Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 1)

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?

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 7)

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 from scratch, but I’ll try to answer your question in as much detail as I can.

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 6)

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?

The Startup Velocity Question: Market Shifts Derail Companies

Let’s take a most obvious example: BPO companies offering large numbers of customer support agents to other businesses.

Enter AI.

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 5)

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?

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 3)

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?

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 2)

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. I think we decided we were going to do this in the fall of 2012. Nico had previously been at a video game streaming startup called OnLive in Palo Alto. Evan had sold his last company, which was called Zappedy.

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 1)

Gridspace is a wonderful case study of a speech technology company on the bleeding edge of Machine Learning and Generative AI. You will learn how the founders managed to bootstrap to large paying customers and then raise strategic funding. You will also learn the nuances of how they used various Open Source components and existing ML models to get to a point where they can afford to develop more original technology. You will also learn the importance of solutions versus technology platforms.