Sramana Mitra: How did you get that off the ground? Erik Severinghaus: It began with me just investing my own personal money – the money I made at IBM and some of the money that I made at iContact. After maybe a year or so of running it, I started to look for outside capital and
Erik discusses his journey as a serial entrepreneur and we deep dive into the Positioning of Bloomfilter. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and what kind of background?
Sramana Mitra: I have one last question on the engineering stack. To what extent were you able to leverage existing models and components that are out there? To what extent did you have to kind of do things from scratch? Anthony Scodary: That’s a good question. In general, we try to build everything in Gridspace
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to your company building. You bootstrapped for a year and a half to product. Then you had started getting these paid pilots. Did you raise any money or is it fully bootstrapped all along?
Sramana Mitra: They want the problem solved, and if the problem is solved by a machine; that’s perfect. Here comes the sensitive question. What does this do to the workforce? What does this do to the bottom line? What are the human resource and financial metrics of your solutions in the call center?
Sramana Mitra: What are the results of these deployments? Anthony Scodary: For instance, we have one customer that calls when you’re discharged from hospitals, and they call thousands of patients a day. Some people spend twenty minutes talking with Grace. We build all our own language and speech synthesis models, so we’re able to make
Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about the structure of these. As you were revolving from these pilots to actual deployment, sounds like your platform was strengthening. Who was doing the application layer? Was a part of your team doing the application layer or the customer’s team doing the application layer?
Sramana Mitra: Let’s trace this a little bit more granularly. When did you launch the company? When did you quit your jobs, or did you not quit your jobs? Did you start it before quitting your jobs? Anthony Scodary: No, I quit my job in November 2012 and I think we started a day later.