Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In One Million by One Million, we are huge fans of the bootstrapping entrepreneurs. In fact, we have this mantra of Bootstrap first, Raise money later. We are very much in your camp in terms of the way we think about businesses. It’s not like we have anything against raising money but there’s too much gratuitous raising of money that goes on in the startup ecosystem in the world. There is a big misconception that entrepreneurship equals financing that is being propagated by the media.

Or Shani: Totally. This is why we’ve created a very interesting DNA within our company. We do it with the client and internally. We have no bullshit approach. We are not doing things just because other people are doing it. We are not hiring. We are not taking the most fancy offices. We are not hiring more programmers if they’re not as good as we need them to be. Being cautious is a classic business tool.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you revenue-wise? What’s your 2015 revenue number?

Or Shani: We ended the year with $23 million. We were profitable that year. I think we’re going to grow this year. As we’re a public company, I cannot talk about numbers. We do feel a lot of excitement in the industry on what we’re offering.

Sramana Mitra: My last question is about trends in your industry. What’s happening? What’s on the horizon? Where do you see opportunities for new entrepreneurs to start companies?

Or Shani: Artificial intelligence within marketing?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Or Shani: I don’t want to create any motivation for anybody to work on AI in marketing. We want to make everything for ourselves. There’s no doubt there’s a lot of opportunities. What most people don’t quite understand is it’s a very complex thing. Most people don’t quite understand that. Most people just use that as a catchphrase. I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes.

I think people should focus on solving problems and see if they need machine learning or artificial intelligence to solve that. Going through that path is a very expensive path for many reasons. I think there’s so many opportunities in marketing. Anything from what we’re doing which is the actual marriage between marketing and advertising to dealing with natural language processing in terms of creatives is a huge issue. Hopefully we can deal with that in the future. Also, attribution. It’s almost unlimited.

If I had to start my own company again, I would probably bring a partner that is within the industry who knows the pain firsthand. I think it’s very important to start with a problem and have a very intimate knowledge of what makes people in marketing tick. The other day, I met two people and they told me, “We have an amazing technology. We want to apply it to marketing.”

Sramana Mitra: This is a very traditional technology-looking-for-a-problem-to-solve mindset which I’m very wary of because you end up creating a lot of technologies that are completely useless.

Or Shani: Exactly. I would encourage everybody to start with the problem and then marry the technology.

Sramana Mitra: I loved talking to you. Good luck and take care.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani
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