Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Now, on this timeline, we are in 2022. This is also when AI is starting to hit the popular consciousness and the venture capital industry in a big way. What impact did that have on your product strategy, go-to-market strategy, et cetera? So, tell me more about what’s your AI strategy and

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Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise in your first round? Cynthia Chen: First round was $2.5 million. Sramana Mitra: What milestone did that get you to? Cynthia Chen: It got me to tens of thousands of active users.

Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Language models have evolved a lot. Arvind Jain: There is that vision for the future. The nature of knowledge work is going to change. We are going to have these powerful assistants that are going to take care of most of the repetitive time-consuming tasks as well as the tedious parts of search.

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you this question, computer scientist to computer scientist. Really great work in search is a matter of great algorithms. Algorithms are not necessarily people intensive. Five people can write great algorithms. Is this really a people-intensive business? Google was never a people-intensive business. They hire a lot of people,

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s another positive impact that happened during the pandemic. On the sales side, organizations became comfortable buying products over Zoom calls. You do everything on Zoom. Large deals were closing purely on Zoom calls. Arvind Jain: Yes. In our first year, we had one sales person. Then we hired the second one. We

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This strategy that you followed is good for companies that have a lot of early-stage funding. It’s not so easy to follow for companies that are trying to work in a very constrained financial resources situation. What did you learn? Focus on the nuggets of what you learned from the early customer engagements

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In your selection of which investors to work with, what was your decision making? Was it people you worked with before? Arvind Jain: There are two key investors in our first round. One of them was Ravi from Lightspeed. I had worked with him in my previous startup. It was an easy choice

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Building an AI Unicorn: Glean CEO Arvind Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: This problem has been identified a long time ago. People have tried to build such enterprise knowledge management companies before. I’ve seen many of these attempts. Mostly they’ve failed. While these attempts were made and failing, there was an explosion of digital tools and data. All this was happening in parallel. In 2019,

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