Scott Clark. He’s the co-founder and CEO of SigOpt, a Y-Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz backed, optimization as a service startup. Scott has been applying after-learning technologies in industry and academia for years. He holds a PhD for applied mathematics and an MS in computer science from Cornell University and a BS degree in mathematics, physics and computational physics from Oregon State University. He was chosen as one of Forbes' 30 under 30 in 2016.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
What CEO do you follow? – Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and Phil Knight
Favorite online tool? — Gmail and Slack
How many hours of sleep do you get?— 8
If you could let your 20-year old self know one thing, what would it be? – Scott would tell himself that it doesn’t get easier, so set up habits and processes to make things sustainable when you have the time and ability to do it because that will definitely help once things ramp up

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:44 – Nathan introduces Scott to the show
01:25 – SigOpt is optimization as a service
01:27 – SigOpt helps companies build different, complex AI and machine learning pipelines
01:41 – SigOpt is a SaaS model and the subscription is based on the number of models per month
01:53 – Pricing starts at $2500 a month and enterprise starts at $10K a month
02:13 – Average monthly RPU
02:33 – SigOpt usually engages at the executive level
02:38 – People wanted to use AI for their businesses but couldn’t find the right person to do the work so they go with SigOpt
03:23 – One of SigOpt’s client is Prudential
- 03:31 – Insurance companies are augmenting their traditional methods to the new data that is being collected
- 03:48 – As their data increases, the need for the best possible performance increases
04:26 – What SigOpt does is different from the traditional machine learning as a service companies
04:41 – Scott shares a specific example of how SigOpt works with credit card companies
- 04:44 – Fraud detection has been around for decades
- 05:28 – SigOpt fine tunes different knobs and levers in the configuration parameters that makes the machine model work
06:15 – SigOpt focuses on black box optimization
07:45 – SigOpt relies on the domain expertise of the person at the specific firm to build a deep learning model
08:31 – SigOpt applies an ensemble of global optimization techniques to the problem so they can efficiently configure the system
09:20 – SigOpt suggests different curvatures
09:58 – SigOpt has raised $8.8M to date
10:30 – SigOpt never sees the underlying data
11:11 – The entire system is designed to be hands-off
11:43 – SigOpt was launched end of 2013
11:51 – Number of paying customers is around a dozen
12:18 – Average MRR
12:25 – SigOpt prefer annual deals
12:54 – No churn yet
13:14 – Team size is 13
13:35 – The capital raised was spent on the team and the enterprise sales efforts
13:54 – 3-4 of the team are in sales
14:05 – CAC
14:22 – They sometimes visit their customers
14:55 – Investors like to make big bets on the new technologies
15:33 – The goal for the series A money
16:33 – Average expenses
17:40 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

The need for AI and machine-learning is growing fast and there’s not enough people who are qualified to develop these products.
The headcount can eat up most of a company’s expenses—especially in the technology industry.
Optimization services make a business more efficient leading to a less to none churn rate.

Resources Mentioned:

The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

705: With $8.8M Raised, Is This The Ultimate Machine Learning Tool?

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