YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Wiltschko

lines on the record: 70
first: 2025-03-18
most recent: 2025-03-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Alex, thanks so much for your time. Patrick, thank you so much. It's so fun to bring you here to the lab to show you what we do to kind of share this passion. And I hope we can do it again soon sometime.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who was there every single step of the way both when I was inside of Google and then when I'd spun out the company, Josh Wolf for playing the instrumental role of, I mean, what his tagline at his fund is, is we believe before others understand and he lived that very, very deeply with me to bring Osmo to life. And then more recently, Colin Byrne at Tucson. This is little moments where people say yes that can make all the difference.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sold to Twitter. And then when I moved to Google Brain, DSC with really no reason believed in this idea of digitizing olfaction before anybody else did at Google Brain. And then Jeff Dean saw what we were doing and said, you know what? This weird little thing, let's just let this flower grow. Let's see how it goes. And so Jeff was instrumental in kind of giving us cover or a force field just to grow this very delicate young idea into what it's become today. And then when we converted from an industrial research project and we decided that the right way to scale this was a company, a whole new cast of characters took a bet as well where there was really not a lot of evidence that they should have. I'm thinking of Andy Palmer, who believed, first of all, that I could do it. And when I wasn't really sure that I could, Krishna Yeshwan.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were moments when. People could have closed the door on me or said no thanks or I don't believe you or I don't want to take a bet on you. I really divide the people that took a bet on me into the three chapters of my professional life. First, in my academic life, Josh Burke and then Bob Data took a huge bet on a Know-Nothing kid to mentor and to grow as a scientist. indebted to them for taking the time and kind of taking me in a raw form in helping mold me into a scientist. And then I moved from academic science into industry, into entrepreneurship. And there I have a number of people to think as well. It's Brian Adams, first of all, for taking a bet on me to co-found a company with him, which we ultimately.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tools that were turned into the ability to design scent even better and capture other scents, train the AI models and kind of build the entire olfactory intelligence platform. But like that moment when I smelled the plum was really special.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Journey of asking whether or not what we hope to do is possible, like, hey, we've got this crazy dream of actually digitizing smell. Is that possible? Like we had to get together this crazy team that had never been assembled before and then tackle this technology that had never been built before. And then when we actually teleported the plum the first time and we smelled it and it was actually a freaking plum and it was beautiful and almost like hyper real, I just fell out of my chair. I mean, that was like a really dreamlike moment. It's like this works, right? Like, yeah, we are, we did it. Like computers can smell now. Like it's in the lab. We'll make it smaller and cheaper and better. But it's no longer zero. We've gone from zero to one here. And then there's all the stuff that came out of that, like all these capabilities and”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is really hard to predict the future computers haven't had a sense of smell. I can't see on the other side of that wall what happens when our sensors actually can fit in your pocket? Like, what happens not just to the products that we build or the partners that we have that are building on our platform, but what happens to society? Society's different because that computer in your pocket can see and hear. I think it's largely better, right? There's more information flowing. You're remembering more things you can hold on to moments. Like there's some beauty that's there that wasn't there before. And I think that there will be beauty in what comes out of what we're doing.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea is like we know what we need to do now, right? We know the markets where we can be valuable now. And so we're not going to waste any time on anything else other than building a business that makes people happier and makes other people's businesses run better, makes sense more beautiful sense faster”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What in the smells that we are exuding contain information that help us make better health decisions? And there's already a link there between what we do at Generation and what we will be doing on our journey for the next R&D frontiers. Scent has powerful effects on our mood, and there's already a very deep tradition of aromatherapy. And, you know, look, the science, I think, needs to be expanded there. And I think that we'll contribute to that. But as we're turning emotions into data, incent into data, and then data into products for people to build better businesses, to build launch better products, all of that goes into one platform that is going to help us push back the frontier.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I love everything that we do. And if it isn't clear, I really like smell. And I really like making smell and experiencing it and sharing it. And so generation, launching generation is kind of a dream come true. But it's not the last thing that we'll do. What's really wonderful is by building all the systems that are going to allow us to create beautiful sense for folks and generation, that platform is going to help us on our mission to understand human wellness with scent. And that is one of the next mountain peaks for us is”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's suffused into everything that we do. And again, right tool for the job. So, I don't think there's any. Osmos probably is a smaller company as a result of all these AI tools. There's a bunch of stuff that we just need to get up to speed on, and we can just ask ChatGPT for like a reasonable 80-20 answer, like, hey, is there any problems with this NDA? We can just do that. And then if it's really critical, we obviously get an informed opinion. So yeah, it's suffused into almost everything that we do”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The data. Like, that's the fuel that drives you up that S curve. And so we've just realized this step by step. So we started out say, hey, we want to digitize smell. Great. Where's the data? We try to do some licensing deals. We were successful. The data wasn't kind of AI compatible. So we said, okay, I guess we have to create it ourselves. And so then bit by bit, we began to build basically the entire AI ecosystem that exists for images. We built an internal and proprietary for the sense of smell. So we have a building of people that label smells all day, every day. We have a laboratory full of sensors that 24-7 are dissecting sent down to the molecular level. We have robots that are creating smell. We're going to get even bigger robots to create even more smells. So we've created the entire virtuous cycle here that allows us to build the data that allows us to train the models to bring these capabilities to the world.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as far as I can tell, we're the ones who are driving AI up the S curve for scent. And we're really at the far left. So we're just starting to take off right now. And the thing that is the fuel here is data. And so, yes, we use specific kinds of AI models. We even use LLMs in some of the work that we do. They're super useful. Our philosophy is the right tool for the job. And so we're not going to take a dogmatic approach and try to shove everything into an LLM, although LLMs are extremely useful for this. And I think actually they will get more capable over time for even what we do. But most of what's under the waterline, most of the iceberg, as it were, is just creating the data, right? Like having the infrastructure for accepting that data, having the operations to create the physical and the digital all linked together, you have to have”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got up at the main AI conference Neurops and said, look, there's one internet, and we've trained on it, right? There's no more data. So, yes, there'll be some remaining tricks. We'll make it cheaper, we'll make it better, we'll add reasoning, but like we're out of the raw fuel that drove a ton of the innovation and text, and I think also similarly for images, right? Like we've downloaded all the world's images and all the image models are trained on all those images. Video, we're not done yet because it's super expensive. So we're not quite at the end of the curve. Those are just three modalities, right? There's drug discovery, right? There's chemistry, design of chemistry to treat diseases. There's materials design. There's all kinds of things. And what I'm concerned with at Osmo is marching up the S-curve of a human sense. So we're on text. We're on vision and images. Those are handled by really brilliant people.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology usually proceeds on an S curve, right? It sucks, it sucks, it's getting better. Oh my gosh, it's getting better super fast. And we're pretty much done and it levels off. And I think we're pretty close to the right side of that S-curve with text. We kind of blew past it, but yeah, we passed the Turing test. I regularly am fooled and curious whether or not this was written by ChatGPT or not. So text works. And then Ilya Setzkover, who is really one of the progenitors of modern AI for text.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But to find a route up that mountain with a shallow enough grade where at some points we can stop and build a business. The philosophy here, and I've just seen other startups kind of fail to do this, is build along a responsible path that makes you harder to kill over time as opposed to makes your likelihood of success even riskier over time. This is just because I want to do this for my whole life. I don't want to just flip this company and sell it. I really want this to survive. It has to survive. And so we're building in our strategy a way to make that much more likely than not.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm always paranoid when Mother Nature is going to show up and say, You're done. Like, no. In 2025 or 2026 or 2027, this is not the year for you to peel back another mystery of how this human sense works. And so you're blocked for taking the next step. And that could manifest in any number of places. We could fail to make these sensors small enough to be held in your hand at an appropriate price. There could be something fundamental. We don't understand about the world. This is an existential kind of risk that we can never really remove, but we continue into the darkness and into the fog regardless. What we're trying to do is never lose sight of the mountaintop, which is we fully digitized the human sense in its personal, it's portable, it's affordable, and our philosophy for doing that is not to climb up the sheer face of the mountain to that single goal.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of what is being provided in the industry we think can be augmented by artificial intelligence and we can do this faster. The other piece here is customers are typically quite sticky. So if you're running a beauty or a CPG business and you run out of stock, your first inclination is to reorder from your past supplier not to bid out again. And so typically if you've won the business industry standards for repurchasing are well above 50%. So if you build this very wide book of business, that has different parts that fluctuate based on the macro. You have a really resilient business there and the margin profile is typically quite good.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're A few pieces here. One is at first brush are recession proof. So if people aren't buying luxury fragrances, they're buying hand soap. So fragrances in 90% of the products in your household. And there's a very small number of companies that provide all of that. And so if one category is going down, another is typically going up. So really, really great long-term profile. Margin profiles are also very great. So fundamentally, these are manufacturing businesses with non-manufacturing margins because there's a ton of know-how that goes into producing the finished blended product. So although it's just ingredients mixed together in a jar that's then sent to a customer who then puts it in their packaging, how you get the exact right blend of those molecules is typically A deeply held secret.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human health and wellness. I think the signal that is inside of the scent that we emit is completely untapped. What's weird is it turns out that by getting really good at designing the sense of fruits and flowers and vegetables you actually for free get good at these other sense problems like with human scent or with product scent because the overlap of the actual molecules that you see is actually pretty high so there's not an infinite number of molecules out there there's a lot but if you get really good at one domain of scent it turns out to mole you in other adjacent domains”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, like, something's a little bit off. And then two days later, they actually get sick. That's real, right? Like, what's on the inside of us gets to the outside, what's in our blood and in our organs is eventually exhausted through our breath, our sweat, whatever. And we know that dogs can pick up on that stuff. So we've proved out that we can use the scent of a product to tell whether it's a real or a fake, basically tell it's provenance. And that's something we've got to play at StockX and that's going quite well. We think that there's other counterfeit detection and kind of truth and safety applications for scent. But I think it goes deeper than that, right? So I think we could be detecting harmful substances at the border and stopping them. Whatever sniffer dogs are doing, I think eventually a computer will be able to either help with or do entirely. But a holy grail for us is”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. So that's what we're doing with stock acts. Then again, our main thing is generation. We think that that's going to really have a massive impact. That's creating smell. But there's all these applications for detecting smell. So I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but a lot of people can sometimes smell if they're a loved one or their partner is getting sick.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so just really briefly, the idea is the easier it is for a person to do, the harder it is for a computer. Because if it's easy for a person, it means evolution has spent a ton of time making it easy for us. But if something is really hard, like proving a math theorem or something, it turns out we've taught computers to do that stuff, right? And it was weird that those were the first problems to fall, but like walking has been hard. And we're just now kind of getting good at that by making robots walk and smelling has been extremely hard and we're just now kind of cracking the code there.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better smells. So, like, look, it's still also the most mysterious sense. We were talking a little bit earlier. It feels weird that we haven't figured out scent, right? It's like computers can see, computers can hear. They can touch, right? We have touchscreens and we have the work that formerly control labs is doing with these wristbands haptics. But computers can't smell. And that's weird because it's such a fundamental thing. It feels like almost free or easy for us to smell things. Like, why can't we teach computers to do this? There's this concept called more of X paradox. Have you heard of it?”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you smell something, first of all, that is the physical world touching your brain. Your brain sends neurons out of your skull into the top of your nose, and your brain is literally touching the world when you smell something. And the number of steps it takes for that information to get to your centers of memory and your centers of emotion is faster than any other sense. So we're anatomically wired to have scent project directly to our memory and to our centers of emotion. Those areas are called the hippocampus and the amygdala. So we're wired to associate smell with emotion. So it's like evolutionarily super old. There's still a lot of mysteries that remain about smell. And there's amazing researchers that are pushing back the frontiers of what we know of figuring out why things smell the way that they do, of engineering.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This sounds like hyperbolic. It sounds extreme, but it's the first sense, right? So if you think of us as little microbes a billion years ago, we survive by eating things. And we got better at surviving by eating things by detecting if the thing we want to eat is nearby. That's what smell is, right? Smell is like sipping little amounts of the chemical environment around us to figure out where is there more of that thing or less of that thing. So it's a super old smell. You can even see it in the brain.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, familiarity, it's elegant, right? It's like if you smell it anywhere else, you're going to think of exactly that hotel. And so I think one thing that we're realizing is there is an appetite to add scent to more layers of our economy, to more businesses, to more markets, to more products. It's just inaccessible. And so what we're trying to do is bring more people to scent and create more sense for people. So that's what generation is all about is If you want to make a scent and if you want to do it quickly and if you want to do it safely, like we're here. Like we figured out how to fuse AI with the human aspect to create really beautiful smells.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's a lot of businesses out there that need to have a smell. And it's already happening, right? Like the Ritz-Carleton has a scent.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The opportunity not to just sell into an industry that is look very large, it is very secretive, but I think with this software and these tools, we have the chance to really transform it for the better. The way that business is done here hasn't transformed for 300 years. And a lot of the way that things are done should stay the same, right? Like they've stood the test of time, but the world's getting faster. People are asking for more transparency. People want to make sure that the fragrances that they're using are safe. And also, there's a lot of people who still don't even know how to get a fragrance made, right? And like, look, every company has visual branding. They have a feeling that they're trying to create for the people that interact with a company, for the people that are in the company, but there is no modality. There's no sense that is more emotional.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question is, like, do you become a software provider for the incumbents or do you take your capabilities and do you compete in that market? And I think there's been examples on both sides of this. There's plenty where you are an input or a service provider. I think a recent example where folks decided to just enter and compete would be like Metropolis, if you've heard of that example. They're making software for managing parking lots. The parking lot industry just weren't ready buyers of that software, but it actually worked. It made parking lots more efficient. So they became a parking lot company, right? We went through a similar journey where we, I mean, if I could have sold the software here, and believe me, we've tried, like, yeah, we'd be selling software. We might not be talking, but there's not that many fragrance houses, period. And I think that we have...”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the limit, we're going to be able to explore that design space more fully. But it really depends on what's the market you're entering with that platform capability. So a lot of successful platforms are entering markets where there's already a ton of vibrant activity and they're helping to grease business and make that happen more fluidly. There's not a lot of fragrance companies out there. So there's not that many buyers.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We hit all of our scientific milestones at Google and we asked ourselves, what's the right way to scale this idea? And that's where Josh Wolfe comes in. So we were thinking internally at Google, maybe this should be a company. And I was working with Krishna Yeshwant at GV, who's a very close friend. We'd worked together for five years. And someone at GV, another investor named Izzy Rosen, was getting lunch with Josh, who's the founding and managing partner at Lux Capital. And apparently, Josh had this 10-year-long thesis about digitizing olfaction, and we had never met. And so Izzy was listening to Josh give this pitch again. He said, hey, have you talked to this guy, Alex? He's kind of in the smell. And then Josh and I met and it just was an instant connection. And so Josh was integral in pulling this IP out of Google Brain and building it into a completely new company. So Josh led the round.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nature was not going to stand in the way of continuing on this journey of actually digitizing the sense. So if you can solve that one problem, it means you can start to ask, okay, great. Now what happens if instead of feeding this AI algorithm a pre-digitized molecule, what if I feed it a reading from a sensor, like the data off of a camera, right, if we were talking about images? What if I then ask it to recreate that smell with the ability to mix together different molecules to create a new scent? If you can actually round trip a smell, so take a physical smell, put it in one system, and then round trip through the reader, this map that we built, this graph neural network-based map, and then write it back out again and then compare it, and it actually smells like the thing that you put in. It means that you have actually digitized a human sense.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This smells fruity and mineral, and that's it. So I'll give it a three out of five fruit. I'll give it a one out of five mineral, the rest yours. And that's called rate all that apply. It's just like that's how we label data. And then what we did is we said, okay, we have our predictions. People have their double-blind ratings. Where do our predictions fit within the people? Because the best is the average of the panel. That's how you get really high quality data for AI. So where are our predictions worse than the worst person? Or were they in the pack somehow? And it turned out that our AI predictions of what these smells were going to be were better than the average panelist, meaning if you're going to add one more person to this panel, you'd actually prefer to ask our software what it smells like that doesn't have access to the physical molecule than to train up another person to physically spell it, which is kind of like passing an odor touring test. When that happened, it was very clear that mother”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I was recruited away to Google Brain, which is now called Google DeepMind, which is kind of their Xerox Park or Bell Labs. And I worked on some internal projects for a bit, but after a year or so, I said, you know what? Let's take a crack at this smell problem again. And it turned out that in the time between when I left academia and got into tech and entrepreneurship and when I arrived at Google Brain, some breakthroughs happened. And what happened is AI researchers figured out how to make artificial intelligence work on chemistry. And that maybe doesn't sound too crazy, but up until then, AI systems really”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning things, but like a simple question let me draw a molecule on the whiteboard like we're in chemistry class. Can you look at that molecule and tell me what it's going to smell like? Will it smell like apple or cinnamon or anise or what? So it turns out that's like a hundred year old problem nobody had been able to solve. That really stuck in my crow and I'm like, why don't we know how to do this? I ended up leaving academia. I started and sold to AI companies, one in the biotech space, one in the kind of pure ML as a service space. That ML company was bought by Twitter. I helped to start their deep learning team with my co-founders and with another company that we were combined with. That's where I really learned like internet scale, artificial intelligence applications. We applied AI to their ads platforms and made them a lot of money and applied AI to their data centers and saved them a lot of money.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, no, no, somebody made this. And this is the whole thing. The whole fragrance unfolds over time. And that kind of was the end of it for me. I got just completely hooked. And, you know, the way that my brain works, I wanted to understand where it came from, how it was made, how the brain processes it the way that it does. I think if I was born in southern France, maybe I'd be a perfumer, but I was born to two academics, and so I became a scientist. And I went to school for neuroscience at the University of Michigan, and then realized that there is a subspecialty of neuroscience called olfactory neuroscience. So people who want to figure out how the brain processes smell, and the most people who study that are at Harvard. So I went to Harvard and realized after many years of doing science there that actually we don't really know how smell works at all. Like we're making progress.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Watching the good films. Everybody's watching the popular films. And for me, this whole world opened up a fragrance where, I mean, I remember the first fragrance that really taught me that this is an art. It was Bulgari Black, which is frankly not like a very long-lasting or particularly performant fragrance. It comes in a bottle shaped like a hockey puck. And you spray it on, it lasts 45 minutes. But what it does is it unfolds in three acts, right? So the first smell is like the smell of screeching tires and rubber. And then within five or ten minutes, it cools down to like of this vanilla rub-dunna leather chair. And then all of a sudden, after like another 15, 20 minutes, there's like this smoky tobacco leather chair smoking room vibe. And I remember the first time I experienced it, like, whoa, this fragrance changed. Has it gone bad? And then I just sprayed it again and again and again and watch this movie play out for like an afternoon.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invisible thing on you that changes how people see you and treat you for the better or for the worse. I just couldn't understand it. I had already felt a little bit like a social outsider and I was trying to decode that. Why are they popular and I feel like I'm on the outside? And so I looked at the clothes, but it was the fragrance that really like it confused me to no end at first, but then it fascinated me. And so I started looking into fragrance and I found out what these kids my age were buying. It was polo blue. It was Abercrombie and Fitch Fierce. Both fragrances that our master perfumer that we just passed designed many years ago. So it's completely full circle now. But then I realized there's not just two or three fragrances, there's tens of thousands. And it was like discovering that movies exist and you can go into the movie theater and there's nobody.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because David Senra is in your world, he has a few phrases that really resonate, which is like the exit strategy is death, right? Like this is the last thing I want to do. I grew up in a town called College Station in Texas. Not too big, not too small. I got bit by the computer bug pretty early, so started programming computers when I was like eight or nine full-on computer nerd by 12. When I started collecting perfume and I started collecting perfume because I noticed that people, when they put this invisible thing on them, would all of a sudden be treated differently by everybody around them. But within this little radius, right? So it was this magic potion spell combination that when you just say it like that, almost as unbelievable, which is can you spray an in-”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fish and trail. All right, the marketing copy is a fragrance inspired by a timeless determination in the pursuit of one's mission capturing the essence of ambition and discovery.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mountain peak is something you can hold in your hand, like your airpods and your phone that can read the chemical slice of reality, capture scent moments, tell you if you need to go to the doctor, tell you what vitamins to take, to really read scent, and then another device that can recreate it so that we can fill this room with, it can smell like walking through the redwoods, which that forest bathing smell is one of my favorite smells of all time. So we're getting there. So you saw the big reader. You saw the one that we made smaller. We have to take that down by a factor of like four to eight in order for this to be something you would really say is portable. Right now, we can move it around. We could deploy it. I don't think you can say it's portable today. And then you saw the scent printer, which is half the size of this table, right? We've got a lot of work to do to make that thing smaller. But if we've known one thing about technology is making things smaller is like a thing we can do. So let's take a look.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's happening behind the scenes is we're tapping into all the Tools that we've built, the olfactory intelligence that we've built over time, we will take what we've put in and we'll embed it into our map of SENT. So our map is not three-dimensional like RGB. It's about 300 dimensional, which is, I think, why Scent had to wait for artificial intelligence to be digitized, because it's just more complicated and will then decode that. And this is, by the way, this is a multi month process that we're condensing down into minutes.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A skin cream and you want it to be slightly fragranced. Well, the fragrance can't make the skin cream turn a wrong color and it can't make the scents change too much. So you have to do application testing as well. Now you've added more time. So that whole process is handled in most fragrance houses something that looks very close to pencil and paper. And a lot of guesswork. And so what we're doing with generation is taking each one of those pieces and applying modern methodology. And in some cases, AI, in some cases just efficiencies to make that faster and to make sure that you get something custom every time that's actually tailored to your brand. So when you submit the brief, that should be a chat GPT interface. You should have a conversation that should be available to start instantly. So we have a tool. So let's make, but you want to make a colossus fragrance?”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't give me a library sample. Now you're looking at like a 12 to 18 month process of going back and forth. Every time you submit notes, it might take three months for them to get back to you. Super long process. And by the way, once you get the fragrance, you still don't know if it actually works in the application that you're going to put it in. So you have to do application testing. So let's say you want to launch a”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dollars per kilo. Just depends on what you want to launch. You submit that brief to a fragrance house. And again, this is the traditional way. Somebody receives that and in their kind of weekly meeting, they read the brief, they read the volume that you want to make and the price, and they decide whether or not they want to work on it. And here you haven't paid the fragrance house anything. They are look at the brief, and then they say, okay, we want to work on this. Usually 90% of the time they go to their library and they say, oh, we've already made something for somebody else. Let's send Patrick this cent that is from our library. And then you'll get that and maybe you like it. Maybe you're done. But 90% of the time, sometimes more, you aren't getting a new custom sent. And by the way, that process itself, that may take weeks, months. But let's say you push back and you say, actually, I want something that's really custom. So you know what you're a sophisticated buyer. You say,”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me tell you how it's done today and then how we're changing it. So the way that you get a fragrance design today, and I'm not even talking about launching the full product, like literally just the smell. There's more that you have to do to launch the full fragrance. You submit what's called a brief. So a brief in other industries would be called a request for proposal or an RFP. And it can be anything. So it's actually very, very freeform in this industry. That itself could be revolutionized. So let's say you write a Word document, you describe your brand. You're going to describe what you want it to smell like, who you are, what you want the brand to be resonant of. And then at the bottom, you'll usually specify two pretty important things. What's the benchmark? So is there a scent that you want to beat? And usually that means I kind of want my thing to smell like this, but make these changes. And then what's the price you want to pay? So how many dollars per kilo? Which can be as low as like 10 bucks per kilo. It can go for fine fragrance. It can go up into the many hundreds.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is do you want to launch a fragrance? Do you have a place to put it in front of people, but you're missing all the pieces because we can now automate lots of this and we can bring humanity to the rest of this? Let's work together. Let's build you a fragrance.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called generation. And the idea is to take all the technology that we've built, but also all the humanity, the people, the perfumers, the noses, and to combine that in a new way of designing sense for people who might not have been able to have access to designing a new scent or haven't been able to do it fast enough. And so that's called generation, and that's something that we're just now launching. What we're doing with this scent is this is a scent that we custom design for a creator. So someone who has a very large active audience on Instagram has like a really great rapport and a brand, frankly, but what she doesn't have access to is a way of creating her own product that is resonant with her values, but also just is straight up beautiful. And so what we're able to do is take all of our technology, take our perfumery, and what we've done in very short order is design her a fragrance, and we're going to help her launch it. And so part of the value proposition of”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's important to me that what we've done, and I think it's just a plum today, but it's a lot more that we're doing in the future. One thing that we're doing is we're launching a new kind of fragrance house.”
2025-03-18 · Invest Like the Best · Alex Wiltschko - Giving Computers A Sense Of Smell - [Invest Like the Best, EP.415] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source