SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
With 1 Exit Done, Can He Automate Diligence for Financial Firms Using RPA?
18 May 2021
Chapter 1: What is the background of Vik Singh and his previous ventures?
you come from this world, if you were gonna go raise, I mean, do you plan to raise this year?
It's a possibility. I mean, based on what we're seeing right now and the feedback we're getting, it feels realistic.
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My guest today is Vic Singh. He's the CEO and co-founder, or he was CEO and co-founder of Infer, a company that provides a predictive platform for helping businesses win more customers. That was acquired by Ignite. He's also an EIR at Sutter Hill Ventures. Now he's working on a stealth startup in the enterprise AI space. Vic, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it. All right.
Talk to me about what you're working on. What's the company do?
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Chapter 2: What is Vik Singh's new startup focused on?
And so could we apply that instead of to controlling cars, could we use that to control computers themselves? Think of your screen. It has all these pixels. You're looking at your browser and all this text. And if you applied the same algorithms that your self-driving car is using to your screen, it performs remarkably. It's actually a lot easier. It's very high quality. What does that mean?
So let's say you're, you know, you have your browser open and you're looking at like a LinkedIn page, right? And you're scrolling down. If you had one of these vision techniques that are being applied, you know, with your car, those reading stop signs that are far away and fuzzy and has bird poop on it, it's much harder, but it's still able to identify those things.
If you take that capability and apply it to your screen, And we know exactly what's going on, right? Because the resolution is so high. And so we can understand the text really well. OCR accuracy is improved dramatically.
And so if you can understand what's going on on the screen, then it's possible to control the mouse and keyboard in the same way you control a steering wheel and a gas pedal in a car to actually doing the work that humans do on the computer.
And so there's a lot of... A car only has a definitive amount of moves where it's quantifiable. When I'm looking at a brow, I mean, I can do anything on the internet with my fingers and my eyeballs.
Yeah. I mean, even with a car, you'd be surprised. I mean, there's lots of degrees of freedom, even turning left, like how much you turn left, like how much you turn right. There's quite a bit of freedom there. Here, if you think about it, you just got a keyboard that has only a certain number of characters on it and you have a mouse that clicks and you just move things on an X, Y position.
And so it's more about Um, can we automate the things that humans do that are repetitive or manual or hard to make consistent? And so if you look at the RPA space, they have done a really remarkable job in finding repetitive, you know, things to automate. Data entry into Salesforce, data entry to SAP systems.
Like, you know, uh, you look at banks automating the loan application process so that you don't have to do data entry multiple times. Um, so they've kind of done that, but if you look at how those programs have been developed, they're really rule-based. You have to define the rules. You're basically writing code.
Everyone listening probably is familiar with Zapier, right? So that's like the elementary version of this and maybe UiPath would be like a way more advanced version of this. So we're on the spectrum.
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Chapter 3: How does self-driving car technology relate to Vik's new project?
And you have these associates you work with, they'll go and call a whole bunch of people, try to set meetings for you. Uh, it's very manual. It's very expensive. These meetings can be anywhere from a thousand to $2,000 a meeting. Um, and it really varies depending on what associate is working with you. So associates have different skill levels.
And so the quality of the matches you get in terms of who you connect with for find out more about a company or market can vary. And so we thought, well, what if you actually just automate that? What if we use our capability and we actually do the same work, these associates and these armies of consultants do, could we actually just replace that need for huge human labor?
And not only do that and bring the cost down for all parties, but we can also drive better quality and better accuracy and better matches to getting the best information.
Regardless, the person you're going to find, let's say someone wants to go hire an expert in Google search and you go find Eric Schmidt. Right now, an associate might have to dig around to find Eric Schmidt. You're saying you can find Eric Schmidt faster and cheaper. Somebody still has to get him live though on the call. That's the hard part.
So the queries that people have that they run through these firms today are a little bit more broad. If you have a very specific person you want to talk to, then arguably the better way to do that is through your own network or through an introduction and just go to that person directly.
But if it's more like, hey, I want to talk to 100 customers of Salesforce and I want to find out if they like the product or not and what their issues are. And if you want to do that, you can call up these consulting firms. They'll go and try to find you those companies online. And they'll try to find the right people in those companies.
Maybe you want to talk to the engineering side, or maybe you want to talk to the sales side, or maybe you want to talk to the product people. So you kind of give like your job title and you give a couple examples of the companies you want to go after. And then they'll go and like find people either in their network or go reach out to new companies.
And they're sending requests or figuring out the incentives. Like, hey, if you take this call with this person, I'll pay you 500 bucks. They have to figure all that out manually. And in reality, it's actually a big optimization problem. Right.
So you have this big search space, which is like who you go after and who are the people who are more likely to respond and who's the best match to the request the person has. And then it's an incentive problem, which is like, okay, should I pay this guy a hundred dollars, $200, $600, $9,000. So all that stuff is tons of variance.
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Chapter 4: What challenges exist in automating human tasks with RPA?
Okay. Got it. And, um, when, so you guys got going on this, I think you said about 18 months ago, you've been sort of in stealth building this, you're putting in your own personal capital to date. You guys haven't raised traditional, anything traditional.
Yeah. We haven't done any new raise, uh, for this company yet. Um, but we're, you know, you come from this world.
If you were going to go raise, I mean, do you plan to raise this year?
Um, it's possibility. I mean, it, based on what we're seeing right now and the feedback we're getting, it feels, It feels realistic. We're not in a rush either. Like we're growing. And so it's just a matter of like, you know, it depends on what market we end up kind of really going after.
If we're going after like the enterprise segment, or if we're going after kind of a tail and we want to make this open to everyone to use, then we probably want to build that product out first and then be able to raise on that. So right now we're kind of still in that early phase of running it with, you know, tens of logos and then see what the feedback looks like. And then,
and then decide what market we go after, and then that's going to dictate how we bankroll it.
When you guys came off the ground, I guess 18 months ago, did you just go, we'll split it 50-50, we're equal partners, or did you do something different?
Yeah, our equity structure, we're not really disclosing that as well.
Part of the reason we do the show, though, is to help people understand how to create a company. The number one conflict, and usually the first conflict with co-founders, is equity. Talk about it to the extent that you can.
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Chapter 5: How can automation improve the diligence process for financial firms?
Appreciate it. All right.
Awesome.