#212 Founder Magic Leap & SynthBee Rony Abovitz: Underdog
Grit14 Loka 2024

#212 Founder Magic Leap & SynthBee Rony Abovitz: Underdog

Guest: Rony Abovitz, founder & CEO of SynthBee

SynthBee CEO Rony Abovitz grew up “really believing” in Star Wars and the idea that there could be benevolent, artificially intelligent beings like R2-D2 and C-3PO.

“It wasn't a dystopian vision of the future,” he says. “It wasn't HAL from 2001. It wasn't the Terminator. It wasn't Skynet. It was this kind of friendly, empathetic, more utopian vision.”

George Lucas himself told Rony to tone it down and not “take it so literally” — but he was undeterred. The way he describes today’s leading AI powers sounds like an idealistic Rebel conceptualizing the Evil Empire.

“You’ve got companies that receive massive funding that want to take all the data in the world ... I feel that's a massive mistake,” Rony says. “We become serfs. They become the Lords. They become the Kings. I'm completely opposed to that. So I started to imagine for SynthBee what is a different form of computing intelligence, one that could help us, but have much more safety [and] human centrism.”


Chapters:

  • (01:12) - Fundraising
  • (02:27) - Meeting John Doerr
  • (07:05) - The Beast
  • (10:06) - Unfinished business
  • (11:47) - Apple and Meta
  • (15:20) - The COVID-19 pandemic
  • (21:12) - “Investors panicked”
  • (25:28) - Shaquille O’Neal vs. digital Shaq
  • (29:43) - Magic Leap alumni
  • (32:45) - Financial outcomes
  • (38:27) - Peggy Johnson
  • (40:27) - “A weird version of hell”
  • (44:08) - A strange intro to Google
  • (50:42) - Larry Page and Sergey Brin
  • (54:27) - Founder voting power
  • (01:00:40) - Mako Surgical
  • (01:03:04) - The 9/11 term sheet
  • (01:06:40) - The worst pitch ever
  • (01:09:55) - The 2008 IPO
  • (01:16:15) - Selling to Stryker
  • (01:18:30) - What is SynthBee?
  • (01:26:44) - Humility in tech
  • (01:31:44) - Who SynthBee is hiring


Mentioned in this episode: Scott Hassan, Bing Gordon, Chewy, Mary Meeker, Suitable Technologies and Beam, NASA, Mark Zuckerberg, Matthew Ball, NTT Docomo, Blade Runner, Wired Magazine, CES, Dow Jones, Tesla, Zoom, OpenAI and Anthropic, Adam Silver and the NBA, John Monos, the Apple Vision Pro, Madden NFL, McLaren, Satya Nadella and Microsoft, the HoloLens, Godzilla and King Kong, Willow Garage and ROS, Trading Places, Z-KAT, Frederic Moll, John Freund, Christopher Dewey, John and Christine Whitman, Sycamore Ventures, Andy Bechtelstein, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, Kevin Lobo, Muhammad Ali, Star Wars and George Lucas, Yuval Noah Harari, and Infosys.


Links:

Connect with Rony

Connect with Joubin


Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Jaksot(278)

Synthetic Data and the Future of AI | Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez

Synthetic Data and the Future of AI | Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez

How do companies like Salesforce and Dell scale intelligence across every cloud?Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, explains how they’re building AI that works across all enterprise systems and...

17 Marras 20251h 11min

From Yext to Roam: Howard Lerman’s Second Act

From Yext to Roam: Howard Lerman’s Second Act

The hardest company to build is the one you start after you’ve already succeeded.After scaling Yext into a platform powering millions of businesses, Howard Lerman chose to start over with Roam, the “O...

10 Marras 20251h 25min

Rebuilding Front for the AI Era | CEO Dan O’Connell

Rebuilding Front for the AI Era | CEO Dan O’Connell

The hardest part of transformation is knowing what to let go of.Dan O’Connell, now leading Front as CEO and formerly on the board at Dialpad, joins Joubin Mirzadegan to explore the delicate balance be...

3 Marras 202559min

ElevenLabs’ Vision for Voice Interfaces | CEO Mati Staniszewski

ElevenLabs’ Vision for Voice Interfaces | CEO Mati Staniszewski

Before AI became a buzzword, a few true believers were already building.Since early 2022, Mati Staniszewski and his team at ElevenLabs have been among them, working to create voices that “actually rep...

27 Loka 20251h 4min

95% Faster Video Production with Synthesia | Victor Riparbelli

95% Faster Video Production with Synthesia | Victor Riparbelli

What’s product-market fit like when you give people the power to do what they never thought was possible?On this rerun of Grit from April 2024, Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, shar...

20 Loka 20251h 8min

From Idea To Impact: How Gamma Is Redefining Presentations | Grant Lee

From Idea To Impact: How Gamma Is Redefining Presentations | Grant Lee

Make your product irresistible, and everything else will follow.That’s the philosophy of Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma, an AI design platform with an 'anti-PowerPoint approach', used by over ...

13 Loka 20251h 10min

Leadership Lessons From Snowflake’s Sales & Marketing Duo | Chris Degnan and Denise Persson

Leadership Lessons From Snowflake’s Sales & Marketing Duo | Chris Degnan and Denise Persson

Scaling a business globally comes down to leaders who align teams and drive them forward together.Snowflake serves over 12,000 customers, and early executives Chris Degnan and Denise Persson share how...

6 Loka 20251h 23min

The Man Who Builds for the Decade Ahead | Founder of Google X, Waymo, and Udacity

The Man Who Builds for the Decade Ahead | Founder of Google X, Waymo, and Udacity

What does it take to reinvent entire industries, over and over again?This week on Grit, Sebastian Thrun, the “godfather” of self-driving cars and massive open online courses, reflects on a career push...

29 Syys 20251h 13min

Suosittua kategoriassa Liike-elämä ja talous

sijotuskasti
psykopodiaa-podcast
rss-rahapodi
mimmit-sijoittaa
ostan-asuntoja-podcast
herrasmieshakkerit
rss-neuvottelija-sami-miettinen
rss-h-asselmoilanen
rahapuhetta
rss-rahamania
oppimisen-psykologia
pomojen-suusta
rss-lahtijat
rss-laakispodi
sijoituspodi
rss-porssipuhetta
rss-markkinointitrippi
rss-merja-mahkan-rahat
rss-sisalto-kuntoon
rss-inderes