Just because a startup is focusing on Artificial Intelligence applications – a booming field – doesn’t mean the company isn’t facing constant challenges.
So says Mason Levy, founder and CEO of Swivl. In an exclusive interview with YourLocalStudio’s CEO Alexander Ferguson as part of the UpTech series published in partnership with WRAL TechWire, Levy talks about how he and his team strive to stay on the leading edge of development by listening to feedback – especially that which is critical.
- What kind of hurdles do you see in order to get to [your goals]? That you’ve got to overcome and work through?
Mason Levy from his LinkedIn site.
Yeah, I mean, I think any startup has a thousand hurdles, we’re actively finding product markets right now, and so some of the biggest things we talk about internally is how do you sell a product that is pretty complicated? You need to have buy-in from multiple organizational units, whether that be customer success or your sales and marketing team, as well as the technical team that’s gonna be the ones are helping implement.
So those are some of the headaches that we think about, obviously startups always like to say the best entrepreneurs know how to let fires burn. There’s more fires than any of us could put out in one day and some of them will just have to sit there and let burn for a little while.
- So how are you always staying on top of and keep innovating, as obviously the marketplace is changing and people are adapting, both competition, as well as your customers. How are you constantly innovating?
Yeah, I think going back to the kind of what our core competency is, is about the feedback loop. We’re always looking for feedback. Very critical feedback is great.
How can we get better? Where did we fail?
And then we do a lot, spend a lot of time researching what’s on the market, talking to people at the large corporations like Microsoft and Amazon and Google about what they’re up to and how we could partner with them to be successful.
And so constantly learning and being educated about what’s happening, talking to people that are innovating in similar regions and kind of looking at what’s happening in autonomous driving and where that piece of the market is going so we can take bits and pieces of it and say, “Hey, look, that hasn’t really been applied to this unstructured type of data yet, so how do we apply that?”
