Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho (Part 1)

Real-time, distributed data availability for Big Data use cases is a key issue. Here, we speak with Adam Wray about the nuances.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Basho.

Adam Wray: I’ve been raised in companies like Akamai and Limelight Networks. I actually worked for Amazon for several years before starting my own company, but it’s always been in the cloud services space or trying to use some form of what used to be called ASP. I came to Basho via that path with the understanding of what distributed systems mean to your data being moved all over the world.

Sramana Mitra: What does Basho do? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 5)

Vincent Yang: We use, what we call, topic modelling to analyze every single news. For example, is this company acquiring the other company? Is this news about conference sponsorship? How do we know how strong an implication is? We have no idea. That’s the point where we have to rely on machine learning. Machine learning will be very helpful for us in figuring out the correlation of every single business indicator to the final outcome. We analyze tens of thousands of features and also millions of combination of features to find the correlation factors of all of those.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you find your early traction? Was it in the technology industry? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to start asking you very deep questions because I did a startup in the sales lead generation area back in 1997. It used NLP and the whole AI stream. It was a bit early. It was well before the Internet had completely established itself. I know a lot about this area in general. Tell me more specifically about exactly what you do by applying your technology to the sales lead generation.

Vincent Yang: We have two use cases. First, we come into any company. We say, “Let us link to your internal work flow data whether it’s CRM or marketing automation data because we want to learn who, historically, are your good leads and who are the bad leads.” We do this for labeling. Then we start using our crawling engines to crawl every single information about those leads.

The underlying assumption is there must be something in common about those good leads. Why are they all converting? Why do those leads that you interact with never convert? We wanted to use a mathematical formula to describe it. This is what we call audience selection. >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you leave Summit to do this?

Vincent Yang: I left Summit in 2012. I didn’t start the company back then. I actually went to Stanford Business School. I already had the idea. We raised some angel money. It was in Stanford where I started the company. We hired a bunch of Stanford Ph.D.’s in the neuroscience team to help us write very sophisticated algorithms. We hired a natural language processing expert to analyze companies. That was the turning point from having the idea to making things happen.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2014?

Vincent Yang: We started in late 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise on which you raised the angel financing? What was the business that you told your investors you were going to build? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2009?

Vincent Yang: That brings us to early 2010.

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens next?

Vincent Yang: Then, I moved to Palo Alto. When I was in JP Morgan, my main job was to analyze companies. In particular, I developed a mathematical model to analyze public companies. It’s very funny. Investment banking is much like the military. If you’re a junior, nobody cares about you. You basically follow the order. For me, it was very interesting because before investment banking, I was actually a CEO. I was not a fit at all at JP Morgan. I remember in the first week, I was telling the partner, “Let me source a couple of deals for you.” The partner looked at me and said, “Now, this is what I want you to do. You just do PowerPoint.” I repositioned myself. >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 1)

I did a company in the sales lead generation and qualification space using Artificial Intelligence back in 1998. We were very, very early. It’s exciting to see the movements in the space, and how EverString is succeeding almost 20 years later.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were your born, raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Vincent Yang: I was originally born and raised in China. I was born in Shanghai. I went to college in China. When I was studying in high school, I was very interested in mathematics. I was one of the few students in high school who didn’t go to any class for help in mathematics and computer science. Obviously, right after high school, I selected mathematics as my undergraduate. I went to one of the top universities in China and studied mathematics.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you finish university? >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch the questioning. Tell us about how your business has ramped. You started in about 2003 and you’ve, obviously, evolved and maneuvered well strategically. What has been your revenue trajectory? Where are you now? What kind of growth rates are you experiencing?

Sai Gundavelli: For the first five years, we were really struggling. We were trying to build the entire product. We were trying to educate the market. Average typical selling price was about $100,000 to $200,000. Later on, I would say it became around $250,000. With the Big Data product, the deal sizes are north of a million dollars. One deal that we’re signing up right now is about $3 million. >>>

Scaling a Technology Company Against Major Competitors: Solix CEO Sai Gundavelli (Part 6)

Sai Gundavelli: We also did two killer partnerships. One is with a company called Kronos and the other one is with EDT. We made them put OEM on our products. They also had a lot of data that they needed to archive. They’re implementing our product in all their customers. We’re getting all the seeding with this strategic alliance. That’s 6,000 enterprise customers all around the world.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific.

Sai Gundavelli: Then, Big Data really gave us a huge differentiation. Big Data should be part of your enterprise blueprint. The traditional hardware is not going to school. You need Big Data. We position enterprise archiving on Big Data and that gave us a tremendous strategic advantage. We are the only player among all the competition to offer that. Even Informatica, IBM, and HP are struggling to innovate. They can’t act as fast as we can. These two things really helped us.

Sramana Mitra: This is what I’m looking for – the real product positioning angle to see the differentiation. Do you just do archiving or their retrieval capabilities as well? >>>