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Puneet Mehta

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30
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2016-03-18
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2016-03-18
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1
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  1. “Well, I think we are living in really exciting times. In five years, we would see AI play an integral part in various aspects of our life. So I've never been so excited about anything I've done. And as we build the next company that should create a humongous wound of value for everyone, I would like to repeat what Steve Jobs said at the Stanford commencement speech. That's kind of what we wish upon us for the next five years. Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “You know, when we started message.ai, that was the case. Our core thesis was this would become the next big interface and not everybody agreed with us then, but now most people do. So it's exciting to see that change.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I would say to Peter Thiel's zero to one. The question that he puts forward, what important truth do few people agree with you on? I ask that question to myself every time. So whether I'm asking solving a distribution problem, or that helps you find that one thing that other people might not think is valid, but it is true. The second book I love is The Power of Now by Ekatoll. And so if you marry the practical side of things from zero to one to the spiritual aspects, from the power of now, that's kind of my pieces.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “You know, I would say this, find a practitioner nearby who can help you learn it and just understand it. There are a bunch of resources on the internet. I personally learned it from the heart of Living Foundation.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, you know, I would say my favorite productivity tool is not a digital one. It's meditation. What really gives me the sanity to kind of work in this environment, be fast-paced, and achieve everything that I want to is meditation.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, so again, some of the smartest people on the planet, but what we heard, which was amazing, were their stories on how it's all a walk in the park, or it's not like everything goes great. There are ups and downs and you go through them. And I think the most interesting part was just listening to them about their journeys.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I would say the people I've had the good fortune of meeting the most amazing people on this journey, some of the smartest ones on the planet. So that's definitely people”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “To be honest, the last few months I haven't had an opportunity to read many of the amazing blogs and newsletters, but I have to say one of the best resources for startup wisdom are Paul Graham's essays. And I've read each one multiple times.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Oh yes, you know, as a matter of fact, even with Sony Pictures, some of the conversations were so personal at a consumer level. It's an interesting incident. There was some consumers that would use bad words or the AI would block them. They would come back and say, hey, sorry, I didn't know you would stop talking to me. I didn't mean to say that. When was the last time someone apologized to an AI? So that's kind of how personal it got. And that's how consumers felt.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “What concerns me is not what would prevent growth, but what I call the possible messaging gold rush. And if businesses try to build messaging apps without truly understanding real-time customer context or without leveraging human-assisted AI for scale and efficiency, that's where it would not deliver on the promise of conversational interfaces. So I'm more worried about this being done wrong than I'm worried about this not happening.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, so our AI is also human assisted AI. Those were the two things that we made a decision early on. We said if we have to solve this problem and take it to market quickly, we should help brands with certain vertical approaches to make a narrow AI and also we should also have it be human assisted. But it depends on the brand. Sometimes the humans train it enough where it can work in an unsupervised mode. And then the humans are essentially just watching what it is doing but not intervening. But in other cases, they could let AI be the first line of defense and handle just 10% of the traffic and 90% screen goes to humans and they keep increasing it over time. So brands have businesses that work with us. They have both the options.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “You know, I would say if you have real AI power in these bots with machine learning and some elements of deep learning, it's that immediate personalization by understanding what the consumer needs, understanding the real-time context. And it's just my version of that interaction, right? No two interactions are like, that's something that has never really happened at scale without involving a human in the workflow. So that happens, for example, with phone calls, but it requires a human on the other end. So that's where AI really steps in where it can create this massively personalized interactions that are one-on-one with millions of people.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “You know, it's all about adding value to people's lives. So, you know, brands that are able to add value to people's lives would be able to have amazing conversations.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “a really good use case where I don't have to download a bunch of apps, I don't have to make phone calls, I don't have to send emails, I might not even have to talk to people in the store. But then another key element to this is how would we create conversations that lead to commerce. That's why the conversation aspect is key.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, you know, if we look at just the top four messaging apps, there are three billion people there now. So that's bigger than all of social put together. Long story short, it's the top habit on the smartphone. And transacting on messaging, we are seeing that happen in China. That was one of the key things that we noticed when we started this company. But linking it back to where would this really work is, you know, our thesis on that is that for infrequently used services, messaging is the best interface. So what I mean by that is that if you use Uber every day, you would take the pain to download an app, learn an interface, and use it. There are other services for takeout food, et cetera. Anything that you use every day or multiple times a week, you take the pain to download a piece of software and learn it. But for everything else, that's where transacting on messaging would be.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “On businesses can use a combination of AI and human staff and be there and be available all the time. So in this case, what we are seeing is not only would consumers be talking within AI, they would actually transact with one. So can AI be the key catalyst for commerce to happen? And that's why we call this the Turi test for money.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, so you know in today's world when businesses and consumers transact with each other, there are multiple interactions happening there. It could include phone calls, emails, downloading mobile apps, interactions within browsers, in person, all of that. And if you look at just phone calls, last year there were about 270 billion customer service phone calls made. That's very expensive for businesses to handle. And as a result, the consumer experience is also not that great because businesses are not doing a great job at this. And it's actually so bad that 85% of customers were put on hold, 67% hung up, and 48% fell unhelped. Now that's just one interaction channel. So at Message AI, what we've been building with human assisted AI would really fix this problem. So consumers can now text with businesses just the way they text with their friends and friends.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I think the toughest element, at least for me personally, is sometimes you, if you're selling to a large customer, that would be a large company and they have a hard time figuring out how efficient this would be and the level of efficiency this would bring or if they're stuck with old monolithic processes and you have to handhold them and really show them the promised land that's not as easy to do as it looks, especially with large enterprise customers. So that's the part that's probably a bigger challenge. But we have succeeded at that, considering that we've signed up many of the Fortune 500 in the last 90 days.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “You know, I think it's all about surrounding yourself with really smart people. That's one of the things YC has done for us beyond the Skeller Advice. And the network is absolutely amazing and there's an entire culture of paid forward. So what other YC founders would help us with, whether it's in the form of advice or doing something else for us or helping us structure our thinking is just amazing?”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “You know, it has been both. So if you unpack those two key elements that I mentioned earlier, which is make something people want and how you grow really fast, so we've had to do both. As a function of that, we signed up some of these bigger brands and we think they will be some of our best customers.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So, one of the other pieces of advice that I received, which I think is really good advice, is left with your legs, not your back. What that means is you have to build your startup enough where it does the selling and pitching for you, not the other way around. So most of us have prepared ourselves over the last 90 days or even before to make our startups stand out so well that we don't really have to prepare much for pitching other than just articulating what we do.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I would say the key thought process that goes behind this is take it seriously because in my mind it's even more serious than marriage. You are really going to be working together in the long term. So make sure you get along well, not just from an intellectual level, but really somewhat of an emotional level as well because startups are bound to have ups and downs. So plan for that.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “In one of those two buckets and figuring out how do we connect the dots on that, and then really the thought process around how do we make it even bigger.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Sure, so right from the beginning when we started the company, we had two key elements or two main areas that we wanted to address. One was AI and the second is go-to-market. And in AI, we already have a really strong set of investors that we had in our seed round. And same with Go-to market. So now again that we are having some of these discussions. We are looking at those two elements and we are saying how do we bring these together in the best possible form, the best commercially viable use of this type of AI. And the most exciting investor conversations we normally have all follow the same format. They start with saying we can see what you're doing. We know it is going to be big. So let's spend our time talking about what would make it even bigger. So that's kind of our little, call it litmus test or chemistry test on how well do we get along.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “That was one of the part that I was actually amazed about. At that scale, again, the quality of advice that we've been receiving is just amazing. The YC network contributes very significantly and is probably one of the best networks for anything in the world. So the support that the startups receive in the form of really good advice, the personal attention that the partners gave us, and also the network is second to none.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So, coming in pretty early on, we figured out certain ways that we wanted to A-B test in order to achieve that goal. And we just started doing it. So there was no real path to strategizing for many weeks or just figuring out what are the different alternatives. We just created a shortlist and just started doing it immediately.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, no, it has been great, in my opinion. Visey gives some of the best startup advice an early stage founder could ask for. Their slogan, make something people want, sums up most of the key elements you want to focus on. And that builds a really, really strong foundation. And the second key aspect that YC focuses on is growth. And again, that entire foundation on you're building something people want and you can grow that really fast is what a startup is all about. And since we took both of these foundational elements very seriously, that has caused us to grow 100% month over month since starting YC. And now our customers include some of the biggest brands in the world. So yeah, it has been just phenomenal.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Absolutely. So message to AI is a platform that brands and businesses can leverage so that their customers can text with them. Now consumers, if you look at the smartphone, their top habit on the smartphone is text messaging. That's how they talk to their friends. That's how they talk to everybody they trust and they surround themselves with. So as brands and businesses want to become an integral part of their lives, they have to go where consumers are. So we are essentially leveraging AI but tapping on the top habit on the smartphone.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yes, absolutely. So we raised the siege round around October last year. We were fortunate to have some of the best AI people be in that round, the founders of Google, DeepMind, Tamis and Mustafa, the CTO of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, the chief scientist at the New York Times, Chris Wiggins, and then obviously Y Combinator. And we have some other really smart people from venture funds helping us with go-to-market. So yes, we did that around the end of October last year and after we started YC this year, we've been growing 100% month over month. So yeah, it's been a really exciting journey.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yes, so I started my career at IBM's Watson Center around the year 2000. From there I went to Wall Street and I built infrastructure for trading bots. And I've actually been waiting for this time to arrive when AI can play a mainstream role in technology that touches us in our daily life. So when this happened, when I saw the messaging revolution essentially take off with what weChat is doing in China and what businesses are trying to do by using WhatsApp in India instead of giving their phone number, they now give you their WhatsApp ID. And I was like, oh, this is finally here. This is a great use for AI. And I've been waiting for it all my life. And I started message AI about 16 months ago.”

    2016-03-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · Pre-YC Demo Day: Msg.ai's Puneet Mehta on The Rise of AI, The Potential For Messaging and Life As A Current YC Startup · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source