Heroes in Business - Igor Jablokov CoFounder Alexa, Founder CEO Pryon enterprise AI

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

Alexa, put on the Heroes in Business Show. Igor Jablokov CoFounder Alexa, Founder CEO Pryon is interviewed by David Cogan founder of Eliances and host of the Eliances Heroes show broadcast on am and fm network channels, internet radio, and online syndication.  

Welcome back to Alliances Heroes, where heroes in business align. To be part of our super community and find out more about Alliances, visit www.alliances.com. Well, fantastic. We're back and we just had on the founder and the CEO of BetterWorks, who could be reached at betterworks.com. He was the CEO of WebEx. And thank you for the feedback we continue to have from having the former NASA administrator for the past three presidents on the Alliances Show. So make sure you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-S.com.

It is the only place where entrepreneurs align. Well, I got to tell you again, so excited because our next guest, he's done so much. In fact, he started a company that ended up, the co-founder that ended up becoming what is known as Alexa today. And welcome to the show, Igor Yablokov, who could be reached at Pryon.com. That's P-R-Y-O-N.com because he is the founder and the CEO of it. All right. I want to know about AI and how all this fits into Pryron. Yeah. So Pryon, funny enough, it was the code name of the speech engine that became Alexa.

Funny enough, it was the code name of the speech engine that became Alexa. So we just ended up reusing it for our new site and just people in the know, you know, heard this name before. And it's sort of an in-joke because it's a misspelling of the prion protein that causes mad cow disease. So it's a it's a machine learning joke, unfortunately. So tell us about it. I mean, I've seen some of it. I've read about it in that. I think what I'd like to do is focus on something that's true and dear to my heart because I was in the industry of it, is the caregiver aspect of it. So talk to us about what it does for that. Yeah, look, I mean, we made an announcement in the springtime when the virus was hitting at first. So we moved everything aside and started working with another Intel capital backed company

called K4 Connect. And I first met their founder when we were both entrepreneurs in residence at Blackstone. And he's an inspiring guy who actually ran the company that invented the Touch ID sensor. They were Apple's only publicly traded company that they ended up acquiring. And he's just doing a fantastic job birthing this platform for senior living communities. And so when this pandemic hit, there was a drastic need to get just-in-time intelligence to all of their caregivers throughout their sites. So we moved Heaven and Earth in order to blend that content into their consoles for all of the nurses, the doctors, and other folks that are in those environments. So that was just a great use of AI. Tell us more about the AI aspect and also specifically what Pryoron is.

Yeah, so look, even since my days at IBM, and I know we in some cases may have even worked in similar environments, right? Since my time there, since the last startup that Amazon acquired, which was the first cloud-based AI company. I've always been fascinated with getting knowledge to people as fast as possible. So the fastest thing, the highest bandwidth thing that you have is your ability to speak and hear. That's it. There's nothing faster than that. This is why as children, it's the first thing that we do. And so I was always fascinated with speech recognition, reducing friction between people and knowledge. That's what I wanted to do at IBM. That's what I wanted to do with the last startup.

And now over 100 million plus of you have have this physical device sitting in your kitchens that can do just that. But I also knew that this was going to come to you at work. And so we founded this company in order to figure out what does knowledge management mean for the enterprise and why hasn't been getting stymied so far? One of the great, I think, ways of thinking about why AI is important into the enterprise is understanding customer relationship management software in the past. You know, there were lots of failed implementations of things like Siebel in these enterprises. Why? Because it was on-premises, it was huge software, very expensive, needed a lot of services. And then you had people like Benioff come in with Salesforce and completely disrupt that market. Why? It was faster, better, cheaper. And so when I think about knowledge management,

many companies were trying to buy big things. They were trying to grow their own capabilities. And really, just like cloud was the linchpin technology that solved the CRM problem, AI is going to be the linchpin technology that will solve knowledge management for work where do you see the future of the AI is just as it gets more smarter and technology gets faster and faster with it how do you see things developing because I mean right just within the past nine months how fast technology has taken place of everything yeah look at work, at work, it's this thing. If we lost all electricity in our companies,

our companies would still operate. You know why? Because humans are actually at the core of these workflows, right? We can take a pen and paper and still run our companies if we had to. Will it be as efficient? Absolutely not.

Will we generate as much revenue? Absolutely not. But the company would still work. Why? Because humans are at the center of it. So we envision augmented intelligence, right, where humans are still a fundamental part of workflows. But the companies that are going to win, survive and thrive over the course of this next decade are the ones that are going to figure out how to take the best of humans and the best of machines and then blend them together in that augmentation. The second thing, the second big issue with AI is there is not enough data scientists to go around. Only the biggest of tech companies can afford departments full of AI scientists and engineers, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Microsofts, so on and so forth. And so we have to democratize access to AI in order to activate your workforce, whether they're in the mailroom

all the way up to the C-suite. That's the second thing. And the third thing that Benioff did rather well with Salesforce is he didn't come in and say, hey, you can activate your whole enterprise with this. You can start at an individual level, at a department level, workgroup level, and then eventually you can land and expand and then activate the rest of your enterprise when you're ready, not when the tech company is ready to sell to you. That's amazing. Amazing. And you're listening and watching me, David Kogan, host of the Alliances Hero Show. So make sure you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com. Why? Because it's the only place where entrepreneurs align and that we get to interview and speak with Igor Yalikov, who is co-founder of Alexa

and now founder and CEO of Pyron, who can be reached at P-R-Y-O-N.com. Igor, tell us about it though. When you started off with it, you got the initial seed round of four and a half million dollars. How did you go about, you know, we get a lot of questions and we have a lot of startups that listen here and watch, getting people to actually believe in what they've got. And are there any of those key magic words that one should use? I don't think so. I think the late comedian Gary Shandling told other aspiring and up-and-coming comedians that there is no shortcut to comedy. So I don't think there's a shortcut to fundraising or developing your company. I think absolutely you're going to hear

a lot of rejection. So you have to believe your idea from the inside out. And if you do, you're going to be able to handle the rejection and instead of being perturbed by it or annoyed by it you're going to take it you know in a in a in an ability to have self-reflection and adapt and say hey even these people that that don't quite see what i see they're giving me feedback let me take it back to the team, adapt, figure out where it doesn't quite fit. And over time, it's a highly iterative process. That's how product market fit works. Now, one of the things that we did do, though, to stack the deck is our first investor was an applied AI fund. So they had lots of intuition about taking AI and turning it into something real that people in business can consume.

Another investment group had many key Fortune 500 companies that are their limited partners. And as a result, we were able to quickly advance product market fit with them by talking to the innovation officers of either of those companies. So those are some quick things that you can do to stack the tech, which is get close to people to stack the tech which is get close to people that understand your tech well and get close to people that could eventually become your customers and that way you're not trying to stumble and figure that out in year five, you're doing it from day

one. Now you also too worked at IBM, we have something in common, I worked there too. Tell me about what you feel that you've learned from IBM that you brought over to now Pryor. And one of the great things is it was a global business, right? So to not just have an America-centric view of technologies, but also to think about how would it work in Europe?

How would it work in Asia? How would it work in Africa? For that experience, I'm really thankful. Now, they tend to take a big enterprise view of things, and they don't tend to consumerize technology and make it so it's consumable by an individual, right? So that's something that they haven't quite figured out. You know, they tend to, you know, typically sell to the biggest of enterprises. And so I was fascinated to bring this to everybody. And the way to do that at times is to become an entrepreneur, to spin out and just get to work. Because we saw, we called this market early. We knew that the way

that AI would be cracked is with cloud computing. It was still relatively early to do that in 2006. And so you had to leave, get venture funding and start addressing it yourself then. We've got a little less than about a minute or so left. And I think it's important to ask is, again, you've created something that the co-founder that became Alexa, household name. I mean, everybody in the world knows it. What about young engineers now in college that are like, they want to make their mark. They're studying nonstop, working, getting straight A's, taking classes, all the engineering, everything of that. What things can they do to be able to increase their odds of being able to leave their mark in the

world like you have? Well, I think in some ways, half of it is vision, strategy, execution. The other half is just dumb luck at times. I mean, I'm sure many entrepreneurs that you've interviewed here talked about how much luck played into it as well. But I have to say, luck comes with a work ethic, right? If you're constantly going out and meeting new people, talking to customers, partners, look, I get inspired by talking to five-year-olds about this technology and 95-year-olds. You know, how would you do this better? What's some of the things and use cases that are important to you? How does this technology stymie your ability to use it? And so I think being open to lots of folks, get internships in your field, go work in some of these big companies, just like you and I

have in the past. They really help, you know, build up our subject matter expertise so that by the time you encounter investors that could back you, you know, you're considered somebody that has a unique perspective on what the future of work would look like. Excellent. Well, I love it. And I like luck. Good luck to all and stuff of that. Well, Igor, you've created something that changed lives, made access to information easier. That's what it's all about. And that's a hero. Igor Jablokov, co-founder of the technology company that became Alexa, now CEO and founder of Chiron. He can be reached at chiron.com. This has been David Kogan with the Alliance of Heroes show.