#69 - Danny Goh, CEO of Nexus FrontierTech - On using disruptive technology to turn ‘useless’ data into competitive advantage

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around seemingly ‘ignored’ areas of data, and my guest is Danny Goh.

Danny is a serial entrepreneur and an early-stage investor. He is the General Partner of G&H Ventures fund, which invests in early-stage start-ups primarily in Southeast Asia. G&H Ventures has invested in more than 20 portfolios in deep tech and is building its third fund to help start-ups into the growth stage.

He has also co-founded Innovatube Frontier Labs (IFL), which later merged with Nexus. Innovatube is a technology group that operates an R&D lab in software and AI developments and acts as an incubator to foster the local start-up community in Southeast Asia. It has a team of researchers and engineers to develop cutting-edge deep technology to help start-ups and enterprises bolster their operational capabilities.

Danny currently serves as an Entrepreneurship Expert at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, and is also an appointed Fellow at the Center for Policy and Competitiveness at the École des Ponts Business School. He is an advisor and judge to several technology start-ups and accelerators, including Microsoft Accelerator, Startupbootcamp IoT, and LBS Launchpad. Danny serves as a visiting lecturer at various universities in Europe and he is a speaker at various conferences, including TEDx and the World Economic Forum.

Last but not least, he’s the Founder and CEO of Nexus FrontierTech, an AI research firm that easily integrates AI into organisations’ processes by using natural language processing to transform idle information into structured data, enabling them to run better, leaner, and faster.

And that promise intrigued me, hence I invited Danny to my podcast. We explore the enormous value opportunity that millions of organizations leave untouched around unstructured data simply because they "can’t manage it". We also explore Danny’s vision on how the world is changing from an app-centric world into a skill-centric world and how that will influence the way we can create solutions going forward.

Here are some of his quotes:

One key area that has been helping clients the most, which is to actually help clients to manage their data in a better way.

And the biggest problem is, they don't know how to manage those data. And when I say those data, they are like, maybe PDF, graphics, and so on. Those data are not really useful. And what we did, we created the engines, the machine learning engines, to read those documents, and then extract it out. And then human can use all their analytical skills and statistical models to create something out of it.

The advantage that we give to them, is they’re one step ahead of their competitors.

That to the client is unimaginable before

The efficiencies and the accuracies that we bring to them allows them to imagine a lot more. It allows them to create more business opportunities.

When they have a new tool that suddenly upgrades their level to the next level, then suddenly they know they can go beyond their limits.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That incredible innovation opportunity is often right in front of us, we are just too busy or too ignorant to see it
2. How ‘skills’ will be the answer to making AI and Machine Learning more accessible and change the way we’re creating solutions
3. Why, in order to be successful, you have to stay persistent and remove the temptations to drift away from your vision