Lewis – Jacopo – From PHd to Building a Data StartUp

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

In this week’s insightful and amusing episode, Lewis Adams-Dunstan speaks to the brilliant Jacopo Tagliabue about his experiences of building a successful data start-up business, covering:
✅ An overview of Jacopo’s journey from Ph.D. to starting and leading several AI start-ups.
✅ From a dream to reality – How to turn ideas into realistic and profitable opportunities.
✅ How to secure funding.
✅ Being acquired – What this means for the founders and their employees.
✅ Advice/best practices for entrepreneurs who are looking to build an AI Start-up.
If you’re looking to take the leap then you don’t want to miss this episode!

Transcription:

Lewis: So today we are actually going be talking about building an AI startup which Jacopo is no stranger to. Some of the topics that we’re going to be covering in this discussion are essentially back on Jacopo’s journey from his Ph.D. to leading several AI startups from dream to reality. So how to turn ideas into realistic and profitable opportunities, how to secure funding and being acquired, what that means for the founders and employers. And then finally, we’re going to hopefully go through some advice and best practices for entrepreneurs looking to build an AI startup. So, I know, at least I believe you’ve told this story a few times, certainly about the acquisition period that you went through. But I actually want to kind of go back a little bit further than that, really just talk about your journey as someone who entered the world of technology to AI and then finally found yourself co-founding a business that was acquired and running very successfully since.

Jacopo: Sure. So maybe a bit of context for those of you who are not familiar with Tooso, which was to be the startup I co-founded. It’s not like Uber so most people will need some kind of context. So Tooso was an AI &NLP startup in San Francisco, founded by three Italian guys, all of those with the very, long last names that are hard to pronounce, but mine is by far the hardest, unfortunately. So we at the time I was in New York, Ciro was in Belgium, Mattia was in Germany. So we got our first investor in Silicon Valley, but I’m going to talk about investment later. Now just the story, so we got our first investment in San Francisco. So we all moved to San Francisco, in the house together in the suburbs. You know what we could afford with our investment and we lived together for three years and a half, much like in the movie, you know, and so we lived together, we actually had the garage, so we started building this AI startup which focused on providing retailers with good NLP & AI technology but we wanted to go to the entire pitch but the idea is that if you go on Amazon, you’re going to get like a super nice experience. But Amazon has a lot of data and there’s a lot of good tech and good people doing that. If you’re a medium to big retailer, but not on the scale of a billion dollars like Amazon. How do you compete? Our entire startup was basically founded on the idea that we had some secret sauce and some idea on how to make your experience Amazon-like without the money, the data, and the tech that Amazon has, so we kind of provide Amazon experience as a service for a bunch of retailers.

Flash forward two years and then we got acquired by Coveo, which is like a Canadian Unicorn that is basically doing the same thing but on a much bigger scale. So search recommendation and AI services for a variety of industries, including retailers. So that is the story ark. So back to the beginning. It seems to be what interests you the most, so I always wanted to have my own thing for as long as I can remember. When I was back in Italy, doing my Ph.D. I always thought funding a company would be something that will satisfy me as a person, as my inspiration. Finally, our company is indeed a very satisfying thing, but it’s something that you deeply need to want, it cost a lot of sacrifices and it’s a very long and painful and tiresome journey, and so first, you need to really want it because nothing is going to be given to you. And second, choose your travel companions very wisely, because at the end of the day, especially for most small startups, especially in the first few years, what is going to determine your success is a lot of stuff, but on a personal level is basically the people you’re working you’re working into this adventure with. So when we started, we kind of have this idea, the two original founders, on applying our knowledge of study in ontology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and linguist. So applying all of this to change search was 2016. And the idea, much before the recent NLP explosion of the pre-trained model. It was early deep learning days for NLP, put it this way. And so our idea was, how do we put all these ideas and knowledge that we have to solve the search in a different way? Because, sure, Google works well, but then Google couldn’t do anything like the last three movies by Sofia Coppola right?