Startup Ecosystem in Kolkata: New Technologies Bring New Opportunities

Join us on Thursday, July 20, at 8:30 p.m. IST / 8 a.m. PDT for a special roundtable program: Brainstorming on Eastern India Startup Development. Come share your perspective, sign up to Speak and we will accommodate as many as possible with a few minutes to talk, register here. In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here.

I am sure many entrepreneurs are chomping at the bits to get a Generative AI startup going.

And, you are reading about hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding being splashed on this quest.

Well, I want you to think differently.

Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Series A is the last financing round?

Chris Lu: That’s been our last financing.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your virtual team. You’ve chosen to move to Houston and build a virtual team.

Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of function, it was still operating as a UI to OpenAI.

Chris Lu: Right. The early models were not as easy to use compared to the models today. There was still a good amount of work required to get good results.

Sramana Mitra: With the timing of the development of OpenAI and ChatGPT, you were coming in to a window where all of that wasn’t developed and you were offering usability.

Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of conversion rates were you seeing from free to premium?

Chris Lu: We got a lot of people who are international and who aren’t able to pay $49 a month. If you filter it down to the core markets – US, Canada, Australia, UK – it looks like a normal SaaS conversion metric.

Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What do you offer?

Chris Lu: When we first started, we were more of a copywriting app. We help write your email copy or sales copy. However, that has transformed over the years. Our entire vision has always been the business’ business. How do we become the product that helps your business assemble and run itself?

Building a Generative AI Startup to $10M+ with a Virtual Team: Chris Lu, CEO of Copy.ai (Part 1)

Chris and Paul have built a front-end to Open AI and a significant business with over $10M in revenue. Now, they’re broadening their product capability to business workflows. We also discuss ideas and opportunities for new entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It seems like Microsoft, AWS, Google will create sophisticated AI-optimized cloud environments. These environments are going to be so advanced that you would be hard-pressed to argue against using one of those.

Volker Smid: The other aspect is if you have the system on-premise, it’s hard to be connected to external services. All the advantage of this connected infrastructure goes away if you deploy on-premise. There’s still sensitivity and concerns around security of cloud. There are European customers who don’t want to use a service that is hosted by companies that sit in the US because of information security.

Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: From your product roadmap point of view, you operate in the post-content production scenario mostly, right? You’re looking at content and governing content. You’re not involved in the production piece.

Volker Smid: We are also involved in the content production piece because we provide the side bar for the authoring environment. When an author creates a piece of content, we have a side bar that is connected to the enterprise so that you can create content following the rules of the enterprise. We are connected to the production piece as well.