Key takeaways from dinner with Josh

Hedgefund

  • CHTR – good company to buy 18% YoY revenue growth over the next 3 years
    • friend jay buys on the dip in the stock market

Machine Learning companies

  • Quids engineering team
    • majority efforts focused on DevOps
    • been losing engineers a lot lately
      • main reason is because they feel not enough investment in core technology
    • Core engineering tasks
      • zero downtime deployment
      • Monitor service to expose API calls
      • elastic search
      • daily caching of data from LexisNexis into S3 in case elastic search goes down
    • uses IBM named entity extraction for news article
      • Data not even that good
    • users trying to do search for articles related to company names
      • wants to look into knowledge graph to help auto complete. Talked with DiffBot
      • Not sure why not use in house entity database
    • User profile: digital marketers trying to do competitive analysis
      • search and curate articles about company into clusters
    • He thinks they should focus on a venture arm that invest in companies instead
    • CEO is strong business person and CTO ex very technical guy
      • prefers the external solution procurement approach instead of building critical solutions in house
      • technical person does the 3rd party solution procurement
      • they even talked with DiffBot
    • Targets for this year: wants to focus on building out targeted interfaces for specific personas like marketers
    • revenue
      • 50% consulting
      • 50% SAAS service
      • 30 million USD last year
    • feela could do so much more with the data than just clobbering on third party solutions targeted at existing use cases
    • marketing team not that good
    • sales team doing acquisition via enterprise sales approach
    • just rolled out solution similar to what Vincent company is doing

On Sales

  • Being able to define the business case really fast to help frame the cost of the problem for the prospect
  • sell a solution to the prospect for a lesser amount than the cost they are currently incurring.

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