The Georgian Impact Podcast | AI, ML & More: Recent Episodes
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On Georgian's Impact Podcast, we get into the latest tech trends and how they impact growth-stage software companies.
Jon talks with folks from around the tech ecosystem at the intersection of business and technology.
When we think about legal tech software, we think about value add discovery or document management. But with the explosion of AI, new opportunities are emerging. We're going to share a story about how technology can help lawyers help more people and you'll hear a word that might surprise you too: Justice.
On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we'll be talking with the founders of one of Georgian's investments, a fascinating company with an absolutely wonderful name for a company in this space, Darrow. But, it's not the name that matters today. It's about an idea and the coming together of a vision.
You'll Hear About:
- The role of AI in legal tech and litigation.
- Darro'w mission and approach to justice.
- Building class action lawsuits with data and AI.
- Addressing data biases and fostering trust.
- The significance of Darrow's PlaintiffLink offering.
- Darrow's human-centric company culture and social impact.
Who are the Co-Founders of Darrow?
Evyatar Ben Artzi is the Co-Founder and CEO at Darrow.ai. Evyatar harnesses his legal and technological experience to improve legal systems and societies, empowering people to make better decisions and become the authors of their own story. Evyatar assumed leadership roles in the collaborative and dynamic teams he has led and worked with, whether as a Combat Officer in the IDF, a clerk at the Israeli Supreme Court, as a Co-Founder of Yahav – a progressive education program – or as Co-Founder and CEO at Darrow, using AI to unearth the legal implications of real-world events.
Gila Hayat is the Co-Founder and CEO at Darrow.ai. Prior to Darrow, she spent seven years in computer intelligence in the IDF, in part, focusing on classified projects on ethical issues of AI both in the military and police forces. She and her team earned presidential honors for their work.
We all get a few chuckles when autocorrect gets something wrong, but there's a lot of time-saving and face-saving value with autocorrect. But do we trust autocorrect? Yeah. We do, even with its errors. Maybe you can use ChatGPT to improve your productivity. Ask it to a cool question and maybe get a decent answer. That's fine. After all, it's just between you and ChatGPT. But, what if you're a software company and you're leveraging these technologies? You could be putting generative AI output in front of your users.
On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, it is time to talk about GenAI and trust. Angeline Yasodhara, an Applied Research Scientist at Georgian, is here to discuss the new world of GenAI.
You'll Hear About:
- Differences between closed and open-source large language models (LLMs), advantages and disadvantages of each.
- Limitations and biases inherent in LLMs due to their training on Internet data.
- Treating LLMs as untrusted users and the need to restrict data access to minimize potential risks.
- The continuous learning process of LLMs through reinforcement learning from human feedback.
- Ethical issues and biases associated with LLMs, and the challenges of fostering creativity while avoiding misinformation.
- Collaboration between AI and security teams to identify and mitigate potential risks associated with LLM applications.
Who is Angelina Yasodhara?
Angeline Yasodhara is an Applied Research Scientist at Georgian, where she collaborates with companies to help accelerate their AI products. With expertise in the ethical and security implications of LLMs, she provides valuable insights into the advantages and challenges of closed vs. open-source LLMs.
Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start when it comes to generative AI. It’s not too hyperbolic to say that many different aspects of a business have the potential to be affected by this new technology. Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s behind the scenes for most people, although hopefully not this audience. It’s coding.
On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we dive into the world of generative AI and its impact on coding, testing, and product design with guest Rodrigo Ceballos. Rodrigo is a Machine Learning Engineer at Georgian and provides firsthand experience and expertise, shedding light on the transformative power of AI in the tech industry. Exploring the exciting possibilities brought about by the fusion of human creativity and AI technology.
You’ll Hear About:
- The progression of software engineering from low-level to high-level languages, culminating in the use of natural language for coding.
- The daily integration of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, in automating tasks and writing code.
- The role of large language models (LLMs) as an intermediate layer and a translation layer between different pieces of software.
- The impact of generative AI in automating functions, unit testing, and API interaction in programming.
- Using generative AI to brainstorm and guide game design, showing the versatility of AI in enhancing human creativity.
- The potential upside and downside of leveraging generative AI in streamlining processes and increasing efficiency.
Who is Rodrigo Ceballos?
With over six years of experience in AI research and engineering, Rodrigo Ceballos is a dedicated Machine Learning Engineer at Georgian. In his current role, Rodrigo collaborates with portfolio companies to implement solutions in computer vision, natural language processing and generative AI. Before joining Georgian, he served as an AI Research Engineer at PAIGE.ai, where he played a pivotal role in developing PaigeProstate, the world's first FDA-approved AI-assisted pathology diagnostic tool.
We’ve all heard about how generative AI is changing almost every aspect of a business. If you crack open the door and peer in on the AI teams. You’ll see them playing with models and, no, we’re not talking about planes and trains. We’re talking about providing the correct inputs necessary to drive desired outputs in an AI model.
On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we will be discussing the impact of generative AI and fine-tuning data strategy with Rohit Saha, an ML scientist at Georgian’s R&D team. Rohit will explore how large language models (LLMs) and fine-tuning are changing the AI landscape for businesses, the necessary skills for data science teams in the age of generative AI, and the pivotal role of dynamic data strategy in leveraging new technology effectively.
You’ll Hear About:
- The role of fine-tuning in tailoring foundational AI models to specific use cases.
- How the landscape of ML and AI has evolved with the emergence of LLMs.
- Leveraging LLMs to enhance productivity and build enterprise software.
- Evolution of skills and talent required in the era of generative AI.
- Creating a dynamic data strategy and leveraging open source models for fine-tuning.
- Identifying golden use cases and the impact of LLMs on classification tasks.
Who is Rohit Saha?
Rohit Saha is an ML Scientist at Georgian's R&D team. He works with the portfolio companies to accelerate their data science roadmap by assisting them in scoping research problems, writing machine learning or AI code, and putting solutions into production. Rohit has worked across various projects, specializing in computer vision, natural language processing and large language models. His expertise lies in helping companies fine-tune and leverage large language models for enterprise software solutions.
Generative AI is redefining businesses with its capacity to write text, generate code, execute tasks, create images, and more. Gen AI is fundamentally changing how companies have to build their products.
This is the first in a series of podcasts featuring our AI team, where they share their experiences on the generative AI work they've already done with more than 20 of our portfolio companies. In this episode, we are joined by two technical leaders of Georgian's R&D team Parinaz Sobhani and David Tingle. Parinaz is the Head of AI at Georgian and David is the team's Engagement Manager for our work with our customers.
You’ll Hear About:
- How generative AI is reshaping businesses by excelling in text, code, task execution, and image generation.
- The importance of a cross-functional collaboration approach and a top-down problem-solving strategy in technology development.
- An overview of the historical focus of Georgian's AI team on data and machine learning.
- Exploration of the starting points for companies, including the use of foundational models from big tech companies and the role of first-party data in differentiation.
- Discussion on the crawl, walk, run stages of generative AI adoption, highlighting the importance of finding a golden use case and the need for a "trust-first" approach for future-proofing.
On this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, we are talking to a guest we last had in 2020. Back in 2020, we were talking about AI and marketing and how to use things like automation tools to make our jobs easier. Now in 2023, generative AI tools are basically the biggest topic of conversation right now. So, we're here to break that down with Paul Roetzer.
Paul is the author of several books on marketing and AI, including Marketing Artificial Intelligence, and he's the creator of the Marketing AI Conference.
You'll Hear About:
- The evolution of generative AI tools in marketing.
- The role of AI in ideation and strategy, rather than writing.
- The adoption and integration of AI tools into marketing workflows.
- The impact of generative AI on content creation and strategy.
- Building an AI council within organizations.
- Developing responsible AI principles and policies.
- The importance of a moral compass in AI application.
- Transparency and disclaimers for AI usage.
- The future of AI in entrepreneurship, creativity and scientific breakthroughs.
- Addressing fears and concerns related to AI in the workplace.
On this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, we’ll be breaking down the technologies that make up generative AI and how it works. From Large Language Models (LLMs) to deep learning, this podcast will help you understand how AI has evolved to get us to this point with GenAI and what he’s excited about in the space.
Mahan Salehi, AI and LLM product manager at NVIDIA, will explain how the space has evolved from his experience at NVIDIA working with AI.
You’ll Hear About:
● Machine learning vs. artificial intelligence.
● The need for guidance for GenAI models.
● Rules-based models vs. deep learning models.
● The two pieces of generative AI.
● How foundational models are trained.
● The value of first-party data.
● Mahan looking back and looking forward.
● The impact on different industries.
Since our inception, Georgian has identified new trends that we believe will change the way companies do business. This kind of thinking resulted in our thesis areas like Applied AI, Conversational AI and Trust.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Sonia Lagourgue, Georgian’s Head of ESG and Emily Walsh, Lead Investor at Georgian. They will break down Georgian’s latest thesis area: Product-led Purpose.
Simply put, Product-led Purpose is our view that the next generation of market-leading technology companies will not only deliver superior economic value but also a quantifiable positive impact on societal challenges.
You’ll Hear About:
● Georgian’s purpose and what it takes to get the whole team engaged.
● Where the purpose came from and its ties to Georgian’s history.
● How Georgian’s Purpose Report holds us accountable.
● Why Georgian launched a Product-led Purpose thesis and what that really means.
● How a strong top-level executive focus on purpose can motivate and drive a company forward.
● The main pillars of the Product-led Purpose thesis.
● The natural tension between pushing technology and purpose.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast about the importance of purpose within a company, we talk to James Novak. The former CEO of Fiix Software — now a Rockwell Automation Company — explains the company’s journey of discovering its maintenance management solution could go beyond its utility and tackle real problems like climate change. Through that journey, they explained how a purpose was important for employee attrition, attracting consumers and so much more.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Tiffany Xingyu Wang, OpenWeb’s first-ever Chief Marketing Officer.
With a mission to “save online conversations,” OpenWeb wants to improve the quality of conversations online while enabling conversation-based advertising, which allows brands to connect with their most active audiences. Through connecting with audiences, publishers can garner first-party data for ad targeting — a valuable tool as publishers prepare for the disappearance of third-party cookies.
In our first-ever episode of Bridging Web3, we’re talking about interoperability with Jon Kol from Hyperlane.
Hyperlane allows developers to connect their apps across blockchains and are dedicated to interchain singularity. Our goal is to understand the building blocks to make Web3 more usable and drive adoption, and to understand the real-world opportunities in the long term
In this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, we’re talking to Francois Chaubard, CEO of Focal Systems. Focal Systems leverages AI and cameras to automate many steps in the retail delivery supply chain.
In this episode on commercializing AI, we speak with Cameron Schuler, a key contributor to AI's game-changing prominence. Cameron is the Chief Commercialization Officer at the Vector Institute and is dedicated to advancing the transformative field of AI.
In this episode on commercializing AI, we speak with Cameron Schuler, a key contributor to AI's game-changing prominence. Cameron is the Chief Commercialization Officer at the Vector Institute and is dedicated to advancing the transformative field of AI.
There are a number of pillars that make up responsible AI — this idea that AI should be free from bias and impact people and society for the better.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, we’ll be talking about one pillar, explainable AI. Explainability provides insight into what's training your data and how it's performing, so if something goes wrong you know exactly where to start looking for a solution. The transparency means you're not only preventing performance issues, you're also preventing potential fines or negative publicity from biased AI.
Today’s guest is from Palo Alto-based Fiddler.AI, which promises to provide a unified environment that has a common language, centralized controls, and actionable insights to operationalize ML/AI with trust.
Fiddler.AI founder and CEO Krishna Gade breaks down how explainability provides insights into training data and performance, and why visibility on how this works enables trust.
You’ll Hear About:
● The balance between data and models.
● What happens to the model when the data changes.
● Model performance management.
● Krishna’s definition of MLOps.
● Bias as a model performance issue.
● Explainability and what Fiddler does to help people understand what is coming out of a model.
● How Fiddler helps detect issues and monitors models.
● Krishna’s view on trust.
There are a number of pillars that make up responsible AI — this idea that AI should be free from bias and impact people and society for the better.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, we’ll be talking about one pillar, explainable AI. Explainability provides insight into what's training your data and how it's performing, so if something goes wrong you know exactly where to start looking for a solution. The transparency means you're not only preventing performance issues, you're also preventing potential fines or negative publicity from biased AI.
Today’s guest is from Palo Alto-based Fiddler.AI, which promises to provide a unified environment that has a common language, centralized controls, and actionable insights to operationalize ML/AI with trust.
Fiddler.AI founder and CEO Krishna Gade breaks down how explainability provides insights into training data and performance, and why visibility on how this works enables trust.
You’ll Hear About:
● The balance between data and models.
● What happens to the model when the data changes.
● Model performance management.
● Krishna’s definition of MLOps.
● Bias as a model performance issue.
● Explainability and what Fiddler does to help people understand what is coming out of a model.
● How Fiddler helps detect issues and monitors models.
● Krishna’s view on trust.
No matter how you get into entrepreneurship, once you're in the game, there are some common keys to success. On this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, we talk to Neha Sampat founder and CEO of Contentstack. Contentstack is a pioneering headless content management system, a fast-growing space that could change how we consume content online.
You’ll Hear About:
● Neha’s entrepreneurial journey and the beginning of Contentstack.
● Working with the technical teams when you aren’t a technologist.
● What does culture mean to Neha?
● Neha’s lessons about entrepreneurship
● Headless content management systems.
● How customers have become more nimble using Contentstack.
● Third-party integration and how it benefits Contentstack and its customers.
● The MACH Alliance.
● The importance of content as the heart of digital experiences.
No matter how you get into entrepreneurship, once you're in the game, there are some common keys to success. On this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, we talk to Neha Sampat founder and CEO of Contentstack. Contentstack is a pioneering headless content management system, a fast-growing space that could change how we consume content online.
You’ll Hear About:
● Neha’s entrepreneurial journey and the beginning of Contentstack.
● Working with the technical teams when you aren’t a technologist.
● What does culture mean to Neha?
● Neha’s lessons about entrepreneurship
● Headless content management systems.
● How customers have become more nimble using Contentstack.
● Third-party integration and how it benefits Contentstack and its customers.
● The MACH Alliance.
● The importance of content as the heart of digital experiences.
Working from data has shifted from aggregation to getting helpful insight. With that change, it has become increasingly important to build an open-minded team with effective leadership.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Brian Ritz, Director of Data Science Solutions at SPINS. SPINS connects wellness brands to their retail and omnichannel data, and they've partnered with over 300 brick-and-mortar retailers so far. Bringing advanced analytics to their clients allowing for deep fact-based decision-making.
You’ll Hear About:
● How Brian has seen tech develop over the past few decades.
● Ways to improve at getting more useful information from data.
● Ensuring you don’t get caught up in just the tech and data science side of product development.
● Will we reach a point where there is too much data?
● Data moats and how they can provide a competitive advantage.
● The need for companies to change or pivot.
● The importance of communication when striving to be a good leader.
● Diversity in your data and data team.
At Georgian, we love talking about self-sovereign identity. We’ve discussed it in previous episodes with Drummond Reed, the co-chair of Sovrin’s Governance Framework Working Group, Kaliya Young, a self-sovereign identity expert with over 20 years of experience in the field, and Mathieu Glaude, CEO of Northern Block.
There’s a lot of layers to self-sovereign identity, and it’s easy to get lost in the noise of it all. We try to make it easy for you.
In this episode, we cover it with Riley Hughes, Sovrin’s second employee and co-founder and CEO of Trinsic. Trinsic, which Georgian recently invested in, provides a cloud-based platform for credential verification and monitoring.
You’ll Hear About:
● What is identity?
● The different ways Trinsic can be used by developers.
● Ways to disrupt or democratize the current model of identity.
● Decentralized identity and its many use cases.
● The continued need for anonymity in a digital identity world.
● How identity will evolve with web 3 and the metaverse.
On this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, we are joined by Kaliya Young. Kaliya is an expert in self-sovereign identity. You might know her as Identity Woman. Kaliya has spent the last 20 years developing a layer on the internet based on open standards, with the goal of empowering people.
You’ll Hear About:
● The Internet Identity Workshop that Kaliya co-founded in 2005.
● What it means to have open standards for digital identity and its importance.
● What businesses would benefit most from SSI.
● Challenges in creating a user-centric digital identity.
● How data became siloed within a few companies.
● The link between digital identity and Web3.
● The need to create standards that reflect all backgrounds.
In part two of a two-part series on the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Maggie Love, founder of SheFi and co-founder of W3BCLOUD.
In part two, Maggie talks about how to get more underrepresented groups interested in Web3 and DeFi, what Maggie has learned about onboarding more people onto DeFi and the SheFi approach to education.
In this podcast, you’ll hear about:
- How Maggie became interested in blockchain
- Challenges with onboarding more people onto Web3
- How SheFi makes it easier to break through Web3
- The importance of community in Web3
The old tech adage goes that you should move fast and break things, but moving fast could mean you could be leaving some of your users behind. According to our guest, the way we do design today is “broken.”
On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Alwar Pillai, the CEO of Fable, a leading accessibility platform powered by people with disabilities. While many companies focus on trying to build for at least 80% of people, Alwar says, trying to build for people at the margins can lead to better design.
“You suddenly are creating a product that is adaptable, more personable, more usable, and more customizable, which in turn makes the products accessible to everyone.”
In our podcast, she talks about how companies can avoid just “checking a box” and actually get proactive about inclusive design.
What you'll hear about:
- Alwar’s journey into accessible design
- Why inclusive design builds better products
- Overcoming biases in UX design
- The mindset and approach needed to build inclusivity into design
- Case studies from Fable
- How Fable works with enterprise clients
- What Fable is doing with its Series A
When it comes to quantum computing breaking encryption, it’s not a question of whether or not it will affect you, but when.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we will be talking to Dr. Michele Mosca, CEO of evolutionQ. evolutionQ helps organizations work through all the various stages of getting ready secure as quantum technology advances.
You’ll Hear About:
● The critical factors Dr. Mosca looks at when assessing risk.
● The need for quantum risk assessments.
● The current level of encryption available and how it performs.
● Where Dr. Mosca sees the quantum industry going in the short term.
● The new era we are entering into.
● Does the hardware matter?
● Where are quantum and encryption right now?
● The importance of trust in the industry.
In part one of a two-part series on the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Maggie Love, founder of SheFi and co-founder of W3BCLOUD. In part one, Maggie talks about her story, building the infrastructure needed to scale Web3 applications and how Layer 2 solutions can help us overcome scalability challenges.
In part two, we’ll talk about how to get more underrepresented groups interested in Web3 and DeFi, what Maggie has learned about onboarding more people onto DeFi and the SheFi approach to education.
In this podcast, you’ll hear about:
● How Maggie became interested in blockchain.
● The evolution of blockchain into DeFi and Web3.
● The challenges with scalability in blockchain.
● How less friction around smart contracts would help with DeFi adoption.
● The building blocks that can create the foundation for more mainstream adoption.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we sit down with Lauren Feld. Lauren is Head of Business Development at 3Box Labs, the company behind Ceramic, a decentralized data network that allows developers to build apps with Web3 data.
Lauren breaks down the problems Ceramic is trying to solve and how we should understand digital identity in this new world.
You'll Hear About:
● The difference in building Web3 applications compared to Web2.
● Moving away from centralization and getting users back in control of their own data.
● Different use cases for people building Web3.
● The importance of identity in building Web3.
● Where Ceramic lives in the ecosystem of Web3.
● How protocols like Ceramic are helping to enable innovation.
● Will existing data in Web2 move into Web3?
● The role reputations will play in digital identity.
● Crossover potential in centralized and decentralized projects.
● What a Web3 internet looks like.
Trolls or no trolls that is the question, and guess what? This could be in your control. In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk with Nadav Shoval CEO of OpenWeb. OpenWeb’s mission is to build a healthier open internet, starting with improving conversations.
You’ll Hear About:
● What trust means to Nadav.
● The need for transparency when dealing with data.
● Users taking back control of their data, preferences and ID.
● How advertising needs to change and adapt.
● Why conversations matter to Nadav and OpenWeb.
● Where is the line between moderation and censorship?
● How OpenWeb looks to encourage positive online interactions.
● Evolving comments into conversations.
● The balance of ML vs. people when it comes to moderation.
● How OpenWeb demonstrates value to advertisers and publishers
In this episode, we have a wide-ranging discussion on privacy, competition and advertising with Vass Bednar. Vass is the Executive director of McMaster University's Master of Public Policy in Digital Society program and works at the intersection of public policy and technology in Canada.
You’ll Hear About:
● DuckDuckGo as an alternative option for consumers in a data-driven world.
● Apple’s approach to data collection.
● Consumer concerns surrounding data collection.
● The evolving way the digital economy is regulated.
● A potential shift in the gig economy with a focus on workers.
● How mega-companies will impact start-ups and innovation.
● The importance of radical incrementalism when it comes to regulation.
Shouldn’t you own and control your identity? It is yours after all. That's the idea behind self-sovereign identity — the idea that you control your own data without intervening administrative authorities. Mathieu Glaude is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast. Mathieu Glaude is the CEO of Northern Block and helps enable organizations to build digital trust platforms. He also has his own podcast on SSI, called SSI Orbit, which informs a lot of our conversation here.
You’ll Hear About:
● What is self-sovereign identity?
● Digital trust and what falls under that umbrella.
● How issuers, holders and verifiers make up the trust triangle.
● Similarities and differences between SSI and crypto.
● The challenges with interoperability when establishing an ecosystem of digital trust.
● What it will take to get SSI into the mainstream.
● How this might create opportunities for tech founders.
You will be hacked, the question is what can you do about it? Can automation in threat detection help eliminate noise and false positives? In this our final episode on cybersecurity, we talk to Dustin Hillard, CTO of eSentire about how companies can better understand how to build up their cybersecurity defences and respond to threats.
● Dustin’s start at eSentire.
● The importance of identification and containment when it comes to cybersecurity threats.
● The role automation plays in detection, and the need to contextualize events to filter out false positives.
● The human challenges that exist in cybersecurity.
● How SOC’s respond and contain threats.
● The role eSentire plays in protecting their customers
● Proactive risk assessment to prevent threats before they can land.
As we continue to discuss cybersecurity, we ask the question, what exactly does it mean to detect cyber threats? After all, before you can respond and take action, you have to know that something wrong even occurred. In this episode, we talk to Marc Van Zadelhoff, CEO of Devo, about just that.
In this episode of our cybersecurity series, we talk about identity. You have to know if that's a good person you're going to let into your castle or your computer system and ensure you're keeping the bad people out. We have CTO John Summers from our portfolio company (Trusona) to take us through the authentication space.
You'll hear about:
- Authentication with little friction
- Ensuring no false negatives and false positives through cryptographic keys
- How multifactor authentication looks likes today
- Biomechanic measures used as continuous authentication
- The evolution to password-less authentication
- Validation through the registration process
- Rise of QR codes in a touchless world
Cybersecurity is a topic that is not to be taken lightly. We're working with Georgian's Head of Security and Privacy, Alex Manea, to bring you a series of content for your company's cybersecurity needs. In this episode, we approach the cybersecurity landscape metaphorically — we take you back to the middle ages where castles, kings, and knights existed. Think of your company as the castle you're protecting and dive into the systems to consider when creating a security architecture.
You'll hear about:
- Cybersecurity attacks and how to prevent them
- Ways to spread out your risks
- Hiring security experts internally or externally
- Detecting potential security threats
- Drawing the line to protect the company while being mindful of legislation and employees' rights
- Responding to a DDoS attack
- What we can learn from the SolarWinds attack
- Anonymity and what it means for your data
For most of us, backing up files has become a part of everyday life. Throughout the years, there have been many ways to back up one’s information. We’ve gone from paper, CDs, hard drives, flash drives, and the new king, the cloud.
In this episode of the Georgian Podcast, we’ll be talking to Mike Potter, Co-Founder & CEO of Rewind, to understand how cloud-based storage systems work and what it means for your data.
You’ll hear about:
· How cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) storage providers backup their data and what that means for your information
· Why third party applications can cause some issues
· The benefits and inner workings of Rewind's cloud backup system
· Building a culture within a company
You might think that selling consumer products has never been easier. Not so fast. Sure, e-commerce is everywhere and is becoming more user-friendly by the minute, but where do you start? Who do you market to? How and where should you advertise? Digital advertising offers myriad of options, but with options, come decisions. Big decisions. That’s where Zeze Peters and Beam.city DNA come in.
In this episode of the Georgian Podcast, we’ll be talking to Zeze Peters, Founder & CEO of Beam.city DNA, to understand how digital advertising and AI go hand in hand.
You’ll hear about:
· How to spend your advertising budget effectively
· The future of A.I in digital advertising
· Striking a balance between the creative side and the business side of advertising
· The effects of COVID-19 on retailers and what retail is going to look like in the future
· Fundraising as a black entrepreneur
Human interaction, there’s a lot we know but a lot to learn. AI and conversational data can help us in this learning process. In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we will be talking with Raphael Cohen, previously the VP of Research at Chorus.ai and currently the Senior Director of Data Science at ZoomInfo. Recently acquired by ZoomInfo, Chorus.ai helps teams make decisions using the insights you'd get if you were sitting in on every sales or customer success call.
You’ll Hear About:
● Chorus.ai’s mission and how they help people get better at conversations.
● Understanding that one size doesn’t fit all and the need to build a product that enables people to understand their sales processes.
● How Chorus handles the massive amounts of data and adapts to the different ways organizations work.
● The impact Chorus’ work has at a management level.
● Wav2vec and how it will impact learning the structures of speech from audio.
● Why cutting down on compute resources was necessary for a model’s success.
● How Chorus sells their technology and differentiates themselves.
With the right focus, history can inform us today; you find the parallels. Thinking back can help you know your market, know your customers and potential customers. Rob Rastovich is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is the CTO of ThingLogix and focuses on driving digital transformation across many industries using IoT and AI.
Charles Radclyffe is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is a partner at EthicsGrade who specializes in evaluating companies' ESG credentials. In other words, he hunts for watermelons—companies that look green on the outside but are anything but in the middle.
You’ll hear about digital ethics and how it fits with ESG, the need to engage with stakeholders and find out what matters to them and how the AI Act will affect those working in high-risk areas.
In this new world of machine learning and AI, where data basically writes code and algorithms, MLOps has developed into something broad and very important. So much so that a huge community has developed around this space.
David Aponte and Demetrios Brinkmann are our guests on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. David is a Software Engineer at Microsoft with a focus on MLOps. Demetrios is the Community Coordinator for the MLOps Community and also works in the ethical AI space. Together they will break down MLOps and why it is so important.
You’ll Hear About:
- The MLOps community and how it has grown.
- How MLOps compares with other fields and what sets it apart.
- The challenges of integrating ML with product management.
- How the MLOps community works to address accuracy and bias.
- The need to diversify the community with not only technical side of things but also the ethical.
- How the cloud has influenced the rate of development.
What do you think of when thinking about innovation, particularly around AI? Probably an interesting software startup, but why not big established companies? If you don’t think of them you might be missing an opportunity to understand innovation at scale, with complex technical and organizational issues as well.
Peter Poon and Yevgeniy Vahlis are our guests on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. Peter is the head of Canadian Digital Product Management Capabilities and Innovation at BMO. Yevgeniy is the founder and head of BMO AI Labs and they will show you how a large enterprise can find that sweet spot between creating a small team of experts and building enthusiasm for emerging technology across an entire company.
You’ll Hear About:
- Establishing a team to drive AI across the enterprise.
- The challenges in figuring out how to apply AI to the vast amounts of data at BMO.
- Finding a basic use case that impacts many customers, alerting them to cash flow shortfalls.
- How they provide a nudge to change consumer behavior using a very simple interface with complex deep learning behind it.
- The need to set up privacy measures from the very beginning to clear a path for you to do great work.
- The overwhelmingly positive feedback and customer engagement to the recommendations.
- Other use cases across BMO and the other teams desire to get on the AI train.
Marketing has evolved from a shot in the dark to marketing automation solutions that enable incredibly detailed measurements. Now advertising is programmatic, tools abound in the marketing automation submarket to measure click throughs, dwell time and so much more.
Paul Roetzer is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is the founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute and PR 20/20. Paul helps transform marketing by focusing on the current and future potential of AI, machine learning, deep learning and cognitive computing.
You’ll Hear About:
- The marketing industry’s understanding and adoption rate of AI technology.
- Making machine learning more approachable through demonstrating use cases.
- The effectiveness of technology in elevating content strategies.
- The value in having different perspectives and backgrounds on teams to avoid bias.
- Ensuring that the tools you are using integrate with one another to avoid siloed data.
- Different AI marketing roles that will be needed in the future.
The evolution of natural language processing means that chatbots are finally learning how to, well, chat. In this episode, we talk with Jeff Orkin, head of Drift's AI Lab who is using AI to create positive, personalized customer interactions in real-time, at scale.
You’ll Hear About:
- Jeff’s background in video game development and how it led to his startup Giant Otter.
- Why context is the key to conversations.
- Drift’s acquisition of Giant Otter and how the two benefitted each other.
- How using a “human in the loop” leads to smarter chatbots, and avoids pitfalls of the past.
- How Drift’s platform allows non-experts to build complex bots.
- The need for multidisciplinary and diverse teams when working on bots.
Tech jobs are in huge demand, so as the interviewer you need to understand what you are looking for. How does your company compare to other companies the candidate may be looking at? Are you focused only on the skills needed right now, or are you focused on what you will need as your company grows? Hiring the right technical candidate for your company couldn’t be more challenging than it is today. Kathryn Christie is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. She is the Head of People at Georgian, and will help you to understand what it takes to determine who’s right for your company, and how to get them to yes.
You’ll Hear About: The important role culture plays in recruitment. How smaller companies can leverage their vision to attract technical candidates. How to assess candidates on their work and the work you need to get done. Understanding what stage your company is at, hiring to address what is required now and down the road. The importance of creating a recruiting organization mindset.
When AI needs a personality, you need a team of creatives to work hand-in-with hand the technical folks. Deborah Harrison, our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, is one of those creatives. She talks about how she and her team at Microsoft developed Cortana, Microsoft's conversational assistant.
It used to be you could trust what you saw. With the prevalence of deep fakes and other synthetic media, today it isn’t always so easy knowing what is real and what isn’t. Kathryn Harrison is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. She is the founder and CEO of the DeepTrust Alliance and FixFake, a company with the data and expertise to find fakes and fight fraud.
Imagine a future where our technology interacts with us the same way we do with one another through conversation, perception and empathy. Dr. Rana el Kaliouby is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. She is the CEO and Co-founder of Affectiva, a pioneer in the field of Emotion AI and Human Perception AI and author of the book Girl Decoded.
You’ll Hear About:
● Her journey to humanize technology starting from The American University in Cairo, to Cambridge, and then MIT. ● How her life experiences helped to influence and inspire her vision for technology. ● Her transition from working with people with autism to commercial uses of her techniques. ● The challenge of turning down opportunities in order to stay true to established core values. ● The importance of diversity in not just your team, but also in the data. ● Work life balance and making mental health a priority.
Is there such a thing as a problem people wish they had? When it comes to challenges in scaling your business, the answer is yes. Allan Leinwand is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Slack, this is a person who knows all about scaling.
You might think that getting your customer base to adopt your AI product is a sales and marketing challenge. But it starts much earlier in the product lifecycle, with empathy for your customers’ problems, creating solutions that fit into their workflow and building trust that you’re treating their data with care. Three pillars of AI product management. Frank Emery, our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, takes us through how Fiix is accomplishing this. They’re connecting teams, tools, data and processes to get critical insights, scale maintenance programs and boost asset performance.
With the growing pervasiveness of AI and machine learning, knowing how to effectively implement it in software development is key. But the idea of “just take X and add AI” isn’t a cure-all. So, when? How? Where? Daniel Faggella is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is the CEO and Head of Research at Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research, a research and advisory company working with business leaders to help develop a winning strategy.
Leading on privacy means more than compliance and technical solutions. To excel, companies should also foster a privacy culture.
Vivian Byrwa, our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, discusses how cultural guardrails can reinforce policy and technical guardrails. Vivian is the privacy counsel at Spotify and has close to a decade of experience focusing on privacy and its implications for companies.
You’ll Hear About:
- Privacy culture and how internal attitudes can affect data protection and privacy.
- The importance of policy and technical guardrails but also the need for cultural guardrails.
- The difference between being compliant and doing the right thing, when privacy and ethics intersect.
Resources:
- 50 Stats Showing Why Companies Need to Prioritize Privacy
- The Modern Privacy Program Needs Cultural Guardrails
Who is Vivian Byrwa?
Vivian Byrwa has spent nearly a decade focused on privacy and how it affects companies. Her focus on privacy began while working at Herrick, Feinstein LLP and later at Davis & Gilbert LLP. She joined Spotify in 2019 as the first and only U.S. based privacy counsel and helps develop and maintain Spotify’s global privacy program with a focus on advertising and marketing, creator related issues and student data.
In real life we identify ourselves with a passport, driver’s license, or other government ID - and we use the same ID in multiple places. But digital identity isn’t so easy, and doing digital credentials badly can leave users and systems vulnerable.
Drummond Reed is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is the Chief Trust Officer at Evernym - a company at the forefront of a rapidly growing movement to decentralize digital identity. Their approach is called Self Sovereign Identity or SSI, and it makes the process of proving your identity in a digital space much more straightforward.
You’ll Hear About:
- Self Sovereign Identity or SSI, and how a Digital Wallet and Digital Agent will streamline the process of sharing the necessary credentials within the digital realm.
- The role biometrics play as one piece of the “chain of trust” of authentication.
- How SSI differentiates itself from federated identity when it comes to privacy and security.
- The possibility to store not only your credentials in your digital wallet but also micro-credentials.
- The growth and adoption of verifiable credentials and SSI.
- The different roles of Evernym and Sovrin Foundation.
Who is Drummond Reed?
Drummond has spent over two decades working on Internet identity, security, privacy, and trust frameworks. He joined Evernym as Chief Trust Officer after Evernym’s acquisition of Respect Network, where he was CEO, co-founder, and co-author of the Respect Trust Framework. Drummond has served as co-chair of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee since 2004, the new semantic data interchange protocol that implements Privacy by Design. Prior to starting Respect Network, Drummond was Executive Director of two industry foundations: the Information Card Foundation and the Open Identity Exchange, the international not-for-profit clearinghouse for Internet trust frameworks. He has also served as a founding board member of the OpenID Foundation, ISTPA, XDI.org, and Identity Commons.
Imagine having to sort through millions of documents to find the one detail that matters most. This is the discovery process, a legal requirement for most corporate lawsuits. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with risk – a perfect job for AI – as long as you can get it right.
Alan Lockett is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. Alan is Senior Director of Research at CS DISCO, an eDiscovery company with an AI-assisted review product and a Georgian company. DISCO is dramatically reducing the time and money that goes into discovery.
You’ll hear about:
- How lawyers are using CS DISCO to sort through tens of hundreds of terabytes of data.
- Why emails and chat transcripts are making the discovery process more complex than ever before.
- How Alan’s team is setting new standards for technology assisted review (TAR).
- How DISCO collaborated with the R&D team at Georgian.
Who is Alan Lockett?
Alan Lockett is Senior Director of Research at CS DISCO, an eDiscovery AI company with a focus on working the way lawyers work rather than reinventing the wheel. His research focusses on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and cognitive architectures - especially methods including neural networks, graphical models, and probability theory. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin and completed a Postdoc in Robotics & Deep Learning at IDSIA in Switzerland.
Passwords are the worst. We know many users pick easy passwords and reuse them everywhere, passwords managers create a treasure-troves for hackers, and even two factor authentication has vulnerabilities. So that got us thinking – what’s next?
Ori Eisen is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is the founder and CEO of Trusona – a company working to bring about the death of passwords. Their technology verifies online identities using a combination of the existing biometrics in our phones, along with a snapshot of the “river of data” coming from the phone’s sensors. It’s online security that goes way beyond asking for your mother’s maiden name.
You’ll hear about:
- Why two factor authentication often isn’t as secure as we’d expect, and why companies like Google are moving away from SMS-based 2FA.
- The pitfalls of password managers, and how they can make life easy for the bad guys.
- How Trusona integrates with everything from Office 365, to Zoom, to Wordpress.
- How to thwart spearfishing attacks even if hackers steal your phone or spoofs your SIM card.
- Why anti-replay is a key part of any security solution.
- How quantum computing could soon undo the last 50 years of cryptography.
Resources:
- Watch Trusona's demo here
- See Trusona's anti-replay demo here
- Listen to our episode on quantum cryptography with Isara CEO Mike Brown
Who is Ori Eisen?
Ori Eisen is the founder and CEO of Trusona. He has spent the last two decades fighting online crime. Prior to founding Trusona, Mr. Eisen founded 41st Parameter – the leading online fraud prevention and detection solution for financial institutions and e-commerce. Prior to that, he served as the Worldwide Fraud Director for American Express focusing on Internet and counterfeit fraud. And before that he was the Director of Fraud Prevention for VeriSign/Network Solutions.
As an early or growth stage company, scaling is always top of mind. Skills are scarce and expensive, so machine learning and AI have to be the foundation you build on. And balancing this opportunity with the challenges it brings is key.
On this special edition of the Georgian Impact Podcast we’ll be getting insights on this fascinating topic from Alistar Croll, Beckie Wood, Leslie Fein, Harper Reed, and Jana Eggers. A group uniquely qualified to bring an expanded view of the role of an AI Project Manager.
You’ll hear about:
- The unique challenges of scale-stage growth, and what it means to software developers.
- How AI Product Managers must navigate between: ethics, technology, business acumen, statistics, design, and customer development.
- The importance of Product/Market fit, and how tools like V2MOM can help.
- How the wrong team, set of testers, or almost anything else can make ML and AI products behave badly.
- The need for a diverse team working towards a common goal, and why sometimes you need to step outside your comfortable tech bubble.
Who is Alistar Croll?
Alistar Croll is a visiting Professor at Harvard Business School and teaches a course entitled “Big Data and Critical Thinking.” Alistar has been directly involved in the launch of major conferences such as: O’Reilly’s Strata, Techweb’s Cloud Connect, and Interop’s Enterprise Cloud Summit. He graduated from Dalhousie University with a B.Com (Honours) and an advanced major in Strategic Marketing.
Who is Beckie Wood?
Becky Wood is an advisor at VSCO, and was recently Vice President of Product Management and Insights at Pandora. While there she led both music and non-music content strategic product expansion. Along with her team, Beckie helped launch podcasts for millions of listeners and deliver personalized recommendations. She also provided data-and-user research insights that drove product strategy and prioritization decisions.
Who is Leslie Fein?
Leslie Fein is an advisor at a firm based in San Francisco called Enjoy the Work. Leslie and Enjoy the Work partner with CEO’s and founders of startups through seed and even as far as series C and D funding, teaching the craft of entrepreneurship.
Who is Harper Reed?
Harper Reed is a technologist that predicts the future for a living. As the CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign Harper brought a tech mentality to a political level. As the co-founder of Modest Inc. Harper garnered the attention of PayPal with the technology he developed leading to PayPal acquiring them only a few years after launch. His roles as Head of Commerce and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at PayPal helped him guide his team into the future of e-commerce.
Harper is an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, sits on the advisory board for IIT Computer Science and the Royal United Service Institute, and is on the Cornell College Board of Trustees.
Who is Jana Eggers?
Jana Eggers is the CEO of Nara Logics, a neuroscience-based artificial intelligence company with a focus on turning big data into smart actions. Her understanding of customers and technology comes from technology and executive positions at Intuit, Blackbeard, Lycos and as CEO of Spreadshirt. Jana received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science at Hendrix College, followed by graduate school at PRI and supercomputing research at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Virtual reality and augmented reality are becoming more mainstream every day. At its peak, 28 million people were running around trying to catch virtual monsters in Pokémon Go. But it isn’t all fun and games – the corporate world is eyeing VR as a cheaper, more effective and engaging way to train employees – and so far, it seems to deliver on that promise.
Derek Belch is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He’s the founder and CEO of virtual reality company Strivr, which helps to create and administer courses for employee training. Strivr started as a way of training athletes, but when Walmart came calling Derek knew he had to pivot the company to the enterprise.
You’ll hear about:
- Derek’s journey from football coach to VR company CEO.
- How VR can be used to simultaneously train and test real-world performance.
- Measuring ROI compared to traditional training methods.
- How head and eye-tracking data can be used to improve training and assess employees.
- Examples of VR’s benefits from difficult HR meetings to active shooter situations.
Who is Derek Belch?
Derek Belch is the founder and CEO of virtual reality company Strivr, which helps to create and administer courses for employee training. Derek developed the idea for the company as a way of training football players while he was the graduate assistant football coach at Stanford University. He has a BA in Communication, an MA in Journalism, and an MA in Media Studies, all from Stanford, as well as an MBA from University of Southern California. In 2017 Sports Business Journal included him in their "Forty Under 40" list.
When companies start leading with trust, they win.
Jes Ellacott is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. Jes manages the content marketing and creative services team at Fiix Software, which is upending the way companies track equipment maintenance. Fiix is on a mission to bring trust to the forefront of everything they do, and Jes is leveraging her background in journalism to build trust among customers, employees, and the broader community.
You’ll hear about:
- Why communicating trust as a core value internally is an important early step.
- How citing sources, talking to experts, avoiding clickbait titles, and adhering to journalistic ethics can build trust in marketing.
- Trust in the era of COVID-19, and how empathy in messaging is key.
- How a data driven company stepped back from hard metrics to build trust through culture change.
- The value of pointing out and encouraging trust building behaviours at all levels of a company.
Who is Jes Ellacott?
Jes Ellacott is Content Marketing Manager at Fiix Software, a cloud-based CMMS is disrupting the market by revolutionizing how thousands of companies worldwide schedule, organize, and track maintenance. She has a degree in Journalism from Carleton University, and a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Production from Algonquin College. Before Fiix she was Blog Editor and Content Manager for Technavio.
Manufacturing is faster paced and more competitive than ever before – all while product life cycles are getting shorter. Spending six months getting a factory line set up just won’t cut it anymore. But what if that process could be cut down from months to days?
Etienne Lacroix is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. As the Founder and CEO of Vention, Etienne is revolutionizing the process of designing, programming, and procuring an assembly line. Like LEGOs, Vention’s modular manufacturing products snap together quickly and can be reconfigured with ease. Pairing their technology with a sales and support process that removes barriers for large and small companies alike makes Vention a truly disruptive force in manufacturing.
You’ll hear about:
- Why self-serve tools paired with high-touch support are a killer combination for industrial automation and manufacturing sales.
- How Fortune 500 companies and mom ‘n pop shops alike are designing, programming, simulating, and ordering equipment online.
- How Vention’s modular approach to industrial automation means machines and assembly lines can evolve over time as the product evolves.
- The advantages of side-stepping time consuming procurement processes.
- Why Vention isn’t monitoring their sales people’s task compliance (number of emails sent, meetings arranged etc…) and focuses on more meaningful data instead.
- How sometimes turning potential customers away can build trust.
Who is Etienne Lacroix?
Etienne Lacroix is the Founder and CEO of Vention, a software and hardware platform that enables mechanical designers to develop and manufacture custom industrial equipment significantly faster than what is possible today. Before Vention, he spent five years at McKinsey & Company as an Associate Principal with Operations and Product Development Practices. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a BA in mechanical engineering from the École de Technologie Supérieure.
Recovering after a car accident is slow and cumbersome. It can take weeks for the process to run its course. That painstaking process includes data collection though – and it turns out that dataset is the perfect training ground for AI.
Alex Dalyac is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He’s the Co-founder and CEO of Tractable AI. Until recently humans had the edge over AI when it comes to image classification tasks – but the scales have now tipped in the computer’s favor. Tractable is leveraging that fact to help people recover from automotive accidents and natural disasters.
You’ll hear about:
- How accident and disaster recovery could be 10x faster using AI.
- Why Tractable chose to pivot their AI’s strengths from plastic pipes to the accident recovery.
- How Alex and his team convinced competing insurance companies to pool their data – and how they keep that data safe.
- The challenges of selling in such a consolidated industry.
- Tractable’s approach to improving trust and transparency.
Who is Alex Dalyac?
Alex Dalyac is the Co-founder and CEO of Tractable AI , an artificial intelligence company specialized in visual tasks for traditional industries. The company's current focus is insurance and automotive, where its AI predicts the cost to repair a vehicle based on photos of the damage. Its products are used by leading insurers in Europe and North America. Tractable was spun off from Alex's research at Imperial College London, where he led the Computing department's first industrial application of deep learning. Prior to research, Alex was as a hedge fund quant.
A solid data strategy can prevent your company from running aground and turning a huge opportunity into a horrible mess.
Dan Wu is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. Dan is a superstar commentator in the privacy and data governance space. He’s leveraging his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy and his law degree to help protect people and their data. Dan believes that the best way to do that is through data strategies formed by cross-functional teams that include input from governance, analytics, marketing and product departments.
You’ll hear about:
- What we can learn from the botched launch of the Apple Credit Card
- Why every company needs a data strategy
- How regulation, like the Algorithmic Transparency Act, could add protections for consumers and accountability for business
- Offensive vs. defensive data strategy – HBR Article
- Where responsibility for inaction leading to data breaches should lie
- Data risks businesses face, including biased algorithms, sharing data with the wrong people, 3rd party data breaches, insider incidents, and technical mistakes
- Why data ethics need to go beyond what’s strictly legal in order to establish and maintain trust.
- AI Now’s 2019 report that touches on ethical inequality risk factors in AI
Who is Dan Wu?
Dan Wu is the Privacy Counsel & Legal Engineer at Immuta, a leading automated data governance platform for analytics. He writes about purposeful data strategy on TechCrunch and LinkedIn. He holds a J.D. & Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Deep Fakes are incredibly realistic impersonations that blur the line between truth and fiction. So what happens when the tech to make them is available to everyone? We’re about to find out.
Kundan Kumar is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is co-founder of Lyrebird AI, and now heads up research at Descript. Descript is making it vastly easier for anyone to manipulate audio, even to the point of inserting words that were never actually said. This brings up obvious ethical, trust, and security questions. Fortunately that’s something Kundan and the company are putting a lot of thought into.
You’ll hear about:
- How anyone can create a voice-double, and the ethical questions that raises.
- Automating common audio editing tasks like removing ums and ah, and bleeping swear words.
- Georgian’s podcast production workflow – and how we manipulate what you hear.
- How these new technologies are, in many ways, evolutions of exiting machine-assistance features like auto-correct, and Google’s Smart Compose
- Maintaining trust when trickery is effortless and skepticism is ubiquitous.
Who is Kundan Kumar?
Kundan Kumar is Research Lead at Descript and co-founder of Lyrebird AI. He is a PHd student at Mila, Quebec’s artificial intelligence institute, where he works on generative models for sequences e.g. speech and music.
Working from home isn’t new, but today an unprecedented number of people are “telecommuting” for the first time – whether they want to or not.
Our guest on this special edition of the Georgian Impact Podcast is Ben Wilde, our VP of Business Development & Marketing. Ben manages a team in Toronto from his home office in New Zealand. He’s been leading from afar for years, and shares his tips and insights with all those adapting to new ways of working during the global pandemic and beyond.
You’ll hear about:
- How work may change forever A.C. (After Coronavirus)
- Informal management of remote teams when you can’t pop by their desks
- Etiquette for video meetings and time-shifted communication
- Creating boundaries and structure when working from home
- Building trust through casual conversations and social bonding
- Being conscious about your approach to remote work
Who is Ben Wilde?
Ben Wilde is Vice President Business Development & Marketing at Georgian Partners and a member of the Georgian Impact team. He provides input to overall strategy including product management and product marketing.
Ben has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry, and has held senior product management and strategy roles at IBM, Informix, and a range of early and growth-stage startups. Ben holds a BTech (Hons) in product development from Massey University, New Zealand.
Machine learning isn’t just for the Googles and Facebooks of the world. But how can startups (or even, growth equity investment firms 😃🤓) do data science right?
Our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast is Ji Chao Zhang. He says that data scientist may be the most important job of the 21st century – but also the least understood. Luckily, Ji Chao understands it better than most – he’s the Director of Software Engineering here at Georgian Partners, and he and his team have consulted with scores of companies around our thesis areas including Applied Artificial Intelligence.
You’ll hear about:
- Our in-house software development, including our work on TensorFlow Privacy
- How data scientists differ from data analysts
- Tips for building your in-house machine learning team
- Our Machine Learning Maturity Framework
- Andrew Ng’s AI Transformation Playbook
- The value of an iterative approach to ML
Who is Ji Chao Zhang?
Ji Chao Zhang is Georgian Partners’ Director of Software Engineering and a member of the Georgian Impact team. In that role he leads our internal software engineering efforts and supports portfolio engagements.
Prior to joining Georgian Partners, Ji Chao was a Software Development Engineer at Amazon, where he worked on the design and development of the data platform, business analytics and machine learning systems to support supply chain optimization and fulfillment.
Ji Chao holds a Master of Computer Science in computer software engineering from the University of Ottawa and a Bachelor of Engineering in computer science from Zhengzhou University.
The Gig economy. We know what that means. Outsourcing jobs. We know what that means. Working remotely. We know what that means. But what happens when all three are combined?
Our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Mary Gray, co-authored Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass and if you are growing your Machine Learning and AI investments Mary’s got some thoughts on the bad and the good behind what type of workers and workforce you might be needing to be able to proudly talk to your customers about the company you strive to be.
You’ll hear about:
- The manual work behind many AI models
- A new model for employment relations
- How micro-employment platforms guarantee the skills you need
- How to do good by your contract employees
Who is Mary Gray?
Mary Gray is Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a fellow at the E.J. Safra Center for Ethics Fellow and Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society Faculty Affiliate at Harvard University.
Using the tools of anthropology and critical media studies, Mary looks at how material conditions and everyday uses of technologies transform people’s lives.
Her most recent book, "Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass," co-authored with computer scientist Siddharth Suri, explores the lives of people paid to train artificial intelligence and, increasingly, serve as “humans in the loop” delivering on-demand services.
“If you want to be a good data scientist, you should spend ~49% of your time developing your statistical intuition (i.e. how to ask good questions of the data), and ~49% of your time on domain knowledge (improving overall understanding of your field). Only ~2% on methods per se.” Nate Silver, a statistician and writer who analyzes sports, elections and more.
In this week’s podcast Jon Prial is joined by Tara Khazaei, Chief Data Scientist, National AI Team, Customer Success Unit at Microsoft. Jon and Tara talk about how domain knowledge, as well as statistical intuition, make for more successful outcomes in machine learning projects. They discuss performance through the lens of projects Tara and her team have led at Microsoft.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- Why you need enough, high-quality data
- The importance of iterating and validating your approach to achieve the best performance
- The challenges bias and explainability pose to ML projects
- Why domain knowledge is crucial for successful outcomes
- How to decide when your model is ready to go into production and why you need to go beyond accuracy
Who is Taraneh Khazaei?
Taraneh Khazaei is Chief Data Scientist on the National AI Team, Customer Success Unit at Microsoft. In this role, she advises Microsofts clients on how to adopt machine learning. Working with clients, Tara has researched the state of the art of speech to text methods and technologies, developed deep sequential modeling methods (e.g., use of embeddings, RNNs, and transformer networks) on terabytes of clickstream data to model and predict user online behavior and designed and developed an ML pipeline to predict the market price of a vehicle.
Do you know where your data goes? How can your control where it ends up and who it's sold to and then choose products that are trustworthy? In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial is joined by Lisa Levasseur, founder of the Me2BAlliance. They discuss a future where consumers are more educated and companies adhere voluntarily to standards to earn the trust of their customers.
You’ll hear about:
- Developing a standard for personal data management
- How to develop standards for products and services that are trustworthy
- Why business models are the foundation of trust
- How consumers can manage their data across businesses
Who is Lisa Levasseur?
Lisa Levasseur is the founder of the Me2BAlliance. Lisa has been a software professional for over 30 years, with her formative career years spent at Motorola, developing software for mobile phone infrastructure. M2B’s aim is to review technology products so you know right away if a product or service is treating you right.
The blockchain is a game-changing technology everyone's talking about. It's disrupting other technologies in the same way that the Internet did more than 20 years ago. The problem, however, is that few people seem to actually understand what it's all about and what its applications are for online security. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with entrepreneur and investor William Mougayar about what this important new technology at that intersection of software engineering, cryptography and gaming theory, and what it means for today's businesses.
You'll hear about:
- The basics of the blockchain as an infrastructure layer (1:10)
- The role of the ledger in the blockchain (3:27)
- Bitcoin and Ethereum as blockchain applications (5:12)
- The implications of this technology for security (8:03)
- The adoption of blockchain technology in the financial services industry (9:54)
- What developers and business professionals should be doing about blockchain (12:45)
Who Is William Mougayar?
William Mougayar is the leading blockchain industry analyst and thought leader. As a long time industry insider, William is a prolific researcher, writer and theorist who has been described as the most sophisticated blockchain business thinker. His views and insights are well respected worldwide.William is the General Partner at Virtual Capital Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund, and currently on the Board of Directors of OB1, the OpenBazaar open-source protocol that is pioneering decentralized peer-to-peer commerce, a Board Advisor to the Ethereum Foundation, a member of OMERS Ventures Board of Advisors, an Advisory Board member to the Coin Center and Bloq, and founder of Startup Management.
We live in a world that’s increasingly fueled by data and analytics. But for companies to unlock the value all of that information represents, and improve business processes, they need some very specialized help. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Georgian Partners’ own Chief Analytics Officer Chris Matys about data scientists. Find out what they do, where you can find them, and what it takes to build a successful data science team.
You’ll hear about:
- Why companies are building their own data science teams (1:56) -What data scientists actually do (3:18)
- The four skill sets necessary for data science (4:07)
- Why it’s important to start your data science team with a product manager (5:08)
- How to approach data to glean insights (6:46)
- How data science needs change as companies scale (9:15)
- Why companies struggle to find data scientists and build data science teams (11:10)
- How to find and vet data scientists (13:10)
- When it does and doesn’t make sense to outsource data science (16:01)
- What factors determine whether data science teams succeed or fail (22:07)
Artificial intelligence is often perceived as a black box. Most companies don't know how to approach it and some even fear it. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Brian Garcia, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Welltok, one of the world's leading health optimization platforms. Together, they explore how Welltok is using artificial intelligence and IBM Watson to create better customer experiences with their data. They then focus in on how companies in other industries can start using these technologies to create greater value.
You'll hear about:
- Welltok and its anchor platform, CaféWell (0:39)
- The company’s partnership with IBM Watson (2:14)
- The insights Welltok has gathered from its artificial intelligence projects (4:17)
- How companies can leverage artificial intelligence effectively (8:56)
- How to combat skepticism about artificial intelligence within your organization(10:38)
Target, Jeep, Ashley Madison. You don't have to look very far to find examples of major security breaches happening at businesses all around us. And it's not just the big guys that are at risk either. Companies large and small are finding themselves under attack. In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with veteran entrepreneur and CTO Richard Hyatt about why it's so important to put security first in your business, and why keeping your environments separate is such a critical part of that process.
You'll hear about:
- Why keeping development and production environments separate is essential (1:15)
- The role of developers in security (5:09)
- Working with third-party vendors for security (7:54)
- Key security trends that businesses should be focusing on (9:25)
When most of us think of messaging, we think of talking to friends and family using apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, or Line. But a growing number of companies are developing innovative ways to use these and other messaging apps for business. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to two entrepreneurs doing just that. Eytan Oren is the CEO of Block Party, a consultancy focused on messaging for business, and Stuart Wall is the CEO of Signpost, a cloud-based marketing software company that helps companies build and manage customer relationships. Get a glimpse into what the future of messaging is all about.
You'll hear about:
- What messaging for business means (0:26)
- How messaging and social networks are different and how they overlap (3:07)
- How brands are using push notifications (4:10)
- What messaging apps are doing to avoid being perceived as spam (5:24)
- Who should be thinking about messaging to reach their customers (9:29)
- What companies should be doing to embrace this trend (12:34)
If you want to get deep insights into what's happening in tech, sometimes the best way to learn is by talking to VCs. In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial chats to JS Cournoyer, general partner at RealVentures about the firm's fund and its approach to a variety of tech trends, including big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Find out where the industry is headed directly from someone with his finger on the pulse.
You'll hear about:
- The origins of Real Ventures (0:53)
- How Real Ventures supports its portfolio companies (5:24)
- The tech trends affecting today’s startups (8:32)
- How machine learning is relevant for startups (9:10)
- Acquiring talent to do machine learning well (14:04)
- How the security equation is changing for young companies (19:28)
For B2B SaaS companies, creating value is the name of the game and critical for long-term success. But doing so is never easy. It takes discipline and a razor-sharp focus on the few key drivers that truly matter. In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks to a veteran entrepreneur who knows this all too well. As the former founder and CEO of PeopleAnswers, a predictive talent analytics software company, Gab Goncalves has been there and done that. Find out what it took for him to sell the business in 2014 at more than seven times revenue.
You'll hear about:
- Why getting your value proposition right matters so much (1:50)
- The importance of having a truly defensible business (4:42)
- How scalability fits in (5:44)
- The implications of doubling your revenue (7:45)
- How churn can drive strategy (10:12)
- Competition and the rules of engagement (13:00)
- Being purposeful when working on renewals (15:32)
- The key elements of an exit (16:30)
Natural language processing (NLP) is a growing application of artificial intelligence. It can bring tremendous value to your client interactions and take your company down entirely new paths of process automation. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Jason Brenier, CTO of Idibon, a San Francisco based company that provides cloud-based natural language processing services. Find out how your business can benefit from this amazing technology. You’ll hear about: -What Idibon does and how (1:03) -Idibon’s biggest challenge taking machine learning from research to applications (2:31) -What NLP is and the four things you can do with it (5:58) -Using NLP as the building blocks for more sophisticated systems (8:02) -What CEOs need to do leverage NLP within their existing infrastructure (9:50) -The type of skills that companies should be hiring for to succeed in the space (12:30) -Data needs for doing NLP (14:06)
In part 2 of our discussion on Machine Learning, Georgian Partners’ Madalin Mihailescu continues his conversation with Jeremy Barnes, founder and CEO of Datacratic. In addition to learning about Datacratic and its machine learning database (MLDB) offering, you’ll also find out about other tools and services CTOs need for training machine learning models, the latest trends shaping the machine learning field and much more. You’ll hear about: Jeremy’s company Datacratic and the tools it offers (0:49) Business design points to make machine learning more effective (3:03) How Datacratic built its machine learning data base (MLDB) system (3:39) Use cases for MLDB (4:53) The steps R&D need to take to productize machine learning (8:27) The tools and services for training machine learning models (10:37) Levels of lock-in for businesses using IBM Watson (16:35) Machine learning trends (19:27)
Everyone’s talking about machine learning and how it can be applied to solving some of today’s top business problems. CTOs know that it’s becoming an imperative for building successful software products. But is it really the answer and, if so, how can companies overcome the many execution gaps that exist? In this first episode of a two-part series, Georgian Partners’ Madalin Mihailescu talks with Jeremy Barnes, the Founder and CEO of Datacratic to get some unique perspectives about both the technological and business sides of machine learning.
You’ll hear about:
- Jeremy’s definition of machine learning (5:42)
- The other areas of pattern recognition fall under machine learning (6:46)
- Why businesses should care about machine learning (9:17)
- How machine learning is evolving as a tool for solving business problems (12:45)
- Realistic applications for machine learning today versus expectations (13:39)
- The complexities of applying machine learning (16:27)
- The current state for ensuring model quality in production (19:16)
- Incorporating safeguards into systems (21:12)
More than $4 billion in venture capital has flowed into digital healthcare companies over the past couple of years alone. It's an exciting and evolving sector and one that could see trillions of dollars shift hands over the next few decades. To learn more, Georgian Partners' Steve Leightell joins Jon Prial for a discussion with Jeff Margolis, the Chairman and CEO of Welltok, a company that helps population health managers guide and incentivize consumers to optimize their health. Adding further perspective to the discussion is Steve Kraus of Bessemer Venture Partners. Find out what's driving the digital healthcare boom and what it takes to make it in this highly competitive market.
You'll hear about:
- Some of the reasons why Georgian Partners invested in Welltok (2:00)
- The market trends driving investment in digital healthcare (5:25)
- The technological trends driving investment in healthcare (7:15)
- How to drive innovation in healthcare (12:50)
- Measuring ROI in healthcare platforms (15:26)
- Companies leading the way in digital healthcare (17:00)
- The importance of getting ahead on technology (22:12)
- The rationale for Welltok’s acquisition of Silverlink (24:14)
- Whether the digital healthcare bubble is about to burst (26:43)
- Leadership lessons from Jeff’s experiences in digital IT (33:30)
- Welltok’s collaboration with IBM Watson and Apple (36:06)
To be successful, today's companies not only need to be thinking about data security and privacy, they also have to be part of their DNA from day one. In fact, data security and privacy need to pervade companies, infiltrate their culture, and even end up in the hands of the sales teams. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Ben Sapiro, Senior Director of Security, Privacy, and Compliance at Vision Critical, about what all of this means for business.
You'll hear about:
- The 411 on Vision Critical and why it values security (0:58)
- Lessons learned from making security part of the company’s value proposition (2:12)
- Where companies should start with security first (6:09)
- Trends that will be shaping security going forward (7:28)
Montréal isn't just a beautiful city, it's also a hotbed of activity for deep learning. Fueled by ambitious entrepreneurs and some ground-breaking research coming out of the University of Montréal, the city is at the forefront of machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. In this episode, Jon Prial is joined by Georgian Partners' Ben Wilde for a fascinating discussion with two machine learning practitioners: Nicolas Chapados, Chief Science Officer at Imagia, and Jean-François Gagné, Entrepreneur in Residence at Real Ventures. Learn from these experts about what it takes to successfully leverage this technology in your own business.
You'll hear about:
- Why Montréal is one of the world’s most dynamic cities for machine learning (0:50)
- The types and stage of companies that Real Ventures typically invests in (7:51)
- What it takes to incorporate machine learning into an early stage company (8:53)
- Data acquisition and the transferability of deep learning models to other domains (12:04)
- The University of Montréal’s use of models for and research around image analysis (15:40)
- How the University’s research is coming to market and the opportunities that creates (19:17)
- The availability of data and its implications and opportunities are for early-stage companies (22:10)
- How deep learning can facilitate smarter decision-making (24:57)
- What the open sourcing of Google’s TensorFlow means for deep learning (27:40)
- Typical applications for Theano (29:45)
Serial tech entrepreneurs who have built successful companies time and again have deep knowledge and expertise. When you can get them to open up and reveal their secrets to success it’s a great opportunity to learn. In this episode, Ben Wilde interviews Michael Hyatt, the founder of BlueCat Networks and Dyadem, as well as a well-known investor and speaker, and one of the hosts of the TV show Dragon’s Den. Find out what it takes to succeed in today’s cut-throat tech world. You'll hear about: -Working on your strengths and partnering for your weaknesses (3:35) -The importance of hiring big egos and letting your people make decisions (4:20) -Why autonomy and purpose are the keys to retaining top talent (6:48) -How to hire the right people (8:13) -Why tech companies need to be able to pivot (10:35) -The characteristics of great board members (13:04) -Some of Michael's biggest missteps and lessons learned (15:57) -The difference between good and great products (19:06) -The importance of security as a fundamental product feature (21:28) -Emerging opportunities in the life sciences(22:52) -Why you should and shouldn’t be worried about technology (26:13) -Why humans are bad at predicting the future (29:20) -The massive opportunities yet to emerge online (31:16)
Ladies Learning Code (LLC) is a not-for-profit organization with the goal of teaching 200,000 Canadian women and youth to code by 2020. It’s a fantastic organization that Georgian Partners is proud to support. In this episode, Steve Leightell speaks to two of LLC’s founders, Melissa Sariffodeen and Laura Plant, to learn more about who the organization works with, what their goals and objectives are, and how they’re making a difference in tens of thousands of lives each year. You'll learn about: • What LLC is and how it works (0:32) • The women in tech problem and what it means (1:47) • Some of the LLC’s success stories (6:55) • How LLC exposes students to other tech companies (12:08) • Some of the challenges LLC has overcome over the past five years (13:02) • The LLC’s main objectives (15:00) • The demographics of LLC’s target audience (18:49) • How to get involved and offer your support to LLC (21:34)
Supply chains are critically important to many businesses, and managing them effectively is often the key to competing in the global market place. That’s because even small mistakes can translate into delays, missed opportunities and lost revenue. In this episode, Georgian Partners’ Tyson Baber speaks with Gary Meyers, the CEO of FusionOps, a provider of supply chain analytics that helps companies save money, increase revenue, and improve customer service. Find out about changes in the supply chain management landscape, what you need to be thinking about to manage your supply chain as well as how to build a business that’s steeped in analytics. You’ll hear about: -How supply chain management is evolving and where the opportunities lie (1:26) -How to optimize your supply chain end to end (5:14) -Taking your supply chain beyond basic reporting and business intelligence (7:47) -How FusionOps helps its customers address their data and analytics challenges (9:56) -Overcoming common concerns about shifting supply chain information into the cloud (12:11) -What the IoT means for supply chain management (14:39) -The importance of context in managing your supply chain (17:12) -Gary’s advice for other CEOs building enterprise SaaS companies (20:36)
Natural language generation (NLG) is a technology that allows companies to take vast quantities of data and turn them into compelling narratives that communicate the valuable insights they contain. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Stuart Frankel, the CEO and Co-Founder of Narrative Science. Find out about the amazing advances in NLG technology and how this particular type of artificial intelligence is changing the way that many companies do business. You'll hear about: -Narrative Science and how it helps data rich companies become more efficient(1:03) -The difference between natural language processing and natural language generation (3:12) -Why NLG projects have to start with communication goals, not data (5:29) -The limits of data visualization (8:01) -Turning various types of data into narratives (9:59) -Why Narrative Science initially didn’t call itself an AI company (16:15) -Leveraging other AI engines versus doing everything yourself (18:11) -Measuring success and getting better with AI solutions (20:08) -Approaching the many aspects of AI to create a successful strategy (21:29) -The maturity of the NLG industry (23:06) -Where CEOs should start with AI (24:15)
To be successful, today's brands need to publish content. And plenty of it. The idea is to offer customers useful information while at the same time earning their trust. Increasingly, that content is going to be delivered through messaging apps. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Kunal Gupta, the CEO of Polar, a company that allows publishers to serve native advertising and sponsored content to their readers, about the content marketing revolution and the role that messaging apps have to play it in it. You'll hear about: -Where content marketing should fit into your overall marketing mix (4:00) -How they way people interact with content on different devices will evolve over time (5:12) -The move to pushing content to specific audiences(6:10) -Using content to enable long-term relationships with a brand (7:19) -Why a publisher’s website soon might not matter (10:47) -The role of messaging in your business (11:33) -Whether content or messaging interfaces should lead (12:56) -How to decide what messaging environment to use (16:17) -The role of privacy in messaging (18:26) -How CEOs can get started in messaging (20:01) -Polar as a company(21:37)
Every year, millions of older Americans are readmitted to the hospital, costing Medicare (and tax payers) billions of dollars. And yet 76 percent of those hospital readmissions are avoidable. The key is knowing how to prevent them. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Wes Little, the business line manager at Kinnser, a software company in the home healthcare space that is using its massive data set to help solve the problem. You'll hear about: -Why hospital readmissions are a problem and what’s being done about it (0:42) -How Kinnser helps in the home healthcare space(3:49) -The type of data Kinnser used to help solve the hospital readmission problem (5:15) -Maintaining patients’ healthcare data privacy (6:06) -What Kinnser’s data reveals about predictors of hospital readmission (7:06) -How clinical managers can benefit from these insights (12:14) -Results from early adopters of Kinnser’s RiskPoint product (16:17)
Privacy is something that matters to individuals and to governments. It's also something that every business needs to incorporate into its strategy. In this episode, Jon Prial welcomes Mark Vecchiarelli, who spent years working for Ontario’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. They talk about the importance of being transparent and the implications of privacy for today's companies. You'll hear about: -How companies should be thinking about privacy (1:23) -Whether or not privacy is dead (2:20) -How much governments and companies should be regulating privacy (4:41) -How to Change the perspective of the C-Suite around privacy (8:15) -Bringing privacy by design to your entire company (10:40) -How founders and CEOs can embrace privacy(12:51) -Playing the long game when it comes to getting information (17:50) -Whether people will ever truly be in charge of their own data(19:55)
Identity theft. Fraudulent transactions. Security breaches. We hear about issues like these all the time. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Ori Eisen, the Founder and CEO of Trusona, a company that provides guarantees authentication so you really know who is on the other end of a login or transaction. Learn from a security expert just how susceptible you and your business are to security threats, and what you need to be doing to keep your confidential information safe. You'll hear about: -What CEOs need to be thinking about to be secure(3:30) -Whether new technologies such as chip cards and NFC are really helping ensure security (4:54) -When we might reach the point where data breaches ruin companies (7:36) -The importance of getting employees on board with security (9:07) -Building a culture of security(11:02) -Whether small companies need to be worried about security (12:25) -Tools and maturity models for measuring security (14:43) -Where to get started with security (15:58)
We all know that technology is rapidly advancing and changing the way that companies do business in the process. As a CEO or entrepreneur, you need to understand that evolution and what it means in practical terms for your company’s operations. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with David Court, a Director and Senior Partner in McKinsey & Company’s Dallas Office. Find out what it means to be analytical in your business, where the big tech disruptions are going to be coming from, and what you need to do to get ready for them. You’ll hear about: -How IT has gone from a control mechanism to a means of managing your business (1:41) -How CEOs should think about keeping up with tech issues(4:44) -Where responsibility for analytics should lie in your company(6:09) -How analytics tend to work in organizations (9:13) -What a CEO needs to do first to embrace analytics (10:42) -The evolution of digital first to be more than just analytics (14:00) - Machine learning, the digitization of processes, and looking to ahead to the next five years (18:15)
Has the mobile security industry had it all wrong for years? It has spent billions of dollars applying the concepts that work for PCs to mobile devices with little success. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Andrew Hoog, the CEO and Co-Founder of NowSecure, a mobile security provider that helps enterprises secure their apps and their devices. They go deep into mobile security and what enterprises need to be doing to manage this growing area of risk. You’ll hear about: -The security challenges with mobile devices (4:41) -The best ways to access mobile apps (6:43) -Dealing with the challenges of a bring-your-own-device strategy (9:00) -The four areas that drive risk in your phone (13:45) -Instant apps and the future of mobile security (19:58) -The role of trust in app adoption (23:38) -The importance of two-factor authentication (25:26) -What CEOs should be doing about security (32:30)
Artificial intelligence is starting to reach the point where it can make your interactions with computers and software seem much more authentic and real. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Eric Adrian, CEO of Davi, a French company that helps its customers transform their digital relationships into human ones. Find out how that company is using AI in innovative ways to help humanize today’s digital world. You’ll hear about: -The need for better customer interactions (1:23) -The importance of context and long-running customer conversations (4:35) -What CEOs should be doing to embrace AI (6:00) -Using in-house versus third-party resources to support your AI strategy (8:00) -How AI is evolving (12:48) -Why Davi calls themselves The Humanizers (17:17) -Building empathy into AI systems (22:38) -Lessons learned while building an AI business (24.25)
When you think about the blockchain, you probably think about a public ledger that lets you move money securely from one place to another. But the reality is that it's about more than that. It's a way to safely share all kinds of information. In this episode, Georgian Partners' Ben Wilde talks with Alex Tapscott, the CEO and Founder of Northwest Passage Ventures, about the implications of the blockchain in financial services and beyond. You'll hear about: -The limitations of the traditional Internet for payments (2:41) -The underlying reasons why the promise of the Internet was unfulfilled (4:28) -Bitcoin and the peer-to-peer economy (7:13) -The broader applications of the blockchain (8:04) -Who’s adopting the technology (10:44) -Misconceptions about the blockchain (14: 47) -The rise of private blockchains (17:45) -How banks are using the blockchain to trade with each other (21:24) -How NASDAQ is reinventing its business with the blockchain (24:13) -Opportunities for blockchain beyond financial services (26:16)
Your peers often influence your purchasing decisions. When they like something, you're more inclined to buy it. When they don't, you're less likely to do so. And those who are the most vocal supporters tend to have the most influence. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Mark Organ, the Founder and CEO of Influitive, a software company that specializes in advocate marketing. They get into the important role that messaging apps will have in shaping the future of marketing. You'll hear about: -How sales have changed from high touch to low touch (1:28) -How marketing is changing by mobilizing customers (2:34) -What CEOs should be thinking about when it comes to marketing (5:22) -The importance of advocate marketing (7:19) -The role of messaging in advocacy (9:44) -The importance of push and pull in messaging (13:24) -The best messaging platforms for building advocacy (17:30) -How CEOs can stay on top of technology trends for their business (19:25) -Achieving work-life balance(23:04)
Not all that long ago, bounty hunters were burly guys who apprehended fugitives using brute force in exchange for a reward or "bounty." And while those types of bounty hunters still exist, these days the vast majority of them are hackers looking for bugs. In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Katie Moussouris, a highly regarded computer security researcher who's best known for creating the bug bounty program at Microsoft. You'll hear about: -Results from the recent Hack the Pentagon Program (1:15) -What companies can learn from the government’s approach to engaging with the hacker community (2:36) -How to determine if your organization is ready for a bug bounty program (5:40) -Issues larger enterprises face versus smaller startups (7:20) -Maturity models for assessing vulnerability (11:28) -Best practices for engineering teams (14:54) -The keys to success for bug bounty programs going forward (17:44)
In 2007, a cyber attack rocked Estonia, affecting parliament, banks, and media outlets. It was an event that cast a spotlight on cyber security and that also gave rise to a number of new businesses. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Lee Cocking, the SVP Products at Guardtime, an industrial blockchain platform that’s being used to power digital transformation. In a fascinating discussion, they look at how the blockchain is making it possible to take digital security to a whole new level. You’ll hear about: -How Guardtime was formed in response to cyber attack in Estonia (1:10) -Why blockchain is suitable for security solutions (2:04) -Pubic key infrastucture (PKI) vs. keyless signature infrastructure (KSI) (3:26) -Building layers on top of the blockchain (6:45) -Public versus private blockchains (8:17) -Guardtime’s data protection solutions (10:14) -Physical assets in the blockchain (14:33) -How CEOs should think about the blockchain and security (17:45) -Skillsets that companies need to hire for security (19:13)
Every once in a while, a trend comes along that changes everything. That's certainly true in technology. Just look at cloud, mobile, and big data. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Justin LaFayette, the co-founder of Georgian Partners, about four foundational trends that are poised to have a major impact on every software company: applied analytics, applied artificial intelligence, messaging for business and security first. You'll hear about: -What constitutes foundational tech trends that have the potential to reshape markets (1:53) -An overview of applied analytics (4:38) -The origins and value of applied analytics (5:59) -How to use data effectively and get applied analytics right (7:09) -Artificial intelligence (8:22) -Whether AI will ever reach the level of human intelligence (11:18) -The implications and opportunities of messaging for business (11:50) -Injecting your company’s value into messaging streams (13:45) -Becoming more secure by putting security front and center (15:55) -Security as a differentiator (19:10)
AI-powered chatbots are becoming increasingly pervasive. As they become more and more sophisticated, they’re starting to provide real value by making our lives easier. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Erik Kalviainen, the co-founder of Meya, a company that helps businesses build and host bots. Find out more about the tremendous opportunity that bots represent and learn some of the tricks to getting them right. You’ll hear about: -What bots are and aren’t (1:50) -Why bots might become more pervasive than apps (3:08) -The differences between bots and search engines (4:38) -When using bots does and doesn't make sense (9:25) -Evolving from short-term transactions to longer-term interactions (10:21) -Principles of bot design (11:34) -The best use cases for bots (13:29) -How AI, conversational UX and bots are evolving (19:03) -The case for bots in financial planning (21:39) -Building and launching a bot solution (23:10) -How the nature of bots might change as they become pervasive (26:30) -The point at which bots should become a priority (27:35)
Security first cuts across all areas of software companies, including development, technology, human resources, culture, marketing, hiring and the C-Suite. It's not about building a bigger security wall, but rather fundamentally changing the way your business operates. In this episode, Ben Wilde interviews Yevgeniy Vahlis, Georgian Partners' new Director Security First. Together they do a deep dive on this important topic and what it means for your software company. You'll hear about: -What security first means in the context of a software company (3:22) -Examples of how security first can change a software company (3:56) -Apple as an example of a company taking a strong position on security and privacy (6:02) -The role of cryptography in creating more secure software (7:12) -Practical examples of how security first makes it way into product discussions (10:36) -Whether or not collecting data and protecting people's privacy are mutually exclusive (12:02) -How CEOs should approach understanding security first and hiring the right people (14:02) -Attributes of qualified security first candidates (16:35) -The role of cryptography in creating more secure software (7:12) -Practical examples of how security first makes it way into product discussions (10:36) -Whether or not collecting data and protecting people's privacy are mutually exclusive (12:02) -How CEOs should approach understanding security first and hiring the right people (14:02) -Attributes of qualified security first candidates (16:35)
At Georgian Partners, we usually talk about tech trends that impact the software industry. But in many cases, those trends are also having a major impact elsewhere. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Kyle McNamara, EVP and co-head of Technology at Scotiabank, along with Dubie Cunningham, the VP of Innovation. Together, they discuss some of the major trends impacting the financial services industry and how Scotiabank is tackling disruption head on. You'll hear about: -Why Scotiabank created its Digital Factory (1:20) -The kind of talent that Scotiabank is recruiting for its Digital Factory (3:51) -Scotiabank’s partnership with Kabbage (4:32) -What to look for when partnering with fintech companies (5:32) -The importance of mobile in the banking industry (8:11) -How blockchain is affecting banking (11:00) -Managing blockchain and privacy (11:58)
Conversational interfaces, chatbots and natural language processing are all integral parts of what we like to call messaging for business. In this episode, Ben Wilde interviews Georgian Partners' Jason Brenier, a new member of the firm's Impact Team with deep expertise in instant messaging and conversational agents. You'll hear about: -What’s driving the adoption of conversational interfaces (1:12) -How natural language processing will advance conversational interfaces (3:30) -The techniques being applied in conversational interfaces (6:34) -The evolution of text interaction (7:23) -Automation’s role in conversational interfaces (9:08) -Where companies are focusing their efforts on chatbots (10:28) -How sophisticated chatbots are (11:49) -What bot designers should be thinking about from a language perspective (13:18) -Bot design properties you need to keep in mind (14:34) -Key benefits of conversational interfaces (18:35) -Examples of business applications of the technology (19:22)
At Georgian Partners’ recent annual portfolio conference, Jason Brenier hosted a panel discussion with a variety of experts representing the full range of the conversational business stack. In this episode, Jon Prial brings you highlights from that discussion. You’ll hear from Andy Mauro, the CEO of chatbot building platform Automat; from Joe Rideout, Product Manager of Expression at messaging platform provider Kik; and from Amanda Parker, the CEO of SimplyInsight, a provider of data analysis as a service. You’ll hear about: -The verticals most interested in bots and where opportunities for disruption lie -The future of emoji and other forms of conversational expression -The role of automation in messaging -Guidelines for integrating humans into messaging -Capturing and applying user feedback and data -Building a messaging first business -The role of voice in messaging
The costs of data breaches are rising quickly. Just look at the recently disclosed 2014 data breach at Yahoo that's now threatening to derail Verizon's acquisition of the internet company. There's no doubt security is hard, but many organizations overlook the basics of getting security right. One of those is the importance of culture in leading an organisation toward better security. At Georgian Partners’ recent annual portfolio conference, Seth Purcell, CTO at Signpost, gave a quick and insightful talk about security, why it's not just about technology and the need to develop a culture of security. You’ll hear about: - The nature of security - Why security is not just a feature you add - The problem with users - The importance of culture in security - How to build a culture of security
Did you know that more people use and interact with messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Snapchat than they do with social media apps? The question is why are messaging apps so important and how did they get that way? And what opportunities do they present? In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Joe Rideout, product manager at Kik, a messaging app with over 300 million users, answers those questions and more. You’ll hear about: -Some of the trends that gave rise to messaging platforms like Kik -The three attributes of messaging apps that make them so powerful -Why there’s so much hype around bots -WeChat as an example of what’s to come in messaging -The ongoing debate around apps vs bots
Machine learning is everywhere. It’s a basic foundation for artificial intelligence, it’s driving a fundamental change in the way that programmers approach their work, and it’s so ubiquitous and good, that we often don’t even know when it’s around. In this episode, we share a presentation from Inmar Givoni, director of machine learning at Kindred.ai, in which she shares her insights on the future of machine learning. You'll hear about: -What machine learning is and common applications of it (1:21) -Why we’re in the middle of a machine learning and data revolution (3:54) -What big data is (7:11) -Practical considerations for e-commerce and other domains (8:05) -Data-driven products (16:20) -Future of machine learning (20:25)
Have you every said "please" or "thank you" to a bot, even when you knew there wasn't a person at the other end? In this episode, Jon Prial interviews Dennis R. Mortensen, the CEO of x.ai, a company that has used artificial intelligence to develop Amy and Andrew, two AI-powered bots that will manage your calendar for you. The thing is that they're so good at it, and so completely convincing, that most people forget they're interacting with a piece of software. Together, Jon and Dennis look under the hood at the AI powering this impressive solution and how keep highly sensitive data secure factors into the equation. You’ll hear about: -The evolution of user interfaces and what matters most (2:05) -The rapid rate at which people start thinking of software as being human (4:41) -Security considerations and how to protect data (5:51) -Training machine learning algorithms to handled the nuances of language (10:21) -The role of humans in supporting x.ai (13:57) -Dimensions for thinking about security (18:01) -Monitoring AI to avoid subversion (23:08) -Who’s responsible for security at x.ai (25:40)
When you think about artificial intelligence, you may not immediately think of banks. But a growing number of fintech companies are turning to AI to help them better serve their customers. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Carl Ryden, the CEO and Co-Founder of PrecisionLender, as well as with George Neal, the company’s Chief Analytics Officer. They discuss how the company created Andi, a powerful fintech bot designed to help commercial relationship managers and commercial bankers win better deals and build stronger relationships with their customers.
Want to know what the million-dollar question is that everyone in tech is trying to answer right now? It’s how do you use artificial intelligence to solve actual business problems. We’ve brought together a panel of experts, including Urs Muller of NVIDIA, Mohamed Musbah, VP of Product at Maluuba, Laura Jackson, a data scientist at PrecisionLender, and our own Chief Analytics Officer, Chris Matys, to try to figure this out in a fascinating panel discussion that you won't want to miss.
Gary McGraw is the Vice President of Security Technology at Synopsys, the best-selling author of "Software Security" and 11 other books, and the man behind the Silver Bullet Security Podcast. In this episode, Ben Wilde interviews him about everything from the BSIMM and OWASP Top 10 to software security best practices and how to get companies to start thinking about security early and often. https://www.garymcgraw.com/ https://www.bsimm.com/ https://cybersecurity.ieee.org/center-for-secure-design/ https://www.maxmyinterest.com/
When it comes to security, we’re living in interesting times. Nation states are playing roles we’ve never seen before, or at least been privy to. And more and more large-scale ransomware attacks and breaches are taking place, while executives are losing their job because of cyber security issues. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Ed Amoroso, AT&T’s former chief security officer and a true leader in the field of cyber security. Find out about the challenges of security in the digital age and how to become a security first business. Learn more by checking out: https://www.tag-cyber.com/Annual/2017/ https://georgianpartners.com/security-first/
Machine learning is being deployed everywhere, and it's fueling today's artificial intelligence revolution. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Parinaz Sobhani, Georgian Partners' new Director of Machine Learning. A Ph.D. candidate in artificial intelligence at the University of Ottawa, Parinaz explains machine learning and highlights some of the latest thinking about where this exciting technology will be heading in the coming years.
Artificial intelligence. Is there any term that’s more used in tech these days or that has a wider range of meanings? Any one that conjures up more excitement, hyperbole and fear? In this episode Jon Prial talks with Adam Devine, the CMO of WorkFusion, one of Georgian Partners' newest portfolio companies, about a very practical application of the technology: Using AI to improve and even automate what have traditionally been human-driven processes in the workplace. You'll hear about robotic process automation, an emerging field that is bringing AI-powered software robots into the workplace to help make companies more efficient and effective.
Small businesses need to be able to communicate efficiently with their customers. Increasingly, however, those customers don't want to be called or emailed, and they certainly can't be bothered to download and use a custom app. The solution is to reach them where they already are through text messages and messaging platforms. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Doug Marinaro, the CEO of Riptide, a company that connects businesses and customers using SMS and Facebook Messenger. Find out about the growing trend toward conversational business and how Riptide is capitalizing on it to help small businesses reach their customers.
It's no secret that Asia is leading the world in messaging with platforms like WeChat and Line. Yet when it comes to security, it's a bit of a different story. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Cédric Jeannot, a cryptography and security expert, and the founder and CEO of APrivacy, a company that provides the banking industry with information security and tracking services.
Face-to-face communication is increasingly being supplanted by messaging that's typically much shorter in nature and often happens without any context. For the machines given the task of trying to interpret those messages, this is often a lot easier said than done. In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Saif Mohammed from the National Research Council in Canada about speech and text analysis. Find out how machines are starting to look beyond mere words to try to understand the emotions behind what's being said. http://saifmohammad.com http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/news/a53378/saddest-radiohead-song-graph/
We live in a digital world where companies like Facebook and Google have a lot of data about who you are and what you like. Meanwhile large enterprises such as banks, insurance companies and retailers also have their fair share of data about you. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Steve Irvine. Until recently, Steve was Facebook's Global Head of Partner Programs, but he has since gone on to found Integrate.ai, a new startup that's using artificial intelligence to make the interactions between people and businesses more natural and effective. Find out how his new company is bridging the gap between social and business data to more accurately predict what people want.
When the US House of Representatives passed a controversial law about Internet privacy earlier this year, several news outlets published security advice suggesting that you should use the Tor network or a commercial virtual private network (VPN) to protect yourself. Both of those suggestions turned out to bad ideas. In this episode, Ben Wilde talks with Dan Guido, the founder of a New York-based security consultancy called Trail of Bits, about the trouble with Tor and commercial VPNs.
Apple made headlines in 2016 when it started talking about differential privacy. But what exactly is it? And what opportunities can it create for your business to aggregate and share your customers' data to get better results without compromising their privacy? In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Yevgeniy Vahlis, Georgian Partners' Director of Security First, to get a primer on differential privacy and understand what it's all about.
In this episode, Jon Prial continues his conversation about differential privacy with Yevgeniy Vahlis, Georgian Partners' Director of Security First. Find out more about how differential privacy works as Yevgeniy explains it using simple, every day examples. He then goes on to describe why differential privacy isn't just for the likes of Google and Apple, but rather something that most companies should be taking a close look at.
The dark web. It’s the underbelly of the Internet and a place where some pretty terrible things happen. Cyber criminals, for example, are using it to orchestrate attacks on all kinds of businesses. In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Josh Lefkowitz, the CEO and Co-Founder of Flashpoint, to learn more about the dark web, the very real threats that it presents, and what Flashpoint is doing to help other companies navigate the risks.
Around the world 422 million adults are living with diabetes at an estimated cost of $825 billion per year. That makes it the single largest chronic disease on the planet and a true epidemic. Yet when diabetes is properly managed you can eliminate most if not all of the associated complications. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Rick Altinger, the CEO of Glooko, our newest portfolio company and one that’s using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and broad integration with medical and personal devices to tackle the diabetes epidemic.
Conversational marketing is an emerging field that’s focused on using chatbots to find better ways to engage with your customers and manage your brand. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Andy Mauro, the co-founder and CEO of Automat.ai, an exciting Montreal-based company that just received the largest Series A funding for any conversational marketing business ever. Find out about where chatbots are at today and where they’re going as they becoming increasingly important marketing tools.
Linguistics is a fascinating and very fundamental part of natural language processing and conversational business. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Tyler Schnoebelen. Tyler, who you may have seen featured in Time magazine and Wired, earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford, founded his own startup focused on getting insights from unstructured data, and is currently the principal product manager at Integrate.ai. An expert on emoji and many of the social aspects of language, he shares his views on how our use of language is evolving and how that affects the ways in which businesses need to engage with their customers.
We're living in the age of the Internet of Things. Companies in virtually every industry are collecting vast quantities of data to help them make better decisions. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Ward Thomas, the CEO of Sentient Science, a company that's using the data it's collecting to extend the remaining useful life of fielded assets like wind turbines, and to optimize new product design and testing.
People have been talking to each other for millennia. But we've only been talking to machines for a very short time. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Nandini Stocker, former Head of Conversational Design Advocacy and Partnerships at Google. Find out about voice user interfaces (VUIs) are evolving to help businesses create better experiences for their customers.
They say that no one cares about banking, but that everyone cares about their financial well-being. And while that’s probably true, it also creates a problem: How do you make something as important as banking more accessible and engaging for everyone? In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Jake Tyler, the CEO of Finn.ai, a company that has built an AI-powered personal banking and financial management assistant that you can interact with over a messaging platform. Find out how communication is shifting and what this exciting company is doing to try to improve the lives of billions of people by giving them better access to financial services.
Artificial intelligence is on the mind of entrepreneurs and business executives all over the world. And while everyone is talking about it, understanding how and where to actually apply it to your business is quite a different matter. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Bradford Cross, a founding partner at Data Collective, the world's leading machine learning and big data venture capital fund. Find out how to collect differentiated data and apply AI to it to get big results.
If you think Uber is a ride-hailing business, you're wrong. It's actually a machine learning business. Machine learning is what makes Uber's service possible by, among other things, helping to ensure that drivers get to you as quickly as possible. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Michael Del Balso, a product manager of machine learning at Uber. Together, they discuss how Uber is using machine learning, how machine learning is changing the company's product management function, and what it takes to bring a product to market with machine learning everywhere.
There’s a lot to consider when building any AI solution for your business. In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Kathryn Hume, the VP of Product and Strategy at Integrate.ai, about the evolution of machine learning and artificial intelligence, with a focus on issues like ethics, transparency and privacy. Find out about the adoption of AI in a variety of industries and the practicalities of making it all work.
Everyone knows that data is essential for any modern business. It’s critical for targeting your customers effectively, extracting important insights, and automating business processes. Perhaps most important of all, it’s what fuels artificial intelligence and machine learning. Of course, cracking the data science code is anything but easy. Sometimes you need help. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Mike Segala, the CEO and Co-Founder of SFL Scientific, a data science consulting firm that specializes in big data solutions. Get insights into ways to leverage your data into your AI and machine learning strategy. You'll hear about: -How mature the industry is with ML -Aligning data science teams to business results -Data science and product alignment -When Deep Learning does and doesn't make sense
When you think about the Internet of Things (IoT), maybe you think of your Fitbit or your Nest Thermostat. But, of course, the IoT has many applications that extend beyond our personal use. In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Drew Conway, CEO and Founder of Alluvium, a company that delivers real-time collective intelligence to expert-driven industrial operations. Find out how Alluvium is tapping into the Industrial Internet of Things, and about streaming data, where machine learning adds value, and where we'll need humans and what skills they'll bring.
What makes a company choose to prioritize security as a strategic play? In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Gerry Smith, the CEO of Densify (an analytics company) and Jay Haynes, the CEO of eSentire (a cyber security business). They discuss the relationship between these two companies, and why an analytics business would be thinking so much about, and become a customer of, a cyber security business. Find out why cyber security is so important for every business, how security has changed over the years, and how these two very different companies both think about it.
In 2017, conversational experiences became a part of our vernacular. Google Home and Amazon Echo are just some of the tools that most of us have come to know and a growing number are using on a regular basis. So what does 2018 hold in store for the evolution of conversational AI, both for consumers and businesses alike? In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Jason Brenier, Georgian Partners’ VP of Strategy. Find out where we got to in 2017 and where things are headed in the year to come. You'll hear about -- The evolution of more sophisticated conversational experiences -- How companies can take conversational transactions to the next level -- Advancements in language technology -- Managing conversations across multiple channels -- How to approach building a conversational solution
When you think of Cloudera, the billion-dollar software company that's virtually a household name, you probably think of a cloud-based, new technology data warehousing company. Sure, but did you know that Cloudera is currently a challenger in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management Analytic Solutions against the likes of Oracle, Teradata, IBM and Microsoft? In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Tom Reilly, Cloudera's CEO, along with Hilary Mason, one of the top data scientists in the world, whose company, Fast Forward Labs, Cloudera recently acquired. Together they discuss machine learning from both an executive and technical perspective. You'll hear about: -- Where the market is heading in terms of machine learning adoption -- The types of challenges companies face with machine learning -- The future of machine learning -- Data curation
There are hundreds of thousands of chatbots out there, but they aren't all created equally. In this episode, Jon Prial welcomes Amanda Robinson, who leads conversational marketing strategy, interaction design and customer success at Automat.ai. Together, they discuss why brands are making the move to chatbots, what they need to do to get it right, and how you can objectively determine whether a bot is working the way it should.
When’s the last time you thought about your utility providers? Probably when you signed up for their service, right? Historically, utility companies have never had a personal relationship with their customers because they never provided a unique, personalized service. Yet with the rise of smart meters, we have access to vast amount of data that, when properly interpreted, can help utility companies better serve their customers. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Abhay Gupta, the CEO of Bidgely, a software company with an energy monitoring and management solution that’s working to help utility companies empower and engage their customers.
Manufacturing hasn't really changed all of that much in the past 75 years, with one key exception. Today we're capturing vast amounts of data about every single process that takes place on the factory floor. And while that data is proving very useful, we're only just beginning to be able to use it to optimize decision-making and create better products. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Matthew Putman, the Co-Founder and CEO of Nanotronics. They talk about how miniaturization, sensors and robotics are different than traditional consumer-facing ML solutions. They also discuss the difference between hardware control systems with sensors and software processes, as well as where to focus your efforts for optimization. You'll Hear About: - The uses of machine learning and artificial intelligence in process management - How manufacturing is evolving with the explosion of data - Using artificial intelligence to create new manufacturing processes Access the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2GOAJCM
With analytics you can learn some pretty interesting, and even strange, things about the people using your chatbot. The challenge is figuring out the best way to use those analytics to create a better bot to meet your users’ needs. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Arte Merritt, the CEO and Co-Founder of a bot analytics company called Dashbot. Find out about some of the unsual ways people interact with bots and how companies can use analytics to build the bots of the future. You'll hear about: - The role that analytics can play in improving bots - How to get started with bots - Using sentiment analysis in bots - The importance of natural language processing for bots You can access the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2oN5ZdY
In the not too distant future, talking machines will become a part of our everyday life. After all, we’re already talking to Siri, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa. Before we know it, those conversations will extend to other things too. Of course, in order for people to really trust machines, there needs to be a clear level of understanding. You need to know that the machine isn’t simply just registering the words that you’re saying, but rather that it actually understands the meaning and intent behind them. In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Asfaneh Fazley, the Director of Research at Thompson Reuters and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto. Asfaneh’s area of expertise is at the intersection of psychology, communication and technology. Find out how to apply basic psychology to natural language processing (NLP) systems to help ensure that they are able to correctly interpret the true meaning of our words and sentences. You’ll hear about: - How computers try to understand the meaning of words - The role of psychology in NLP and NLU - How language differs in different contexts Access the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2BWrQbK
How does your company think about security? Have you adopted basic security hygiene practices like running off-the-shelf software to scan your code for vulnerabilities, or have you moved beyond that and begun to explore bug bounties and penetration testing? In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Christie Terrill, a partner the security consulting firm Bishop Fox and a widely recognized expert on cyber security. Get expert advice on how your company should approach security so that it doesn’t wind up making headlines for getting breached. You’ll hear about: - The two approaches to security - Security hygiene best practices - The evolution of bug bounties and penetration testing and their respective pros and cons - Social engineering as an attack service - How to attract and retain women in cyber security Show notes: http://bit.ly/IP-Episode69 More episodes | Subscribe: http://bit.ly/TheImpactPodcast
Over the past decade, just about everything seems to have gone digital. Today complex algorithms serve up recommendations tailored to our individual tastes, completely transforming how we consume books, movies, music and more. And yet, we haven't seen the same digital revolution take hold in the massive $2 trillion fashion industry. Or is that all about to change? In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Bill Adler, the Founding President and CEO of True Fit, data-driven personalization platform for footwear and apparel retailers. Together they discuss how True Fit is using machine learning to disrupt the fashion industry with benefits to consumers, retailers, manufacturers and more. Then stay tuned for an episode of Extra Impact, where Jon Prial talks with Chris Moore, True Fit's Chief Analytics Officer, about how the company has collected and is managing its massive data set. You can access this bonus content by following the link below. You'll Hear About --The challenges facing the fashion industry --How True Fit is applying machine learning to the industry --Building a data collective --The future of the fashion industry Access the show notes and our episode or Extra Impact here: http://bit.ly/2FhxD93
One of the big challenges that many software companies face is how to overcome the cold-start problem. That's when a software company needs customer data to optimize its AI solutions or to even just get them to work. That can be tricky because depending on the predictive model their solution uses, it could take weeks or even months to collect enough data from any new customer they onboard. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Mahmoud Arram, the Co-founder and CTO of Bluecore, the leading retail marketing platform specializing in email. Find out how the Georgian Impact team partnered with Bluecore and used differential privacy to help it solve its cold-start problem. You'll Hear About: - The cold-start problem that many SaaS companies face - How Bluecore used differential privacy to eliminate the problem - The benefits using differential privacy brought to Bluecore and its customers - Bluecore's partnership with the Georgian Impact team and the results they got working together Access the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2HUObpl
Bias exists everywhere. It factors into everything that we do and into virtually every decision that we make. An interesting, but problematic side effect of this is that bias can also easily slip into our machine models. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Clare Corthell, a well-known and respected data scientist and engineer, and the founder of Luminant Data, about the issues that can arise when bias enters your models and how to avoid it in the first place. Plus, check out our show notes to find out how to access our first episode of Extra Impact, where Jon and Clare go deeper into this topic, talking about bias in AI-powered services like Airbnb and the controversial policing stop-and-frisk program. You’ll hear about: -- The nature of bias in machine learning models and what causes it -- Cynthia Dwork’s work on transparency -- How companies should be thinking about data -- Implementing fairness into AI and machine learning models -- Developing an AI code of ethics Access the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2GLyjsU
In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial welcomes investor, entrepreneur and blockchain expert William Mouygayer back to the show. They talk about the use of tokens as mediums of exchange, the importance of trust and how to establish it on the blockchain and why CryptoKitties are so important understand. They also get into the future of the blockchain, the kinds of businesses that are most likely to bring it to the mainstream, and the role that regulation might play in all of this. Then stay tuned for an episode of Extra Impact, for a discussion of the roller coaster ride that bitcoin has been on in recent months and the future of digital versus crypto currencies. You can access this Extra Impact content through a link in the show notes for this episode. (Show notes here: http://bit.ly/2GgiwgD) You’ll hear about: -- The use of tokens as mediums of exchange that are built on top of the blockchain to create value for businesses. -- Why databases and the blockchain might co-exist. -- The importance of trust and how to establish it in the blockchain. -- The concept of digital assets that can only exist on the blockchain, e.g., CryptoKitties -- The timeline for blockchain adoption -- How regulation will affect the blockchain Access the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2GgiwgD.
In this episode of The Impact Podcast, Jon Prial welcomes Chris Saad, the former Head of Product at Uber Developer Platform. Together, they talk about data rights and data portability, what can happen when people perceive that their trust has been violated, and what companies can do to avoid such situations in the first place. You’ll hear about: - Data portability - The story behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal - The role of data vs. attention ion business models - How companies should approach data and data rights To learn more, check out the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2J8c8un
We all have our own personal biases. The question is how do you keep them out of your data so that you can create better products for your customers? In this episode of the Impact Podcast, we welcome renowned mathematician and author Cathy O’Neil to the show. Cathy has long called for an end of conditional trust in big data, and shares her views on why data is so vulnerable to bias, the massive implications this can have and what your business needs to do to avoid it. You’ll learn about: - How personal bias affects data - Developing a data strategy to avoid bias - How to communicate bias to end users - Creating a data Bill of Rights - The risks to companies of having biased algorithms Access the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2lzzD5m
A few months ago we talked to Bill Adler, the Founding President and CEO of True Fit, a data-driven personalization platform for footwear and apparel retailers that's using machine learning to push the fashion industry forward. In a follow-up conversation with Chris Moore, the company's Chief Analytics Officer, Jon Prial digs into how that company aggregates and works with its massive data sets. You'll hear about: - The importance of normalizing data - Some of the best practices True Fit uses to manage all of its data - How to overcome the challenges of working with thin data - Generating features To learn more about this episode, check out the show notes: http://bit.ly/2MlkbcD
With GDPR behind us, maybe you’re breathing a sigh of relief. On the other hand, maybe you see it and all of the changes it’s brought about as just another hassle — just another regulation to comply with to help keep people’s data secure. But does it have to be that way? What if your company recognized that there’s strategic value and differentiation in data privacy and in becoming a company that people actually trust. A company that values privacy as much as they value you being their customer. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Ann Cavoukian, one of the world's leading privacy experts and the former former Information and Privacy Commissioner for the Canadian province of Ontario. Together they dig into trust, privacy by design, and how businesses can turn this perceived hassle into an opportunity. You'll learn about: - Consumer awareness of privacy issues - The benefits of privacy by design - Privacy in public versus private domains - The principles of privacy by design - What it will take to get privacy embedded into company operations - Taking a user-centric approach to privacy - How companies should earn trust To learn more, access the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2MpbCtm
In this continuation of their earlier conversation (see Episode 79), Jon Prial and Alistair Croll, the Founder and Content Chair of Fwd50, discuss GDPR, the critical role of trust and how computing will evolve in the months and years ahead. You’ll Hear About: - Personal data and trust - The economic interests of smart agents Learn more by checking out the show notes: https://bit.ly/2NFD8Db
What's the best way to go to market? It's by capturing people's attention. And to do that, you need to solve for interesting. In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial welcomes Alistair Croll, the Founder and Content Chair of Fwd50, to the show for a discussion about go-to-market and product strategies, market alignments, market adjacencies, and some of the different challenges that B2B versus B2C brands face in these areas. You’ll learn about the: - Importance of focusing on go-to-market strategy to complement product - Critical thinking required among managers for data science and decision making - Role of innovation in go-to-market models Check out the show notes to learn more: http://bit.ly/2LnaWUP
On October 17th the Scale Tech Conference (www.scaletechconf.com) is happening in Toronto. Georgian Partners is co-hosting the event as part of our annual portfolio conference and Jon Prial, host of the Georgian Impact Podcast, sat down to chat with some of the speakers to hear a little more about them and what they’ll be talking about at the event. In this episode we meet Chris Amen-Kroeger, the VP of Ads Engineering at Twitter. Over the last several years, Chris has led world class engineering teams that focus on advertiser value by building machine learning driven multiformat (Display, Video, Search) monetization platforms such as Pinterest and Yahoo. Prior to joining Twitter, Chris served as the Head of Ads Engineering at Pinterest where he focused on building Pinterest's Search, Display and Video advertising products. While at Pinterest, Chris successfully spearheaded an overhaul of the ad platform which enabled a much more personalized and relevant ad experience for Pinners. Before joining Pinterest, Chris led the Display and Video Ads Engineering teams at Yahoo, which build and run the Yahoo DSP (BrightRoll DSP+), Exchange (BRX) and Premium Ads platforms ($1.6B revenue in 2016). In late 2014, Yahoo acquired BrightRoll, the premiere programmatic video platform, for $640M where Chris led the technology teams (Product, Engineering and Operations).
On October 17th the Scale Tech Conference (www.scaletechconf.com) is happening in Toronto. Georgian Partners is co-hosting the event as part of our annual portfolio conference and Jon Prial, host of the Georgian Impact Podcast, sat down to chat with some of the speakers to hear a little more about them and what they’ll be talking about at the event. In this episode we meet Susan Etlinger, an Industry Analyst at Altimeter Group. She is a globally recognized expert in digital strategy and has authored a series of reports and frameworks on topics including artificial intelligence, big data, analytics and digital ethics. Susan was named one of the “Must Know” Top Writers in Technology by LinkedIn in 2016. Her TED talk, “What Do We Do With All This Big Data?" has been translated into 25 languages and has been viewed more than 1 million times. Susan’s research is used in university curricula around the world. She is a frequent keynote speaker, and has been quoted in numerous media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, The New York Times and the BBC. Susan works with global clients to evaluate emerging technologies and incorporate them into organizational culture and practice. She also works with technology vendors to refine product roadmaps and strategies based on her independent research. Susan is a published translator and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. Find her on Twitter at @setlinger.
Everything is going digital. Why should restaurants be an exception? In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Ray Reddy, the Co-founder and CEO of Ritual, a company that has built a fascinating consumer-facing social app that allows people to order food for pickup. And while that may seem simple enough, there’s much more to the story. In their conversation, Jon and Ray talk about rise of the digital restaurant and how technologies like artificial intelligence are changing the way that we purchase food. You’ll hear about: - How Ritual uses AI to assist users with their interactions - The social retail space - Designing a platform people will want to use every day - Approaches for bringing data together - How Ritual has approached scaling - How restaurants will evolve over the next few years For more information, check out the show notes: http://bit.ly/2Q7QZEd
Differential privacy is a technology that's quickly moving from academia into business. And it’s not just the big companies that are using it. With the intersection of trust and AI a hot topic right now, differential privacy is well on its way to becoming an integral part of the conversation. In this episode, Jon Prial welcomes Chang Liu to the show. Chang is an Applied Research Scientist at Georgian Partners and an expert on differential privacy. In the episode, they talk about what differential privacy is, why it’s important, and why every company needs to think about having it as part of its product and technical strategy. You'll hear about: - The limits of data anonymization - What differential privacy is and why it's so important - Ways to protect your data and be differentially private - What epsilon is and what its role is - Differential privacy's potential to solve the cold-start problem - Implications for trust To learn more about this episode, check out the show notes: http://bit.ly/2MTjjLR
In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Jana Eggers, the CEO of Nara Logics, a company with an AI platform that works as a matching engine, helping companies connect their data. They talk about the realities of artificial intelligence, including what it’s actually good for, where to use it, and how to run a successful AI project. You’ll hear about: - The work that Nara Logics is doing to aggregate data - How the company’s synaptic network works - Whether or not AI is a panacea - The key components of a successful AI project - How to think about AI tools and teams For more information, see the show notes: http://bit.ly/2NPwQED
Is it unethical if your company doesn’t do it’s due diligence on avoiding bias? In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Kathryn Hume, the Vice President of Product and Strategy at integrate.ai. Kathryn and her team recently published a paper entitled “Responsible AI in Consumer Enterprise” which offers a framework to help organizations operationalize ethics, privacy and security as they apply machine learning and artificial intelligence. Jon and Kathryn discuss the paper and highlight some of its key takeaways for today’s businesses. You’ll Learn About - How ethics can make or break a company - How machine learning systems can negatively impact people - Using a framework to examine ethical issues as you build ML systems - Practical advice for being more ethical with AI Learn more by accessing the show notes: http://bit.ly/2ycJALW
After spending the past six months traveling across North America and talking to dozens of companies, Jason Brenier, our VP of Strategy, got seem clear insights into the challenges today's businesses face. When it comes to conversational AI, one of the biggest is figuring out how to build the right team to support their business. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Jason about how to go about building a successful conversational AI team, drawing on insights from a new guide Jason and his team have written that's being published this week. You'll learn about: - The latest trends in conversational AI - How to build a successful conversational AI team - The importance of having a cross-functional team - What skillsets are essential for the success of the team Access the show notes here: http://bit.ly/2xLAnuo
Who better to provide a CEO-level perspective on machine learning and artificial intelligence than Sam Charrington, the host of the wildly successful podcast This Week in Machine Learning & AI (TWIML & AI). In this episode, Jon Prial talks to Sam about the insights he’s gleaned from interviewing more than 150 ML and AI experts about an array of fascinating topics. You’ll learn about: - The macro trends in machine learning and AI - How mature enterprises are when it comes to ML and AI - Creating generalizable AI platforms - The last mile problem - The growing importance of trust and bias To learn more about this episode, check out the show notes: http://bit.ly/2yiI8IQ
A few months ago, Jon Prial spoke with Clare Corthell, the founder of Luminant Data, about bias in machine learning models, what the implications of that bias can be, and how to avoid it in the first place. It was episode 74 and you should definitely check it out if you haven’t already heard it. In this short bonus episode of the Impact Podcast, they pick up where the conversation left off.
**You’ll hear about:**
- The potential for bias in AI-powered services like Airbnb
- How to leverage AI and human capabilities
- Recognizing how the objectives of a system can have a negative impact
Who Is Clare Corthell?
Clare Corthell is a Data Scientist and Engineer with experience leading teams, building custom products for diverse business needs, building machine learning and natural language processing systems, and defining corporate data strategy. Over the last few years, she has built and managed Luminant Data, consulting on building more transparent predictive systems. Clients include startups, software companies, media businesses, R&D firms, and international nonprofits. Trained as a product designer, she focuses on building intelligent products with iterative, testable prototypes on the path to production. In addition, Clare is the author of The Open Source Data Science Masters, leads initiatives to combat algorithmic harm and improve transparency, and built a ridesharing NGO in Nairobi.
Earlier this year, Google Duplex garnered lots of attention when it shared its demo of an interaction between a very life-like bot and a human being. It was an impressive display of the potential of text-to-speech applications. Although text to speech has been around for a long time, these days it’s improving so quickly that getting it right is going to be critical to keeping customers happy. In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial welcomes David Vasquez, who until recently was a text-to-speech voice designer at Google. Together, they discuss what CEOs need to be thinking about to deploy text-to-speech technology and where it’s headed in the future.
**You’ll hear about:**
- Interesting applications of text-to-speech technology
- The ethical implications of not identifying a bot as a bot
- The importance of empathy in text to speech
- How to make a text-to-speech system effective
- How to deploy a system effectively
- Trends for the future of text to speech
Earlier this year, Jon Prial spoke to entrepreneur and blockchain expert William Mougayar on the use of tokens as mediums of exchange, the importance of trust and how to establish it on the blockchain, and even CryptoKitties. In this bonus episode of the Impact Podcast, you’ll hear more from William as their conversation shifts to the roller coaster ride that Bitcoin has been on this year as well as the future of digital and cryptocurrencies.
You’ll hear about:
- The nature of the current cryptocurrency environment
- The future of digital and cryptocurrencies
Who Is William Mougayar?
William Mougayar is the leading blockchain industry analyst and thought leader. As a long time industry insider, William is a prolific researcher, writer and theorist who has been described as the most sophisticated blockchain business thinker. His views and insights are well respected worldwide.William is the General Partner at Virtual Capital Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund, and currently on the Board of Directors of OB1, the OpenBazaar open source protocol that is pioneering decentralized peer-to-peer commerce, a Board Advisor to the Ethereum Foundation, a member of OMERS Ventures Board of Advisors, an Advisory Board member to the Coin Center and Bloq, and founder of Startup Management.
Whether overt or unintentional, whether human- or technology-oriented, bias is something that every company must be vigilant about. And while it used to be something you might have to worry about with your employees, today it can be equally pervasive — and problematic — in the algorithms those employees create and the data they use.
Although the examples of bias in AI are numerous, one of the more prominent areas where we’ve seen it happen in recent years is in image processing. In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Timnit Gebru a research scientist in the Ethical AI team at Google AI and a co-founder of the group Black in AI about some of the challenges with using facial recognition technology.
Who is Timnit Gebru?
Timnit Gebru is a research scientist in the Ethical AI team at Google AI. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics (FATE) group at Microsoft Research, New York. She earned her PhD from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. Her main research interest is in data mining large-scale, publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that arise as a result, including fine-grained image recognition, scalable annotation of images, and domain adaptation. She is currently studying the ethical considerations underlying any data mining project, and methods of auditing and mitigating bias in sociotechnical systems. The New York Times, MIT Tech Review, and others have recently covered her work. As a cofounder of the group Black in AI, she works to both increase diversity in the field and reduce the negative impacts of racial bias in training data used for human-centric machine learning models.
Are we headed for a real-life version of Westworld? In this episode of the Impact Podcast, Jon Prial welcomes Suzanne Gildert, the Founder and CEO of Sanctuary AI, a startup that builds human-like robots called synths, or synthetic humans, complete with human-like bodies and minds. Together, they discuss robots and AI-powered software, and what it will take for them to become a part of business processes. They also cover learning and training AIs.
You’ll hear about:
- What it takes to make an effective AI
- The right way to train an AI
- The rise of AI ethics and AI rights
Who is Suzanne Gildert?
Suzanne is founder and CEO of Sanctuary AI, a company with a mission to create ultra human-like robots — “synths” — that are indistinguishable from us physically, cognitively and emotionally. Sanctuary is structured to explore both cutting edge technology and the ethical issues that arise from creating human-like machines. The company strives to create a micro-society in which synths can develop and be granted a safe haven as they transition into full acceptance by our wider society.
Prior to Sanctuary, Suzanne founded Kindred Inc., an artificial intelligence and robotics company. She hand built over 30 robots to demonstrate Kindred’s core technology concept of human-robot teleoperation for reinforcement learning. She grew the company to over 50 employees and opened offices in Vancouver, Toronto, and San Mateo. She helped raise over $50 million in venture funding for Kindred from top tier investors including Eclipse, Google Ventures, First Round Capital and Data Collective.
Machine learning can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be. For many product leaders and C-suite executives, it’s about grasping the concepts and being able to direct the work. In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast Jon Prial talks with Adam Geitgey, the author of the book Machine Learning is Fun, for people who want to get started with machine learning. They talk about the evolution of machine learning in terms that everyone can understand.
You’ll hear about:
- Why it’s still all about the data in machine learning
- What key terms like features, labels, and unsupervised learning mean
- How you know you’re ready for machine learning
Who is Adam Geitgey?
Adam Geitgey is an author and software developer with over 15 years of professional experience building large systems and managing development teams for companies like Groupon. He believes that machine learning is going to be a large part of the future of software development and that it's important for every developer to have a basic literacy of machine learning techniques. This was the inspiration for his book and blog - Machine Learning Is Fun - https://www.machinelearningisfun.com/.
Did you know that counterfeit drugs kill over a million people a year costing the industry over $100B? That kind of loss of life is not only devastating, it also has huge implications for the medical and pharmaceutical industries. In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial welcomes Shabbir Dahod, president and CEO of TraceLink to discuss the pharmaceutical supply chain and the work TraceLink is doing with data to fix these problems. The story has lessons for us all - around business development, network effects, transparency, trust … and a powerful solution.
You’ll hear about:
- How pharma companies track every product down to the individual item
- How to build a network effect and create a data flywheel
- What it takes to build trust in a complex supply chain
Who is Shabbir Dahod?
Shabbir Dahod is President and Chief Executive Officer of TraceLink and a member of the company’s board of directors. He co-founded the company in 2009 with a vision of building a business that will transform how life science companies manage the manufacturing, packaging, distribution, and dispensing of pharmaceutical products across a network of trading partners in the global life sciences supply chain.
Wouldn’t everyone like to clone their most successful sales reps? While we can’t do that (yet) what if you could analyze conversations to understand what it is that makes one person more effective than another? In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Roy Raanani, CEO of Chorus, to talk about how Chorus is capturing the most valuable data set available during the sales cycle - sales conversations - and analyzing it to improve win rates and shorten ramp time for new hires.
Listen to learn:
- Why sales conversations are an untapped resource offering insights into the voice of your customer
- How you can develop expertise quickly in your sales organization through intentional improvement
- How you can identify where your deals stall and what the best closers are doing
Roy Raanani is CEO and founder of Chorus. Roy is an engineer with a passion for business and sales. He’s spent his career working with start-ups and advising technology companies on strategy and ops. Prior to Chorus, Roy was a Manager at Bain & Company in their Zurich, San Francisco, Toronto and Singapore offices. At Bain, he focused on technology, leading the mobile strategy team for Bain’s flagship tech client. Roy holds a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was the first hire at Innovation Endeavors and co-developed the Runway incubator.
Quantum computing is still years away from widespread commercial use. But did you know that you should already be protecting yourself and future-proofing your encryption against the power of quantum computing? In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial welcomes Mike Brown, CTO of Isara and former VP of Security at BlackBerry to discuss why we should address the risks of quantum computing sooner rather than later.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- How encryption works and how it will change with quantum computing
- How quantum will help solve some of our hardest problems
- Why quantum computing will pose a threat to today’s encryption standards
- What you can do to prepare your organization today
As Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Mike is responsible for the technical vision and direction of ISARA Corporation. His teams are singularly focused on research into the state of the art in Quantum Safe algorithms as well as how to implement them in a secure and efficient manner. Mike was most recently the Vice President of Security Product Management and Research at BlackBerry, where he co-founded the product security practice and was responsible for the vision and execution of security for all BlackBerry products. Mike has spoken at global security events including RSA, CTIA, GTEC, Bloomberg, APECTEL and InfoSec Europe. He holds a Masters of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, focusing on cryptography.
Tech giants like Airbnb and Uber tear up the rule-books for their markets. They grow so fast that by the time competitors and regulators react, it’s already too late. There’s fascinating research being done into their impact and how they have reshaped society. In this, the 100th episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial is joined by Alex Rosenblat, Data & Society Research Institute researcher and author of Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work. They discuss how these companies challenge the status quo with new business models, new employment models and new ways of thinking about management.
You’ll hear about:
- How tech companies are disrupting employment models and challenging our concepts of entrepreneurship
- What this means for the future of work
- The trust challenges of managing through algorithms
Alex Rosenblat is a technology ethnographer. A researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, she holds an MA in sociology from Queen's University and a BA in history from McGill University. Rosenblat's writing has appeared in media outlets such as the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, the Atlantic, Slate, and Fast Company. Her research has received attention worldwide and has been covered in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, New Scientist, and the Guardian. Many scholarly and professional publications have also published her prizewinning work, including the International Journal of Communication and the Columbia Law Review.
Imagine being able to capture every source of end-user interaction - from both structured and unstructured data - to provide a rich view of customer experience and actionable intelligence, in real-time. In this episode, Jon Prial talks with Derek Wang, the founder and CEO of Stratifyd, a company with an AI-powered end-to-end customer analytics platform that is enabling its customers to do just that.
On the show, Jon and Derek discuss Stratifyd's vision and how he and his colleagues have taken a trove of unstructured data and applied it to a specific market space using machine learning and NLP to deliver valuable insights and workflow automation.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- How Stratifyd built a startup outside a traditional tech hub
- How they are using unsupervised learning and NLP on unstructured data to provide immediate automated insights into vast amounts of customer data
- How they then use supervised deep learning to generate automated workflows and decision-making
- Why privacy and trust are a priority when handling such vast quantities of data
Derek Wang is founder and CEO of Stratifyd, a customer analytics platform designed to equip business leaders worldwide with deep business insights in minutes instead of months. Before starting Stratifyd, Derek worked in academia, as Associate Director of the Charlotte Visualization Center working on visualization and visual analytics.
The use of AI raises a lot of new questions about the use of personal data. For companies, this means being more thoughtful about how you collect, store and use data. But where do we stand when it comes to the law? In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial welcomes Carole Piovesan, Partner and Co-founder at INQ Data Law. They discuss some of the ethical implications of gathering and using data in artificial intelligence and how to square autonomy with liability.
You’ll hear about:
- How meaningful consent and privacy policies define our relationships online
- Where we draw the line between the private and public domains in our digital lives
- Whether current laws are sufficient for the evolving privacy challenges of artificial intelligence
- Where liability lies in autonomous systems and where new regulations might emerge
- Algorithmic accountability, fairness and trust
Who is Carole Piovesan?
Carole Piovesan is a Partner and Co-Founder of INQ Data Law, a law firm focused on data governance, privacy law, cybersecurity and AI. She has advised the Canadian government on legal and policy issues related to AI and provides advice to companies on their data practices. In August 2018, she served on behalf of the federal Minister of Innovation as one of six appointees to lead Canada’s digital and data transformation consultations (#CDNdigitalTalks).
Before launching INQ Data Law, Carole was a lawyer at McCarthy Tetrault LLP where she served as co-Lead of the National Cybersecurity, Privacy and Data Management Group.
We’re all tempted by the newest, shiniest technology when looking for a solution to a problem. But often the best results come from proven techniques, so it’s wise to find a fast, pragmatic solution to your problem, whatever the technology. How do you know what’s the right choice for your business? And how do you select the right opportunities to pursue with AI, so that you’re augmenting your customers’ experience and ability to get their jobs done?
In this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, you'll hear about this and more as Jon Prial is joined by White House Presidential Innovation Fellow and growth-stage advisor Adam Drake.
You’ll hear about:
- How you can identify opportunities to use AI/ML in your business
- Why you should start with proven modeling techniques
- Getting valuable products out with customers, rather than stuck in R&D
- How to develop an AI BS detector
Adam Drake leads technical business transformations to help growth-stage technology companies continue their rapid acceleration through leadership, technology, and data architecture guidance. He is currently a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow and IEEE Senior Member. Adam’s professional background spans a variety of industries including e-commerce, online travel, online marketing, financial services, healthcare and oil and gas.
Read his thoughts at adamdrake.com. Jon references these articles during this episode:
Novel Results Considered Harmful
Artificial Intelligence and The Heilmeier Catechism
To get started with AI in your business, read our Principles of Applied Artificial Intelligence and rank your organizational readiness with our maturity matrix. You can download your free copy here.
Alex Manea joined our team as Chief Security and Privacy Officer last year to lead our trust thesis and its adoption. In this episode, Jon Prial and Alex have a wide-ranging chat covering risk, privacy, different types of security attacks and how to protect your business. They also discuss how a business should be preparing for a new world at the intersection of fairness, value and trust.
You’ll hear about:
- How everything flows down from leadership’s philosophy on security and privacy
- Why perceptions of privacy, security, fairness and transparency are changing
- The value exchange we make with brands for our data
Who is Alex Manea?
Alex Manea is our Chief Security and Privacy Officer and a member of the Georgian Impact Team. Alex uses his detailed knowledge of security and privacy concepts to help portfolio companies identify opportunities to build and monetize technologies that protect assets and build trust. Alex is also responsible for Georgian’s internal policies and infrastructure.
Prior to joining Georgian Partners, Alex spent 12 years working at BlackBerry, most recently as Chief Security Officer. As a founding member of BlackBerry Security, he has worked to protect mobile, desktop and IoT devices, networks and infrastructure for over a decade, helping to transform BlackBerry from a mobile hardware vendor to the world's leading provider of enterprise software and security solutions. Alex regularly writes on security and has been published in dozens of international publications in multiple languages.
When Brad Katsuyama was working on Wall Street, he saw that the stock exchanges were giving an unfair advantage to high-frequency traders that was costing his clients - pension funds, mutual funds and hedge funds. Worse still, the exchanges were making huge profits from selling this advantage. His response was to create the Investors Exchange, a stock exchange founded on the premise that people want to trade on a fair platform that doesn’t provide advantages to predatory traders.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon and Brad discuss how Brad broke the mold to create an exchange that is founded on building trust between all participants.
You’ll hear about:
- How unfairness in high-frequency trading led to the founding of IEX
- How exchanges work and how they are incentivized
- How IEX has built a different type of exchange based on trust
- Why trust is opening doors to new revenue streams
Who is Brad Katsuyama?
Brad Katsuyama is the CEO and co-founder of the IEX, the Investors Exchange. He co-founded IEX to create a fairer stock exchange. Katsuyama is the focus of Flash Boys, a Michael Lewis book about high-frequency trading.
Before founding IEX, he was the Global Head of Electronic Sales and Trading at the Royal Bank of Canada. There he was responsible for electronic sales, electronic trading, algorithmic trading, market structure strategy, client implementation and product management.
To learn more about IEX and their business, visit their website or check out the best-selling Michael Lewis novel Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. You can read more about Georgian’s investment in IEX here.
To learn more about the fundamental principles of trust and how they can help your business, check out our Principles of Trust and download the CEO’s Guide to Trust.
Quantum computing will revolutionize your approach to a whole array of business problems but it won’t solve everything single-handedly. Your task as CEO is to know where quantum will make a difference and make sure you’re ahead of your competition. In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial sits down with quantum computing expert Vlad Gheorghiu to help you understand the use cases where quantum will be most effective and why by giving a quick primer on the quantum tech stack.
You’ll hear about:
- How to think about quantum computing in relation to traditional computing
- Where we are now versus where we will need to be for certain use cases
- The quantum computing stack and how the different parts function
- How to develop a business strategy for quantum and what the first use cases might look like
Who is Vlad Gheorghiu?
Vlad Gheorghiu is CEO, President and Co-Founder of softwareQ Inc, and a researcher at the Institute for Quantum Computing, working with Michele Mosca on theoretical aspects of quantum computation and (post-quantum) cryptography. He also collaborates on quantum risk assessment with evolutionQ Inc.
Vlad is involved in the CryptoWorks21 Quantum-Safe Cryptographic Infrastructure Program and is a member of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Quantum-Safe Cryptography Standardization Group. Vlad graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a PhD in Theoretical Physics.
You’re always faced with trade-offs. Cleaning up technical debt or adding new features. Hiring more sales reps or investing in customer success. You have to make these decisions. But what about security? Threats are constantly evolving and solutions are too. Is it ever worth the trade-off?
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Kerry Bailey, CEO of eSentire. Kerry emphasizes that it’s not whether, but when you will be breached. Taking this mindset sharpens your focus on security as a strategic initiative and shows that there are no trade-offs worth making.
It’s why we published our thesis on Security First and it’s more relevant today than ever as security performs a foundational role in building trust with your customers.
You’ll hear about:
- Why cybersecurity may just be the best use case in the world for AI
- How managed security has evolved from human-driven to AI/ML
- Why security is about more than tech: it’s a cultural issue and a board level item
Kerry Bailey is CEO of eSentire. eSentire has been part of the Georgian portfolio since 2014. As CEO of eSentire, Kerry is driving the company's market acceleration and its evolution as the industry's leading Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service provider.
His executive experience spans security, managed services and cloud computing at Fortune 50 and early-stage growth companies, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise , Verizon Enterprise, Betrusted and Security Assurance Group.
As business conversations move from email to messaging tools, your inboxes may breathe a sigh of relief, but your security team gets another set of worries.
Is the product you’ve chosen is it as secure as it should be? Are conversations happening out of sight that you need to track for compliance reasons? Is information being shared with people outside your organization without you knowing?
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Navroop Mitter, CEO of ArmorText. ArmorText produces an end-to-end encrypted collaboration platform for critical infrastructure protection and regulated industries.
You’ll hear about:
- Why messaging tools are a security headache
- How to think about privacy versus security when it comes to messaging
- How to maintain security while keeping a record of conversations for compliance
- Messaging between trusted parties in different organizations
Who is Navroop Mitter?
Navroop Mitter is the CEO of ArmorText a mobile security and privacy startup. ArmorText targets the most sensitive communications in the enterprise -- those around the security operations center, the network operations center and, of course, the executive C-suite and board-level communications while still supporting retention & review, governance and information lifecycle management requirements.
Previously, Navroop was a Senior Manager within Accenture’s North American Security Practice. He has spent a significant portion of his security career-building information security practices in emerging markets, leading international security engagements, and growing the identity and access management practice both in the United States and abroad.
Privacy is much more than a compliance issue. It’s a way of thinking about your relationship with your users and a product design choice.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, Jon Prial talks with Professor Ari Ezra Waldman - an internationally recognized thought leader on privacy and online safety and author of “Privacy as Trust.” They discuss how Ari thinks about privacy and what it means for the product design process.
Listen to the full podcast episode to find out more, including:
- How trust, intimacy, and privacy interlock
- Where context comes into the privacy equation
- How social media can cause harm by ignoring the fundamentals of privacy
- Who should be involved to create the best technology design team?
- How “Queer Data Apps are Unsafe by Design”
Who is Ari Ezra Waldman?
Professor Ari Ezra Waldman is an internationally recognized thought leader on privacy and online safety and, in March of 2018, he published a book “Privacy as Trust - Information Privacy for an Information Age” and, more recently, he had an op-ed posted as part of the New York Times privacy project. Ari is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Innovation Center for Law and Technology at NYLS. He also holds a Ph.D. in sociology. His research focuses on the influence of law on technology.
When you think of insurance, customer service excellence and innovation might not come to mind. Now though, a new generation of insurtech companies is changing this. In this episode of the Georgian Impact podcast, Jon Prial is joined by Alex Frommeyer, CEO of Beam Dental. Beam is creating a winning customer experience by automating processes, personalizing their products and incentivizing good dental hygiene using a connected toothbrush. The lessons learned are universally applicable around IoT, data, data privacy, automation and personalization.
You'll hear about:
- How IoT is creating a new data stream for insurers
- Why Beam is obsessed with process and customer service
- How to create a fair value exchange for data
Who is Alex Frommeyer?
Alex Frommeyer is Co-founder and CEO of Beam Dental, a dental benefits company that offers unique dental coverage by using hygiene behavior in pricing. He has two engineering degrees from the University of Louisville's Speed School of Engineering, where he graduated magna cum laude and founded his first company in 2010. He is a Forbes 30 Under 30, a Rock Health alum, and a member of the Kentucky Entrepreneur Hall of Fame.
A lot of effort goes into identifying who we are almost from the very moment we’re born. Birth certificates, passports, fingerprints, now facial recognition. So why does it still feel like companies don’t know us? Why do they send the same offer several times? Shouldn’t it be easy for CRMs to get it right? Well, it can be if you cleanse your data using entity resolution software.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial talks with Jeff Jonas, CEO of Senzing. Jeff has worked in the area of entity resolution for almost 35 years. Over that time he’s worked with casinos, government agencies, and enterprises.
You’ll hear about:
- Why entity resolution is a harder problem than you'd imagine
- How it can be used to detect financial and voter fraud and identify terrorists
- Why privacy by design is core to Senzing’s thinking
Who is Jeff Jonas?
Jeff Jonas is an acclaimed data scientist and CEO of Senzing. He is at the forefront of solving some of the world’s most complex business and big data problems for government and companies. A former IBM fellow, Jonas is the leading creator of entity resolution systems. National Geographic recognized him as the Wizard of Big Data. Today, many organizations rely on his systems to extract useful intelligence from tsunamis of data.
A three-time entrepreneur, Jonas sold his last company to IBM in 2005.
In previous episodes of the Georgian Impact podcast, we’ve learned about the need to get ahead of the impact quantum computers can have on breaking encryption with Mike Brown of ISARA in episode 97. We also got a great overview of different quantum technologies from Vlad Gheorghiu in episode 104.
In this, our third podcast on Quantum Computing, Jon Prial welcomes Christian Weedbrook, CEO and founder of Xanadu. Xanadu is a photonic quantum computing company and a recent addition to the Georgian Partners portfolio. They discuss how quantum will improve financial analysis, help to make more efficient batteries, and optimize traffic congestion...and why the time for adoption is now.
You’ll hear about:
- The advantages of photonic quantum computing over other approaches
- Use cases for quantum
- Why Xanadu is building an open-source machine learning library to help the community adopt quantum
- What you should be doing now
On previous episodes of the Impact Podcast, we’ve talked about Privacy by Design with Ann Cavoukian and Privacy as Trust with Ari Ezra Waldman. In this episode, we complete the trilogy by discussing Trust by Design with Nathan Kinch.
Trust can be a difficult topic to pin down and make actionable. Nathan and Jon discuss how Nathan has built a toolkit called Data Trust by Design to provide a systematic method through which organizations can design for trust and actually be worthy of it.
You'll Hear About:
- Why customers are willing to share data when they trust the company and product
- How you can sell more on a positive message of trust
- What metrics trust can impact
- How brands with trust outperform the competition
Who is Nathan Kinch?
Nathan Kinch is founder and CEO at Greater Than X, working at the forefront of the personal information economy.
Greater than X helps brands to evolve their culture, workflows and practices to systematically release verifiably trustworthy, data-enabled products and services to their customers.
Human-centered design has helped to make truly great products, by designing the product so that the user has a great experience and perceives value. Now, to be successful, we have to design products that consider intelligent machines as users and optimize the interactions they have with human users.
In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Jon Prial and Lindsay Ellerby, Senior Designer at Normative, discuss the concept of centaur design - designing solutions for a world of AI-human hybrid systems.
You’ll hear about:
- What EQ looks like in machines
- How to think about the user in an age of intelligent machines
- How to create positive human-machine interactions
- What centaur design is and how it will impact the future of design
Who is Lindsay Ellerby?
Lindsay Ellerby is a designer who excels in the messy overlaps between business, technology and human context. Throughout her 10+ year career, she has honed skills in information architecture, interaction design, design research and strategy. Since joining Normative in 2009, she delivers strategic and tactical leadership on a diverse range of projects - everything from design and software development to creating strategic roadmaps for clients.