HTBV Podcast: How Guan Dian built a Tech Unicorn from Ground up to address the Trillion-dollar R&D market
To celebrate International Women’s Day 2024, and part of our annual Vertex Female Leader Series, we are sharing beautiful, untold stories of our female leaders overcoming the odds and obstacles to build businesses that are disruptive, yet transformative to the lives of many. Today we are proud to feature Guan Dian.
Watch/ Listen to the episode on
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/hard-truths-by-vertex/id1659392336?i=1000645954385
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3q-7eMV34&feature=youtu.be
Who we are
Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India is a pioneer in investing in tech start-ups in this region and has helped to build a number of unicorns. In this podcast, we want to share and uncover Hard Truths — raw, unfiltered insights and venture capital experience across Southeast Asia & India. Tune in to hear from leading founders, innovators, venture capitalists and industry experts in the region and to gain industry insights from those in the know.
In this Episode
Imagine building a global tech powerhouse from scratch. That’s the story of Guan Dian, cofounder, CMO and APAC GM of Patsnap, a pioneer in AI-powered patent search and analytics. From humble beginnings in China to leading a global tech team, Guan Dian’s story is one of resilience, innovation, and a relentless pursuit of excellence.
See how Guan Dian transformed Patsnap from a small startup into a dominant force in the tech industry through her visionary leadership and strategic partnerships. Discover how she navigated cutthroat competition, industry disruption, and even global pandemics to propel Patsnap to success.
00:00 | Introduction
02:26 | What is Guan Dian’s role in Patsnap?
04:39 | Why did Dian leave her “cushy job” to join a startup?
09:08 | What have been some remarkable challenges in the journey?
13:23 | How Dian realized that she has been pitching to the wrong people
18:23 | Advice for female founders
21:54 | Showing resilience at the face of adversity
25:21 | What were some sacrifices Dian had to make along the way?
27:50 | How did Patsnap meet Vertex?
31:39 | How has Patsnap incorporated AI into their system?
42:12 | Future of Patsnap
Our Guest, Guan Dian’s Bio:
Guan Dian is the cofounder, CMO, APAC GM of Patsnap — a leading provider of research and development (R&D) analytics with AI-powered technology and machine learning. The company has grown from a small four-person operation to international prominence in the highly competitive field of patent analytics. Today Patsnap enables more than 12,000 customers in more than 50 countries to access market, technology, and competitive intelligence as well as patent insights to take products from ideation to commercialization. In her current role at Patsnap, Guan leads the company’s Asia Pacific business.
Guan has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry. Guan started their career as a software engineer at MooWee.
Guan Dian has a background in management science and engineering from Stanford University, and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Management Information Systems from the National University of Singapore. She was part of the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia and 2021 Tatler’s Asia’s Most Influential.
Elise: Hi, I’m Elise Tan, and I’m your host for this episode of Hard Truths by Vertex podcast. Today, I’m excited to be speaking with Guan Dian. Guan Dian is the co founder, chief marketing officer, and APAC GM at Patsnap. Patsnap is a leading provider of research and development analytics with AI powered technology and machine learning. The company grew from a small four person operation to international prominence in the highly competitive field of patent analytics. Today, Patsnap enables more than 12, 000 customers across more than 50 countries to be able to access market technology and competitive intelligence, as well as patent insights to take products from ideation to commercialization. Guan Dian has over a decade of experience in the tech industry. She started her career as a software engineer at MooWee, and then moved over to Patsnap. Right now, she leads the company’s Asia Pacific business. Guan Dian has a background in management science and engineering from Stanford University, and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Management Information Systems from the National University of Singapore.
She was part of the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia and 2021 Tatler’s Asia’s Most Influential. So let me now welcome Guan Dian to the show. Hi, Guan Dian. It’s so nice to have you on the show. How are you?
Guan Dian: Hi, Elise. Thanks for having me. I’m doing well, doing well. Happy to be on the show.
Elise: Yeah, what have you been up to recently?
Guan Dian: Well, I just relocated back to Singapore with my family. So, lived in China for 14 years, ever since I joined Patsnap. And now, moving back.
Elise: Great. you know, I think it’s been such a great journey hearing and also following the journey of how Patsnap has grown over the last, you know, 15 years. So maybe we can start off soon with a simple question, you know, what is your role at Patsnap that can share with us?
What is Guan Dian’s role in Patsnap?
Guan Dian: Okay. My role kind of changes over time as a co-founder, you kind of do what’s needed at that time for the company. So, uh, when I first joined Patsnap, I was in charge of building up the China commercial operations.
So being the first salesperson, hiring the first salesperson, building up sales, marketing, customer success. So anything that’s to do with commercial. And right now, my new role from this year onwards is general manager for Asia Pacific. So my focus will be growing the marketing Asia Pacific outside of China.
So including Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia. And I’m also wearing the hat of the chief marketing officer for our global team. We need to have a comprehensive, cohesive message of marketing. So I’m also playing the role there.
Elise: Yeah, I can’t agree more that marketing is about having that cohesive message so that you can, you make sure that your audience hears it again and again, and that builds trust. So is that your new role as an APAC GM that brings you back to Singapore?
Guan Dian: Yes. Yes. That is one of the reasons. And also, we realized that we passed up being a Singapore company because in the last 15 years we were spending so much of our time outside of Singapore, growing the U. S. market, Europe market, China market, we’re not very well known locally, unfortunately, so we thought, okay, it is the time that the Singapore government is investing in deep tech, investing in AI, recently they launched this national AI strategy 2.0.
There’s a lot of exciting things going on, we really want to spend more time here, so working closely with the local innovation community, um, contribute in whatever way that we can, um, yeah, making ourselves more known, more active in the local community.
Elise: Yeah. Good to know that, you know, we’re building this innovation, deep tech ecosystem in Singapore.
Guan Dian: Yes.
Elise: I was so very curious about, you know, how did you get to know Patsnap? Just tell us about your journey.
Why did Dian leave her “cushy job” to join a startup?
Guan Dian: Okay. I think this, this was more than 14 years ago. We went to this NUS overseas college, short for NOC, I think many of us will agree that it is a life changing experience for us as undergrads, we were sent to one of the most entrepreneurial areas in the world.
So I went to Silicon Valley for a year. During that one year. I would say there was a seed deeply planted in my brain to say that, okay, one day I want to either run the startup or join a very early startup and grow with a company.
And when I came back to Singapore in my final year, like any final year student, you take on internships and in banks in consulting firms. That’s what I did. So I did an internship at Credit Suisse, trying to experience how it is like working in the financial industry.
But I know deep down. I want to work in a smaller company, want to work in a startup, and hopefully a global startup with a global ambition. So that’s when I met Jeff through a mutual friend, also from NOC.
We met up for three hours. During the three hours was pretty much Jeffrey teaching me what is Patsnap about. I think at that point he was still trying to build a prototype, the first prototype of the product with a very small grant from NUS. And the day after he invited me to join some presentation.
To our school mentors and after that, I decided, okay, this sounds like an exciting opportunity. And this is exactly what I want. No funding, no ready product, not sure where the customers are and struggling and working in the container, like the equivalent of garage for Singapore standard. This is actually what I wanted to do.
So I raised my hand and joined Jeffrey and has been working in Patsnap for the last 14, 15 years.
Elise: Amazing. I was in a podcast recording with a colleague. So she was saying that really the best time to start a business is in your twenties because you are young, have energy, you have nothing to lose. And I guess that time. without kind of the burden of, you know, the real world, you might be more creative as well at solving problems.
Guan Dian: Exactly. Exactly. I think especially as a woman, when you’re in your twenties, when you don’t have any family obligation, you don’t have children. That’s the time where you can really be like all in and don’t have to worry about anything else at work so you can put in the hours and really give your best, with nothing to lose. So I would suggest the same thing. Start early if you want to start up something.
Elise: Yeah, that’s a good point. And that also brings me to share that this is part of our International Women’s Day series. So every year, we have this female founders, Vertex female founders series, where we hope to be able to, you know, share insights, share great tips, hard truths, advice from our female founders who has been through such an You know, enduring journey. So really nice to be hearing this from you.
Guan Dian: Sure.
Elise: So, you know, Patsnap has really grown a lot in the last 14, 15 years. I was just reading, you know, the phenomenal achievement that you have done.
I think 186 million patents and am I right?
Guan Dian: Yes, you got it right.
Elise: So some of these patents are dating back to even the 1800s. Patsnap is operating across 170 jurisdictions across six markets, which includes Singapore, obviously, but UK, US, Canada, Japan, China, and now they employ over 800 people.
Guan Dian: 1, 200 Patsnappers globally.
Elise: Great. And then and some of the users include the famous vacuum maker, Dyson, as well as SZ DJI, the world, one of the world’s largest drone makers. So it’s really phenomenal. And I just want to ask you, were there any memorable challenges that you’ve faced?
What have been some remarkable challenges in the journey?
Guan Dian: Oh, always always. There’s challenge at every phase of the company. During the journey of growing Patsnap, there are a few periods of time where we really struggled.
I think at the beginning, it’s always difficult. We are in a B2B enterprise space. So, compared to B to C, in a B2B space, in general, it’s harder. It takes a longer time to build a product that meets the product market fit. Essentially, we ourselves are not the users. If you’re building something like WeChat, you are the user.
In Patsnap’s case, it’s those CTOs, R&D engineers, the intellectual property professionals like lawyers or the IP researchers. Those are people who have many years training in their domain, have deep domain knowledge, so it’s really difficult for someone like us coming from outside of the industry, trying to understand what’s their daily work like and trying to build a product that’s useful for them. And on top of that is a B to B business in the information service space, meaning that our entire software is built on top of piles of data. We are not a workflow software, we are an information service, all this data, like you just mentioned, all these global patents from 170 different countries and all the related information, such as the. The litigation, the citation relationship. scientific journals and papers, court cases, also like technology investment merger acquisitions.
So all this data takes a lot of time and also the know-how to acquire, to clean, to process and to make it useful to users. So we have like kind of two layers of difficulty at the beginning. We had not much experience in this industry and back though, back in those days, Singapore’s, early venture funding scene was not as active as it is today.
So there were basically no funding sources, unlike if you started something in Silicon Valley, there were more options. So, lack of funding and very high barrier to entry took us a long time. I think around five years until we hit the first product market fit. We have the MVP that satisfies a small group of customers’ needs.
So that was really. I think some of the struggles you can imagine during the early, early years. So obviously we spend very little money and we pay ourselves very little salary and the four of the co-founders, we were living in a small, tiny apartment in Suzhou. And during the day we worked together until midnight, we go eat some street side barbecue and we rode our second-hand scooter back to the home that we shared and the next day.
Things going on continue again. So I think those were the difficult times at the beginning, but also were fond memories.
Elise: I mean, we also had the privilege of having your co-founder Jeffrey at an event at Vertex. So it was called Hard Questions with Jeffrey Tiong. Yeah, he shared about what you mentioned, you know, the hard journey that you all have gone through. He even, you know, shared the famous story of turning off the heater in the very cold winter in China.
And now you mentioned about how you have really gone through five years of trying to find a product market fit. And I, I don’t have words for that because it sounds really incredibly patient because in today’s world, right. We all want instant results. We want the cash to come in, but, it doesn’t work that way.
I read that in the beginning, you guys were thinking about legal team being the payer, right? But along the way, something happened, tell us a bit about that.
How Dian realized that she has been pitching to the wrong people
Guan Dian: Oh, yeah, that was an interesting story. Right now, if you look at Patsnap portfolio, we have multiple product targeting at IP professionals and R&D but back then we only had one product, which was a global patent search analytics platform, mostly targeted for the intellectual property professionals.
So naturally, we will look for those people to try to make a pitch and try to make a sale. So, me being the first salesperson leading a small team in China, literally was knocking on the door on any company. Traveling 2 hours by bus to try to get them interested in our product and the result was there’s not much sales done. And one thing happened one day. It’s one of these major semiconductor company’s IP manager and he wanted to help us by the third time or fourth time. I visited him. He’s like Okay, I need to be honest with you. I don’t have the budget. Back then having no corporate training, I was like, okay, there’s such a thing called a budget. You can’t just buy, right? Okay, so then you don’t control the budget,then who controls the budget, who has the decision making? He said, okay, it is the decision of my CTO. So if my CTO is convinced. It’s easy. So he told me that his CTO is a very well known guy, 50-year-old. They hired him from Silicon Valley back to run this company. And every Friday afternoon of, the last Friday afternoon of every month, this guy will host a meeting for all the senior VPs of engineering, or business units of that company. He said, I will try to get you a slot in that meeting, you can present to him and then it’s up to him to decide. So on the day, on the Friday, I went in, it’s a room full of like 40-, 50-year-old male or engineers.
So I did a 15-minute pitch. Of course that was well prepared. And I remember seeing the CTO’s eyes really widened when he saw me demoing past that product, and I was able to demonstrate that we could trace all his personal inventions all the way back to the days when he was in university.
He was really impressed. So after the 15-minute speech, he went outside of the room, right, the IP guy just called me say, okay, our CTO said, yes, we can buy your product. Then I was like, Oh, okay. So, it is not the IP people controlling the budget, it is the bigger guy, like his boss’ boss’ boss, that has to say what to the intellectual property department, which looks like a big budget, a lot of money to them, but to the CTO, it’s a tiny fraction of his total budget.
So that’s the moment I realized, okay, I’ve been knocking on the wrong door. I need to approach the senior people. So that’s when of course, we, we read about how to do sales because nobody taught us and realized, okay, there’s such thing called you have to validate who’s the decision maker, what’s the budget, what’s the decision-making process, we had no clue before that[1] [2] we have to go after the R& D people.
Elise: Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of, you know, thoughts when you share your story,, one is definitely, you know, sometimes, success is really opportunity meets effort. You can see that you have put in so much effort to your presentation and, and also having three meetings with the team before you get your break.
Elise: So realizing that, you know, it should be the R&D team that you should go after how long, has it been since the beginning of the search?
Guan Dian: Yeah, so Patsnap was founded in 2007 by Jeff (Jeffrey Tiong) and around 2012, so five years later, we found the first MVP. And this event I just shared happened in 2013. So that was like roughly around one year of training, trying and hitting the wall again and again. And then you realize, okay. I was hitting, I was doing the wrong, going the wrong direction.
Elise: Yeah, but kudos to you guys. You know, you, you guys never gave up. In one of our previous episodes, we had Joseph Phua, who is the co-founder of 17LIVE. So he also says that, you know, you never actually fail unless you stop right? Unless you give up. Yeah. So, so I think yours is really a good and positive example, which is really nice.[3] [4]
Elise: I also want to switch gears a little bit. So this year, our theme is that of a resilience and clearly, you do display so much resilience, you know, through your time at Patsnap. Do you want to maybe share some advice for a female founder at this point?
Advice for female founders
Guan Dian: Yeah, if we have no strength, resilience is the only virtue of the Patsnap team. Definitely. We can claim credit for resilience.
But I would say some of the challenges in early years, whether you’re a male or female, the difficulty is to build trust.
With the stakeholders, whether it’s customers, investors, or business partners, when you do not have a track record. It’s extremely difficult and I would understand if I were in their shoes. So it’s completely normal that they didn’t start by trusting me. So that means as a young professional, as a young entrepreneur, we have to work harder to earn that trust, which means by doing more homework before you meet them, doing better preparation and being humble and deliver on what you’re promised and slowly building. Trust building on your own credibility.
I would suggest to young professionals, whether women or men, I guess for women, it’s, you have to even try harder.
Because, on top of your lack of skill set, there could be other obligations as women, as a future mother, you have to take responsibility for. And for girls, especially, back to the earlier suggestion, start early. Because I, in my, 20s or even early 30s. I feel that I had no personal life, really like no social life Sometimes I reflect back.
It’s like I don’t even keep in touch with my friends at all because every day it’s working, working, working and from morning to evening and Saturdays and Sundays.
So I think when you were in twenties with no family obligations, all this is tough, but it can be done. Once you have your own family, so I had my first child in 2022. He’s 15 months old. So thank you. So last year is the first time I really feel that. This so called very cliche saying of women have to balance work and life.
It was really true. Really. It’s really hard to balance. Because you, I remember I had to go on a business trips to the UK, to the US. for 10 days and leaving my child at home. I felt very, very guilty. And I really want to be with him. But when I’m being with him and I couldn’t attend some of the business meetings, I feel guilty that I couldn’t deliver on the business part.
So it was a constant struggle. So again, do that early while you don’t have all these obligations. And when you come to the time where you have these obligations, hopefully you already kind of build up a supporting structure that can help you at work. Your colleagues can help you, can back you up and at home, you have your partner, parents or nannies, all this your own small team at home to support you while you’re away from home.
Elise: So going back to the theme of resilience, you know, I also want to ask you if there’s any memorable experience of you, overcome adversity and being able to bounce. Could you share a story?
Showing resilience at the face of adversity
Guan Dian: Well, as a team, Patsnap went through a lot of challenging times when at each of those point of time, we could have given up. For example, in 2011, we had to let go 80 percent of our staff back then. Back then we had like 40, 50 people and only kept 10 people and for the 10 people who, who are still with us, we have to cut the salary starting from us and communicate with employees, to sustain.
Um, so that was really difficult time because you didn’t know how long you would last. And we didn’t know where to raise the next round of money. And, it seems that it’s endless product development life cycle. So that was quite, quite difficult, but I guess in those tough times, you just have to bite the bullet and keep going and also those kind of difficulty, lacking of resources forced us to be hyper focused. I think at the beginning, we were trying to build a product that satisfied many user needs. I clearly remembered when we really have maybe 6 months or even shorter runway. We have to decide.
Okay. We, if we have to just focus on 1 group of customers or 1 type of need, what would it be? So we’re very, very specific on. Okay. Out of all the potential prospects, this tiny group of prospects– if we managed to deliver 1, 2, 3, they will probably buy our product. So we’re very, very focused. Like today, Patsnap have, patent documents from 180 countries. Back then we narrowed down to saying that if we can deliver the patents with a high accuracy from five major countries that can satisfy this tiny group of needs. So we’re focusing on just getting the five countries’ data that is really high quality. And we managed to do that, managed to prove the product market fit and made some revenue. And then one customer after another and slowly see a trajectory.
So that’s just one example. There were many other examples as well.
Elise: Yeah, I’m very sure. And before our episode, I also chatted with Roshni, who is the founder of The Parentinc, previously known as theAsianparent. So she also highlighted that, you know, for like two things. So, so one ismothers, you know, females, like we only really started working full time, you know, as a gender 50 years ago, and there’s really no, not much playbook in terms of how to deal with life, how to manage both work and family.
And then on top of that, you know, you, you started a tech business 15 years ago, where there’s really no playbook for a Singapore headquartered tech
business that is taking on the world. So, you know, it’s really like doubly hard, right? Inventing and going along, building the two playbooks yourself.
Were there sacrifices that you made along the way?
What were some sacrifices Dian had to make along the way?
Guan Dian: I think this going back to the NOC days, we, we, I think both Jeff and I throughout this program, it was so clear to us that we want to be entrepreneurial in the technology space and make an impact to the world. My internship at the bank made me realize that working in a giant organization like that couldn’t make an impact that I want.
So we, we knew that. we were choosing, we’re doing something that we always wanted. So back then it didn’t feel like we were making sacrifices because I think if you really feel you’re sacrificing, then you’ll be deeply unhappy.
But in retrospect, I think, me personally, the biggest sacrifice is first, like zero social life– every day’s work. like in your best, most fun years in your 20s, you had no social life. And the second thing is, um, also I think that stress, the long hours, caused some harm to the body.
But when I was in the 20s, I don’t feel it. If you’re like, okay, work overnight, you pull all nighter the next day. you’re, you’re, you got going again, but then when you hit 30s, some of these problems that accumulated came to hit me. So I was, I was one year, suddenly like had a lot of health problems come up altogether.
Yeah. Then I realized that, okay, this is a long journey. I have to work sustainably. I cannot just keep like withdrawing from my body without like deposit into it, so to speak. So I think in retrospect, it’s these two areas that I feel, as an individual, that was the biggest sacrifice.
Yeah, thanks
Elise: for sharing this. you know, your personal story.
Yeah, it’s a timely, reminder, right? That we have to also care for ourselves so that we can continue the race. Thanks for sharing, you know, so many hard truths for entrepreneurs and even, female entrepreneurs on the show. So I also want to then go back to kind of understanding the Vertex relationship as well. When did you meet Vertex?
How did Patsnap meet Vertex?
Guan Dian: Early 2014.
Elise: And how, how did the connection come about? Just curious about the story.
Guan Dian: Right. So our angel investor, Edmund Yong, helped set up a meeting with Vertex. I believe Edmund and Carmen used to work as colleagues in EDB investments.
So that’s how the connection happened.
Elise: I’m glad there was a connection. And definitely Vertex, we have been very proud to be supporting Patsnap over the years. Yeah. cause, in the interviews that you have done publicly,
So one of the things that you said was it’s so important to get the right partner, the right investors on your board, in your company, so share a bit about your relationship with Vertex.
Guan Dian: Yeah, I think we’re very fortunate to have Vertex on our board. We have been in this partnership for almost 10 years now. We read stories about what happened in Silicon Valley, right? When you have a bad board member, very aggressive person on the board, when things go south, it could be really detrimental to the company. So we were quite nervous as early stage entrepreneurs when it comes to who we want to bring in as the investor because we heard all the horror stories.
But the relationship with the Vertex has always been great from the beginning. I think the team, they are very professional, also very friendly, very personable. So whether it’s Kee Lock or Carmen or some of the early members, the relationship has developed beyond investor and company relationship.
There is a personal relationship, between us and the Vertex team. When we’re living in China and we catch up, there’s always strategizing about new ideas and every meeting like Kee Lock will follow up by introducing us to some relevant people.
And when we come, when the time came, during our series C fundraising, I remember Vertex team was pretty much did all the introductions to all the subsequent rounds of venture capitalist — Sequoia, Shun Wei (Capital) and a bunch of others. So very quickly for us to be able to enter the door of these famous VCs and present ourselves.
So, yeah, in many ways, Vertex team was super helpful, super kind people. So we really appreciate this relationship with them.
Elise: That’s really good to hear. Yeah, for us, we think that is so fulfilling to be able to bring not just capital, but also value to our founders in terms of whether it’s opening doors to investors or partners, or, or just, you know, being a sounding board to, to the founders. Yeah. So it’s definitely, you know, hearing from Joo Hock and Carmen, it’s been a really satisfying journey. And, and I also want to touch on a very, you know, popular topic, which is artificial intelligence, because I think that before AI catches fire, Patsnap has already been deploying AI, right? So I read about how your team would for example, come across a publication by someone, and then, When they come across another one with similar or same name, they would use AI to see if it was the same person (who published it).
So I think that also provides a lot of value to your users. So, just ask more about, you know, how have you been using AI and I heard there is also a new cool product that you just launched.
How has PatSnap incorporated AI into their system?
Guan Dian: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. As early as even like 2015, 2016, we were developing things, in, in terms of like computer vision or natural language processing.
So because patent documents or scientific journal papers are very heavy with text, and it’s very meaningful if the machine could understand the meaning of certain text in our industry. So we’re developing a lot of tools to enable users to have a faster, smarter way of looking for information. So some examples are like, we use computer vision to develop an image search tool. If I am a designer in the automobile space, I have a drawing. I have an idea. I have a drawing. They can upload the drawing and our system will search across all the hundred, 80 million patent documents globally dated all the way back to the 18th century and return the patents that have the similar looking image and design. So this significantly shortens the time for the users to find the information.
We also develop this semantic search capability where in the old times, users have to write very complicated Boolean queries with wild cards with all this computer jargon in order to find the exact information. But with a semantic search, we allow users to just input a paragraph of description of technology description in their own words.
And the system will be able to understand what’s the intention, what the user is trying to look for. And we will help return the results very quickly and we even benchmark these results with some of the professionally search results. For example, searches done by patent examiners from the various patent offices and the match rate is very, very high.
So it means that as an inventor. Because my invention eventually has to go to the patent examiners for them to check whether it’s new, whether it’s novel. So that saves me a lot of time. Also, saving time to companies means shorten the time to go to market in hyper competitive world, everybody’s like rushing to push the new product to the market the fastest.
So those were the last generation of AI, which we started building in 2015, 2016, which has really benefited our users significantly. And recently with a generative AI with chat GPT, we were also one of the first in the industry in very quickly embracing it. Even in 2023, when the general capital markets was very much emphasizing on improving productivity, controlling cost, we still managed to shift some of our budget to developing our own large language model. So we’re the first one that came out with a large language model, developed, trained, by Patsnap team instead of using some of the open source, instead of using some of the commercial ones, the outside ones.
So our users will enjoy a high level of security because all what’s searching would not go to chat GPT, will not go to Anthropic, for example. So they’ll stay within the Patsnap system. So we recently launched it, actually just last week, our own Patsnap Copilot.
We’ll have like a chat bot so the customers can just can interact with the chatbot to ask questions such as “please summarize for me the key technology benefits of this particular page that I’m looking at.”
So within seconds, the bot can summarize a hundred page long patent document and tell the user that these are the key benefits of this technology. And how is it different from the rest of the technology. And also they can ask some generic patent IP related questions. And also with this, a new generative AI, we allow users to quickly generate technology reports, or we call invention disclosure, which used to take them like week to right now, take them a second.
So we’re very excited about this new wave of generated AI. Yeah, and we will have a throughout this year, we’ll have a few major product launches.
Be very happy to share with you guys when it’s out.
Elise: Yeah, sounds good. And, you know, as you share, throughout the podcast, it’s very clear to me that one of the values of Patsnap is definitely customer centricity. I love how, you know, you have invented the technologies to be able to serve them better. And especially now with the Copilot. So yeah, it is really remarkable.
Guan Dian: Yeah. Yeah. Customer centricity is. It’s written in our company values. This is number one. And I know a lot of companies talk about it, but for us, we really think it’s super, super critical for Patsnap survival.
So, Jeffrey nowadays still goes on to meet customers every month. You’ll visit a dozen of customer every month, wherever he travels to and come back sharing the stories and all the senior leaders are required to visit customers. So you have to stay close to the customers in order to know what they want.
Again, we are not the users of our product. They are the professionals. We have to learn from them. This is really, really critical. And. Technology is in the blood of Patsnap. I think we have a good the founding team, we have Markus, our CTO. He’s a very much a techie and Jeffrey loves technology.
And we all come from engineering, computing background. So from day one, it’s always to think of ways how we can leverage technology to solve the problem rather than how to leverage professional human beings to solve the problem. So that’s what differentiate Patsnap that from some of the incumbents as well.
Elise: It’s definitely very visionary. As I think back our conversation, we do talk about quite a bit o you know, stories that went well. Was there a time where it, you know, just being curious, you actually maybe gave the wrong information to your customer? Or like, you know, your AI hallucinated?
Guan Dian: Not really. Yeah, hallucination because we, again, unlike the general large language model, this largest language model we develop is trained based on real patent data. So everything is traced back to the source. So we don’t have the problem of hallucination. In terms of, I think in terms of disappointing users with bad search results or bad product experience.
I think, yes, we always had that, not so much in recent years. I think more in the early years when we’re still trying to perfecting the product. So sometimes we did have to put in some manual hours. to compensate. I do remember that some of the early customers, they gave us their trust by subscribing to our product and the product failed to deliver.
We have to even pay money to hire some outside professional searchers and to help them finish their work. I do remember receiving calls from customers to say that we trusted you, so we buy this product, but now it’s not working. What do we do? I was like, okay, we will, we will do. everything we can to, to help you, right, to deliver our promise.
Elise: But I think the central thing that you, you guys have chosen to take on is being trustworthy, you know, being committed to delivering the solution that you promise.
And I think oftentimes customers would overlook the, you know, the kind of issue that comes up because as long as you really help them to solve it in time. Yeah. So, so there’s absolutely agree with you. Yeah. Like when we kind of have screwed up, we were nervous, but then it turns out that customers can be quite forgiving if you are transparent, honest, and you are genuine. So, I absolutely agree with what you just said.
Elise: So we are coming towards the end of our conversation. I just want to take the opportunity to ask you if you have any hard truths, advice to share with you know, someone listening to this show before we end.
Guan Dian: maybe can share something from my personal perspective. Sometimes we (females) kind of, I, I kind of had doubt in myself. But then I managed to overcome some challenges and managed to deliver and even surprised myself.
And over the time, the confident was built up. And also, maybe this is a female thing, or maybe it’s a personal thing is that throughout all these challenges. Sometimes you get really emotional because you care so much about it. You’re so vested so that you kind of emotionally very much impacted by those challenging situations, but in retrospect, life is short, and this is whether you’re being a investor or being an entrepreneur or being a banker, whatever you do, this is just part of your life’s journey. And there are many, many things in life that’s important. So we’ll still do the same things, the same decisions I made, but. I wish I could do it without that much emotional attachment.
So it could be more detached, kind of seeing yourself from a higher position. I think that way is more healthy.
Elise: Thanks for picking, picking up that topic right? Trying to have more confidence in ourselves and to overcome the doubts that we have. Yeah. So I think I mean, there are many ways to deal with this and the first thing comes with awareness. So, so, you know, thanks for bringing that up. Clearly, Patsnap, and your team is very visionary. So what is your vision for the future of Patsnap? How do you see the company evolving in the next few years?
Future of Patsnap
Guan Dian: Yeah. So the vision for Patsnap is we would like to, we would like to become the go to place for all R and D professionals. Just like if you are a professional finance in the finance industry, whether you’re an investor or your banker, the first thing you open the day is the Bloomberg terminal.
So we want to be called the Bloomberg terminal for R and D engineers from all the way from giving them the inspiration for ideation to managing their innovative projects to collaborating between the various department in the organization or monitoring the latest technology trend. So all those junctures, all these critical points where the user needs to source for relevant information, trying to make a decision or trying to collaborate, working with others around the innovative technology development project that this user is working on. We hope to be the go to place for them.
Elise: Yeah, makes sense. And I’m sure, you know one day you’ll be able to achieve that given the kind of grit.
Guan Dian: Thank you. We barely scratched the surface.
Elise: And with this, you know, I come to the end of our conversation and I really want to thank you for taking the time.
Guan Dian: Thank you.
Elise: And really, you know, I, I enjoy hearing the stories that you shared. Thank you.
At Vertex Ventures SE Asia and India, we pride ourselves as being a leader in gender-equal investing in Southeast Asia. We will continue to strive to be gender neutral in all that we do, and to open doors and empower founders, whether they be male or female, to reach their own vertex — the highest point of a journey, of achievements and of stars. If you are a female founder or a cofounder, do reach out to us at www.vertexventures.sg/apply.
