Enter Symbl.ai’s Bookmarks API—a convenient way to pinpoint the beginning of key phrases or moments within human-to-human conversations and make it simple for everyone on your team to revisit them as well. 

If you are familiar with Symbl.ai’s practical Summary API, you’ll also be happy to know that summaries can be quickly generated for each Bookmark you implement as well. In the case of an interview, the summaries of particular interviewee answers can be shared with others in your organization who have a say regarding who will get the job without them having to A) watch the recording or B) rely on your partial recounting of their answers. 

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Symbl.ai’s Bookmarks API! Think about how helpful this function would be for salespeople to be able to instantly flag when a customer mentioned a competitor, an interesting use case, or a negative reaction to the product. 

Once again, summaries of these moments can then be shared with others along the sales pipeline to shape the overall sales strategy. Additionally, on future calls with these customers, salespeople can pull up previously made bookmarks and their summaries to enhance the overall interaction. 

Imagine a supervisor asking a salesperson for an overview of customer pain points and that salesperson is able to pull up an entire folder of Bookmarks labeled “Pain Points” that are pulled directly from customer conversations—how unbelievably helpful is that?

Another important Bookmarks use case exists for customer experience and support. Relevant moments—for instance, product critiques or other forms of feedback—in customer conversations can be bookmarked and shared with product teams, managers, and support teams. These insights are then easily translatable to new sales opportunities, and they can also be used to highlight much-needed improvements for a given product or service. 

Symbl.ai’s Bookmarks API allows users to not only bookmark parts of a conversation that they find valuable, but to discover others’ bookmarks as well. Unlike Symbl.ai’s Trackers API, which relies on users to determine the larger themes they’d like to track in the conversation as a whole, the Bookmarks API gives customers the opportunity to flag even just a few seconds’ worth of information, label that part of the conversation, then share its summary with others.

Users can bookmark parts of a conversation both in real time and after it has been recorded. Notably, whatever bookmarks are created can also be linked to a user profile, so there is no risk of being confused about who bookmarked which part of a conversation.

The Bookmarks API also perfectly complements Symbl.ai’s other conversation intelligence features—for instance, a sales rep might have a Tracker set for all customer mentions of a particular competitor. With Bookmarks, that sales rep can take things one step further and be able to flag the pain point from earlier in the conversation that led to the mention of the competitor on the fly.

Conversations can be unpredictable, we all know this, so don’t limit yourself to tracking the topics that you foresee. With Bookmarks, you can choose the moments that are most relevant to YOU to summarize and share with others, or revisit on your own at any time. You can get even more up to speed on Bookmarks via our documentation page.

The post How Symbl.ai’s Bookmarks API Makes Data Labeling Key Conversation Points Easy and Shareable appeared first on Symbl.ai.

Most recently, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) have led the charge. As two of the most influential modern tools for NLP and NLG, both are already impacting the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape and bringing the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) ever closer.

Let’s explore the history of BERT and GPT-3 to see which is more practical or better suited for specific use cases.

BERT Was First on the Scene

A brainchild of Google, BERT, was introduced in 2018. BERT is a neural network-based NLP pre-training technique — in other words, a language model. According to Google, BERT “enables anyone to train their own state-of-the-art question answering system.”

Of course, BERT can do more. Using a transformer model as a base, BERT was pre-trained on an unlabeled, plain text corpus (more specifically, English Wikipedia and the Brown Corpus) and continues to learn unsupervised from this initial layer of knowledge during practical applications. BERT’s pre-training focuses on masked language models and next sentence prediction.

The former hides a word from BERT and forces it to use surrounding words as context clues (instead of mapping a word to a one-directional vector), while the latter makes BERT predict if there is sequential logic between two sentences. There are a few noteworthy things here: the pre-training on unlabeled data and using self-attention in an NLP model. 

Its major technical breakthrough is word masking in pre-training, enabling the bidirectional language model to learn natural human language syntax in practically any language. As the name implies, BERT only uses a transformer’s encoder parts for tasks downstream, where users add new trainable layers on top to learn a domain-specific task.

BERT performs well in classification tasks like sentiment analysis and answering questions. The model also excels in named entity recognition (NER) and next sentence prediction. BERT has been immensely helpful for:

• Voice assistants and chatbots aiming to enhance customer experience
• Customer review analysis (this is one of the most common sentiment analysis and classification use applications)
• Enhanced search results

BERT is already used by Google in its search algorithm. Facebook has also leveraged a modified version to handle content moderation on its platform. BERT has even found its way to Japan, where they have built a financial domain-specific model for commercial purposes.

After BERT, Comes GPT-3

As the third iteration of OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), GPT-3 is a general language model trained on uncategorized text data from the internet. GPT-3 dwarfs its predecessors and remains one of the most significant language models in the world today, with its largest model boasting around 170 billion parameters — ten times larger than the nearest notable NLP model, Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG) from Microsoft. GPT-3 learns these parameters from historical training data and applies its “knowledge” to downstream tasks such as language inference, paraphrasing, and sentiment analysis.

In short, GPT-3 takes transformer model embeddings and generates outputs from them. Its pre-training was on such a large base of parameters, attention layers, and batch sizes that it could produce striking results as a generic model with only a bit of user prompting in a downstream task.

GPT-3 has displayed promising performance in zero, one, or a few multitask settings. It can bring existing knowledge to bear on new tasks without more training or on which there’s little to no available data. You can see this in action by testing the model yourself. Go to OpenAI’s GPT Playground and give the model a task and one or two examples of expected output, and just with what it already knows and the information you’ve provided, GPT-3 will attempt to do what you’ve instructed.

So the core GPT-3 model doesn’t know how to perform any specific task, but you can easily make it specialize in a particular task, even without a lot of training data.

GPT-3 is broadly used in answering questions and excels in translation from other languages into English. To date, developers have used GPT-3 to:

• Build websites and applications
• Assist the development of written content and material like podcasts
• Assist in the generation of legal documents and things like resumes
• Generate machine learning code

Indeed, GPT-3 has also been a media darling for language modeling, specifically text generation, where it can complete a sentence, a paragraph, or even a movie script. GPT-3 also powers AI-assisted web content generation, including copywriting and marketing collateral, and a more comprehensive approach to predictive auto-completion or assistance in emails, notes, and even programming languages.

Overlaps and Distinctions

There’s a lot of overlap between BERT and GPT-3, but also many fundamental differences. The foremost architectural distinction is that in a transformer’s encoder-decoder model, BERT is the encoder part, while GPT-3 is the decoder part. This structural difference already practically limits the overlap between the two.

BERT can encode and use transfer learning to continue learning from its existing data when adding user-specific tasks. GPT-3, on the other hand, decodes from its massive pre-learned embeddings to present output that impressively matches user prompts. It does not learn anything new. In essence, it already has enough data to deliver something usable right out of the box.

Additionally, BERT’s bidirectionality gives it a leg up in tasks historically performed better with such encoders. These include fill-in-the-blank tasks where the model must look back and compare two pieces of content and tasks where it must process long passages to generate short answers. But as a more general language model with a more extensive parameter base, GPT-3 performs better at common sense tasks and pragmatic inference than baseline BERT.

To better illustrate this distinction in architecture: at the sentence level, GPT-3 looks back at previous wordsto predict what should come next. Meanwhile, BERT considers the words that come before and after a missing term and predicts what the word should be.

According to a research paper introducing it to the world, GPT-3 scored better on the tasks used for performance evaluation in research papers. More precisely, GPT-3’s base model is already promising as it is competitive or even better than state-of-the-art models, which their developers often fine-tune to specific tasks. For example, GPT-3 is competitive in low-resource translation with Meta’s BERT-based, finely-tuned model called the robustly optimized BERT pre-training approach (RoBERTa). And it produces slightly better results in some common sense reasoning and reading comprehension test sets.

The working-right-out-of-the-box nature of the language model has a lot to do with its state-of-the-art status, which also gives it a bit of an edge in low-resource environments where training data is scarce. Although you can fine-tune BERT, it won’t work without domain-specific training data.

But let’s look at more current data since BERT first arrived, also achieved state-of-the-art in 11 NLP tasks. The newest shiny thing will almost always be at least competitive with predecessors—but how are BERT and GPT-3 models today? Looking at the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmarks, which include single-sentence, similarity, paraphrasing, and natural language inference tasks, both BERT and GPT-3 are high on the leaderboard.

The model DeBERTa + CLEVER (BERT-based) and the model ERNIE (GPT-3-based) are neck and neck in the GLUE benchmarks, literally earning identical overall scores of 91.1, mere inches away from the first and second highest records at 91.2 and 91.3 respectively. In single-sentence tasks, GPT-3 has a slight edge, and it’s the opposite regarding similarity and paraphrasing tasks. The two are practically tied in natural language inference tasks, where one alternatively outperforms the other across four specific datasets.

But the real question is, what does all this mean for you? Which model is more capable? Which is easier to use?

BERT can potentially give you better downstream and domain-specific capabilities at a rudimentary level, given that you have the proper training data. GPT-3 outperforms BERT out-of-the-box in most tasks performed during research, but you can’t customize it to the same degree. In the same vein, GPT-3 is easier to use and simpler to start integrating into your systems and processes. However, its sheer size and black box nature can be restrictive for smaller operations that cannot accommodate the required infrastructure or might need more hands-on model tweaking.

Again, you must take these considerations into account with the historical performance of both models on available applications.

What Does the Future Hold?

GPT-3’s massive model is typically overqualified for simple or particular tasks, not to mention cumbersome and computer power-hungry. On the flip side, BERT requires additional training, which uses many resources because its large model has relatively slow training times and needs a lot of computing power.

It’s also interesting to note that BERT (from tech giant Google) is open source, while GPT-3 (from OpenAI) is a paid model and API. These are essential considerations for larger development teams.

Still, BERT and GPT-3 are far from the be-all and end-all in large language models for NLP and NLG. Another massive language model based on GPT-3 called BLOOM has just entered the fray, backed by collaboration with BigScience, HuggingFace, and other organizations and independent researchers. Only time will tell how it will compare to BERT and GPT-3.

One thing’s for sure, the future of NLP and NLG will be bright, busy, and full of possibilities. 

The post GPT-3 Versus BERT: A High-Level Comparison appeared first on Symbl.ai.

I’m so excited to enlighten developers, and everyone else who happens to stumble across our content, on the wide variety of voice AI solutions Symbl.ai provides and the bright future of conversation intelligence as a whole.

I pivoted into the tech world after spending several years writing and marketing content for a company that hosts B2B natural products industry trade shows. While I was serving a very different audience in that role, I’ve come to understand that simplicity, accessibility, and solution-oriented articles, videos, and e-books are appreciated across verticals.

All this to say, as the new Marketing Content Manager at Symbl.ai—previously having spearheaded our startup program content—I still have a lot to learn when it comes to experimenting with Symbl.ai’s impressive suite of APIs in real time. 

To get myself up to speed on what I consider to be one of our most interesting APIs, the Summarization API, I decided to go ahead and take the Summarization API Challenge in order to prove just how easy implementing it is to those working outside of a developer role.

First, I signed into my Symbl.ai Docs account and reviewed the Summarization and POST Video API documentation pages. 

Next, I downloaded the Postman app and searched for Symbl.ai within the platform, then forked all of the Symbl.ai APIs to My Workspace, generated my authentication token using my app ID and app secret and got down to business.

To kick off the summarization process, I pushed a 10-minute video of a recorded meeting from earlier this year through Symbl.ai’s Async API. Then, I chose “enableSummary” within the Params section and uploaded the recorded video meeting. 

Next, I went into the Lab APIs (BETA) folder and put the conversation ID that was returned to me in the previous step into its designated spot in the GET section at the top of the page.

After clicking “Send,” the most important moments of the summarized conversation were almost instantaneously delivered to me in the Body tab toward the bottom of the page. Users can scroll through each section to gauge when certain topics were discussed, when decisions were made, and .

It’s also worth noting that each summary block is derived from the conversation IDs that exist beneath them, so users can copy and paste those specific conversation IDs into the Messages (Transcript) API after inserting the conversation ID in its place at the top of the screen to return the granular pieces of the conversation that were recognized and used to create the summary. 

Pro tip: You can easily search within Messages (Transcript) for particular sentences or chunks of the conversation by copying and pasting the conversation ID into the box that appears after clicking the magnifying glass at the bottom right of the screen. Each ID should correspond to a sentence.

You may notice in the screenshot above that whoever is speaking is designated as “Speaker.” Prior to a meeting, Symbl.ai users can actually configure this moniker with the POST command so that each speaker has a name that can then also be returned based on whoever dominated the conversation at a given point in time within the summary. 

I hope you enjoyed this quick overview of the Symbl.ai’s Summary API feature—keep an eye out for more super-broken-down how-to blog posts as I continue my journey familiarizing myself with Symbl.ai’s product offerings alongside our growing developer community.

The post How Symbl.ai’s Summary API Simplifies Conversation Summarization appeared first on Symbl.ai.

Books are wonderful learning instruments for entrepreneurs, but the podcast world is also rich with easy-to-digest information from startup gurus and conversation AI industry experts alike.

A singular benefit of listening to podcasts for busy founders is that they can play podcasts while cooking, cleaning, writing, driving, coding, and any number of other activities. It’s almost like education via osmosis! 

If you’re ready to stack up your podcast playlist with our voice intelligence- and startup-centric faves, start multitasking and tune into the binge-worthy podcast series below.

This Week In Voice

Of course we have to kick off the list with the No. 1 voice technology podcast, This Week In Voice. This podcast is hosted by Bradley Metrock, who produces The Project Voice Series (including the Project Voice event, which, if you haven’t heard of it, you certainly should check it out). Lucky for voice AI founders, Metrock also boasts experience in the business development world via his Project Voice: Catalyst program. If you’re searching for a newsy lowdown of movers and shakers in voice technology, as well as updates on consumer and market adoption of conversation intelligence, bookmark This Week In Voice.

The Voicebot Podcast

The Voicebot Podcast is another great option for those of you looking to stay current on voice AI trends and forecasts; this podcast was born out of the Voicebot.ai blog and supplements some of the research published there. Host Bret Kinsella is the CEO and founder of Voicebot.ai and web3 community Niftorian; he brings on founders, developers, and researchers under the conversation intelligence umbrella to discuss advancements in voice AI. Some episodes serve to delve into some of the more impactful news stories (think big shifts in the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa ecosystems) while others assess progress in specific verticals alongside experts.

Masters of Scale

Now onto some less niche startup podcasts—first up, the uber-popular (for a reason!) Masters of Scale. This podcast shares business strategies straight from the mouths of the masterminds behind today’s most recognizable brands. Bob Safian, former editor in chief of Fast Company, hosts this podcast and covers topics spanning from leadership to fundraising to growth mindsets. We love that Safian doesn’t shy away from revealing his guests’ failures along their entrepreneurial journey. Setbacks and the learnings that arise from them are invaluable, so it’s healthy for you to know that even the folks at the top can empathize with your early stage struggles.

How I Built This

NPR’s Guy Raz hosts How I Built This, a similar podcast to Masters of Scale in that Raz interviews his guests—successful entrepreneurs from all walks of life and across verticals—about their humble beginnings. There is more of a narrative arc to each episode than Masters of Scale, so if you enjoy a good story above all else then How I Built This will keep you captivated. Sundar Pichai, Max Levchin, Joe Gebbia, John Mackey, and pretty much anyone pulling the levers at and fostering outsized growth for innovative businesses has been on this podcast, or at the very least been talked about on it. Not to mention, we love soothing NPR continental accents!

Business Wars

Business Wars says the obvious in its title: Business in today’s world is, at its core, war. Coke vs. Pepsi! Cryptocurrency vs. other forms of cryptocurrency! Google Chrome vs. Internet Explorer! Gucci vs. Louis Vuitton! The prize is consumer dollars or their uninterrupted attention, and the outcomes of these battles affect what all of us eat, wear, connect with our fellow humans and what our day-to-day lives fundamentally end up looking like. David Brown, former anchor of Marketplace, hosts this podcast, which focuses on one major “rivalry” per season. You don’t need to listen to these sequentially, so pick and choose the analyses that are most relevant to your product and study up.  

She Did It Her Way

In She Did It Her Way, host Amanda Bolelyn breaks down starting a six-figure business into easy and intuitive steps. With episode titles including “How to Create Urgency With Your Offers,” “How to Overcome Objections,” “Going All In With No Safety Net,” and “Learning to Stop Managing Other Peoples’ Insecurities and Expectations,” Bolelyn’s podcast series goes deep into some of the more intangible aspects of putting on your founder hat, so to speak. She also emphasizes the inclusion of female entrepreneurs specifically and interviews a bevy of qualified women who may not have the sexiest job titles but are crushing it nonetheless. If you are feeling alone as a female entrepreneur, give this podcast a listen—there are several seasons to parse through even though Bolelyn is currently on a podcasting hiatus.

Mixergy

Mixergy features the founders of such trailblazing companies as YCombinator, Wikipedia, and even Barbara Corcoran of The Corcoran Group makes an appearance! Mixergy’s goal is to introduce audiences to experienced mentors through in-depth interviews and courses in which experts detail how founders can uncover solutions to seemingly crippling issues. We also love that the podcast takes a piecemeal approach to understanding the entrepreneurial journey by offering up the fundamental truth that no one expert or businessperson is going to have all of the answers. The podcast also highlights mission as a key driver for each and every successful entrepreneur, something that is implied but rarely explicitly emphasized across startup-y podcasts. 

Startups For The Rest Of Us

Bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped tech business owners, listen up, because this one’s for you. Startups For The Rest Of Us shares stories of founders as they attempt to start, acquire, and grow SaaS companies. There’s a little founder psychology mixed into these personal tales of triumphs and failures as well. Startups For The Rest Of Us is currently hosted by Rob Walling, who has built and sold multiple SaaS businesses and also authored a book about how to bootstrap a startup entitled “Start Small, Stay Small.” Walling has invested in more than 55 startups and offers creative approaches to the podcast format, such as the episode during which he explains the ins and outs of SaaS metrics to his child in order to significantly simplify the subject.

This Week In Startups

If you’re looking for a daily podcast that gives you an overview of the most important news across business and tech, include This Week In Startups on your roster. There are interviews with founders, operators, investors, and innovators scattered throughout this series as well, but the focus here is the must-know news du jour squeezed into each 1-hour daily episode. Hosts Jason Calacanis and Molly Wood also go over VC etiquette (very important!) and interview the people in the game who write the big checks so that you can better understand what they want from you. A lot of what they cover also serves to show that even the biggest companies can fumble, and there is always room for innovative new players.

Panic With Friends

Panic With Friends is a weekly podcast that promises its listeners simplicity and directness, and it delivers a dose of humor as well. Financial industry entrepreneur and investor Howard Lindzon talks to a wide variety of guests for 30 minutes to an hour about “the latest trends in technology and the markets.” The podcast began in 2020 as a means to offer support for people struggling during the pandemic by offering historical context and investing stories. Lindzon’s goal is to set investors up in the best possible way for growth in the years to come.

The post 10 podcasts that will light a fire under today’s voice intelligence startup founders appeared first on Symbl.ai.

Finding and locking on genuine talent can sometimes be more challenging than raising capital for today’s entrepreneurs, and the all-virtual hiring process that has become commonplace in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t made this feat any easier. 

However, countless failed startups have proved that the team you put together at the outset can make or break your company’s success. In fact, your team virtually IS your startup in the beginning stages, and investors will want to know that everyone on it can hold their own. 

Soft skills are just as important as hard skills within a startup, and there are certain personality attributes to keep an eye out for throughout the recruitment journey that will lead to less headaches and churn among your employees down the road. If you’re beyond product-market fit and ready to construct your dream team, read on for our top four pointers.

Take stock of your own strengths and weaknesses

A good starting point is to reflect upon what you bring to the table as the founder of your startup. Are you a technical whiz with less experience on the marketing and sales side, or the opposite? What beliefs, values, and personality traits do you display on a daily basis and consider indivisible from your business? How much real-world experience do you have in the market you want to break into? Do you genuinely like managing people?

Be honest with yourself when reflecting upon your professional and personal qualities, because A) nobody expects you to be able to do everything under the sun and B) once you have an excellent grasp on your own capabilities and limitations it becomes way easier to define the kind of people you will need to hire. 

It’s also worth mentioning that egos can easily become overblown in the startup landscape (cough, cough) so having a solid working knowledge of your blind spots, prior mistakes, and faults will actually place you ahead of the competition in most spaces. Strive to remain open to constructive criticism and outside opinions as you scale.

Be nitpicky about skill set and culture fit

Your goal as a founder should be to focus your energy on what you do best and then hire employees to fill in the gaps, all while fostering a supportive and welcoming corporate culture. A few roles to consider hiring for first include a COO, CEO (if it isn’t your role of choice), product manager, business development manager, CTO, CMO, CFO, and a sales manager. 

Hiring as an early stage founder means keeping a close eye on a given potential employees’ flexibility, resourcefulness, adaptability, and proactivity, in addition to the hard skills required for whatever role they’re going for. Remember that in the ultra-early stages a single person can tip the scales one way or the other, and you should gain consensus among your entire leadership team whenever bringing someone new on board.

The hiring process is rife with competition today, so hiring sites such as Indeed or Zip Recruiter may lead to less quality candidates than you would find by reaching out to your personal network about openings at your startup. Note that while you may be a jack of all trades (most startup founders are) your employees do not have to be. Hire people with well-honed skills in a specific area, not people who are generally good across the board and happen to be available.

Don’t rely on friends and family to power your startup

This leads us to the next piece of advice: Don’t hire someone just because they are friends or family. This will make firing them infinitely more difficult, if it comes down to that, and prioritizing people you already have a strong emotional connection with will lead you to miss out on employees who are entering their professional prime.

Startups are risky and things rarely go according to plan, so it won’t behoove you in the long run to bring emotionally charged relationships into the mix. Many skills can be taught, so as long as you can find hardworking individuals with a good, upbeat attitude and an eagerness to learn, your startup is on the right track.

As we mentioned before, there’s nothing wrong with finding new team members through your network of friends and family who can vouch for them. Just remember that sometimes the right person for the job when your startup consists of five people will be the absolute wrong person when your startup scales to 50 employees, or 100 employees. 

Move slowly

High-stress situations can lead you as a startup founder to feel the urge to hire someone quickly to fix a given problem without due diligence. As we mentioned previously, it only takes a single person to poison a startup’s internal ecosystem, and you are responsible for preventing that from happening by moving through this process at a snail’s pace—at least at first.

Temperament and emotional intelligence aren’t aspects of a person that you can gauge from a quick glance over a prospective hire’s resume, but they are arguably more important to know before hiring someone for a full-time position.

Additionally, founders must recognize that workplace perks, benefits, and compensation all figure into the quality of talent (and quantity of people) that will be attracted to your startup, and these aspects of your business will also take time to develop. Stick it out for the right talent, and always follow your gut instincts throughout the interviewing process.

The post 4 steps to assemble a winning team as an early stage startup founder appeared first on Symbl.ai.

Spectacular startup mentors are few and far between, even though everyone and their mother is on Twitter these days espousing pithy opinions on how to go about achieving success as a small company. 

And yet the search is worth the effort: Locking on a business mentor (or two, or three) who can guide you through the early stages of raising capital, bootstrapping, building your product, finding partners, and especially uncovering your unique market fit will drastically improve your chances of survival in the ultra-competitive tech startup landscape. 

Here at Symbl for Startups, we offer mentoring services of this nature aplenty, and have seen with our own eyes how transformative ongoing conversations with industry veterans can be for emerging entrepreneurs. 

For those of you who are still shopping around for your dream mentor-mentee relationship, we’ve listed four ways to pinpoint quality ones and embark on rich connections with them below.

Identify which aspects of your business require support

To have a positive impact, your chosen mentor must be able to fill in the blanks in terms of skills that you and your team lack. 

Are you hoping to eventually partner with Amazon, or launch via another high-profile platform? Then find someone who has had experience and success navigating those waters. Are you struggling to narrow down the pain point that your product solves? In that case, someone with extensive experience in the market you’re hoping to break into will have helpful insights. Having technical troubles? Find a former or current CTO who can meet you in the midst of that process without missing a beat.

Mentors can obviously also introduce you to those all-important people who write lucrative checks, but it’s never a great idea to push them in a heavy-handed way to pass along these contacts until you’ve established a solid relationship with the mentor and ascertained your business’ value in their eyes. Along these lines, while you may need cash ASAP it’s unhelpful to select a mentor based on their ability to personally fund your startup.

Understand different approaches to mentoring

How you learn and where you are at in terms of your product development should also influence the kind of mentor you pursue. Some mentors prefer to dole out advice in a prescriptive manner based on what they can gauge from your pitch deck or product demo. These relationships may be a little bit more one-sided, but they can work well if you are at the very beginning of your founder journey and are set on soaking up as much expert information as possible.

On the other hand, if you are the type of person who prefers more of an active dialogue-based mentor-mentee relationship, then you should seek out mentors who approach your periodic conversations by posing questions to help you sort out anything that might be going wrong. They might ask you where you see the company heading, how you plan to get there, and how they can best help you, among other pertinent questions.

Some mentors prefer a formal structured meeting setup, while others are good with you reaching out only when you need their help. Some mentors are better than others at being a shoulder to cry on and offering hand-holding during rough times.

Remember that all of these styles and personalities have their own merits and drawbacks, and it will take some work before you come across a mentor who offers the perfect formula for you—either way, you are going to have to use your own judgment in the end to decide what you’re going to keep and what you’re going to discard out of these conversations. 

Where should you go to find mentors?

Mentors don’t have to be wizened old people with decades of experience—you could end up meeting someone who has just a few more years of experience than you in a given field and have your relationship naturally evolve into mentorship without that initial intention. It’s a good idea to strike up conversations with as many people as you possibly can at these kinds of events to increase your chances of finding mentors.

Quite literally anyone you come across who you deem worthy of your respect and who is willing to champion your company can be a potential mentor; don’t limit yourself to those people in certain age ranges or, again, those who have certain investor relationships. LinkedIn, former coworkers, thought leaders, or retired professionals in your field are all valuable resources to tap as well.

Recognize ‘mentor whiplash’

‘Mentor whiplash” is a real thing. When one mentor you love and respect says one thing, and another mentor you love and respect says the exact opposite, who’s right and who’s wrong?

Trick question! You have to remember in these cases that no one knows your business better than you do. You need to think about your customer. Take every single piece of advice you receive in stride and base your decisions on what you think is best for your customer.

A good mentor is not going to be hurt that you dont follow their advice like a robot. In fact, it will actually have the opposite effect. A good mentor will simply be excited to go on the startup journey alongside you, so be willing to be wrong as much as right and know that regardless you will learn along the way.

Stay open to criticism and mind your manners

Another thing a good mentor does: He or she will strive to never make you feel uneducated, uncomfortable, or on the defensive, but you need to understand that your business as it is in the early stages will likely change dramatically once you gain traction.

In fact, it probably must change in significant ways before you can make your idea work in a given market. Positive affirmations from friends and family are great, but they’re not going to push you out of your comfort zone and into the stratosphere.

The mentor-mentee relationship shouldn’t be a thankless one; let your mentors, once you have them, know regularly that you appreciate their pro bono support of your early stage business. You can report back to them regarding applications of their advice and how it’s working out for you. Believe it or not, that kind of feedback will just about make any mentor’s day.

Appreciate every late night, every casual coffee-fueled conversation, and every hard-won piece of truth that your mentor offers you as your nebulous startup idea becomes a tangible thing that exists out in the world. Come prepared to your mentor meetings so you don’t give anyone the impression that you’re wasting their time. 

Once you have found a quality mentor, you will likely have them at your disposal for life across any project you choose to embark on. Mentorship is, at its heart, a relationship just like any other that deepens over time with mutual effort and encouragement.

The post 5 guidelines for choosing the right business mentor for your startup appeared first on Symbl.ai.

You’ll find no shortage of voices out in the world clamoring to tell you what and what not to do when going about launching a startup. This can be extremely overwhelming at the outset.

However, while every business is unique—and you should absolutely seek out personalized advice from mentors who can analyze your business strategy in real time—there are some hard-and-fast rules that will increase your chances of survival.

Below, the Symbl.ai for Startups team summarizes 10 books that will ensure you start your journey as a successful founder off on the right foot. 

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

“Take care of the people, the products and the profits—in that order.”

The life of a startup CEO is full of tough decisions, lonely nights, irreversible mistakes, and failures both small and large. In “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” Ben Horowitz doesn’t gloss over these daunting aspects of leading a startup; instead, he teaches the reader how to learn from the difficult times and offers actionable advice for managing one’s team while scaling. Think of this book as a powerful source of inspiration for when things inevitably go sideways. “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” is our No. 1 reading recommendation for founders, and we don’t say that lightly! 

Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

“Leadership, at its core, is about making people better as a result of your presence—and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”

This book, written by a Harvard Business School professor and the founder of The Leadership Consortium, explains how companies can achieve excellence by baking customer service directly into their business models. Per the book, great service results when management identifies the “operating segments” that are most important to their target customers and optimizes those at the expense of other company attributes. They also delve into four mechanisms that can fund your service model and go over some best practices for managing both customers and employees (hint: simplifying your product helps a ton).

The Design of Everyday Things

“Two of the most important characteristics of good design are discoverability and understanding.”

“The Design of Everyday Things,” written by usability engineer and cognitive scientist Donald Norman, studies the relationship between humans and the real world, which includes artificial creations such as software and digital interfaces. The main underlying theme throughout the book is Norman’s concept of “Human Centered Design.” This means designing things in order to serve the user’s capabilities and needs rather than the other way around; without a deep understanding of people, Norman posits that designs are destined to be faulty and both difficult to use and understand. This book gives the reader a great overview of 

Venture Deals

“Failure is a key part of entrepreneurship, but, as with many things in life, attitude impacts outcome.”

“Venture Deals” is the brainchild of renowned investor Brad Feld and is just about the best book entrepreneurs can read to prepare them to raise venture capital. Securing sufficient funding is no small feat in this day and age, and there are surprises around every corner. For instance, the simple fact that it’s always better to wait for the VC investor to speak or act first when you enter negotiations—honing your ability to wait and listen in these scenarios will serve you well in the long run. Other tips are more obvious but bear repeating, such as championing transparency to avoid ruining your reputation. 

The Lean Startup

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”

Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup” breaks down starting a profitable business into three steps. First, founders must validate their business strategy through what Ries refers to as a “semi-scientific” approach. This means formulating a hypothetical business strategy and immediately getting out there and determining whether or not it can make you money, and not just from friends and family. Next, continuously determine the value of a given product or feature by creating two versions and comparing customers’’ reactions to both. Finally, make sure you’re not focusing on vanity metrics—having a lot of likes on a LinkedIn post is great for visibility, but in the end that’s not what pays the bills.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

“Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.”

An oldie but a goldie. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes when someone suggested you read this (to some, practically ancient) book, we strongly urge you to reconsider. Throughout, Dale Carnegie effectively explains how to network while selling yourself in the most charming and unobtrusive way possible. Many of his tactics boil down to being genuinely interested in, respectful, and nonjudgmental of others, which is still a rarity in today’s business landscape, and especially among startups. This text is a great reminder that the best way to get someone to do what you want is to fully understand his or her viewpoint and light up that same desire within them.

The Startup Owner’s Manual

“A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” 

If you’re looking for a complete reference guide when starting a company, “The Startup Owner’s Manual” is the perfect place to start. Startups run fundamentally differently from larger established businesses, and this text is chock-full of insights into product introduction, customer development methodology, discoverability, and validation. This book will take you step-by-step through the exact processes you should follow when attempting to establish a successful startup, although be warned that it’s written very much in a manual format and isn’t the type of text that is meant to be read cover to cover in one sitting.

Zero to One

“A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”

Peter Thiel’s acclaimed book “Zero to One” reveals a philosophy and strategy for building valuable businesses that offer something entirely new to the world. Thiel distinguishes between companies that enter novel markets vs. those that enter existing ones, and then makes the controversial (but well backed-up) assertion that it’s in a startup’s best interest to avoid competition altogether. Thiel believes that much-maligned monopolies are actually what drive innovation, and he notes that it’s in the consumer’s best interest for a startup to achieve a monopoly—because this would mean that the product is so good that others can’t compete.

The E-Myth Revisited

“Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.”

“The E-Myth Revisited” takes a stab at dismantling some common myths about the entrepreneurial journey, as well as explaining why so many of today’s early stage businesses never get off of the ground. The “myth” in question states that having great technical skills or a solid understanding of any business’ technical work will allow you to effectively run a business. When you start a business, you become much more than the person doing the technical work. You’re the CEO, CFO, CTO, CMO and way more. Throughout, Gerber does an excellent job of incentivizing founders to plan extensively before launch.

Start With Why

“The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.”

If you’ve ever wondered what separates a truly great CEO from a run-of-the-mill-one, “Start With Why” is an excellent read. This book explains that leaders who are able to foster a sense of purpose and belonging among their employees, independent of external incentives, will always come out on top. This is because the “why” that drives a business is what people buy into, more so than the “what.” At points during your founder journey you might find that your “why” becomes foggy or nebulous, and when this happens reflection is a necessity.

The post 10 must-read books for early stage conversation AI startup founders appeared first on Symbl.ai.

Founders who begin their journeys primarily doing what they’re most passionate about, whether that’s coding or designing or researching or something else, may find that their day-to-day duties shift toward employee management more than anything once the startup begins to scale.

While it’s important to learn how to effectively oversee your growing team firsthand, it is even more important to carve out time every single day to engage in what Hungarian-American psychologist and researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as the flow state of being. 

So what exactly does “flow” mean in this context? According to Csikszentmihalyi’s uber-popular 1990 book on the topic, the flow state comes about when a person is fully immersed in a creative process that utilizes skills he or she is proficient in. It is a kind of pleasant engagement with adversity that transforms challenges into a source of deep satisfaction and happiness in addition to fostering unselfconsciousness.

Csikszentmihalyi uses rock climbing as a pertinent example of achieving the flow state of being. The purpose of rock climbing isn’t to rush to get to the peak or some sort of preconceived utopia, but rather its purpose is for the climber to be present and enjoy the mental and physical feat of climbing in and of itself. One reaches the end of a difficult climb and wishes that the route would go on even longer.

Along these lines, identifying what brings you as a founder this same sense of inner satisfaction and achievement, and committing to doing that activity daily, will help you become a better entrepreneur in practically every way. 

Read on for a step-by-step guide to help you unlock the flow state and stay motivated amid the hecticness of running an early stage startup.

Eliminate distractions

The most important step on the path to intentionally placing yourself in the state of flow is to first dramatically reduce common distractions that stem from both your external and internal environments. 

Frankly, you are far less likely to access the flow state if you are hungover or exhausted or caught up in strong emotions such as anger, sadness, and frustration. Similarly, if your outer space is cluttered or loud or you have people constantly interrupting you, it will be tough to relax into a given creative process enough to reach the flow state.

For those founders who have trouble finding prolonged periods of uninterrupted activity, it is practical to begin blocking off one’s calendar at a dedicated time each day for this specific kind of self care. If you’re a morning person, perhaps the best way for you to get into your uninterrupted flow state is to engage in whatever activity you choose as soon as you wake up—while the rest of the world is still snoozing. If you’re a night owl, vice versa. 

Balance challenge with skill

You may not remember the last time you entered the flow state of being. That’s okay! The main thing to look for in a given activity is that it doesn’t overwhelm you in terms of difficulty or overall scope. This isn’t the time to bite off more than you can chew. On the other hand, if you pick a task that is too simple you then run the risk of becoming bored and mentally disengaging with the process.

If you’re struggling to come up with anything work-related that might cause you to enter the state of flow, revert back to literally any activity that brings you joy. The whole point of existing in the flow state is to begin relying more on internal, intrinsic happiness as opposed to external sources of gratification.

Common activities that allow people to enter the flow state are just-challenging-enough forms of physical movement, meditation, diving deep into a specific educational topic, writing code, creating any kind of art, or otherwise completing a goal-oriented task that strikes this solid balance between level of challenge and personal skill. 

Push past negative mental chatter

During your first few conscious attempts to reach the flow state, it is common to hit a discouraging mental roadblock accompanied by much negative mental chatter. Instead of ceasing your efforts entirely, consciously pivot and view going through the motions of whatever activity you have chosen as your brain’s warm-up to eventually reaching the mental runner’s high that is the flow state. It is almost too easy in this day and age to get distracted by your phone or open Twitter on your browser and go totally off track at the first sign of discomfort.

When entrepreneurs regularly practice pushing through negative mental chatter telling them to give up, they are more likely to access the flow state AND complete more tasks day to day. The instinct to zone out can be very strong, but you can decide to acknowledge those tricky moments as precursors to the flow state to help you stay in the zone.

The bottom line is that your focus and the joy that stems from it deserve to be protected. If trying to access the flow state becomes yet another painful box on your to-do list, something is off and the process needs to be recalibrated. 

The post Why it’s so important to find your ‘flow’ as a founder and 3 key steps to get there appeared first on Symbl.ai.

How many times have you come across a blog post with a variation of this title? We’re guessing you’ve already glanced through a whole slew of them that all offer the same vague advice.

This article, however, delves a bit deeper than those into the nitty-gritty process of it all. Something important to remember as you read on is that each of the four steps in the following paragraphs are of equal importance — you will need to put the same amount of effort into these suggestions from beginning to end in order to get your business off the ground.

Step 1: Test demand for your product

The first step in this process is to test demand for your product. Before bringing a startup into existence you have to get out there, make some noise about it, and see who bites.

By this we mean tweeting about your product, buying ads on Facebook, purchasing some Google adwords — even $20 toward this process can go a long way. You yourself will have to shoulder the initial burden of telling the world about it, and telling the RIGHT people. Don’t fall for the “build it and they will come” mentality.

You should also sign up for a cheap or free email campaign tool such as Reply.io. Then, you can build a landing page and offer early access to users who sign up for your marketing emails. Be very clear about the problem you’re solving in order to funnel people to this landing page; these early signups are super valuable.

Now that you’ve got your list of interested people and a functioning landing page, your task is to find three paying customers before you do anything else. Let’s repeat that: You must find three paying customers before you do ANYTHING ELSE.

Don’t knock good old-fashioned cold calls or other seemingly outdated marketing efforts when you get to this point. Put your salesperson hat on and become a bonafide evangelist for your product. Candidly, if you’re the founder of a company and you can’t successfully sell your own product, you shouldn’t have entered the startup world to begin with.

For these discussions it is helpful to generate a web-based clickable prototype (if your product is SaaS based), a prototype app, or use another rapid prototyping tool to create a working mock-up of the product. Figma or InVision are two popular tools of this ilk worth looking into.

Technical founders can also lean on Gs.frame, in which you can write lightweight javascript and build real interactions. The bottom line here is that there are so many rapid prototyping tools out there and you need to find one that fits and use it.

There is no excuse for not having the product put together when speaking with prospective customers. You need to know what the product will eventually look like, how to sell it, and how to build it with this kind of prototyping software.

Step 2: Find spaces where your product belongs

Is there a marketplace for your voice AI product specifically? For instance, are you building for a voice assistant or a conversational assistant? In that case, check out the Alexa Skills Marketplace or the Slack App Directory. Be on the lookout for niche marketplaces where your product’s use cases will be appreciated.

You could also go the crowdsourcing route here, but this might complicate your cap tables. Knowing how crowdsourcing will affect your cap tables is important because that will come up later when you’re in dialogue with investors.

You can also introduce your company directly after it launches on Product Hunt, where thousands of tech enthusiasts and journalists flock daily to check out what’s new and next across sectors. You can learn more about this process here, but know that it’s a little more complicated than it may seem and you will need to finesse the system a bit to stand out among the many other tech startups going live on any given day.

There are so many websites that solely showcase freshly launched startups, so it’s worth investigating which ones will accept you at your stage of pre-launch. Be ready to put a lot of sweat equity into this process of becoming easily discoverable.

Step 3: Generate content

CONTENT IS KING. Be extremely vocal on Twitter, Medium, and your blogging and social media platforms of choice about the problem you’re solving.

This advice comes with the huge caveat that you have to write directly from the heart. Keep your CEO hat on and be plain spoken, honest, and straightforward. Do not try to be trendy—try to be vulnerable and honest. Read: No marketing-ese flowery language during this first stage of your company’s launch!

Founders can also offer to guest write blog posts on publications that their target users consistently read explaining the problem their new product solves; this will work better if one is consistent over time with publishing written content, however. Starting a blog can be a ton of work, but it’s well worth the effort if you break through and end up becoming a thought leader in a given industry.

Even better than guest writing, though, is having a respected journalist or institution give your product an unbiased positive review. You can reach out individually to journalists from all over the world via email or through LinkedIn explaining why their readership would value your voice AI product to get this ball rolling.

There are also tons of message boards and other virtual “watering holes” where potential users hang out online, and your team should use this to its advantage by joining in on conversations across forums, message boards, and social media sites to alert the movers and shakers within these communities about why your product is so great, different, or disruptive.

Speaking of social media websites, you’ll want to create a solid digital presence within whichever one (or two, or three) aligns with your product the best. Invest in a company HootSuite account if this is something your team struggles with.

There are social media tools that you can pay for as well that can help you gain followers at a faster rate, and in turn these new followers will start dialogues with you and each other about their — invaluable, at this stage — opinions on the product.

Step 4: Make yourself and your startup as visible as possible

If you’re building a conversation intelligence product for call centers, you need to be at the trade shows, conferences, etc., that cater to the call center space. If your voice AI product solves a problem within the world of finance, get yourself in the physical spaces where the people who will want to use your product are congregating. This goes for any vertical.

If you don’t have the energy to go to in-person conferences and summits, you need to be where people are looking for your solution on the web. Don’t be afraid to ask for help throughout the process of launching your product — that is also likely to bring in customers. LinkedIn is great for this, because asking people in your network for help or feedback will lead them to become interested in what you’re doing and customers will come from that.

One last thing that is perhaps the most important piece of advice in this article: Don’t despair if this process takes a while. A huge mistake we see many startup founders make is shipping their product too early with the aim of getting rapid iterative feedback. Don’t just ship a piece of crap and see what happens. We believe this is an unfortunate side effect of the popularity of “The Lean Startup” and the concept of the MVP, or minimum viable product.

Stick with it — grit is the key to winning in the long term here. If you are solving a real problem, you’ll know when you’ve done enough. Sit back and ask yourself: Is the thing I’m shipping solving my problem?

If the answer is yes, you’re well on your way to widespread success.

The post How to get your first 5 paying customers as a conversation intelligence startup appeared first on Symbl.ai.

Building and presenting a pitch deck doesn’t have to be a painful experience. First and foremost, it’s your opportunity to tell potential investors a compelling overarching story that weaves together your business’ mission, target user, total addressable market, progress to date and more — and hopefully it gets you to that crucial second meeting.

In crafting a stellar pitch deck you will learn how to prove to others that you are passionate about the problem you’re solving, which is important because potential investors must view you as a driven, trustworthy steward of their money before they take the next step with your company.

Every founder will have his or her own way of creatively approaching this task, but there are certain ground rules that will keep you from looking like an amateur. We also want to note up front that there are many differing opinions with regard to what makes a pitch deck stand out—every investor is different! That being said, the Symbl for Startups team has reviewed hundreds of sub-par to excellent decks and provides some educated guidance on the topic below.

Less is more

To begin with, it’s important to ensure you aren’t bombarding your audience with excess information. Keep the design of the presentation sleek and minimal and limit yourself to one idea or statistic per slide — if you can keep the words on each slide to 10 or less, even better. While the number of slides in a presentation will differ for every business, aim for 10 or less.

Getting straight into the meat of the matter is of the utmost importance once you have a potential investor’s attention, so go ahead and eliminate any “fluff” across your messaging. Note that verifiable numbers such as user engagement, monthly recurring revenue, and traffic will have a bigger impact than clunky text-based slides.

Continuous updates

Your business is a living entity, and the pitch deck you use to represent your company should reflect this. Set a regular time on your calendar to review the core presentation and discard any irrelevant information as your business scales. Revisiting your original pitch deck also gives you a helpful birds-eye view of the business’ progress that might lead you to address roadblocks in new ways.

As the company grows, you will begin presenting modified quickie versions of your pitch deck on a monthly or quarterly basis to investors with pertinent updates. This is why, once again, it is practical to view your pitch deck as a central corporate document that should always be kept aesthetically clean, well-written, and otherwise up to date.

Understand your audience

Depending on who you are meeting with, it is beneficial to keep a few versions of your pitch deck on hand. Potential customers, mentors, investors, co-founders, and partners are often looking for different information when it comes to a business pitch; customers require less information about granular financial matters than investors, for instance. However, demoing is KING for all of these audiences. If you have a working product or prototype, giving people access to that in the form of a video tutorial or interactive demo is invaluable.

Researching potential investors’ goals could lead you to tweak your slides one way or another prior to a meeting as well. Angel investors tend to operate in the spheres they know well and are comfortable with, and they are quicker to deliver in terms of handing over funds. Venture capital investors, on the other hand, are managing other peoples’ money and have longer wait times but more flexibility with regard to the types of startups they will work with within a given market.

Pitch competitions are also an excellent way to get your name out there, reach new audiences and network with other entrepreneurs. For these events, streamlining your pitch deck is of the utmost importance because you will have to reveal as much essential information as possible to judges of various backgrounds in a limited time period.

Necessary information to include

Beyond the intro slide, which is the perfect place to showcase your business’ awesome logo and tagline, make sure that one of your very first informational slides offers potential investors a brief value proposition — which, hopefully, you are able to squeeze into a single sentence. This slide is all about hooking your audience as though they were a fish on a line; reflect on what makes you buzz with excitement about your company and run with that.

The basic structure of your pitch deck should look like this: Intro→The Problem→The Solution→The Product→The Business Model→The Go-To-Market Plan→The Competition→The Team→Progress To Date→Contact Information.

Once you have these essentials down pat, you can begin to plug in optional slides that cater to the specific audience you’ll be pitching to—but remember to keep it brief. DocSend reports that the average VC will spend 3 minutes and 44 seconds reading a seed pitch deck, but the most successful pitch decks can be consumed in roughly 2 minutes as a result of their simplicity and readability.

Mistakes to avoid and top takeaways

In this section we’re going to describe seven frequent missteps that bear repeating from earlier sections. The most frequent mistake founders make is not stating what their business does extremely clearly and up front.

What exactly does your business do? Make sure that the problem you are solving is right at the beginning of the presentation, because more likely than not your audience is time-strapped and won’t want to listen to or read through a drawn out spiel.

The second mistake, somewhat related to the first, is using flowery marketing language instead of phrasing the basic premise in a matter-of-fact way. Do not pepper in buzzwords or trendy phrases across the presentation in an effort to sound more impressive — just be very plain spoken, as though you were explaining a concept to a 5 year old.

Mistake №3 is the overuse of visuals. Only use visuals when they are absolutely necessary. Placing stock photography or background images on every slide will drive your audience nuts. This goes for anything visual, even data-based graphs. You should really only have these in the presentation if they tell a story and are actually meaningful. If you email someone a pitch deck and the cover slide is just a flashy image without any signifier of what the document contains, the person you sent it to might not even read it.

The fourth mistake is not using the concrete data you do have. If it’s easier to showcase these numbers in a graph or plot or picture, then a visual is fine. A really important caveat to this is to exclude all “creative” math. There are numbers that mean something and numbers that mean nothing. Revenue, users and MRR are all totally fine to keep in there, but if you’re making numbers up your audience will know. For example, “projected MRR” isn’t a real number and won’t impress anyone.

Mistake №5 is overloading your audience with information on each slide–keep the copy on these as brief as possible.

The sixth mistake is using Docusign when circulating your pitch deck. Instead of this, format the presentation as an uneditable PDF. If you send out a link to your original PowerPoint file, you run the risk of having people mess things up in there. Additionally, the file name should be the name of the company, your name, and the date you’re sending it so that the recipient immediately knows how old it is.

Finally, mistake №7 is trying to sound more impressive than you are. Nothing smells more like B.S. to investors when every startup is reportedly solving a multi-billion-dollar problem! Be real with both yourself and your audience about the problem you’re solving. The Symbl for Startups team also isn’t a fan of competitive landscape graphs that make it look like your business is the only one out there solving a particular problem — odds are, that’s just not the case.

Again, experienced VCs can see straight through exaggerated claims; be confident in your product’s ability to solve a problem and refrain from blowing up the market size or opportunity. This will only land you with inexperienced or ineffective investors.

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