The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
18 Mar 2016
Puneet Mehta, Founder @ Msg.ai, an artificial intelligence startup for conversational commerce and for an AI founder you don’t get much better than starting your career at IBM's TJ Watson Center, which is exactly what Puneet did. He then went on to build predictive platforms to power large-scale trading systems aka bots on Wall St. It is clearly not joust us who think he is awesome as Advertising Age named Puneet to the Creativity 50 list in 2014, honoring the most creative and innovative thinkers and doers. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Puneet made his way into the world of AI and came to be the founder of YC's latest, Msg.ai? 2.) How has the YC experience been for Msg.ai and for Puneet as a founder? Have YC been able to keep the same quality of mentorship with the largely expanding number in their latest batch? 3.) VC funding is usually very available to YC alums graduating, how will Puneet go about picking his investors? What are the fundamental determinants? 4.) What have been the biggest takeaways for Puneet? What has been the highlight? What has been tough? What was surprising and unexpected? How did Puneet deal with the requirement for 10% weekly growth? 5.) Taking a step back now, Puneet has stated before about building the Turing test for money. So what does he mean by this and how does he look at AI as a key driver for conversational commerce? 6.) What is it about messaging that makes Puneet believe this is the platform of the future? What is it that bots provide that has never been possible before? Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: Puneet's Fave Book: Peter Thiel: Zero To One, The Power of Now: Eckhart Tolle Puneet's Fave Blog or Newsletter: Paul Graham: Blog As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Puneet on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here! This episode was supported by Wunder Capital, the leading online investment platform that allows individuals to invest in large scale solar projects across the U.S. Wunder’s solar investment funds allow you to earn up to 11% annually, while diversifying your portfolio, curbing pollution and combating global climate change. Do well by doing good and sign up for a free account here and join the thousands of people that are already achieving their investment targets.
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