Carnival in the Cloud: Taulia Innovates in Supplier Management and Invoicing

A TechNavio report forecasts the global e-invoicing market to grow 24.2% annually over the period 2012 through 2016. The growth in the market was attributed to the increased adoption of these services by small and medium enterprises and the continued focus on reduction of operational costs. San Francisco-based Taulia is one such fast growing company that has gone beyond simple invoicing to encompass an impressive vendor management offering.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho (Part 1)

Real-time, distributed data availability for Big Data use cases is a key issue. Here, we speak with Adam Wray about the nuances.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Basho.

Adam Wray: I’ve been raised in companies like Akamai and Limelight Networks. I actually worked for Amazon for several years before starting my own company, but it’s always been in the cloud services space or trying to use some form of what used to be called ASP. I came to Basho via that path with the understanding of what distributed systems mean to your data being moved all over the world.

Sramana Mitra: What does Basho do? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 5)

Vincent Yang: We use, what we call, topic modelling to analyze every single news. For example, is this company acquiring the other company? Is this news about conference sponsorship? How do we know how strong an implication is? We have no idea. That’s the point where we have to rely on machine learning. Machine learning will be very helpful for us in figuring out the correlation of every single business indicator to the final outcome. We analyze tens of thousands of features and also millions of combination of features to find the correlation factors of all of those.

Sramana Mitra: Where did you find your early traction? Was it in the technology industry? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to start asking you very deep questions because I did a startup in the sales lead generation area back in 1997. It used NLP and the whole AI stream. It was a bit early. It was well before the Internet had completely established itself. I know a lot about this area in general. Tell me more specifically about exactly what you do by applying your technology to the sales lead generation.

Vincent Yang: We have two use cases. First, we come into any company. We say, “Let us link to your internal work flow data whether it’s CRM or marketing automation data because we want to learn who, historically, are your good leads and who are the bad leads.” We do this for labeling. Then we start using our crawling engines to crawl every single information about those leads.

The underlying assumption is there must be something in common about those good leads. Why are they all converting? Why do those leads that you interact with never convert? We wanted to use a mathematical formula to describe it. This is what we call audience selection. >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you leave Summit to do this?

Vincent Yang: I left Summit in 2012. I didn’t start the company back then. I actually went to Stanford Business School. I already had the idea. We raised some angel money. It was in Stanford where I started the company. We hired a bunch of Stanford Ph.D.’s in the neuroscience team to help us write very sophisticated algorithms. We hired a natural language processing expert to analyze companies. That was the turning point from having the idea to making things happen.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2014?

Vincent Yang: We started in late 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the premise on which you raised the angel financing? What was the business that you told your investors you were going to build? >>>

Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2009?

Vincent Yang: That brings us to early 2010.

Sramana Mitra: Then what happens next?

Vincent Yang: Then, I moved to Palo Alto. When I was in JP Morgan, my main job was to analyze companies. In particular, I developed a mathematical model to analyze public companies. It’s very funny. Investment banking is much like the military. If you’re a junior, nobody cares about you. You basically follow the order. For me, it was very interesting because before investment banking, I was actually a CEO. I was not a fit at all at JP Morgan. I remember in the first week, I was telling the partner, “Let me source a couple of deals for you.” The partner looked at me and said, “Now, this is what I want you to do. You just do PowerPoint.” I repositioned myself. >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 7)

Dave Terry: Our competitors were historically Concur and the big ERP players who have their own shallow apps and then some of the older generation products. While they aren’t out there actively selling, they are supporting their own customers and attempting upgrades. In that market, the older vendors are beginning to be dismissed by most of the market. IBM, even in the last summer, decided to sunset their product. They’ve formally come out with an announcement. All of those customers are rapidly making a change. We’ve been very fortunate to convert a number of very large IBM customers. >>>

Taking On The Big Guys: Chrome River Co-Founder and COO Dave Terry (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At the end of 2013, you put in this $17 million. At this point, you have about $20 million of external capital in the company.

Dave Terry: That’s exactly right. Then we put that to work in the exact same manner. It was really proportional. We now have even more international sales. We are setting up more of a presence in London. We’ve had customers that were international businesses but they were headquartered in the US with 60 to 70 offices around the world. We were now starting to get into accounts that are headquartered in London, Canada, or Australia. >>>