In this episode, Madrona Managing Director Soma Somasegar talks with Typeface Founder and CEO Abhay Parasnis. Typeface combines generative AI platforms with its own brand-personalized AI, so all businesses can create content that is multimodal and on-brand. Typeface just announced $100 million in new funding, and Madrona couldn’t have been happier to participate in the round.

Abhay and Soma have known each other for almost 20 years from their time at Microsoft. But In 2022, Abhay left Adobe, where he was CTO and CPO, because he saw an inflection point coming that he wanted to be a part of. This was, of course, before ChatGPT and all the other popular GenAI tools that we’ve all been playing with this year even came out. Typeface has made waves quickly, attracting Fortune 500 customers and partnering with Salesforce and Google Cloud.

In this week’s episode, Abhay shares about the need to balance your passion and recklessness for going after a dream with a product that you know will resonate with customers. He explains that people relationships are the real currency when launching a new company, and how advisers are just as important as what he calls the flag planters and road builders that founders need to seek out, to help them on their startup journey.

These two industry veterans share all of this and so much more.

You can read a transcript of this episode here: https://www.madrona.com/typeface-abhay-parasnis-shaping-enterprise-genai-strategy/

Chapters:

(00:00:00) Origin of Typeface

(00:00:32) Welcome and summary by Coral Garnick Ducken

(00:02:02) Introduction to Abhay Parasnis

(00:03:15) Build products customers want

(00:05:05) Maintain a beginner's mindset

(00:06:21) How experience at "Big Tech" prepares you to become a founder

(00:06:54) Leaving Adobe before ChatGPT launched

(00:09:21) Genesis of Typeface

(00:14:18) Generative AI vs. previous waves - mobile, cloud, etc.

(00:15:55) "Escaping the glass"

(00:19:15) Strategic partnerships to innovate faster

(00:22:35) Iterating on a product for a customer

(00:26:25) Building a team and culture

(00:29:40) Advisers are equally important as team

(00:31:15) Saying no to good ideas is an important skill!

(00:32:48) GenAI Scouts

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