Today we’re talking to Jon Gibbs and Adrian Townsend, the founders of Savion. These two met while working at Boeing and their startup offers climate-friendly jet travel.

What does Savion bring to the marketplace?

Jon: Savion offers on-demand personal jets at a business class price point. By bringing that price point down, our number of potential customers increases tenfold. We are greener than commercial flights with conventional gas, and carbon negative with renewable natural gas. The fuel that we’re using is not imported, not part of OPEC’s value chain, not tied to crude prices. Our natural gas comes from cow manure. When you capture the poop you can go carbon negative, even further than renewable electricity. In a well to wheels analysis as well as a cost to make and fly an aircraft analysis, natural gas really stands out. …

With 10 years’ experience using rapid diagnostic tests to improve global health and development, Patrick is passionate about empowering patients to proactively manage their health. He earned his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering, magna cum laude, from Princeton University and his MBA, with distinction, from the University of Oxford, where he was a Skoll Scholar.

Born and raised in Alaska, Patrick enjoys spending his free time outdoors, paragliding, rock climbing, or just going for a run. He’d love to walk on the moon someday.

What does Redbird bring to the marketplace?

Redbird lets community pharmacies offer rapid diagnostic testing, so that a patient who needs to check up on their health can pop into a conveniently located pharmacy and get a five minute test done with instant results, rather than having to go to a hospital and wait hours for the exact same test. …

Deb Noller is a dynamic leader who brings more than 20 years’ experience in technology, sustainability and commercial real estate to her role as CEO of the Switch Automation team. She helps large enterprises apply technology for more efficient business operations, resulting in millions of dollars in cost savings for Fortune 100 companies. Deb loves cycling, strong coffee and mentoring young women in the tech industry.

What does Switch bring to the marketplace?

We are the first enterprise-wide platform for digitizing buildings. Most products in the market tackle buildings on a building-by-building basis. …

“Passionate and excited about how technology is challenging norms and changing the way we interact and engage with the world around us. Particularly excited about the convergence of mobile technology, cloud computing and AI.”

What does Gridraster bring to the marketplace?

We observed, and we strongly believe, that augmented reality and virtual reality will change the way we interact or work and live in the long run. But we also had a strong feeling that if all those things were to be possible, they have to be made possible on a mobile device. …

Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. His firm invests in experimental technologies such as biomedicine and robotics. Khosla cofounded computer hardware firm Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy. He spent 18 years at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (now called Kleiner Perkins) before launching his own fund.

Would you say that you’re a venture capitalist?

You’ll never find me saying that we’re venture capitalists. If you look at the tagline on our website, in fact, probably since the 80s, I’ve never called myself a venture capitalist, I always say, I’m a venture assistant. That’s what the tagline on our website says, since the day we started, because our focus is in trying to help with these kinds of issues, and the funding is incidental. …

Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. His firm invests in experimental technologies such as biomedicine and robotics. Khosla co-founded computer hardware firm Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy. He spent 18 years at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (now called Kleiner Perkins) before launching his own fund.

We have noticed that there is a really strong network effect when you adopt the strategy of only hiring really great people. What’s your take on this?

An incredible network effect that’s seldom recognized. I’ll give you an example. I was talking about this particular company, the first four people they’ve hired, and we are talking about a really great person. I said, I’m not going to send him to them, because I look dumb in front of him, because I sent him to these tactical people. …

Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. His firm invests in experimental technologies such as biomedicine and robotics. Khosla co-founded computer hardware firm Sun Microsystems in 1982 with Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy. He spent 18 years at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (now called Kleiner Perkins) before launching his own fund.

If you had to pick the single most common mistake that young startups make, what would it be?

Let me explain the process of building a big company, assuming that’s the goal. It’s like you’re trying to climb Mount Everest, but nobody ever got to the top of Mount Everest without going to Basecamp first, and then camp one, camp two, camp three. The other thing you notice; you look at the route to Mount Everest and it is not a straight line. I always say “be obstinate about your wishes, be flexible about your tactics”. …

Gabor graduated from UC Berkeley with a BS (with honors) in EECS. He then went on to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford. During that time, he was the NLP Architect at Baarzo (acq by GOOG, 2014). He is also a core contributor to the popular Stanford CoreNLP toolkit. In 2016, he co-founded Eloquent Labs, a conversational AI company, with a fellow Stanford NLP researcher Keenon Werling. He Served as Eloquent Labs’ CTO until it was acquired by Square in 2019. He now leads the Conversations team at Square to bring cutting edge conversational AI to small businesses.

What did Eloquent labs bring to the marketplace, that wasn’t already prevalent? What is the unique selling point of Eloquent labs as compared to other B2B NLP startups? …