What makes a good AI product leader?
Many entrepreneurial journeys culminate in founding a hot, venture capital-backed startup in Silicon Valley. However, this particular story of immigration, pushing boundaries and unconventional decisions made along the way is especially interesting. The quest of this particular leader was fueled by the passion to push boundaries and his own limits to create something new and useful.
Building applications for the military and researching early-stage cancer detection aren’t typically on the resume of the founder of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company in Silicon Valley focused on helping sales teams, but for Nitrio co-founder Alex Mihlin it’s simply the latest step in his problem-solving, continent-spanning journey.
After immigrating from the former Soviet Union to Israel when he was six years old, like most Israeli citizens, Mihlin eventually found himself serving in the military. But with undergraduate degrees in physics and electrical engineering (and picking up a masters in theoretical physics while serving), he wasn’t your average soldier.
Instead he spent his time there building and deploying mission critical artificial intelligence systems. Even though his “customer” was the military and not a corporation, it got him to venture beyond just the theoretical and to begin managing teams and delivering production-level solutions.
“You need to build things that work,” Mihlin said. “When you’re dealing with life-and-death situations there’s no room for error. There are people depending on you.”
Mihlin points to his immigrant background as a key component in his outlook and entrepreneurial drive.
“There’s something in the immigrant experience that helps you,” Mihlin said. “If you grow up having everything you want, you tend to be content with your life. If you are deprived of many things, you never become content, and have all this incentive to excel. It pushes you.”
Wanting to immerse himself in a high-achieving environment is also what led him to pursue his PhD at Stanford after his completing his military service.
“You want to be with the best of the best,” Mihlin said. “Getting that Stanford degree means you spent a lot of all-nighters doing very difficult assignments… doing things you might not have thought you could do before but now you know you can.”
For his doctorate at Stanford, Mihlin has decided to leverage his expertise in artificial intelligence towards development of algorithms for early cancer detection. Like many Stanford students, Mihlin got the startup bug.
“Entrepreneurship is very big at Stanford and people are talking about it all the time,” Mihlin said. “Other students are talking about starting companies and it had a huge influence.”
The expertise in artificial intelligence that Mihlin has acquired during his army service and doctoral studies, has enabled him to found an artificial intelligence startup.
That stage of the journey began with a spot in a startup incubator program by Pear Ventures called “Pear Launchpad”, where Mihlin and his co-founder received a small grant to explore their startup idea. This is where Mihlin had to build out the business skills needed for securing larger investments — and eventually building a company.
“Before you have demonstrated product-market fit, investors need to buy into your vision”, Mihlin said. “At this stage, it is critical you can clearly articulate what you’re asking them to invest in.”
After graduating from Pear Launchpad, Mihlin’s startup, Nitrio, has raised $3 million from top-tier venture capital firms. This has allowed Nitrio to go from concept to reality, with its product currently running in private beta with early customers. Of course, that also means Mihlin has had to build out a team to turn his vision into a product, which comes with its own set of challenges.
Understanding people and being able to communicate with them is what Mihlin sees as the biggest challenge of building a company, whether it’s selling your not-quite-finished products to potential customers or getting potential employees to buy in early.
As a founder, Mihlin has also learned that people are the most important asset a company has. That’s why he has put significant effort into creating a culture that celebrates initiative and creativity, which in conjunction with Nitrio’s ground breaking research in artificial intelligence, has been instrumental to attracting great people as Nitrio’s staff has grown to 13 employees.
“People are spending a huge part of their lives working, so the happiness of my employees at work is very important to me,” Mihlin said. “For example, Nitrio doesn’t have any red-tape and unnecessary meetings, people can just concentrate on the work they love. This enables people to create and thrive, making their work interesting and fulfilling.”
Mihlin finds it important for technical co-founders to actively participate in engineering: “I am still writing code very actively,” Mihlin said. “I think it’s important that technical co-founders are as close to engineering as possible. This is essential for their ability to effectively lead other engineers.”
Of course, time-to-product is very important for startups, which means Mihlin is sacrificing sleep for productivity:
“You are burning money until you reach profitability,” Mihlin said. “This is particularly important for startups, since they typically have limited resources. This is also a great motivation that pushes us to excel, and makes our progress very fast which is extremely interesting and fulfilling.”
Mihlin says that the the rewards of seeing his company grow more than compensate for the long hours: “Nitrio was just an idea two years ago, and now it’s well underway to revolutionizing a whole industry. Building something of that magnitude with an extremely talented team of people is enormously fulfilling.”
