EP #258 - Kevin Smith: An App To Unlock The Knowledge In Podcasts

121 snips

Aug 17, 2022

Kevin Smith, co-founder and CEO of Snipd, dives into the fascinating world of podcasts as a massive knowledge base. He shares his journey from banking to founding a startup, driven by his passion for machine learning. Kevin discusses how Snipd's innovative AI extracts key moments from lengthy episodes, making knowledge accessible. He also emphasizes the startup culture he embraced at Contovista and the Swiss startup network's invaluable support. Expect insights into the future of speech AI and personalized learning experiences!

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INSIGHT

Passion Can Redirect Career Paths

Kevin discovered machine learning in university and quickly became obsessed, reading papers and building projects in his free time.
That passion redirected his career from quant finance toward AI and startups.

ANECDOTE

Startup Life Was A Transformative Playground

Kevin describes joining Contovista as a dream because he could create and play with ideas in a startup culture.
He learned product building, hiring, and startup fundamentals intensely during those years.

ADVICE

Choose Applied Creation Over A PhD

Ignore prestige; choose paths that let you create applied work if that's your drive rather than a theoretical PhD.
If you want to build products, start a startup instead of assuming a PhD will help you do that.

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Timestamps:

1:44 - Falling in love with machine learning

15:03 - Developing a prototype at HackZurich

23:05 - Podcasts as the world’s largest knowledge base

40:43 - Doing B2C in Switzerland

49:15 - Benefiting from the Swiss startup mafia

About Kevin Smith:

Kevin Smith is the co-founder and CEO at Snipd, an AI-powered podcast player built to unlock the knowledge in the podcasts you listen to. Originally from England and Germany, Kevin came to Zurich to get his MA from ETH in Quantitative Finance. After a time working for banks like Julius Baier and UBS, Kevin decided to join the startup Contovista, where he worked up to becoming head of analytics and AI.

In 2020, he decided to put his love for machine learning to good use and participated in Hackzurich together with his ETH friend Ferdinand Langnickel, at a time when a breakthrough in self-supervised learning had just happened. Having originally planned to create a prototype around the topic of meeting notes, they eventually pivoted to podcasts, and ended up winning that year’s Hackzurich. In 2021, Kevin, Ferdinand and third co-founder Mikel Corcuera Lejarreta created Snipd.

The problem Snipd solves is pretty intuitive: the audio medium is great for both consuming and producing content, but not so much for interacting with it, i.e., for storing it and consulting it. It’s pretty hard to skim through a 2h podcast episode to find what you’re looking for. Through its AI algorithm, Snipd allows you to do just that: when you’re using their podcast player, whenever you listen to something which particularly interests you, you press a button in the app or you triple click your headphones, and then AI will analyze the content you just selected to determine the appropriate start and end point, provide a transcript, a summary and a title. Snipd also provides you with automatic chapters (with titles and summaries) for each podcast episode.

By providing this service, Snipd is able to collect data about which podcast moments are interesting to each user, and this data will soon allow them to make predictions on what each specific user may be interested in listening to.

Memorable Quotes:

"I’ve come to the realization that creating things is something which fundamentally makes humans happy."

"Something you should ask yourself before you start a startup is: Can you see yourself working on this for 10 years?"

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