Tag Archives: AI

Making The Cake Bigger: Q&A, Jeff Green, Founder 

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Welcome to Mob76 Outlook and our readers, Jeff Green

No worries. Very happy to be here, thanks for the invitation.

We’ll go into your career later, but you’ve launched a new podcast?

Yes, Indeed. The Making The Cake Bigger podcast brings real people with different stories, backgrounds and experiences into the investment committee room.

This is an environment that includes all humans, not just those born in the right place at the right time and where the next founders of Google, Facebook or OpenAI will emerge.

Making The Cake Bigger is a podcast that sets out to solve the problem of how to get a broader diversity of people into both public and private organisations by harnessing a more diverse set of experiences to bring greater innovation and ingenuity.

We want to help solve the world’s problems by giving everybody a slice of the cake, not just the Fat Cats who have been eating too much for too long.

What are the current problems it is addressing?

It starts with educating and shining a light on inequality whether that be financial, health, sport, gender, race or social and how to raise the tide for all.

The investment sectors of private equity, hedge venture capital and government institutions must bring ‘different thinking’ talent into the investment committee rooms and will produce better innovation, better products for wider markets and bigger financial returns. 

We want to bring more financially disadvantaged people into the sector of responsible investing, changing the face of the investment committee room to people from the so-called wrong side of the tracks and not based on what school they attended or their parents’ network or wealth.

The next founder of SpaceX/Amazon/Meta/OpenAI/Google will come from unexpected places, ones that were previously excluded.  

 No small task, how do you plan on going to do this?

I am a very experienced angel investor and as a man of colour I am familiar with the issues faced as an immigrant over the last 50 years and starting at the bottom of the career ladder. 

I had to do it the hard way, but I’m now in a position to give back. The podcast is the figurehead of my foundation and the mission is simple. More education of opportunities and access to those opportunities in a fair, transparent and scalable way.

So you focus on diversity essentially?

I’m not a great fan of that word, I think it’s over-used. While diversity has become the buzzword for bringing all types of people into the working world, it is more than that. 

While it is easier now for people of all backgrounds to be embraced by working practices and employment, there is still a huge lack of financial equality in spite of diversity improvements and too many are currently not part of the decision-making process. 

In the world of investing, more women founders from the emerging world seeking investment, are asked more negative questions and often in lower margin, lower-risk businesses. We need to get better and fairer at helping more diverse founders being funded. 

We need to avoid Groupthink; that is the mission here. The old boys’ network is dead. The decision-makers and changemakers of the new world are coming from different places that are not incestuous, familiar and same. The old model is no longer fit for purpose; the world has moved on.

So what do you think constitutes fairness and success?

There is an emerging body of research looking at what determines success, the role of luck and circumstances, and how this is linked to inequality and equality of opportunity.

This is very much a ‘live’ and emerging area as researchers develop new techniques and access to a greater number of data sources and is likely to be significant in terms of our understanding of ‘what works’ to improve ‘fairness’ or greater equity at a societal level.

Moreover, most researchers and social scientists agree that policy matters in terms of inequality – it is always a political choice with policy design significantly influencing the scale and nature of inequality.

It’s a tricky subject that we’re addressing.In terms of tackling inequality the simplistic ideological gap is between a ‘functional’ or individualist approach and a conflict or collectivist approach but there is no one ‘theory’ that all sociologists are willing to agree on.

You’ve had more than five decades in investment. So this experience is crucial in making the cake bigger?

I’m an angel investor who has made a lot of investments across a multitude of sectors, but like the podcast, I’m focusing on providing a bigger slice for everybody, not just the elite.

Even with such an unlevel playing field, there are some wonderful exceptions of entrepreneurs and individuals overcoming adversity. They are triumphed on the podcast and I can feel the landscape changing as innovation, access, and AI technology levels that playing field.

The world needs people who think differently and Making The Cake Bigger is about giving them the opportunity and education.

That’s inspirational, Jeff, thanks for sharing your story with our readers

My pleasure, we all have to work a bit harder now to create a better world for everybody… and to do something about it, not just talking.

Redecentralisation – Wandhofer and Nakib – BOOK REVIEW

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Redecentralisation
Redecentralisation is not a word that rolls off the tongue. It sounds like a buzzword that has been mangled by business speak, but after reading Redecentralisation – Building The Digital Financial Ecosystem, it will make sense to those who are disciplined enough to read through it.

Co-written by technologists Ruth Wandhöfer and Hazem Danny Nakib, the book is a detailed guide to how finance works, how it used to work and how it’s going to work in the future.

The authors explain that early humans were naturally decentralised in small groups until evolution took over and humans embraced centralisation to be safe.

The financial world we live in now is going back to a looser, more individual experience and systems will reflect this.

I enjoyed this immensely. I wasn’t aware of the term redecentralisation, but from the first paragraph I knew I was in the hands of two experts. It brings together past, present and future financial systems and explains how Web3, blockchain, crypto and AI are going to change everything.

While preaching to this reader as the converted, I learnt about how financial legacy systems work at the heart of global commerce and alien acronyms finally made sense. It made me think about how the metaverse will finally become part of our everyday lives and why crypto is not a fad and Bitcoin is a fascinating technology that defines blockchain and it’s verification of trust.

I also trusted the authors who have a deep understanding of how money works and why’s it’s now so important that people are ready for the disruption that the next force of technology change will bring.

I am now better prepared for the future; always a good sign from a business book, although that future may become extremely daunting for this who refuse to change their ideas. Recommended.

EasyTranslate Q&A: Frederik R. Pedersen, CEO

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easytranslate

Welcome to Mob76 Outlook, Frederik. Please tell us about EasyTranslate

Thanks for the invitation. We enable customers to create and translate quality content at half the price of any other service, by enabling generative AI and LLM technologies. As a result of generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, the translation industry is about to change forever.

We believe that combining AI-GC with ‘humans in the loop’ will enable businesses to create company-specific language models in any language. We won’t translate anymore, we will do ground-up content creation in any language.

We make complicated AI/LLM technologies accessible to everyone, so that customers can utilise the latest AI-technology hassle-free in their content process without any need of prompt-engineers or machine learning engineers.

This enables the customers of any size to communicate engaging content in any language in a single infrastructure that is scalable and future proof.

Wow, that’s a big change, you sound like you’re ahead of the curve

ChatGPT and other AI-GC models are the biggest hype since the start of the internet. Already, 100s of start-ups are getting built, but what it takes to add real and unique value to the customers is still not 100% clear.

Current models are still general in its wording and would need training for each customer to learn their language and by then create real value.

We have created one flow for all of a customers’ content, so they can make engaging content that is optimised towards SEO and we train on the human edits so they can stand out in this content-overload world.

Moreover, we’ve recently reached the finals of the LocWorld Process Innovation Challenge, a highly prestigious competition that awards the most innovative companies in the localisation industry. The winner will be unveiled in Malmo next month.

You recently raised your first funding for Easy Translate?

We decided that we wouldn’t go through the normal investment cycles and bootstrapped the company for a decade. However, as the industry was being fundamentally changed by generative AI products, we raised more than $3 million in January this year.

The funding coincides with the launch of an innovative integration of LLMs that provides automated content generation and translation services. The new funds create room for further development of the new functionality and add to the ambition of accelerating EasyTranslate’s organic growth. In addition, this strategic partnership enables EasyTranslate to grow its market share by realising strategic acquisitions.

We believe that training customer specific LLMs by including copywriters in the loop in any language enables a better and more localised content output which will increase customer engagement and improve organic search ranking.

By challenging the current state of translating content we will see a major shift in the industry towards generating content with trained LLMs within the customers tone of voice and question the need of translation in many marketing content aspects.

From the fine-tuning of GPT-engines, EasyTranslate is planning to build out their own infrastructure of mini-LLMs trained on customer level to reach better levels of accuracy and less hallucination than using OpenAI’s GPT4 out of the box.

What about the early days of the company?

EasyTranslate was founded in 2010 as an online translation agency. We were recognised as one of the fastest-growing companies in our industry in our first 6 years and the youngest company to enter the list of 100 biggest Language Service Providers.

The industry was facing major pressure on pricing as all language service providers sell words and have a mark-up on the freelancers.

In 2020 we decided to do a full pivoting of our market positioning and decided to build our current platform solution where we give away our marketplace of verified freelancers and seamless training of AI enabled in a software that streamlines all those content processes across platforms.

How long have you been in business?

We are a small Danish startup in Copenhagen. We serve customers from 21 different countries across three continents and our tech team is located in Skopje, Macedonia. We have more than 10 years’ experience in running marketplaces with a mission to make custom language accessible for everyone for free.

We will do this by enabling AI-GC training on the fly from the edits human copywriters are doing. These trained models can be used cross-service, which means they will also do foundation for customer specific machine translation when needed. Two birds, one stone.

We have taken all our knowledge from creating a quality marketplace for localisation and content creations in combination with AI-technologies. We will be the first company to support ‘out of the box’ AI/LLM learning from edits that creates customer-specific models in any language.

These models will work cross functionally, so that customers have the ability to increase quality in both AI-GC and machine translation. The technology will be tailored to create SEO content as well.

We grew our SaaS business by 250% from 2021 to 2022 and we are expecting to reach the same level of growth in 2023. We are handling more than 11,000 projects and more than six million words per month.

What is the problem EasyTranslate is solving?

Quality multilingual content at scale. We are creating more content than ever before. From 2020 to 2022 the global online content grew by more than 50% (33 zettabytes

It’s the closest to an infinitive amount of content as 1 zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terabytes. One terabyte is equal to 83 million pages. To stand out in the content overload, we have to create quality content that is worth engaging with and not ‘just content’.

Please walk us about the user experience

We have put our faith in a product-led growth strategy. This means, we are obsessed with the user experience from sign-up to creating the WOW moment. We provide our product as a Free/Freemium offering, so all users can expect to see value before they need to pay for our service.

We have around 300 company freemium signups monthly and they have the full self-service option to build their team of freelancers, integrate plug-ins to their CMS, PIM or directly to their Github repository to ensure the content flow runs smoothly and automatically without human interaction.

Customers can get started on a paid plan within our product without any interaction with sales reps. Starting price is 25 Euros per month for the annual subscription option.

We are educating customers about creating content in any language from ground up instead of translating content every time. One of the biggest challenges in the translation process is “garbage in, garbage out”.

The problem with low quality translation is often based on low quality source content. The end goal is to exit to an AI-GC or LSP, so we will need to make them aware and recognise that they need us to continue delivering value to their customers.

Why are you better than the other guys and who are your competitors? 

We are the only one combining the ‘Human in the loop seamlessly and at a cost price’ that enables the seamless build up of a custom AI that is future-sustainable and makes our product critical infrastructure for our customers.

Easytranslate is up against potential competitors for free/cheap Machine Translation such as Google Translate, DeepL, Microsoft translate or Language Service Providers including LanguageWire and TextMaster. Then there’s translation management software such as Lokalise, Crowdin and Phrase.

But more recently, our real competitors are major generative AI tools, such as  Jasper.ai.

Thanks, Frederik, it looks like great days are ahead for EasyTranslate. Prepare yourself for a trance of inbound from potential acquirers!

Thank you, Monty, a pleasure to have shared with your audience.

Q&A: 7BC Venture Capital Founders

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Andrew Romans and Hazem Danny Al Nakib are the co-founders of 7BC, a venture capital fund using he power of capital, network and technology to back teams disrupting industries and solving global problems toward a more connected, digitized and automated global economy.

7BC

7BC Co-Founder Hazem Danny Al Nakib is based in London.

Welcome to Mob76 Outlook, please tell our readers about 7BC

We were founded for a number of reasons. The first is that although digital transformation and the sharing economy has taken the world by storm over the past 20 years, it has been incredible at sharing, transferring and transmitting data and information, but not at transmitting and transferring value.

The second reason is that without targeted capital investments into innovations at a protocol level, standard, and infrastructure level that really aims at connecting systems, their resiliency, privacy, security, and capabilities and focusing far too much on applications, the entire objective of the model of what economies and industries will look like is ultimately lost.

The third is that we wanted to take a holistic approach across a broad and yet still focused mandate at a technological layer across AI, FinTech and software infrastructure – particularly within the financial sector where it has welcomed, in parts digital transformation, but is nascent when it comes to actual digitalisation where value itself has become digital.

Across all of this, it becomes clear that we are thinking about what global and local economies will turn into and our focus is on what underpins those futures that prioritise security, resilience and optimise efficiencies. We are interested in broader waves effective the use of data, implementations of digital identity, the creation of new asset classes, and the future models of connectivity.

7BC

7BC Co-Founder Andrew Romans is based in Silicon Valley.

Why is the fund called 7BC Venture Capital?

Our name 7BC Venture Capital signals our ability to assist and support our portfolio companies on all 7 continents of the world and experience a journey together with our network where after receiving our capital support they will travel the 7 seas and develop their business with our support on a global basis through expansion and growth.

The number seven suggests our international LP base and other business support networks and is also a lucky number which is important at early stage investing and entrepreneurship. BC stands for borderless continents and borderless capital while spanning many different technologies. We believe that AI, FinTech and software infrastructure will collectively usher in a new era for humankind. Our mission is to fund, develop and support the startups that create the foundation of this new era. The right teams, the right technology, the right capital, and the right business model.

Why are you focusing on AI, software infrastructure and FinTech?

There are disparate alternatives of what the future can look like. However, from a trend standpoint, we know that barriers to entry into the financial sector continue to lower as technology innovations come to the market. As such, the financial sector is becoming more integrated with other sectors and industries within the sharing economy, particularly around healthcare, travel, identity, hospitality and much more.

The second is that we view software infrastructure, and other forms of possibly decentralised technologies as the digital underpinning for applications that are built and that use other technologies such as AI, IoT and others to deliver products, services, and value.

There have been barriers to the successful deployment of many of these technologies and often it comes down to where the data is, how is it being collected, and is it being used well in a connected and secure environment, particularly when it is now more valuable than gold. And secondly, whether the digital representations of physical objects are easily stored, transferred, and transacted in a more transparent, disintermediated, and automatic way.

We find that changing the narrative and focusing on building blocks positions us well from a narrative standpoint to build a robust, disruptive and transformational portfolio of companies with both a unique advantage and a unique selling point and differentiator – Where our portfolio companies work together and are complimentary with each other as well. The future is one that will be even more connected, even more automated, and even more digital, that is all we can be certain of.

At what stage of startup investment do you invest?

The majority of our fund is dedicated to series A and growth stage rounds of early stage businesses at the post-product and post-revenue stage where rapid revenue growth, traction, and expansion are the key performance indicators of the business.

However, we do leave some room for a large number of small ticket capital investments at the seed or pre-series A rounds enabling us to double down in future rounds. Our global network of venture partners and ties to universities, incubators and local ambassadors allow us to support the rights teams early on.

Why is 7BC different to the other funds out there?

Every fund can say why they’re different. Most will say it’s their past performance and current network. We can ‘say’ that, but we can also ‘show’ you. We will continue to show you our network and continue to develop it.

In many cases the network is at our 7BC LP investor, team, VC co-investment / syndication and service provider layers, but our favourite is our own current and former portfolio CEOs and founders supporting our evolving global community, and that brings past performance to current and future financial performance. 

Any advice to startups when the pitch to you?

Really it always comes down to the basics. If the four biggest factors for success in real estate are location, location, location, the biggest factors for success in our lenses are team, team, team, market, technology, traction and who else is supporting this startup? 

Innovations come from having a new technology, at the right time, in the right place with a the right business model. That is what we’re looking for. Where is value not being captured, and where can value be better captured and best delivered?

But with all things, it is a story and depends on the facts of the case at hand – keep it simple, tell your story, have your reason and purpose that drives you and your team, and implement it then demonstrate in your pitch how you’ve been implementing it and what you plan on doing. 

Stick to facts and what is there specifically, what you have accomplished and what you will. As long as that can be shown tangibly and clearly, then you’ll attract the right capital, partners, and team members. Sometimes it is a numbers game, sometimes it’s a bit of your gut and vision, but above all it’s a mixture of demonstrating delivery, having laser sharp focus, being consistent, and being surrounded by the best team in an area of the market that you’ve identified is missing or lacking something. 

We know that our cash cheque is important, but if we can’t see how we can add value in other ways we don’t invest. This often comes down to our experience, advice and network. We believe that is how all early stage investing should be. Good startups will always attract plenty of funders in any boom or bust economy. The best funders need to demonstrate how they will add value and then deliver that value whilst constantly growing their reputation. It’s that simple. Add value or don’t invest. 

November Summit invites AI startup trailblazers

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Best startups in AI sector to battle it out at summit for business rewards

summit

Leading startups from the artificial intelligence industry will compete for a business boost at the winter edition of Malta AI & Blockchain Summit this November.

The Summit will take place from 7th to 8th November 2019, marking the second event this year for the successful expo. Tickets can be booked here and are expected to sell out.

With strong support from the Maltese government, the event has established itself as one of the world’s leading destinations for the growing sectors of AI, Blockchain and DLT, IoT, and other vertical industries.

AI start-ups will be vying for a place amongst the top ten successful start-ups to be selected to participate in the AI Start-up Pitch, where they’ll take part in a live showdown in front of a panel of the most prominent experts from the AI industry and investors. Taking place on the main stage at peak time during day one of the event, the AI Pitch is always a favourite with the AIBC audience.

With a prize package including a year’s office space, media relations support, digital marketing, and more, one lucky start-up will get a massive head start with their business plans – the stakes could not be higher as the Malta AIBC Summit continues to inspire and nurture the incredible talent appearing on this emerging tech scene.

Of course, all participants are set to be winners, as with such luminary figures from the sector judging the contest, taking part all but guarantees invaluable insights from critical feedback and praise of unique applications for artificial intelligence. And with investors aplenty in attendance, it should be no surprise that many start-ups will come away from the summit with a bright future looming!

100 deep tech start-ups from the sectors of AI, Blockchain, IoT, and Big Data will also showcase their projects and services with a 1×1 stand in the start-up village, benefiting both from 1000s of attendees at the show, as well as online visibility at AIBCsummit.com.

Eman Pulis, founder and CEO of the Malta AI & Blockchain Summit, said.

In this, our third and biggest show yet, we can’t wait to see the range and quality of entrants for the AI Start-Up Pitch. If our previous battles are anything to go by, we will be sowing the seeds of growth for some of the future global brands in the AI space.

 

I couldn’t be prouder that our show is instrumental in bringing together such amazing talent in one venue and I look forward to meeting all those taking part.”

The bi-annual event includes conferences hosted by globally renowned speakers, workshops for industry learning and discussion, an exhibit space accommodating more than 400 brands and much more.

The first Malta Blockchain Summit in November 2018 attracted 8,500 attendees from more than 80 countries, with 300 sponsors and exhibitors, 200 speakers, and 1 AI VIP (Sophia the world’s first robot citizen).