
Will.i.am's startup raises $117M, enters enterprise market - mark-ruwt
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iam-enterprise/will-i-ams-startup-raises-117-million-enters-enterprise-market-idUSKBN1D62V4
======
ukulele
I'm surprised to see so much trivializing of the product and flaming of the
entrepreneur.

Investors don't just give away $117M "because he's famous", and I seriously
doubt their enterprise customers care that he's a singer. More likely he and
the team have been making steady progress for years and are delivering real
value. Kudos to them.

~~~
dna_polymerase
> Investors don't just give away $117M "because he's famous"

Investors gave Theranos several >$600M in funding. Today we know about the
lack of due diligence. It was all about investing with that young female
wunderkind because everyone else did. So that's no argument.

Regarding the founder: Looking at that cringe worthy Apple TV shark tank copy
and how he forced one founder to list him as co-Founder I am pretty sure
Will.I.Am just sits around talking BS and others doing the work for him.

Last but no least: Yes, $117M is actually a pretty damn lot for a company that
does chatbots. This type of NLP isn't even resource heavy (like shitloads of
GPUs heavy) so there is no need to put so much money into that. That said, of
course the Germans are clients. They are always late to the party and most of
the time get ripped off.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_female_

I used to feel similarly -- that being a girl sometimes gives you special
privileges -- but then I concluded it's probably not true, and voicing those
feelings is an old tradition, best left in the past. How would you feel if you
got a job somewhere and all your coworkers suspected you didn't deserve it?
Same thing.

It gets tricky when there's a grain of truth to the feeling, since it's
confusing trying to figure out whether you're censoring your own thoughts to
the exclusion of reality just to conform to social norms, or whether you're
actually being regressive. But FWIW all evidence thus far in my own life seems
to point to "being a girl may have mattered once, but if anything it tends to
work against them rather than in their favor." E.g. you have to worry about
shit like an investor coming onto you: if you say no, what will happen? Or if
I dress a certain way, will it affect how I'm treated at work? We take it for
granted that we don't even have to think about any of that, ever, but those
are real concerns.

This is a sensitive topic, so we should try to keep the conversation neutral
and substantive. But I did want to open the door for talking about some of
this.

(Traditionally, the two options are to ignore the "female" putdown, or ask you
to stop. Any time anyone even tries to ask "Why do you feel that way?" the
conversation immediately devolves into a catastrophe. I'm trying to see if
there's a productive third option, which is to frame the conversation in a
certain way where people are inclined to learn and relate experiences, rather
than to be combative or dig in their heels. I'm going out on a limb here, so
please don't make me regret doing this.)

The truth is probably closer to "she was a rich kid with connections that we
could only dream of."

This has been on my mind, so I may as well talk: When we see things like
female-only conferences or events, it's really tempting to feel jealous, and
to feel like girls do get special treatment. Or even if it's not really
special treatment, it's still "special" because no one goes out of their way
to try and recruit you to some event just because you happen to be a dude.

I think this is a symptom of feeling isolated in general. Church attendance is
declining, and -- setting aside the question of religion -- church was the
primary social activity for a long time. It was a weekly thing, and you'd feel
special and included. When you're not religious, you lack this facet of your
life, and it manifests itself even though we'd really like to believe
otherwise.

You can go out and attend React meetups or whatever, but it's different than
(a) you're expected to attend, because (b) you're [a girl, religious, a
harvard grad, etc]. When you have nothing like that in your own life, it's
extremely tempting to feel like the world is against you and you've had to
work for every single thing you've ever had, so this special treatment is
unfair.

But here's a concrete example. A female webdev friend of mine works at a
startup, and they made it to YC's interview stage last week. She was employee
#1. The moment they received that email, the founder started treating her
differently. She and I were both mystified about why. Why would the prospect
of transitioning to YC's pipeline possibly matter? She was an effective
employee, and built their whole stack. Her work was identical to any male.

Then we had a very uncomfortable realization: one of the founders joked that
if they got into YC, they'd all have to bunk together like it was college. You
tend to live in the same apartment at first.

She asked me "do you think if I was a boy, I'd be invited to the boys club?"
and it was heartbreaking to realize that it was very possible that this
employee #1 may have had to worry about not being invited along to California
_solely_ because she was a girl. We still don't know. (They didn't get
accepted, so it was a moot concern.)

This is an extremely complicated topic, but I wanted to share some of that in
case it's a positive thing.

~~~
dvt
I think you're reading too much into the word "female" \-- although I do agree
that its use in this context is kind of weird (why not say _girl_ , or
_woman_?).

I think you're reading to much into it because it's pretty well-known that in
startup circles being a woman is, generally speaking, a net _negative_. So an
argument that she got funded because she's a woman goes against matter-of-fact
realities in Silicon Valley.

~~~
jknoepfler
With respect, and not to belabor a silly topic, but 'female' is an adjective,
and is the only correct choice between those three options in the original
sentence. Although I would tend to agree that as collective nouns are
concerned, 'women/men' is almost always correct when describing adult humans
when one wants to specify a particular sex or gender. (Girls/boys/kids rustles
my jimmies when used to describe adults).

'female wunderkind,' in an irrational, razzle-dazzle bullshit train like
theranos was probably emphasized to create an aura of exoticism and magic
(e.g. 'wonder woman'), not because of the sociocultural situation of women in
tech broadly speaking. The symbolic significance of gender changes depending
on where/how one invokes it.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_' female wunderkind,' in an irrational, razzle-dazzle bullshit train like
theranos was probably emphasized to create an aura of exoticism and magic
(e.g. 'wonder woman'), not because of the sociocultural situation of women in
tech broadly speaking._

I didn't even consider this. You're probably right.

Well, in that context, it was obviously absurd for me to start talking about
any of this. Sorry about that. But HN is optimized for good conversation, so
hopefully it will turn out interesting (if unexpected).

Looks like this thread got knocked off the front page anyway, so it doesn't
really matter now. Drat; I was hoping to get people's thoughts on this.

------
vm
Here's a video of the product if you're as curious as I was. Siri/Alexa for
enterprise users --
[https://iamplus.com/enterprise/](https://iamplus.com/enterprise/)

Seems like a smart market entry point. Enterprise employee virtual assistants
are probably a wide open market today because Apple, Google, Amazon,
Microsoft, and Samsung focus on consumer AIs. Easy to envision a startup
getting solid, near-term customer traction with a keyword-driven voice
product.

~~~
scotchio
Not going to knock it, but I don't really get it. How different can an
enterprise version of this be? Probably a lot more to the plan here than this
video.

Out of all the different voice things out there (Siri, Alexa, Google, Cortana,
whatever), I've only ever done 3 commands really:

> Hey Google! What's the weather?

> Hey Google! Play ____ music on Spotify.

> Hey Google! What sound does a cow make?

Does anyone have stats on how the general population are using these things?
So far, just for me personally, I can't really find a way to be more
productive with any of this tech.

Conspiracy nut in me first reaction is, "Ok, a new way to spy on companies".

~~~
symkat
I use Siri to add things to OmniFocus multiple times a day, "Hey Siri, remind
me to ...", a lot of people seem to use it for a lot of things[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/549ytw/how_many_of_y...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/549ytw/how_many_of_you_actually_use_siri_and_for_what/)

[1] Well, a lot of people who use reddit and are interested enough in apple to
be on an apple subreddit.

~~~
jbergstroem
My most common pattern is "Siri, remind me to ____ when I get home". The
geolocation-"awareness" really hits my soft spot.

------
justboxing
> I.am+’s first enterprise customer is Deutsche Telekom AG (DTEGn.DE), the
> German telecommunications giant and parent company of T-Mobile. Since July,
> the company has been using Omega to power an AI customer support chatbot and
> it plans to add a voice phone system soon, i.am+ said.

Wow. I had no idea ChatBots needed $117 MILLION in funding to ship.

A quick search of GitHub shows several 100s of chatbots, even 1 with just 200
lines of code.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agithub.com+chatbot](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agithub.com+chatbot)

This has Juicero written all over it.

~~~
gkoberger
I have no clue what I.AM.PLUS is; this is a general comment:

Sure, creating a dead simple chatbot is easy! But you can't compare a bare-
minimum open-source dumb chatbot with a enterprise AI company that happens to
take the form of a chatbot.

~~~
ng12
Enterprise is a funny word here. It just seems like any other voice assistant
except it connects to your inventory control system rather than your Nest at
home. It seems like mostly marketing to me, I doubt the technology is
particularly unique.

~~~
gkoberger
That's pretty much just what Enterprise is, though... a consumer product, sold
at a much higher price, and including things companies need like support and
customization.

------
olivermarks
[https://youtu.be/xGakbjwILKs](https://youtu.be/xGakbjwILKs) who would give
this guy $117 million?!

~~~
jxramos
this is crazy funny, I can't tell if its sarcastic parody or a genuine homage
of some kind. That somehow boosts the funniness in the straight face dimension
a lot however.

------
blhack
Here's a demo of it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPKO36KJYxg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPKO36KJYxg)

~~~
komali2
Anyone have any experience with it? How accurate is the video?

For example, second use case - in the car, she queries the software the amount
of some_specific_product in some_specific_warehouse, and the tool answers near
instantly. Is that a currently functional scenario? Is this because the client
has an API set up with `counts` already calculated for these queries, or is a
part of the tool intelligently crafting these queries to answer these kinds of
voice questions?

~~~
Eridrus
No insight into Omega, but natural language interfaces to
spreadsheets/databases exist.

Google Sheets has an implementation if you click the explore button in the
bottom right hand corner.

I made a dummy spreadsheet with columns name & warehouse, then typed in "how
many units of rose gold are there in la" and it got the query right. It even
got "how many rose gold units are in los angeles" correct despite the
spreadsheet never saying los angeles. But it's pretty easy to trip it up; if
you make an item called "rose gold" and "rose gold ring" and ask it for rose
gold, it assumes you want the exact match. If you ask it for items in la or
sf, it will only give you a count for the first condition. If you ask it about
California, it will get confused.

Still pretty impressive for a two column spreadsheet though IMO.

------
wallabie
Will.i.am's failures and eccentricity (for example
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prv5q84-Ebg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prv5q84-Ebg))
are far more well known than his successes. I'm surprised he was able to raise
so much money.

~~~
650REDHAIR
Pretty sure his Beats success is more well-known than any of his failures.

~~~
ac29
Beats was Dr Dre, not will.i.am.

~~~
obmelvin
he was involved - [http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-
mobil...](http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-
mobile/6106526/beats-by-william-co-founding-and-cashing-in-with-jimmy)

------
make3
there is something unexpectedly deeply depressing about knowing will.I.am is a
top executive in your field

~~~
diego_moita
If you want depression I can give you a better one: Kim Kardashian's game made
more than 200 million on revenue.

------
mpeg
I guess that's what you get for being buddy-buddy with Benioff...

There's a joke in there somewhere about how most telco customer service is
indistinguishable from AI chatbots.

------
matt_wulfeck
> _will.i.am has raised $117 million [...] as it announced its entry into the
> corporate computing market with a voice assistant for customer service._

Voice assisted AI startup from a pop star receives $100mm financing? Guys if
this isn’t bubbly then I don’t know what is!

If you’re an IC, I hope you can take a little off the table while the gettin’
is good.

------
kapauldo
Celebrity worship is harmless when it consumes leisure time and disposable
income. This is not going to end well.

------
adamnemecek
billy, you have to stop, you are wasting money.

