the 1,000 lawyer international firms and I did too,” Ancer said.

Big firms needed to exist ten years ago when it was impossible for smaller boutique firms to coordinate with each other.

“If you are going to build a scaling company, you need IP lawyers, trademark lawyers, corporate tax, twelve different kinds of lawyers,” Ancer said. “There was no infrastructure to collaborate across firms. You had to have this massive overhead, the file room, the secretaries, all of that so a high economic model necessitates lots of lawyers to spread it across.”

What has happened over the last ten years is you have this enormous growth in software as a service products, and so the cost to run a law firm has gone down 90 percent, Ancer said.

“It’s sort of the same story for startups,” he said. “It’s why you see so many more startups today. You are seeing a lot more law firms pop up.”

The firm is comprised of serious lawyers that are right-sized to serve the classic non-unicorn startups, Ancer said.

Egan Nelson also does not represent venture capital firms, Ancer said. He wrote a blog post recently on how to avoid captivate company counsel. VC firms sometimes recommend a law firm to a first-time entrepreneur that is also the VC firm’s lawyer. That can lead to conflicts of interest, Ancer said.

Ancer also wrote a blog post about why startup founders don’t trust startup lawyers and it has a lot to do with the law firms that serve both the investors and the companies, Ancer said.

Despite all the software available today, entrepreneurs still need startup lawyers. Legal services like Clerky and Legal Zoom can take care of some standard issues, but there is an enormous role to be played by a human with experience in the startup industry that can tailor advice to your company, Ancer said.

Egan Nelson charges $500 a month for up to six months for its formation package for early-stage entrepreneurs. It is highly selective about who it takes on as clients, Ancer said. The hourly rate is about $300 to $400 per hour for senior attorneys, he said. The firm’s focus is commercial, corporate and tax.

For more, listen to the entire interview below where Ancer talks about everything from CEO startup pay to the quest for work-life balance and founder burnout.

And please rate and review our Ideas to Invoices podcast on iTunes and support Silicon Hills News by becoming a patron on our Patreon site. You will get to vote on what we cover in future podcasts and stories.