The following interview is a conversation we had with Igor Jablokov, CEO of Pryon, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $50+M Raised to Build the Future of Enterprise Knowledge Management
Igor Jablokov
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Brett
So, to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Igor Jablokov
Sure. So I started my career in AI over 20 years ago when I led the advanced multimodal research team at IBM. And when they did not want to commercialize the baby version of Watson that we discovered, in my frustration, I departed and started my last venture. We had a great time of it. A year into it, people didn’t realize. When I showed up at the first ever Techcrunch disrupt conference, I pulled a phone out of my jacket, spoke into it. It spoke to everybody. This was in 2007, by the way. That was the same conference that was lampooned in HBO’s Silicon Valley TV show and crickets in the audience. They didn’t know what they were seeing or hearing. What they didn’t know is that were secretly working with Apple on the prototype of what eventually became Siri.
Igor Jablokov
Five years later, we became the first AI cloud company. Dozens of enterprise and carrier customers, almost 50 million users were on our platform. And when were raising our series b at the time, you had Google, Microsoft, and some others, including Amazon, jump tracks and went to acquire us. And were secretly acquired by Amazon to birth what many people now know as Alexa. So Alexa is my older sister’s name, which is a coincidence, but the code name for it was prime. Now, many years later, I looked around and I saw a dearth of companies that were trying to build and bring that natural language experience to our workplace. And so we decided to catch her on football.
Igor Jablokov
Knowing that this was going to be important in critical infrastructure, in academia, in obviously very serious enterprises and government agencies, we decided to found a company that was purpose built for enterprises, and that’s how prime was born.
Brett
Did you ever have any regrets that you sold that company in 2011 to Amazon or are you happy with that decision?
Igor Jablokov
I get asked that question rather often and actually even earlier in the day, and I will tell you that was not my choice. When you look at any financial backers that you have at that point in time, many of their portfolio companies either atrophied or died through 2008 time frame. So when they saw an exit appeared, they were euphoric to take that win, because the way that venture capitalists obviously work is they need to have wins in order to raise the next fund. But no, it was not my choice to exit at that point in time, but it was a different time, a different place. It was before gpus existed in AI, before neural networks, and it was a good outcome for them, but it could have been a great outcome for them.
Brett
I had a guest on earlier and they were using AI and they had started in 2016, and I joked, well, you guys were doing this before it was cool, because it seems like it became cool, so to speak, in November of last year when chat GBT got big. But that probably just sounds like nonsense, talking with you and looking at your background. So you said you’ve been doing AI since the.
Igor Jablokov
I’ve been in the tech industry since the 90s, but I’ve been doing AI full time since 2002. My chief scientist still carries the offer letter that was handwritten to him from the famed Fred Jelanek of John Hopkins fame, who invented speech recognition from a Pan Am flight. In 1981, he was invited to start working on artificial intelligence. So we have a very mature R and D team that has not just been doing this for two years and not just two decades, but like four decades. So, yeah, we’re og original, generative.
Brett
I love that. How do you define the state of AI today?
Igor Jablokov
Lots of carpet baggers are coming into it. So I would say that when you guys encounter AI companies, they fall into three main buckets. The first bucket, and you’re seeing a lot of Y combinator style companies are just building interesting applications on top of somebody else’s API. Whether it’s OpenAI or any of the primitives that exist at AWS, Azure, GMCP, they could probably build interesting lifestyle companies, but I’m not sure if they’re IPO path because they’re not building platforms. The second and the third category companies tend to be technologically they’re making different decisions, and generationally they’re different.
Igor Jablokov
The 20 something and 30 something founders, their contemporaries are other data scientists and other developers, and so they tend to focus on, hey, I’m going to build for the world a speech recognition engine, or somebody else is going to focus on dialogue management, somebody else is going to focus on vector databases, so on and so forth, and they’re going to put an API on it and essentially build developer ecosystems around that. And that’s where they have a lot of credibility, because those are their contemporaries. That’s personally disinteresting to me, because it’s like sending any one of us into an auto parts store and telling us to build a Honda Accord or a Toyota Camry from parts. The third category tends to require more mature R D teams that have built every manner of engine, model and language.
Igor Jablokov
And they try to be a full stack platform where they own the whole thing, soup to nuts. That actually lends itself to the highest level of accuracy, scale, security and speed. These teams tend to be more mature where their contemporaries are the C suite of their customers and partners, so they can get entry point to the highest level of those companies, and they’re doing what Apple does well, right, by vertically integrating. Apple builds their own chips, their own device, their own operating system and their own applications. That’s why they have the best firepower with the lowest energy use. So that’s my framing device. When you guys encounter AI companies, they typically fall in these three buckets. That’s super useful.
Brett
Now let’s talk about in the early two thousand s. Then when you first discovered AI, I would have to think that in your head you had a light bulb go off and you got excited and you saw the potential of the technology. At some point early on in those days, are you happy with how the technology has progressed? Or back in the 2000s, as you were envisioning what this technology could be? Would you think that 20 years later we would be much further ahead than we are now?
Igor Jablokov
Oh, goodness gracious. One of the things that Bill Gates says is that you overestimate what you can do in a year and you underestimate what you can do in a decade. So I think the industry is overestimating the value that they can deliver over the course of the next year for their various constituencies, and they’re probably under predicting their value over the course of the next decade.
Brett
A few follow up questions we’d like to ask on your personal journey, and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick. First one is, throughout your career, has there been a specific CEO that you’ve worked with or a Founder that you’ve encountered that you’ve really felt inspired by or that you really admire?
Igor Jablokov
I mean, as you get more mature in your field. There’s always folks that you’ve looked up to in the past, and as you get older, you realize that they’re all flawed in their own way, and you become a lot more comfortable becoming yourself. So I think we each have to be the best representations of ourselves.
Brett
If you could go back through history and pull any three people to be on your like, let’s call it a personal board of directors, who would those three people be? And they can be alive or know any time period, who would those three people?
Igor Jablokov
Well, one I know for sure would ben Franklin. And the reason why he’s an interesting cap is because our primary mission in the company is to reduce the distance between knowledge and people. And I think with him founding academic environments, newspapers and the like, I mean, he fully expresses that interest. Of course, Turing, right, who is big in our field as well, and underappreciated. So that would be a second one, and a third would be Seymour Cray, just for his early visionary work in know those vector style supercomputers that were ahead of their time.
Brett
And what about books and the way we like to frame this? And this is taken from the author, Ryan Holiday. He calls them quake books. So a quickbook is a book that rocks you to your core, really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any books like that come to mind? Yeah.
Igor Jablokov
So my parents are both artists, so they try to give us a very renaissance upbringing where one summer they would throw us to learn how to dance or history, or learn how to paint or work on a farm, be a lumberjack, be a fisherman, really try to expose us to a lot of things so that we had more authenticity of our choices of life path. And one summer they threw us at this monastery to work as farm know, so there was no electricity in the evenings. And by candlelight I read Asimov’s foundation, and it blew my mind in terms of having mathematics that could predict outcomes so that you had better planning and could safeguard as many people in the community as possible.
Igor Jablokov
So that definitely was something that was giving me a north star in terms of the positive opportunities of this style of technology.
Brett
I’ve not heard of that book, but I’ll add it to the list. That sounds super interesting. Let’s switch gears and let’s dive deeper into the company. So on LinkedIn, I read it’s AI as a service platform for enterprise knowledge management. Let’s unpack that. What does that mean? What does the company do? What does the product do?
Igor Jablokov
Yeah, I mean, by now, everybody’s heard of things like chat, GPT. Just imagine a version of that was specifically targeted towards enterprises with the level of accuracy, scale, security and speed that they need. Think of their own version of Alexa, their own version of Siri. That’s what we’ve been working on. But what it does is it takes their existing hard won assets that are trapped. Think of things that are stuck in their business applications or in cloud storage folders, and it converts all of that unstructured knowledge that is an untapped oil well, if you will. It refines it and allows you to use it to power workflows and experiences for customers, partners and employees.
Brett
Can you define knowledge management for us? What is that? Maybe legacy description? How does Gartner define enterprise knowledge management?
Igor Jablokov
Well, I don’t care how they define anything. I’ll tell you, the tail that wags this dog is the way that customers and partners define it. And in the case of a big energy company that they were working with, for years, they’ve been trying to build an AI that would work for their outage and maintenance services, and they poured millions of dollars to it. And the reason why it was such an important mission for them is they were predicting they can reduce the downtime of nuclear power plants if they had such a thing. And as a result of having such a thing, we can reduce the incidence of utilities spinning up fossil fuel burning plants. So that’s their problem that they needed to solve.
Igor Jablokov
It’s how do I get very sensitive technical documentation and answers to the engineers and technicians that were working on refitting these plants? We were able to put them in production in five business days.
Brett
Wow. How important is your market category? So you mentioned there about Gardener’s definition, and I hear that pushback a lot from founders. But when it comes to the market category, is that something that you spend a lot of time thinking about? Like, is it going to be a play that reimagines enterprise knowledge management and redefines it? Or what’s your thinking there when it comes to the actual category?
Igor Jablokov
Yeah. So here’s how I’ll answer that. When I was at IBM, were actually fielding prototypes of our work and hiding in it places. So I was working with then chief information officer of Wake Forest University, where were fielding some experiences for students and trying on early AI assistants. We were hiding this stuff in Disney’s Epcot center for children to cross paths and to see how they would relate to things like speech recognition early on. And by the way, this was like 20 02, 20 03, 20 04 20 05 and then we also fielded this in the operating room of Miami Children’s Hospital.
Igor Jablokov
And when they interviewed the surgeon about him using this next generation AI assistant to set surgical timers and to recall documentation while he was in the OR, they asked him a question and I never forgot his answer because I just had a chuckle at it. They asked, how do you keep up with the state of the art? And then I think it was either a CNBC or an ABC News reporter that asked him that question. And he said, well, I am the state of the art.
Igor Jablokov
So with a tip of the hat to him, I’ll have to say again, not really sure how people want to categorize things, but if you look at some of the great brands that are doing great things in our respective communities, things like Apple, things like Nvidia and the rest of, you know, walking to the beat of their own drummer, and they’re just making experiences that have value for their constituents. And sometimes it’s something brand new, like an iPod, like an iPhone, or maybe an iPhone is a refactoring of something that people know but delivered in a new way, or an Apple Watch or their new spatial computing devices or GPUs that were only relevant to 3D simulations and things of that sort. All of a sudden being able to act as an underpinning of a new way of doing things.
Igor Jablokov
So we’re doing things in a new way. And I’m not trying to fit into anybody’s neat and potty buckets.
Brett
I’d have to imagine the downside of doing something new is it requires a lot of education. What are you doing right now to educate the market so that they understand what you’re doing and feel comfortable with what you’re doing?
Igor Jablokov
Yeah, the goodness is, as serial entrepreneurs that have exits under our belts or things of that sort, I’ve heard every objection possible from every stakeholder possible in the past as well. So I’ll give you some examples. When I was at IBM, were thinking of, hey, let’s put a microphone on the PlayStation three because were doing that with Sony and Toshiba at the time building the cell architecture, and everybody was laughing. They’re like, nobody’s going to ever allow a microphone in their house. And then the following year we’re like, hey, put the microphone in the PlayStation, but we can put our speech recognition in the cloud. We didn’t know to call it cloud back then. We called it client, server, or hosted. Everybody was laughing, saying nobody would allow their voice to leave their house.
Igor Jablokov
And then by year three, we said, holy smokes, have a microphone here. Send the reporting up to the cloud and we’ll answer any question that anybody has about anything in 1 second. Children asking, why is the sky blue? As an example, by then they were laughing their heads off that it’s not possible. And so when you’re used to that, if you’re an entrepreneur, an innovator, inventor, whatever, and you actually see that some of these folks were wrong, and you have a unique experience and can kind of continue working towards that path, it doesn’t matter. Now, AI obviously gets a lot of acclaim and attention and things of that sort.
Igor Jablokov
And some of us that were early on and working on this stuff for 1020 years, we kind of have ugly duckling syndrome where we’re not used to the attention and people patting us on the head.
Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Let’s talk a little bit about regulation. So because I have an AI expert here, I have to ask, what are your opinions on all these conversations about how AI should be regulated?
Igor Jablokov
Yeah, it’s funny that some of the folks that are asking for that and sitting in front of Congress, it’s like the Marlborough man asking for regulation against cigarettes. They had control over the way that their tools would be used as well. Some of us that try to build responsible versions of AI have always kept that in mind, right? Because as we create these tools, and I’ll give you an example of a hammer we’re envisioning and hoping that somebody like Jimmy Carter is going to be taking this hammer and building for habitat for Humanity. We’re not expecting that a Ted Bundy like character would be using it in order to bonk people over the head with it. And so, yeah, regulation is going to happen, but a lot of the big tech companies are going to be asking for it in the same way.
Igor Jablokov
Know, when I sat across the table from, you know, the former chief executive officer of bank of America who presided under their times of extreme growth, he welcomed regulation because it just built a bigger moat for new entrants coming in to compete with him. And he could always pay more than the regulator, so he could always ensure that he had freedom to operate.
Brett
Do you believe that’s what Sam Altman’s primary intention was when he went to go testify? Because I watched a lot of that, and he was basically begging for regulation and had a plan for how regulation should unfold. Or at least that was my takeaway. Do you think that was a play to have a moat?
Igor Jablokov
What would you do in his shoes?
Brett
I’d probably go to Congress and build the moat.
Igor Jablokov
There you go. Occam’s razor, right? The simplest explanation is usually the right know he’s going to have the capital and the number of people that are going to be able to figure that out. And once you get to a gravy right in terms of being a platform, then what you have to do is make it far more difficult for other folks to show up. And that’s what’s happening.
Brett
Do you worry about any of this upcoming regulation and worry that it’s going to stifle innovation in any way?
Igor Jablokov
I don’t think so. Regulation is this thing that’s always described as this scary beast. But there’s not a day that our lives aren’t encumbered by regulations in a proper way. I mean, you and I open up the tap water and we expect clean water. That’s because it’s regulated. We expect certain things to happen and secure our banking transactions because that’s regulated. We’re expecting that people are taking our taxes out of our paycheck and using it to appropriate end because that’s regulated. We’re driving on roads that have a certain level of performance to ensure that our cars don’t wreck or the traffic lights work. That’s all regulated. So we’re in a morass soup of things that are watching over our ability to operate. And this is just one other thing. It’s not an unusual or unnatural thing.
Brett
I like that. That’s a nice perspective on this and everything that’s happening or everything that’s at least being discussed in the media.
Igor Jablokov
To build on what you just said, it’s a little bit hypocritical to believe that you’re in a field that shouldn’t be regulated, but yet all those other conditions that I just mentioned, we do expect regulation of other people in the performance of their jobs. It would be hypocritical to give yourself a wide freedom of action. But then everything else, you’re expecting folks to be like little tin soldiers and perform.
Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What about growth and traction. Are there any numbers that you can share that demonstrate some of the traction that you’re seeing right now? Our audience loves to hear metrics, but of course, we do know that you’re a private company, you don’t have to share anything. So just whatever you’re comfortable with sharing.
Igor Jablokov
We’D love to hear. Yeah, I mean, it’s going to be interesting. I think some of the growths that we’re seeing year to year, in terms of revenue growth, I think it’s going to be like 700%. So things are certainly exploding for us in all directions. So that’s going to be fun. But as Bezos says, this is still first pitch for sinning. If I think about the dawn of the computer age, also known as the information age, and now we’re at the dawn of the intelligence age, things are going to move fairly fast. But like I said, people are overestimating what’s going to happen in the next year, but they’re underestimating what we’re going to see by the end of the decade. Just like we’re all pleasantly surprised with our iPhones ten plus years in, we’re pleasantly surprised with electric cars.
Igor Jablokov
We’re pleasantly surprised with things like the COVID vaccine, leveraging the mnrna technologies. So there’s some good stuff brewing and.
Brett
I’d love to talk a little bit about funding. So as I mentioned there in the intro, it’s more than 50 million raised, and I know there’s a bit of context there. What have you learned about fundraising so far that you could share with our audience? And again, you have the audience. They’re the early stage b, two b founders. So from that lens, that’s how we’d.
Igor Jablokov
Love to hear answer to that question. Yeah, well, if any of them over capitalize their companies, they’re knuckleheads. And let me share why two times now in my last company, in this one, when I was an early stage company, everybody was telling me, oh, gosh, Igor, there’s this other company that has nine figures of funding and they’re going to blow you out of the water. Okay? If you take on too much capital too early on, guess what’s going to happen to you. This is like watching Tom Hanks in the movie big. You take any entity and you try to leapfrog adolescence and you’re in a world of hurt. Gary Chandling, the famed comedian, was once asked by a young, up and coming comedian, what’s the shortcut to comedy? And his answer was, there is no shortcut to comedy.
Igor Jablokov
You’re all trying to short circuit things, thinking that you don’t have to get on a road trip and go tell jokes and bomb in all of these smoky comedy clubs all over the country. And then you wonder why things aren’t happening for you, why you can’t figure out product market fit, why you’re not attracting the right folks, why sales aren’t working out, where the technology is failing and things, why you have no ip and things of that sort. That’s why you’re taking too much. And then it’s like, oh, no, we have to pretend that we’re a big company. We have to open up all these offices, we have to hire all these folks, we have to buy all these little chotch keys for everybody. And then guess what? You end up doing two, three years in. You’re doing rifts, you’re laying folks off.
Brett
And that’s what we’re seeing today, right? I think there were so many companies that raised what we could call Fu money at Fu valuations in 2021 and maybe early 2022, and that’s all coming down right now. And it seems like a lot of companies are getting crushed. Every time I open my LinkedIn, there’s another round of layoffs of one of these hot companies that raised hundreds of millions of dollars. So it seems like we’re in a very painful period of time for their workers and for the founders, the investors, for everyone who’s been involved in us.
Igor Jablokov
Yeah, take the capital. When you know what you’re going to be doing with it and why. I know it sounds like very basic advice, but again, the right people are going to hear this, the wrong people are going to hear something else. And we all have our unique paths, and entrepreneurship is the art of nonlinearity, but you’re working backwards from an end goal. But a lot of people. Why are you doing this? I’m passionate about fielding the world’s best product in this category. And if the category doesn’t exist, I’ll make it with our team. We’re so passionate about this space. We’ve been working at it when there was zero money in it whatsoever. Right? Nothing. There was nothing there. I personally like hiring folks like that because we’re true believers in this confluence of art and science, which is AI.
Igor Jablokov
If you’re showing up thinking that it’s a get rich quick scheme and you’re doing the Ponzi scheme, which is trying to bulk up and take secondaries early on, you’re going to get your just.
Brett
Desserts outside of what we just talked about with fundraising. And let’s narrow this and let’s make this for an early stage B. Two B Founder who wants to build a company focused on AI around AI, what would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give to them?
Igor Jablokov
I don’t want to hear anything about AI. I don’t even know why that comes up. Are they trying to sparkle AI in order to attract capital? No. Who cares if you’re using AI or salting crackers to solve the problem? If you’re a b to b company, what problem are you solving and for whom? Answer that. AI is a means an end. If you think about a vehicle between a to b, right, you can fly, you can take a plane or a helicopter. You can take a speedboat, you can take a ferry, you can take a bus, you can take a train, you can take a bicycle. There’s different technologies for accomplishing the movement of your body from point a to point b. AI is just one type of technology.
Igor Jablokov
Some people are just trying to retrofit or jam in AI just because they want that sparkle. And that may not be what’s needed. Smart companies solve problems, right? They’re not hindered by one choice or another in terms of technology.
Brett
Is that driving you crazy, then? A little bit. To see all these companies that launch with their AI domain, and every company has AI in the headline of the press release and on Techcrunch, does that bother you and frustrate you at all?
Igor Jablokov
I don’t think so. Like I said, we love what we do. We’ve always done it. We always will do it. We’ll be doing it to the end of our lives. And I think people get attracted to that as different stakeholders, whether it’s customers, partners, investors, prospective staff members as well. And we’re confident in what we can do. And yeah, the market is always changing for and against something. There’s always fair weather, friends. Sometimes crypto is hot, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes a consumer something is hot, sometimes it’s not. I mean, all these things are cyclical, just like the stock market. Sometimes people think the banking sector is hot. Sometimes it’s at a weakened state. And that’s true for every other industry has its day in the sun, if you will.
Igor Jablokov
When people are really happy about what’s happening today, I tell them, that’s okay, but gird yourself that tomorrow is going to be worse. And when people are complaining about what’s happening today, I tell them to not lose their minds. Tomorrow is going to better. So I tend to be a lot more. Even keel about it.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out. Five or ten years into the future, what is the big picture vision for the company? What does that look like five to ten years from today?
Igor Jablokov
Yeah, we do have a big vision. I think one of the things that’s portraying a lot of big tech companies is this. Think of the retailer target every time all of you listening to the podcast have a big life change, right? You’re moving, you’re graduating, you’re getting married, you’re having kids, something big happens in your life. There’s a reason why you suddenly get these mailers from all these retailers trying to influence you. Because what happens in these big transitions is all of your taste change. The grocery store you go to changes, right? Because you’re moving or things of that sort.
Igor Jablokov
So I think what’s panicking a lot of these big tech firms is in the same way that Internet and web and email and social and mobile and cloud essentially changed the deck chairs in terms of who was now leading in that particular category. With AI, they’re seeing the same thing happen. And so their job is obviously to moat that they’re too big to fail, right? Like some of the banks in our banking system. But they’re terrified secretly that they’re claiming that they’re too big to fail, but they’re the Titanic. And so there’s going to be new entrants that come in because that’s always the case. There’s always something that comes out of left field and starts disrupting some of their core businesses because they have a better way of doing something that is one of their legacy businesses.
Igor Jablokov
And so, frankly speaking, by the end of this decade, you’re going to see a brand new set of companies that are maybe trillion dollar companies and things of that sort that you’ve never heard of before. They’re working in obscurity. They could be in the US, they could be somewhere overseas. It could be two people starting, it could be 20 somethings that are popping out of school. It could be 50 somethings that have toiled in obscurity for a long period of time. But it’s going to be new people that you’ve never heard of before.
Brett
Well, that’s a positive note for us to end on. So we are up on time. We’ll need to wrap here if any founders listening in want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute here. Where should they go?
Igor Jablokov
Yeah, a couple of different places you can find me on LinkedIn. Certainly by my first and last name, Igor Yablakov. Or you can find me on Twitter at ijab. L-O-K-O-P as in Victor.
Brett
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about what you’re building and to just share your perspectives and your expertise on AI. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I know it’s going to be a hit with our audience as well. So thanks so much for taking the time.
Igor Jablokov
Great. Thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. You. Bye. Close.
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