Spotlight On

Ada’s founding story is one the Accel team has always loved. Before its launch, founders Mike Murchison and David Hariri convinced seven customer service teams to let them work as support agents. After a year of exhaustive intake, they knew that for Ada’s customer service platform to add real value, AI was imperative. This was 2016 and at that time, an AI-first approach to customer service was unique—but the results were astounding. We discuss their journey on this episode of Spotlight On. “We realized if we can put AI in the hands of customer service teams, allow them to help more customers and help them resolve more – we can transform the future of customer service. And that's what we've been focused on ever since.” - Mike Murchison Let’s back up a bit. In 2014, Mike and David had just launched a different startup. The company grew quickly, but it had a major problem: keeping up with customer service demand. Their team went from wanting to talk to our customers a lot, to avoiding customer contact. That bothered them. But these problems weren’t new. Customer service is notoriously cumbersome and hard to scale. The problems also weren’t going away, so Mike and David saw an opportunity to build a solution. Two years later, Ada was born. Today, enterprises like Meta, Verizon, Yeti, and Square use Ada to automatically resolve customer inquiries in any language or channel. In this "Spotlight On: AI'' episode, Mike discusses the early reactions to Ada’s customer service AI approach, challenges they’ve faced due to recent demand, advice for other founders on how to use technology to deliver real value, and the impact AI will have on the customer service workforce. Conversation highlights: 00:00 - Intro 04:00 - The core learnings from Mike’s experience working as a customer service agent, and how they approached AI in the early days 07:32 - Why Ada made an early decision to bring AI capabilities in-house, and how they built a strong technical team 14:09 - How the rapid development of ChatGPT and LLMs impacted Ada 25:00 - Advice on how to make a lasting impact with an AI product, and cutting through the hype Host: Ben Fletcher, Partner at Accel Featuring: Mike Murchison, CEO and Co-Founder of Ada Learn more at Accel.com/SpotlightOn/Ada

We first got to know Daniel Sturman during his time at Cloudera, and have always valued his insights on building great technical teams. Daniel was part of Accel’s original "Spotlight On" series, which debuted as a blog back in 2019. His insights on Building Great Teams were as salient then as they are now. In this episode of Spotlight On, we expand upon the subject of team building, by examining it through the lens of today's rapidly evolving AI landscape. The company name Roblox is ubiquitous among all humans under 13 and many over that. The 3D immersive platform allows users to create their own experiences, or participate in those created by others—and they’ve been building AI into the platform for years. Daniel Sturman, who is now Roblox’s CTO, believes the recent surge in AI progress has significantly enhanced trust & safety on Roblox and further democratized the platform for its creators. But challenges persist, and for many CTOs like Daniel, hiring top technical talent is a critical priority. Daniel teams up with Accel’s Talent Partner, Pete Clarke, to talk about the hiring philosophies he’s used to build exceptional teams at IBM, Google, Cloudera, and Roblox, as well as the transformative journey of Roblox’s AI development. Conversation highlights: 00:00 - Introduction to Roblox and Daniel’s background 03:21 - Where Daniel and the team at Roblox see the most immediate impact of AI, in trust & safety and creator-assistance 12:45 - Advice for talent acquisition during today’s AI era where technical talent is extremely competitive 17:17 - How Roblox’s Generative AI capabilities like Material Creator and Code Assist empower creators on the platform 27:43 - Daniel’s advice for building great teams that can advance and adapt to new AI technologies 37:00 - Advice from Daniel for making the best Barbecue Sauce, based on a recipe from Franklin Barbecue with a few special touches including a base of bourbon, reduced sugar, heightened spiciness, and his secret ingredient: a dash of fish sauce! Host: Peter Clarke, Talent Partner at Accel Featuring: Daniel Sturman, CTO at Roblox Learn more at www.Accel.com/SpotlightOn/Roblox

Dylan Fox, founder and CEO of AssemblyAI discusses the profound changes to the AI landscape over the past eight years, gives insight into where he thinks AI is going as a category, and offers advice on how founders should approach hiring, problem identification, customer interaction, and more. In 2015 Dylan Fox was a machine learning engineer at Cisco. Amazon Alexa launched earlier that year, taking the world by storm, and creating a significant demand for companies to add voice controls to their products; Cisco was one such company. Dylan had to get familiar with the various speech recognition software solutions in the market. Much to his frustration, they all had poor developer experiences. He knew there was an opportunity for advanced speech technology. Soon after that, AssemblyAI was born. Today, AssemblyAI is used by enterprises like WSJ, NBC, and Spotify to access state-of-the-art AI models to transcribe and understand speech and build AI-powered features faster. Highlights from the conversation: 00:00 - Intro 06:15 - AssemblyAI's origin story and Dylan's journey as a solo founder in YCombinator 08:10 - Advice for founders around hiring and product improvement 19:26 - Advice for founders during the AI development process 29:40 - The change across the AI landscape since AssemblyAI started 27:34 - Best practices for cutting through the noise as an AI-native company 35:45 - Predictions about the future of AI apps Hosts: Sara Ittelson and Steve Loughlin, Partners at Accel Featuring: Dylan Fox, CEO and Founder of AssemblyAI Learn more: www.accel.com/SpotlightOn/AssemblyAI