Colors: Blocks I

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Blocks I

Blocks 1 | Sramana Mitra, 2022 | Watercolor, Pastel, Ink | 8  x 8, On Paper

Featured Videos

Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Very good. So, what is the genesis of the new company?

RJ Talyor: Well, when we were purchased, I was playing around with the early versions of the generative text content. With my history in email marketing combined with my background as an English major [it’s really unique in the tech space], I went back to what if we could create unique and performant content that drives actual performance on the email side? So, those are two important adjectives, unique and performant.

Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra:  So how did you finance all this in the early stages?

RJ Talyor: At Pattern89, we raised money from a few different sources, mostly from Friends and Family/Angels. Then we were backed by High Alpha, which is a venture studio as well as a venture capital firm. They invested in Pattern89, which allowed us to hire the right people and build the machine out.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of numbers are we talking? How much did you raise?

RJ Talyor: In total, we raised $8 million.

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637th 1Mby1M Roundtable Recording

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Roundtable Recap: April 18 – Validate First, Chase Money Later

During this week’s roundtable, we had two entrepreneurs pitch pre-seed startups.

WaveOn Health

First, we had Adam Halpern from Albuquerque, New Mexico pitch WaveOn Health.

Kuttl

Next, we had Varunesh Vishwakarma from Gurgaon, India, pitch Kuttl.

Both projects need extensive validation. I am not convinced about the viabilities of their business models.

Both entrepreneurs were receptive to feedback, which was refreshing to see.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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AI Unicorns: H2O.ai Builds Smaller AI Models

The growth in the AI industry has led to the increasing size of the AI models. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, for instance, are composed of more than 100 billion parameters. GPT-4 is estimated to be built out of over 1 trillion parameters. However, these large parameters require substantial computing power, have high operating costs, and can perpetuate harmful biases if not carefully monitored. The high resource requirement makes these large AI models inaccessible to smaller players. Mountain View-based H2O.ai is helping democratize AI adoption by working on smaller AI models, some that weigh as little as 1.8 billion parameters.

Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Two questions. One is, who came up with this technology?

RJ Talyor: It’s a big combination of things. My co-founder, Jeff Cunning, and I kind of dreamed it up.

Sramana Mitra: That’s the management part of it. You positioned the product and you kind of envisioned the product. But somebody still has to do the algorithm.

Best of Bootstrapping: Long Bootstrapped Journey into Generative AI and $5M

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Businesses are finding unexpected benefits by incorporating Generative AI into their product roadmaps. Ragic Founder Jeff Kuo shares how they have built a $5M ARR no-code platform in the market. A Generative AI front-end is adding unprecedented usability and adoption momentum. Fascinating!

Sramana Mitra: Alright, Jeff, let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Jeff Kuo: I was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan. I mostly grew up here, but in my childhood, I lived for two years in the US in Michigan.

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