The First Time

Kaushal Saraf
Sep 8, 2018 · 4 min read

Everyone talks about their first time and everyone is excited about it too. Landed in San Fransisco during a chilly morning on 5th September, I was curious as what would the next three days entail. Whether it would be the curious case of the next thing in Distributed Ledger Technology or it would be about the way Financial services giants are looking at the engineers in the valley? It could be the way people are tackling privacy after the big fiasco that the industry saw. It could be the excitement of what top Venture Capital firm partners like Aston Kutcher thinks is next in technology, or what big banks personnel like Marty Chavez thinks about cryptocurrencies? Or it would be some of the success stories of startups like Robinhood!

This was my first time at TechCrunch Disrupt in the Valley.

I have seen Kutcher in The Ranch (by the way one of the best shows!) and now as a VC talking business in the Valley! Wow!

Being a developer at Goldman Sachs for over 2 years, I have gained interest and passion into the financial world. The plethora of opportunities it opens doors to and the kind of engagament that financial technology has with instituional market and the consumer market brings real values to the users and real impact on the society.

There were tons of options to attend sessions, workshops, Q/A sessions. I was running around all the day trying to make the most out of it.

I preffered to walk in the Startup alley for a longer period of time and got to see some pretty cool and interesting startups taking off the ground and launching themselves into this Valley Space with a tether as long as their funding and their users. The variety of the tech stacks just makes me wonder that the width of the space is so broad and that you would not be able to list a limited set of technologies to sum up what people are upto these days!

As I was roaming around the FinTech alley,

I found Compliance.ai.

I met Shanna there and the solution they are providing looks exciting and comprehensive in this space. The regulatory requirements and tracking changes today in the financial services space is something small firms have to spare a ton of resources for. These guys at Compliance.ai are approaching that complexity with a very simple solution with a SMART web application (That’s what they say!). The interfaces look ultra cool as you can check them out here where they have a free version to filter and access Regulations across several authorities across different domains filtering on specified requirements.

The next was I like to think a child of Instagram and Youtube.

It’s called elevn

It is a social media video platform to share highlights of a user’s day. Brian at elevn has made sure of the amazing Design and User Experience on the iOS application. So, many different new features packaged well and presented to the users making the application very powerful.

Another domain that’s catching up like wildfire in the industry today would be Voice Interaction with products like Alexa, Google Home establishing standards. Banking on this hype, there are tons of applications that have come up with a lot of cool implementations solving problems for the specially abled as well as taking accessibility to the next level with the minimum efforts.

Orii ring makes it special

They were a wildcard entry to the Startup Battlefield and saw them present their story with an amazingly engineered product was inspiring to do something special for the people we really care about. It was an amazing cross-over between wearables and voice commands using a medical technology that is atleast 20 years old(bone-conduction technology Wiki). Crazy! Although they did not win the Battlefield, they brought something special.

Over the day, I realised that I could be end up sharing my experience with almost 80% of the products being launched or shared with the world in that auditorium.

So, the above are a few I felt stood out for me on Day One! There are three days to this experience and it gets better!

I also caught up with a few of the Blockchain startups exploring new domains on the chain like wine, Real Estate, Medical Records etc.. The next reads would talk about them.

Feel free to share your experiences and some of the interesting ones you found during your visit! Or your thoughts about the ones I shared above.

Kaushal Saraf
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