526th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Oleg Rogynskyy, People.ai

Oleg Rogynskyy is Founder CEO of People.ai. This is a fantastic discussion on how to cold start an AI company, build it to scale, etc. Also, excellent guidance on white spaces around which to build new AI companies.

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Oleg Rogynskyy, Founder CEO of People.ai (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping course and the Investor Introductions page.

This is a fantastic discussion on how to cold start an AI company, build it to scale, etc. Also, excellent guidance on white spaces around which to build new AI companies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself. Tell us a bit about your background and all also introduce us to People.ai.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Last question. When you look around in your space, where would you point new entrepreneurs to look for white spaces? 

Ram Swaminathan: In general, you should look for problems by not reading some Forbes article. The challenge is more on the ground. The more that entrepreneurs can talk to functional workers in that particular domain, the better.

The first way to start is, of course, to look at Forbes, Wired, and all of these magazines to find areas where they are pointing at problems. The next step is to take some of these problems and see what relates to the functional workers and the journey they have gone through in life. They need to spend the time and go meet people. 

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You are from Utah, right?

Ram Swaminathan: I spent 20 years in India. I grew up in Chennai and had a full scholarship at Utah State for electrical engineering. I always wanted to go to Utah. You might be surprised, but NASA has a sister division of JPL which is called Space Dynamics Lab (SDL) in Utah. It is located 80 miles north of Salt Lake in a city called Logan, Utah.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Your AI is integrated into all kinds of EMR systems?

Ram Swaminathan: Yes. We are working with one of Athena’s accounts and we hope to grow that account and potentially work with Athena directly as well. The hope is to keep going up the channel partnership route and integrate ourselves with almost all the EMRs now. 

Sramana Mitra: But is the model still taking a percentage of the collections?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 3)

Ram Swaminathan: We go back in time with the hospital data sets; and we mine the claims data and the medical record data, the way the physicians writing the notes come from different backgrounds. We grab all of those variants in history and we customize the NLP technology for AI to understand these various documents.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: There is a company that we covered extensively for a while in the payments space. This was Athenahealth. It sounds like what you are doing is like what Athenahealth does but with AI. Is that correct?

Ram Swaminathan: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: Why don’t you expound on that? I’ll phrase the question a little bit more specifically. Athenahealth’s big innovation was having the expertise to be able to manage these codes, claims, and collections processes.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI (Part 1)

You have read our coverage of AthenaHealth over the years in the healthcare IT space. BUDDI.AI is taking an AI-driven approach to healthcare coding and billing.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start introducing our audience to yourself as well BUDDI.AI.

Ram Swaminathan: I am the co-founder and CEO of BUDDI.AI. We focus on building the next generation of artificial intelligence for healthcare.