Catching Up On Readings: Google I/O 2023

This feature from The Verge covers the highlights of the Google I/O, Google’s annual developers conference held in Mountain View, California last week. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

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Colors: Mendocino VI

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 – Mendocino VI

Mendocino VI | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9  x 12, On Paper

606th 1Mby1M Roundtable Recording

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

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Roundtable Recap: May 11 – Startups Working on Various Facets of Fashion E-Commerce

During this week’s roundtable, we had four excellent discussions. For those of you following these roundtables and the recordings, especially if you’re primarily in the learning phase, please use them as case studies and exercises that you can work on. Ask yourself how would you process my feedback? Put yourself in the investor’s shoes. Put yourself in the entrepreneur’s shoes.

MADSTO

First up, we had Prashanth Sathri from Bangalore, India, pitch MADSTO, a plus sized men’s clothing brand from India.

Zosper

Next, we had Diana Tkhamadokova from Dubai, UAE, pitch Zosper, a personalization front-end for fashion retailers.

Pabloo

Then Pabloo Alsahlani from San Francisco, California, pitched Pabloo, an app for processing store-credit for retailers of fashion and footwear.

Skimmet

Next M’Lisa Ellis from Las Vegas, Nevada, pitched Skimmet, a social media tracking app for brand mentions.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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Cloud Stocks: Analysis of Amazon’s One Medical Acquisition

Recently, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced its first-quarter results that surpassed market expectations. Amid recessionary fears, Amazon has been announced a series of layoffs that helped it earn strong profit in the quarter.

From PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: SuperAnnotate CEO Tigran Petrosyan (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How is it working with your brother?

Tigran Petrosyan: Many people tell me that they would never work with their siblings. When you do it right, it can be a blessing. We have done quite a lot of work early on to make sure that not only the brotherhood works, but also the business side works.

We’ve gone a very long way. You can trust each other. You know that you rely on each other and you can be safe. Having that backup all the time is critical, especially when you’re building something new and innovative. The rate of failure can be high.

From PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: SuperAnnotate CEO Tigran Petrosyan (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: After raising that $100,000, you went to the accelerator. Did the accelerator give you some money?

Tigran Petrosyan: Yes. It was $100,000.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other investment?

Tigran Petrosyan: We had a few other angels and pre-seed. The big part came when we raised our seed round in early 2020 with Point9 Capital. It’s one of the most highly-respected European VC firms. That $3 million helped us expand our operations and build a go-to market in the US and Europe.

From PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: SuperAnnotate CEO Tigran Petrosyan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What emerged as your target market?

Tigran Petrosyan: This is a good question. Machine learning can be applied to all kinds of industries. Initially, our target was computer vision. Basically, those who use images to get intelligence out of images. This was our niche.

We started to build an engine to attract clients. It went through a few iterations and another six months before we realized that what we were building is much more than an annotation platform. There’s a big pain about the platform itself as a standalone software solution. We released that in early 2020.