Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: David Talby, CTO of John Snow Labs (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you go to market? Is this a professional services go-to-market strategy? Technology-enabled services kind of strategy? 

David Talby: It’s a mix. It’s about half and half. We do software licensing and we also do professional services. 

Sramana Mitra: Is the professional service yours or is it outsourced or tied up with system integrators?

David Talby: Professional services is ours. We thought about that a lot, but so far we’ve kept it internally. We did this for two reasons. First, it is hard to do. You need trained people to do it. With machine learning and anything to do with even just basic statistics, it’s easy for junior people to get results, numbers, and the highest quotes.

They might oversee it, and you have a highly-biased data set. There is no way that this would work in production. You do need to understand what is going on. 

Sramana Mitra: How big is the company? How big is it on the product side? How many people do you have on the professional services side?

David Talby: We have around 80 people overall. Most of them are data scientists, engineers, or clinicians. I think we have two people in marketing and one person in sales. 

Sramana Mitra: Are you a VC-funded company or a bootstrapped company?

David Talby: Absolutely no VC. We don’t talk to them. As a policy, we do not take calls with VC companies. We get several emails a week that we politely reject. 

Sramana Mitra: What revenue level are you at?

David Talby: We don’t make it publicly known. Is there anything that you need to publish?

Sramana Mitra: No, I am just curious, that is all. It seems like you are building a very interesting company, and I was just wondering how far you have gotten. 

David Talby: We are close to eight figures. We doubled the sales in the two previous years. We are happy with that kind of revenue. I expect that we are going to do the same this year with COVID. Since the company was created, it was profitable every year. 

Sramana Mitra: Do you plan to build this company in the same way with technology and professional services development all internally or are you going to open up your platform? You could do some sort of a PaaS strategy where other developers will develop different verticals and different use cases from your core engine.

David Talby: We may but not this year. With the same size as ours, they need to show that they are ready to deliver at the level that we do. In one sense, it’s already happening, because quite a few of our customers are software companies and they are already building products on top of our technology.

For example, we are not building an engine for clinicians to match patients with clinical trials, but you have a customer that does exactly that. They use the engine. Then they build the UI, integrations, and workflow. It’s the same way with clinical coding software. 

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: David Talby, CTO of John Snow Labs
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