1Mby1M Udemy Courses with Sramana Mitra: Artificial Intelligence

At 1Mby1M, one of the most popular courses these days is the Artificial Intelligence segment. These courses include case studies that involve discussions on opportunities and challenges in Generative AI domain.

Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So based on this, in terms of prioritization, are you going more after the enterprise accounts, the very large deals like the Infosys, TCS, and IBM global services, or are you going after the mid-market? Where are you finding traction?

Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So coming back to what you just said on the how, let’s double click down one more level. Take me through examples of how you use generative AI to stitch together these disparate systems in the software development process.

Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Great. Let’s kind of role play through this and tell what you pitch to your VCs from a TAM point of view. What is the positioning? What segment are you going after? What use cases are you going after? What is the pricing model? What is the business model or the pricing model? 

Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, for six-seven years, you stayed in the same company, is that right?

Erik Severinghaus: No, I was at SpringCM. We built that. We got it growing again. We ended up selling that to DocuSign right before the pandemic.

Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It’s much more than that. We come up with this issue all the time. I recently published a series called The Startup Velocity Question, and the thesis of it is, ‘why do venture funded startups not achieve velocity?’, which equates to failure basically, because we see that trying to go from zero to a $100M in five to seven years. If you don’t hit velocity, you’re considered a failure. Why? So you may find this series interesting.

The Startup Velocity Question: AI Blah Blah Blah

There’s an AI blah blah blah phenomenon right now all over the industry!

“Product growth is plateauing or declining but we have AI that will rejuvenate everything …”

Well, AI will do what?

What is the exact positioning of your AI offering?

Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 2)

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 raised about a million dollars seed round.

Sramana Mitra: When you went out to raise your seed round, what was the situation? Did you already have a product in the market? Did you have customers?