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Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What role did you play in this company? There were other people who co-founded the company and you came in later?

John Rauscher: Yes, I came in as the COO. Then, I became the CEO of the company.

Sramana Mitra: When the company was sold to Oracle, you were running the company?

John Rauscher: Yes, I was running the company. I negotiated the deal with Oracle as the CEO of the company. It was a six-month process. It was a good experience. I didn’t regret it even though I wasn’t a major stockholder. The decision to approve the transaction with Oracle came from the board. I was a stockholder of the company but not a major stockholder. >>>

Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 1)

John has self-financed and scaled an interesting AI software company built on French technology, and would like to take it public. Very impressive execution!

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?

John Rauscher: I was born and raised in France. I did a few jobs as a student. Then, I became a Mathematics teacher. It was important for me to learn how to set goals and understand how language is important for human beings. That was the first step. I came to the US to study English and Marketing at Berkeley. I learned so much in my experience at California that I promised myself to come back and live in the US, and start my company as an entrepreneur. >>>

Bootstrap First, Raise Money from Kleiner Perkins Later: William King, CEO of Zephyr Health (Part 1)

Continuing on our theme of ‘Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later’, here’s William King’s story of building a robust company in the healthcare industry, now funded by Kleiner Perkins.

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

William King: I was born in Princeton, New Jersey. I lived in Princeton until I was 18. I’m the oldest of six children. That’s a little bit unique in that we had a lot of action in the house. The age span was actually a difference of 10 years, which was pretty interesting and pretty heroic, now that I’m a parent myself. As a child, part of my experience in growing up was leading my siblings and helping them to participate. Kids look up to their older brothers and sisters. A lot of what was instilled in me at a very young age is this notion of making good choices, collaboration, and the idea that people are paying attention to the things that you’re doing. >>>

Building a Cool Technology Company from Chicago: Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Fascinating. Other than the 50% of revenue coming from financial services, are there any other dominant sectors? Obviously, media continues to be one?

Stuart Frankel: We continue to do a little bit in media. Our business with the US intelligence community is a fair chunk of our business today. We also have customers in marketing services. We work with advertising agencies to automate the preparation of campaign performance reports. You’ve experience in that area, so you’ll understand this. Account managers have all of this data associated with advertising campaigns, and they spend a lot of their time analyzing that data and preparing reports for their customers. Quill can do that for them. >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you can charge higher rates for the leads? Are you even able to take a transaction commission? What does that give you in terms of financial metrics?

Avi Steinlauf: All of the above. It allows us to work much more closely with our partners, and depending on the individual relationship, allows us to just just have a much better sense as to what’s going on. In a way that works better for us and our partners, and candidly, better for our shoppers, because it provides them with a better solution.

Sramana Mitra: What about your strategies for acquiring traffic? I understand that you have relationships with the manufacturers and direct relationships with the dealerships? What is the strategy in acquiring the consumers?
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Building a Cool Technology Company from Chicago: Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do they pay a subscription?

Stuart Frankel: Yes. I’ll tell you how much the business has evolved. Given our customers today and given what we do, it’s a much more relevant model for us rather than selling volumes of content. When we were creating news content, that’s how news content is bought. That’s how we sold it.

Sramana Mitra: You said you got some early customers. Are we talking of 2011?

Stuart Frankel: 2010.

Sramana Mitra: In 2010, you got some customers and you were selling to them in this per piece mode.
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Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Did you have venture capitalists in your early rounds?

Avi Steinlauf: There were some small venture funds that were portions of larger companies but none of the blue chip VC funds that you would be familiar with today.

Sramana Mitra: When you were raising money at that time, was this part of the conversation—that the family plans to keep majority ownership of the company and you wanted to keep the company private?

Avi Steinlauf: I’m not sure how evolved our thinking was at that time. We didn’t quite know what was in store for us. We were in an environment where all sort of things were going on. I think the same values were in place then that are in place now. The long-term orientation was in place, but I’m not sure I could say that we had the understanding that we do today 17 years ago. >>>

Building a Cool Technology Company from Chicago: Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How does it work? Can you explain the science behind it?

Stuart Frankel: We would have to fast forward a little bit as well, because at that time this was a baseball story writer. That’s the prototype that was built in the lab. It worked really well but all it did was write stories about baseball games. Ultimately, we have turned this into a horizontal technology, which I’ll tell you about in a minute. In short, the idea is that you’ve got lots of data and within that data, there’s a story to be told. In this case, it was a baseball story writer. It would look at relevant data associated with the baseball game—game data and also contextual data—and the system would write the story.

Sramana Mitra: Are you talking about all structured data? Is this software working on all structured data and then turning that into a natural language story?
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