What does one of the top minds behind Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and IBM’s Watson think about the current state of artificial intelligence? Are we trending up—or treading into dangerous territory? And what can you learn from his latest company’s recent $100 million Series B investment win?
Igor Jablokov founded Raleigh-based Pryon in 2017. The company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to shorten the distance between knowledge and humans by unlocking the value help within enterprise content. Named an “Industry Luminary” by Speech Technology Magazine, Igor previously founded industry pioneer Yap, the world’s first high-accuracy, fully automated cloud platform for voice recognition. After its products were deployed by dozens of enterprises, the company became Amazon’s first AI-related acquisition. The firm’s inventions then served as the nucleus for follow-on products such as Alexa, Echo, and Fire TV. As a Program Director at IBM, Igor led the team that designed the precursor to Watson and developed the world’s first multimodal Web browser.
Igor recently spoke at an Innovate Carolina Founders Forum event that took place in the 79°West innovation and coworking hub in Pittsboro. During his chat, he offered bits of hard-won wisdom and shared stories behind his entrepreneurial ventures: what helped, what hurt and his advice. Here are a few insights that Igor shared in a recent separate interview with our Innovate Carolina team about some of the highs, lows and lessons that can help aspiring entrepreneurs chart their next steps.
Entrepreneurs by nature are infinite thinkers, and they’re goal oriented. Once most people achieve a goal, they’re satiated with the achievement. But entrepreneurs are different. They think, “Well, I’ve done nothing yet. On to the next thing. On to the next client. On to the next partner. Time to recruit more staff members. Time to recruit more investors.” It’s surreal because an objective party witnessing a funding event from the outside sees a successful transition. But when you’re inside the event, it’s another day at work. I tell people that this isn’t the terminal state of the company. We just have more resources to prove ourselves for another couple of years.
Of course. Imposter syndrome is something that most people won’t talk about until they’re pretty secure in themselves. Founders don’t talk about it with their own family members or the people they work with. But founders do talk about it with other founders. It’s like the stuff that only one ballplayer would say to another ballplayer, because only they would understand.
A lot of entrepreneurs—especially the successful ones—feel survivor’s guilt. For example, going back a few years, there were two other marquee entrepreneurs who started their ventures about the same time that I did. I would have objectively told venture capitalists at that time that they should invest in the other companies and not mine because those founders were very well spoken, they were brilliant and they had great backgrounds. But both of their companies cratered, while mine is still alive. Then, as a founder, you’re left wondering, “What happened?” Startup companies have near-death experiences every year, but you can’t lose yourself when those happen. It’s predictable that you will face dire straits, so when you encounter it, don’t bite your fingernails. You just try to figure out a pathway through.
Around water.
I hire senior executives whom I feel have the intestinal fortitude to punch me in the face if I ever do anything unethical. ‘Yes people’ don’t belong. I need independent thinkers. Human nature is to be around people who are agreeable and who think the same way we do. It’s like everyone thinks the ideal is to be in a state of rest—to stay in bed or in a comfy environment. They want to believe that there’s nothing bad happening. But then your muscles atrophy, and you can’t move anymore. Without those personal challenges coming from people who have different life experiences and diverse backgrounds, your organization will atrophy and die. People think it’s positive when there is no conflict and when everyone does the same thing, but they’re wrong. That’s why companies like Apple that cannibalize themselves are the ones that have staying power. They’re always reinventing themselves.
I wish I could live without my phone. Phones have messed up peoples’ minds because they make us sit and drift. So, I think the power button—the ability to turn our phones off—is the one app we can’t live without.
The Age of AI: And Our Human Future by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher. Plus, another book that I personally took to the beach: T-Minus AI, by Michael Kanaan. It’s approachable and gives a nice survey of AI. It came out before the generative stuff popped, but it was all true.
I was at Renaissance Weekend in Charleston recently. They invited me to speak at a session called Business War Stories, and I told them a tale of my previous company Yap’s exit to Amazon. I revealed some very strange machinations among the companies that were trying to acquire us, and everyone’s hair basically turned white. Nobody knows those stories. There were lawsuits filed. There were people trying to destroy our company to try to keep us from exiting to Amazon. There were all sorts of shenanigans behind the scenes with multiple law firms. At one time, I think there were a dozen different law firms involved. On the outside, they say it’s a duck floating on the pond. But behind the scenes of an M&A transaction, it gets pretty ruthless. And we were the little entity in the center of it.
People think we’re running a technology company at Pryon. And in some ways, that’s the furthest thing from the truth. Technology is as perishable as the fruits and vegetables you buy at Trader Joe’s. It changes. We can go into the weeds to talk about all the buzzword bingo: vector data bases, blockchain, GPT4, multi-nodal neurons, AI accelerators. It doesn’t matter because they’re obsolete tomorrow. But what’s not obsolete is the mission that you’re pulling human beings together to accomplish. People don’t trust technology. They trust other people.
The first slide in my presentation that I give to new hires at Pryon says this: “You didn’t join a tech company. You joined a company that should be part of the journey for humanity that causes the preservation of life in all of its forms.” That’s the journey we’re on. It just so happens that we do it by reducing the distance between knowledge and people. And that we support people who do fundamental research and run great companies, hospitals, power plants, academic environments, etc. If you’re not focused on one of the big four challenges that our communities face—multiple wars, a still-brewing pandemic, climate change, and economic distress—what do you expect to put on your tombstone? Is this the pride that you’ll feel for all the people who mentored and educated you from birth onward? We need more company leaders to do that adulting.
We all know what a founder is on day one. You are the attorney, the accountant, the engineer, the scientist. You are all of these things simultaneously. But people tend to put founders too much on a pedestal. Being an early catalyst was my most important job as a founder: to be the single-cell organism that splits into two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and so on. And after a while, you have to trust that people will show up in your organization who are subject-matter experts in their respective fields. That’s exciting because, once that happens, it’s like a lightning bolt striking amino acids: life takes on its own form, and it actually doesn’t matter if a company has a founder anymore.
You better embrace the fact that you’re going to be obscure for the first decade. Nobody knows you exist for 10 years. So just make peace with that. Your family members, your friends and colleagues from other organizations will ask you, “Why are you working for that thing? I’ve never heard of it.” And that’s normal. There was a time when no one had heard of Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, and all of these brands that we now take for granted.
Want to hear other founders share advice and stories from the startup trenches?
Register now to join the next Founders Forum talk on January 25 featuring Will Pleasants, managing director at Wasserman. The conversation will be moderated by Rick Steinbacher, senior associate athletic director at UNC-Chapel Hill. The Founders Forum is a series of founder-led talks hosted by Innovate Carolina, UNC-Chapel Hill’s university-wide initiative for innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. Embrace the imperfect entrepreneurial journey as we delve into tales of triumph and missteps, as startup leaders share their victories and openly discuss their pitfalls.
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