Dr. John Bates

Well, I'm really a product guy.

And so I always look at things through a product lens, I guess.

I'm a former professor of computer science.

I'm a PhD in computer science.

And Appama, which was the first company, was when I cut the umbilical cord and went over there to

from the crossed over to the dark side, if you like, and decided, okay, I'm going to commercialize some of my research, which was a company that used machine learning techniques to find patterns in fast moving data and act on them in sub microsecond latency.

But so my first experience, I guess, was building everything myself from the product to the company, to the go to market, to then doing crossing the chasm.

Boy, that's a lot of effort.

So we applied that technology in the area of algorithmic trading.

So I had a lot of early experience with autonomous agents kind of running around trading automatically and processing millions of events a second and fighting against each other.

So I think I've got a little bit of a harbinger for what's going to happen with the agents now that we're rolling out of AI.

But I learned really from that that

It's really cool to find a really good technology and in a space that's ripe for disruption.

In that case, it was algorithmic trading.

People were taking months to build algorithms, gave them a technology where they could plug them together in hours.

And

Pointing that technology in that space that's ripe for disruption, playing into a coming revolution.

And I've done that a couple of times since.

I've sold five businesses and everything from my previous company, Eggplant, which was a really cool software test automation technology where we used... It was really the first AI-powered software test automation, which everyone's doing now, but...

applying generative AI with a model to say, okay, let's automate the building of test scripts based on what we can figure out about this system.