Building a Venture Scale Two-sided Marketplace for College Prep to 8-Figure Revenue: Empowerly CEO Hanmei Wu (Part 1)

EdTech is notoriously difficult to build at venture scale. Hanmei is doing it.

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about your go-to-market strategy? I understand the system integrator part is straightforward. You do partnerships with system integrators who build on top of your platform.

When you’re choosing to work with startups or product companies who are building their products on your platform, how do you find these people? How do they find you? What’s the go-to-market strategy for that?

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: “Operating system” isn’t the right term. Here’s my two cents—during the cloud era, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) became a well-understood concept.

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: My thesis is that the best approach to build truly serious, complex systems leveraging all the capabilities of AI—whether it’s generative AI, agent-based AI, or others—is to go to market as an IP-plus-services company. Pick domains to focus on and develop deep domain expertise. That, I believe, is one of the most effective ways to build very, very valuable companies. Is that what you’re trying to do?

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So you positioned the company in 2022-2023 in the direction of Generative AI?

Marty Sprizen: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What applications did you go after?

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. But standard VC route at the time was different from the standard VC route of today because the number of, the amount of money that VCs used to invest was much smaller. The VC fund sizes were much smaller. It was actually the way venture capital should have been.

Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 1)

The world is severely short of AI talent to build complex solutions. It is essential that platforms offer layers of abstraction on top of which systems can be built without getting deep into the weeds. Vantiq is innovating with such a platform and offering excellent business model options including revenue sharing, outcome-based pricing, etc. Very cool company.

1Mby1M Entrepreneur Bootstrapping an AI Deep Learning Venture to over $5M ARR: Bharath Gaddam, CEO of Data Poem (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What were the ARR numbers between 2022 and 2023? Can you walk me through that growth?