Startup Grind 2019 — AI Takeaways
Last month, Startup Grind hosted its annual Global Conference in Redwood City, CA. The conference was loaded with over 2 days of content on 6 stages. The conference provides great insight for entrepreneurs, founders, and investors on the latest trends. Thought leadership such as Reid Hoffman, Michael Siebel, and Arlan Hamilton were present.
I had the opportunity to attend the conference for the first time on behalf of Latinx in AI coalition. My goal was to connect with Latinx folks in the AI space, meet partners to collaborate with and of course gain knowledge!
I’ve highlighted my top insights from three AI talks (AI Stage) at the conference.
Ethical AI — Leveraging Cloud AI/ML Technologies for Social Good
This panel highlights the work being done at a couple of startups that leverage AI for social good, mayday.ai and Labelbox.
Panelists included Jason Scott (Google Cloud for Startups, Global Program Manager), Kian Mirshahi (mayday.ai, Founder & CEO) and Nathana Sharma (Labelbox, General Counsel).
Labelbox is a collaborative annotation platform for artificial intelligence applications.
Mayday.ai is an artificial intelligence based platform for real-time & near real-time disaster information services.
Jason opened the talk by sharing Google’s AI Principles:
Google AI Principles
- Be Socially Beneficial
- Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias
- Be built and tested for safety
- Be accountable to people
- Incorporate privacy design principles
- Uphold scientific standards of excellence
- Be made available for uses that accord with these principles (Theme of the talk)
Challenges
Nathana brought up that one thing that we need to be on the lookout for is the increase in the use of machine learning can actually support authoritarianism. One such example is project sesame in China where big data is being used to track and rank what you do to calculate a social ranking. This is something to be aware of as the people who are building these applications, support these implications.
AI should be used to empower people for social good, such as Google’s AutoML project being used to advance wildlife conservation by identifying wildlife with cameras.
Another concern currently with AI is AI alignment. We want to ensure that AI does not run away from our control e.g the cliche terminator example.
Kian predicts that AI will be autonomous and a part of our life just like computers are today. Ethics regarding the collection of data can be a pitfall for AI. It is important to build frameworks around data collection as data is the backbone of AI. How can we ensure that we hold the right people accountable?
Early Stage AI Strategy
This talk was presented by Zach Bratun-Glennon, a Partner at Gradient Ventures. Gradient Ventures is Google’s AI-focused venture fund, which invests in early-stage startups.
Gradient Ventures initially looks for the following:
- Founding team with a track record
- Appropriate market opportunity
- Early customer Proof of Concepts and revenue
- Product-market fit
If you meet the criteria above, Zach highlighted several key items that will allow your startup to stand out to pull in the investors and beat the competition.
A long-term product roadmap
The opportunity in machine learning is to discover the enablement of each building block that you build that will enable subsequent ones to continue to differentiate yourself and make your technology defensible.
An example Zach brought up is having your product able to move cross-industry. Zorroa initially focused on Media & Entertainment companies and eventually moved to Oil & Gas.
Another way a company stands out is by having technology that will do things that are impossible today.
Voice technology is currently predominantly supported by few languages and if you do not have the native accent the technology was trained on, you cannot engage with it.
One of the companies they recently invested in helps people speak in dialects that are closer to the target language that they are trying to speak in. The hope is to one day be able to learn a language by being able to speak with a voice assistant.
Technological shifts driving new opportunities.
Federated Learning — “a specific category of distributed machine learning approaches which trains machine learning models using decentralized data residing on end devices such as mobile phones.”.
Auto-complete in apps and search engines is an example of federated learning.
Every business is a people business
Startups need to strategize with their people. How to run the executive team, how to think about culture, recruiting, retention.
“You need everyone rowing in the same direction to have a chance at surviving.”
Zach provided a great chart that highlights some key challenges AI startups face and how to overcome them.
A couple of other key points, to highlight are:
In order for startups to overcome the shortage of data the first couple of customers should be seen as partners in order to build trust. Part of building that trust is to be transparent of what you can actually deliver with timelines.
Investing in AI Startups
The last talk I want to highlight was presented by Xuezhao Lan (Founding Partner, Basis Set Ventures).
Xuezhao first introduced her firm’s investment framework. Essentially they invest in Full stack applications, companies with Horizontal use cases, Programming & Platform Algorithms and Core Computing Tech in the following verticals:
- Office
- Factory
- Farm
- Home/Construction
- Deskless workers.
A couple of companies Basis Set Ventures’ portfolio are Falkonry, Lime, and Farmwise.
“AI is transforming how everyone works. Not just the people who work in offices.”
She highlighted five trends in AI that her $140M early-stage venture firm is currently investing in.
Trend 1: Startups that democratize access
Security systems such as Deep Sentinel, a 24/7 security camera.
Trend 2: Startups that automate repeatable processes with clear ROI
Rasa is an Open Source machine learning tool to create contextual chatbots and assistants.
Trend 3: Startups that help solve labor shortage issues
There is currently a shortage of welders in the US, shrinking at a rate of roughly 7% yearly. An autonomous welding company emerged to solve this issue.
In addition, Farmwise is an autonomous weeding robot. This robot can run 24/7 to save farmers time and operation costs.
This trend stood out to me. It continues to highlight how AI will affect the Latinos community in the United States and displace workers.
The National Center for Farmworker Health, Inc. reports 71% of farmworkers are from Latin America, 68% comprising of workers born in Mexico. This demonstrates that Latinos represent the majority of farmworkers, thus will be affected by displacement the most.
We need to ensure our community is aware of this challenge in order to provide a better path forward.
Trend 4: Startups that Augment human potential
Verge Genomics augments human potential by using machine learning to process genetic information and discover the best treatment for each disease.
Trend 5: Startups that scale AI infrastructure
Mythic allows every device to become “intelligent”.
Xuezhao’s vision for AI and where it is heading is
“for every individual and business to have real-time access to the highest quality products and services at the lowest prices.”
She also had a strong ending to her presentation evoking a call to action to help you determine your unfair advantage.
What’s your unfair advantage?
- Proximity to customers
- Availability of top technical and sales talents
- Availability of capital
- Understanding of technology and the local ecosystem
- Local government and tax incentives (e.g. opportunity zones)
LATAM Startups
Given SoftBank’s recent launch of a $5B investment fund in LATAM where “VC funding more than doubled in 2017 to $1.14 billion compared to $500 million in 2016.”
I also want to give some shoutouts to the LATAM startups I was able to meet.
BLUY is a logistics platform and network that provides last mile on demand parcel delivery for omni-channel commerce by connecting companies with self-employed couriers on a per-transaction basis. Retail e-commerce sales in Latin America are expected to increase from $54B to $74B between 2018 and 2020.
Based in Montevideo, Uruguay the company is led by Jonathan Donzet, a software engineer with previous work with BBVA.
TuGerente (formally Netbits)is an Admin and Finance Software for Latin American SMEs. In Spanish “Tu Gerente” translates to “Your Manager.”
In 2017, this startup won the Seedstars Santa Cruz competition to be recognized as the best startup in Bolivia, in addition, this past November they were selected by Startup Chile (№1 accelerator in Latin America) to take part in their 6-month accelerator program.
Lastly, a huge thanks to the Kapor Center for providing me a complimentary ticket. Startup Grind was a gratifying experience! Please do check out their events in the future.
Thank you for reading! Comments and feedback are always appreciated!
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