Entrepreneur Vitaly Golomb Automates Sales with AI to boost Qualified Leads and Reduce Costs

Vitaly Golomb is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor who most notably co-founded HP’s corporate venture arm. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of  Sofielabs, the next-gen CRM that uses AI to automate the sales process. 

Hear how AI was applied to the costly weak link of sales and how their startup strategically emerged from stealth to take on Hubspot and Salesforce which dominate the CRM market.

Transcript

Jeanne Gray: I'm Jean Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series, Experienced Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success. 

Jeanne Gray: With the emergence of artificial intelligence, entrepreneurs now see opportunities to tackle problems previously considered too complex to solve. Our guest today on Experienced Voices is Vitaly Golomb, co founder and CEO of Sophie Labs, the next generation CRM that uses AI to automate the sales process.

Vitaly is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. And most notably co founded HP's corporate venture arm. Welcome to experience voices Vitaly.

Vitaly Golomb: Thanks for having me, Jeanne. 

Jeanne Gray: So let's discuss your, your company, Sofie Labs, which I understand is Going to be disruptive in the CRM space. So share with our listeners what your business model is and why it will be disruptive. 

Vitaly Golomb: Well, time to time in the tech world, we find ourselves with the ability to reimagine and disrupt, you know, the same old problems with a new generation of technology.

And obviously the new generation of technology that we're talking about in 2024 is generative artificial intelligence. And, you know, it's a buzzword it's flying around and everybody's very excited and hyped up about it. But, you know, we founded the company a couple of years ago to look at commercial applications of autonomous agents.

So that means looking at things that will, will make a big impact for companies, for businesses, for enterprises. And the area we zeroed in on. Is really enabling sales ops, right? So companies, you know, B2B companies, especially they sell through relationships. They spend almost half of their budget on marketing and sales, and it's really becoming a noisy marketplace out there.

And it's very difficult to break through. So it requires automation. And what we're doing specifically with our first product engage is we're kind of getting in the middle of that, in the middle of that pie. So you have your marketing operations. That, you know, do events and email marketing, what have you advertising, they bring people to the website.

People fill out a form on the website after looking at some products and they're expecting an appointment with the account manager or account executive to pitch them the product, give them a demo, et cetera. What happens in the middle there is, is usually something really painful for most companies. And that's what we focus on is, is the automation there.

So we can kind of talk a little bit more detail, but that's, that's generally the area that we're operating in. 

Jeanne Gray: And you referred to the individuals in the middle as, as sales development reps. 

Vitaly Golomb: Yeah. So, so what we have is, you know, the people, the first people that that will take those leads that come in those prospects and that first encounter that the prospect will have is usually with a sales development rep, an inbound sales development rep, an SDR.

And who's an SDR? An SDR is typically, it's an entry level sales or marketing job. For somebody straight out of college with very little training and you can imagine that's the first impression that is out there for your customers is this interaction with SDR and if you look into the sausage factory a little, what's happening is you accrue two or three SDRs.

To keep one in a month or two. And if they're good in the, in the best case scenario, a few months later, they become an account executive and they start doing the next step of the process. And you, as a person running that business, trying to scale that sales team, that sales for the company is you you're doing that process over and over again.

So it's very expensive to recruit, train, and retain this particular group. Within your whole marketing and sales organization. And what we're doing is we're effectively automating that and nobody is going to know. My kids weren't growing up and one day say I'm going to be an SDR.

Even if they want to go into business, it's kind of grunt work. It's this entry-level manure shoveling, pardon my expression of the sales and marketing world. We're replacing that with automation that not only frees up these people to do more valuable things, it ultimately makes life easier for account executives.

But it's a qualitative and quantitative improvement to the whole sales operation. 

Jeanne Gray: I hear a lot of, about AI automation. Can you spend a little time in describing, in say in layperson's terms, what does AI automation mean? 

Vitaly Golomb: AI automation is essentially automating a certain task that happens in a predictable way.

The artificial intelligence has some kind of a decision-making process, right? For example, in the world of CRMs, we've had this idea of sequences, so the sequence could be this happens, then we send this email. Then we wait a day or two. If they don't answer, we send email number two.

If they don't answer, we send email number three. And then if they don't answer, we just take them out of the sequence, right? So that's very linear, very simple kind of automation.

But with artificial intelligence in our case, what we're doing is when somebody sends in a request within the first two minutes, what we do is we will go to their LinkedIn, we will go to their company's LinkedIn, we'll go to the company's website and we gather intelligence.

We understand who this person is? What is their role in that company? What is that company? How does that relate to the product that we are selling, right? Because we have the playbook, the sales playbook for the company, and then we have our own sales best practices. In under two minutes, we can have a very personalized, very custom response to that prospect in 35 languages, 24 hours a day with qualifying questions.

They submit something as simple as their name and email address, right? The simpler the form, the more chances you're going to get people to actually fill it out. They fill that out and within two minutes, they get a respondent saying, Well, hello, John, thanks for your inquiry form about such and such product.

We saw that this is what you were interested on our website and we understand you're from so and so company and we imagine that this could be very useful for your company in such and such way. I just have three questions for you to then set up an appointment with an account executive to give you a full demo.

Right. And those three questions will be always personalized, always custom that are qualifying questions that do two things. First of all, because we answer so quickly, we have the chance, you know in sales generally kind of the general rule of thumb is whoever answers first usually gets the deal in, in this world we're talking about digital marketing and qualification.

The stat published by HBR by Harvard Business Review is that if you don't answer within the first five minutes, your chances of qualifying that lead fall by 90%. Right. So we answer in two minutes, we could answer faster, but it's going to feel strange if we know all these things about this person and have this personalized response too quickly, right?

We have to at least kind of put on a show that that somebody is doing the work and it feels like, you know, it's human scale. So, that's one thing, but the other thing is that we're also a gatekeeper and we protect the account executives time, because what happens now is about half the time that they get on a sales appointment, it's not really a qualified lead. 

It might be a company that's generally fits the profile, but they're nowhere near ready to buy the right. They're just kind of doing basic research there. There are six months or a year away from, from buying right. So ours are very eager and they'll set up these appointments and half the time they're unqualified and the account executive gets on the call and asks a couple of questions to requalify it. Half the time, they roll their eyes back. They know it's an unqualified lead. They're about to waste an hour of their day, giving them a demo. So for us, we're a gatekeeper and for those that are not sales qualified, we'll actually nurture them.

So we'll come back and we'll follow up with them in 30 days or in six months. Or have you try to requalify them and set up that appointment. So net net  you being able to answer really quickly and in a really personalized way. What we're seeing in our pilot now is that we're able to set up three times more qualified calls for the sales reps without increasing the marketing budget.

So that's, that's a tremendous effect when you're talking about half of your company's budget being marketing and sales. That's a tremendous you know, advantage that, companies that are using automation like ours have over their competitors. 

Jeanne Gray: Is the process fully automated in the sense that a lot of what you described a person was doing, you're doing the information gathering?

The customer or the prospect on the other side are they receiving a text or an email or even a virtual voice? or is there still a person that still is in the intermediary role? 

Vitaly Golomb: Because we're doing this interaction 24 hours a day, that first interaction of first response is completely automated, right?

And that happens within two minutes. But on average, it takes about nine touch points, nine back and forth. We're talking about B2B sales, going back and forth with them. To set up the appointment and answer some basic questions, et cetera. 

Tthe way our system is set up is like a virtual human because they have an account in the CRM just like anybody else. They have their own inbox, they have a name and what you can see in the CRM, you can actually break in at any point if it, becomes complicated for some reason. Yyou want to break into the conversation much like you would with any kind of junior SDR. If you're a sales manager you can do that, but otherwise you just let it go, it's a completely automated process.

You can see all of the communication recorded in the CRM. We enrich the contact. We provide a lot of information from, you know, LinkedIn, public sources Zoom info, et cetera, but we also have our own database that we're accumulating over time, which is more behavioral, right? Because we encounter people again and again in our network with that professional email address, right?

As the unique identifier, we get to know them. We know approximately when they answer emails. We know if they respond quickly to short emails or long emails. We, we get to know them, we know how to talk to them and how to better formulate you know, a conversation with them, which is really magical.

And it's fascinating to see some of these conversations in our pilot we're really passing this touring test which was for those who are hearing this for the first time. Its really figuring out for lack of a better word, to fool a person into thinking that they're talking to another human.

And in our case, they feel like they're speaking to a human who's giving them the information they're looking for and is being helpful and they're responding very quickly to their requests. 

Jeanne Gray: So you're entering a CRM space that I understand is dominated by HubSpot and Salesforce.

Stepping back to the origin of the idea to do this startup, what was your thinking that you could take on such dominant players? 

Vitaly Golomb: Great question. I mean, first of all, right now, the way our system works, it works within whatever setup you have. So if you're using Salesforce and you have, you know, a hundred sales reps.

And you have all these systems set up and you've taken years to build it out. We just integrate right into it. Salesforce, Hotspot, etc. As you can imagine you know, as we build our system out further, like right now we're kind of in the middle of that sandwich where the ham in the sandwich. But there's certainly lots to do and lots to improve on the marketing side, kind of on the inbound and automation that could be helpful for the marketing team.

Not necessarily replace it, but, but certain things that could be much more efficient there. And also on the sales side, you know, when, when we set up the appointment with the account executive, there's a lot of things that they have to do. They have to do the call. They have to analyze the call. They probably have to put together a proposal.

So there's a number of things that we do. We'll be doing after the fact. So you can imagine what kind of going middle out where we're creating this value and automation throughout the issue with incumbents. This always happens with every next generation of technology is they have a decision to make.

Are they going to completely cannibalize their existing business and redesign their product and sell something new? Are they going to try to kind of slow walk the whole industry and try to get there, you know, eventually? 

So that's the opportunity for startups is to actually go in and do something you know, solve the same old problem, but do it 10 times faster, better, cheaper using new technology as leverage.

And that's the advantage that we have as a startup is that we don't have this baggage. We don't have, we're not a publicly traded company that has certain revenue that it has to keep up. And have to worry about being destructive and disruptive to our own product. So that's really the approach and kind of to generalize it.

you know, that's startups in general. 

Jeanne Gray: And who are the target customers? 

Vitaly Golomb: We we're currently working on the pilot, as I mentioned, and we target companies who have some kind of sales velocity, you know, they have a certain size of sales team. You know, a lot of SAS companies are perfect fit for us because that's how they sell.

They have an average, you know, average sale average contact contract value of, you know, five to 10 to 15,000. They have this three step process. Marketing creates demand and brings people to, to the website, usually our landing page and they have the SDRs, then they have the account executives. So that's, that's one one easy target there is, is company software companies or services companies.

But we see in the future, we can expand to things like professional services. When you're talking about lawyers and investment bankers, et cetera, who are out there and they're marketing themselves and they're creating a brand for themselves. And then it all fails when somebody comes to them and tries to contact them through the website and they don't hear from them for days, right?

Those are very valuable customers for them. We can imagine going in that direction and ultimately any kind of B2B sales structure our system could be very helpful. 

Jeanne Gray: You have a deep background and I see you've been in venture capital. In your type of company there are so many AI startups now, and people are fundraising.

Are they going to venture capital firms that claim that they're good at AI? Or are they going to venture capital firms in their industry, who are now seeking AI startups? 

Vitaly Golomb: Well, whenever there's a new technology wave, the, you know, the, the hype is around the particular vertical, right? So we thought that mobile was a vertical or social was a vertical or the internet was a vertical before that.

But reality is that really when it's a true wave, it's a horizontal and it affects all industries and it goes kind of across. So. It's a new technology era. Right now it's starting to mature a little bit. The market's understanding that, you know, we're not AI investors. We're investors in what your industry is with that experience and that network there. 

But we understand that all the new solutions are going to incorporate some kind of AI, some kind of automation to rethink the solutions to old problems from before. The short answer is everybody is all of a sudden an AI investor and they have to get smart about how this works, how this will affect their particular industries that they're interested in.

We are in the software space ultimately, and most Silicon Valley investors are well aware of kind of the software business models, software space. And we're somewhat generalized from that perspective. But you can see, I spent years in investment banking focusing on mobility and climate tech.

And even in those categories, obviously one of the first commercial applications of AI was autonomous driving. That's a very difficult AI problem or in the energy space. You can see that AI is being used to make decisions at a very high pace about how energy gets generated and stored, et cetera.

We're in the AI era, right? So everything is going to be infected with this particular technology. Wait and you're going to see completely new ways of rethinking the same old problems, but also solving things that weren't solvable before.

Right. So I'm, I'm pretty excited about what's going to be happening in, in bioengineering and in medicine with the help of AI, that just wasn't possible before.

Jeanne Gray: For startups, what is the challenge or is there a challenge in finding the talent to recruit into a startup?

Because AI is taking off so quickly, is there a shortage? Is more AI talent on the West Coast and people should be looking that way for team building? 

Vitaly Golomb: I grew up in Silicon Valley and ever since I can remember, there was always a shortage of talent, engineering talent, technical talent.

Because there's always more ideas of what to build than there are people who can actually build it. What's interesting, what's happened since COVID. COVID kind of forced us to think remote and it's become accepted to have this remote workforce from all over the world.

You're seeing a lot more of that in the last half a decade. Even my last startup which is a decade ago now which I sold in 2015, an ecommerce platform, I had the same challenge  back over 10 years ago in Silicon Valley. Just couldn't compete with the big tech companies in trying to attract top talent, top technical talent.

What I did is I went to Kiev and built an engineering office there, and then kept all the sales and marketing here in Bay area. So that's a very common template because it's very difficult for startups to compete with a big tech, especially because it's a certain job security to a certain degree.

The stock is very valuable. That's part of it. And talented engineers could be making, you know investment banker or hedge fund type of income in Bay area. And, and they know it. 

Jeanne Gray: So that's making it particularly hard for entrepreneurs who are not techies. And if they're out there looking for a a tech partner, they've got quite a a hurdle to overcome.

They can't pay them for what they're getting somewhere else. Are they by definition having to create a partnership to go forward in these models? 

Vitaly Golomb: It's exceedingly rare for tech based startup software companies, or especially deep technology which is research based to have non-technical founders.

I'm fortunate to have a co-founder, we've been friends for a very long time. We complement each other very well. We both ran companies, both sold companies, but my background is design and human computer interface way back in my educational background. And Jonathan, my co founder, he is more on the technology side.

And even though he has been running companies for the last decade and a half, he actually is very current and with his hands in the code and he wrote the first lines of code in our product. 

It's absolutely necessary when you have a tech-based product you have people who are technology specialists, even if they're not writing code, if they're managing the team, they need to understand within a certain scale, how long things take and what technology to use, et cetera, with AI, it's very, very technical.

I would say it's almost impossible to start a company without at least if not all the founders being somewhat very technical. 

Jeanne Gray: Now, I understand that you came out of stealth, so, can you share a little bit about your thinking of being in stealth, how unusual is that? 

Vitaly Golomb: It's pretty common, right, because what we're doing is, we're doing experiments hence the name Sofie labs. We started a lab to run experiments, find commercial applications of this particular technology. 

Autonomous agents is what it's called. And we tried a few different ideas before we landed on what we've built in this engaged product. And that allowed us to kind of experiment and get that feedback. 

Although we're more than average experienced entrepreneurs that told us that we need to talk to customers and users very early on, get feedback because the idea is if you think that you already know everything and you're, you're there building a product and investing millions of dollars in a couple of years of your life, very likely you're going to come out of stealth, you know, or, or introduce a product to the world and it's going to flop, right? You're going to get an unexpected response. 

We've built the initial product. We've tested it on a very close company to us. We know it works well. We're now ready to start taking it to the next degree of separation.

Companies that are portfolio companies of our investors are kind of our cousins and then more to the public companies that we don't know that just fit the profile and want to work with us. We start working with them in this pilot phase and then ultimately we'll get to a public release where anybody will be able to sign up.

And be able to take advantage of Sofie in our business. 

Jeanne Gray: If I'm an entrepreneur thinking that I want to keep things behind the wall, would I be approaching these entities close to you? Do you guys use non disclosure agreements in those cases? Or are you really just relying on those trusted relationships?

Vitaly Golomb: Yeah, it's not so much about kind of the, the cat being out of the bag. You know, I, I wrote a book years ago that's become a bestseller, in the startup world. You know, if, if somebody can steal your idea just by knowing about it, you probably don't have much of a business, right? You have to have something, some secret sauce that's, that's difficult or impossible to replicate.

So we're not so afraid of somebody like taking our idea and having them sign the NDA. Okay. But it is important for us to kind of validate and understand what it is that we're building, how we're going to position it to the market who our customers are just so we don't waste time and resources kind of just doing this in, in public.

The bigger mistake I think is a lot of entrepreneurs stay in stealth for too long. They, they think that they know exactly what they need to build and they're sitting there, you know, especially when you have entrepreneurs who are just purely engineers that have never gone to market or sell something.

They will tend to have this concept that they already know what the solution is. And I can tell you that's, that's not, that's often not the case. You might have a hypothesis, but you're going to get really interesting feedback. And you're going to learn things every time you talk to customers, especially early on who are going to just react to it from their context and think about you know, how would this work in my business?

What are my fears? What am I excited about? How do I practically set this up? How long does it take? You know, all those things really are kind of the, the meat and potatoes of getting a technology product out there and then figuring out, you know, in turn, how we're going to market to the world, how, what our sales cycle looks like, all those kinds of things, that kind of next step, but the important thing is to get what's called product market fit to figure out who's our customer, what problem we're solving for them.

And ultimately for them to recognize the same thing and be excited about using your product and wanting to ultimately, you know, pay for it.

Jeanne Gray: What's your next big step. You're saying you're in a pilot. Is that something that's going to run for six months or you have a couple of milestones that you're looking to pass? 

Vitaly Golomb: Yeah, I think it's more of a it's not, it's not really a step function. It's you know, for us, this is kind of the next logical step and, and things kind of accelerate gradually and expand from there.

So from the pilot, we're going to keep, you know, opening it up to a wider and wider audience until we stop calling it a pilot and it becomes a public release. Obviously for us, you know, from a standpoint of how we think about the businesses, you know, we've been largely financing the business ourselves.

Not everybody can do that. The next step for us though, is to have enough proof points to go out there and raise a substantial venture round, which will really allow us to expand much quicker and grow the business. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, you've built companies before, like you mentioned your e commerce company.

So when you're going through these different stages, you know especially when you go in your pilot phase and you're, you're trying to build traction in the market, you're How hard or difficult is it to make that transition to build the next iteration of your product at the same time you're trying to bring in sufficient demand to attract an investor?

Vitaly Golomb: Yeah. I mean, , it's not a either, or it's not a start stop. It's it's everything happens all at once. Right. And this is why you have division of responsibilities in the company is you have somebody responsible for, you know, continuously improving the product and listening to the feedback from users and customers.

And you have the business, the commercial side of the business doing something similar, figuring out, okay, what works on the marketing and sales side, what doesn't work and continuously improving that. The adage is, you know, a lot of founders, a lot of startups there, they have, they put together an idea.

The idea is really untested and they go out there, you know, they go running after investors and they spend 80 percent of their time out there chasing investors when they should be instead getting those proof points and chasing customers, right? Because at the end of the day the goal of a startup is to be a startup for the shortest possible period of time, meaning it's an experiment looking for a business model.

And you need to get there and start focusing on building a business as soon as possible. That's, that's something that a lot of founders, a lot of entrepreneurs, especially young first time entrepreneurs, that's what they don't realize is that, you know, you don't need to be going to every conference and, you know, wasting the hours of your day chasing investors and kind of looking at the industry.

You need to go out there and talk to customers. , and then the investors will come to you. So that, that's really, you know, that's something that comes from experience and doing this for a couple of decades. And kind of seeing the signals, what works and what doesn't. 

Jeanne Gray: That was one of the questions that I was wondering about is given that you have all this experience, are you better today at setting your milestones than when you had your first company?

Because that's what the investors want to latch on to is that your ability to communicate. When certain things are going to happen and you deliver upon what you're saying 

Vitaly Golomb: Yeah, I mean what you will learn, you know with every generation of technology everything is you know You you kind of throw it in the salad mixer again and spin it around and everything's different but the whole point of a startup is nobody's ever done this before in quite the same way So you have to kind of figure it out along the way Otherwise if if you're just copying something that was already done then You're not going to be able to build that, that giant value in the company and go from zero to hero very quickly.

So yeah, it's, it's the experience that you do have is that you start realizing, you know, it's more like psychology and, and, and being a little bit more stoic about it, if I may say you know, you, you're not, you're not trying to make yourself busy. You're not going out there and. And saying, Oh, you know, just adding tasks to your list, like, Oh, we have to go find an office.

And then we have to go and fill it with furniture and then hang the pictures on the walls. No, no, no, no. None of those things matter to the business, right? The business doesn't care if you have a nice office and, and it's really easy to feel busy. When, when you're not doing things that are productive and you're just waiting for something to happen to your company.

So that's probably the biggest difference is that going out there and figuring out what's important, what to focus on. What those positive signals are and where not to waste time. That's probably the thing that comes from, from experience the most. And you know, on the other hand, being a little bit more experienced entrepreneurs, the expectations from investors that we talk to are higher for us, right?

The, the, the bar is higher and as it should be, the bar for ourselves is higher. Because we, we already can avoid a lot of the mistakes that we've made in the past without having that experience. 

Jeanne Gray: But is there like a real source of anxiety among the team members of making the build and then realizing that you need a certain amount of significant investment to get to another milestone, which is further down the road?

Is, is that a gulp moment that a lot of entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs realize? You know, they have to get through certain stages, but if they don't have the funding, you know, they It really becomes difficult to go forward 

Vitaly Golomb: Yeah, I mean funding to scale and when you're when you get overwhelmed with all the things have to be done That's kind of a high class problem if you think about it because things are working right right and And when that happens, you're going to get noticed anyway, and you're going to have investors coming, knocking on your door.

Right. Because your company is working, something is scaling really quickly and sure, yeah, you can, you can drop a lot of balls in that period and, and kind of break a lot of things again. That's what the experience you, you kind of are able to see a little bit down the road and you don't get overwhelmed with with banal things.

So that's, that's kind of the high class issue. The, the more common issue is that you're running out of money because you wasted a bunch of time. Time is money, right? You, you raised X amount of money. You're burning Z amount of money every month, every day. And you just thought things are going to be a lot quicker and you're going to be more successful than you are.

You know, 95 percent of the time, that's what happens. And the companies run out of money because they just didn't move fast enough and didn't make best use of the capital that they were able to raise. And get to that next milestone. And that next milestone is really all around kind of commercial questions.

It's our customers responding. Have you figured out who the customer is? Are they willing to buy the product at X price? Are you able to find them fast enough? You know, those are the things you have to focus on. So it's really, when you raise money the race begins, right? The, you know, a lot of founders, you know, they raise money and they put out a press release and everybody congratulates them.

Congratulations on raising money, but that's not the end. That's just the beginning. That's the beginning of the next phase. And you have to run very, very quickly to outrun, you know, before that money gets spent before that money disappears, you need to hit the next milestones to grow the business. So again, if it's, if it's the reverse and you get overwhelmed with all these things that have to happen.

That's really, that's, you have to think about that positively. That means the experiment is working and now you need to figure out, okay, how do we scale this? Who do we, you know, what kind of people do we need to recruit to put around this company? What's the next step? And if it's really working, it's not going to be that difficult to find money.

Jeanne Gray: Well, you've shared a lot of great advice here in our conversation for entrepreneurs. Is there, Any specific pitfall about an AI startup? Is it, are they, are all startups alike or in this AI era, you're seeing something that separates out certain AI startups doing well versus others. 

Vitaly Golomb: Yeah. I mean probably, you know, if we were going to talk general, general type of ideas you have to, Kind of avoid the hype, right?

You know, going out there and just talking AI, AI, AI, just for the sake of AI, because it's popular, you know, okay, that works for, for a little while. But at a certain point, you know, we get this trough of disillusionment and people don't want to hear it, right? It becomes kind of overhyped. Instead you want to focus on, you know, who's your customer?

What value are you providing to them? And just really practical things, you know, building a business that you know, they're, they're customers that are happy to pay for your product because you're making them. more successful or making their life easier, whatever it is. So it's really important to focus on those, those aspects and not just get wrapped up in the hype and the, you know, the parties and the conferences and what have you, just focus on building a business.

If that's your goal, right? Otherwise you have to be honest with yourself and say, no, that's not my goal. I'm doing this for lifestyle. I like to go and, you know, talk, walk around and have people, you know, praise me because I'm a AI founder, but you know we're, we're a little bit past that age to where that's not important to us anymore, right?

I'd rather spend time with my, with my family on vacation than go to the, you know, conference number 17 for the year. 

Jeanne Gray: So we touched upon this before about AI talent. So Where should an entrepreneur be looking at? So we're not assuming that all entrepreneurs are in, in the Valley. New York is, you know, a really big tech hub.

Now, are there places that they should be gravitating to or particular say accelerators that they should try to compete and be accepted into an accelerator? 

Vitaly Golomb: Sure. I mean, accelerators are a great step especially for new old technology entrepreneurs, because what an accelerator does is, is in a certain period of time, hence the name.

You fill the gaps in your knowledge very quickly and you get access to a network and you get some money, right? A small, relatively small amount of money. So accelerators are great and they, they serve their purpose. That's why they've been around for, you know, two decades now. I've been involved with a dozen accelerators as a mentor, board member, et cetera.

So what I would say is that there's this concept called clusters of innovation and the clusters of innovation you know, Silicon Valley Probably the number one in the world hands down. They have several different players and those players are universities who are pumping out technology, talent, and business talent.

There are governments that various governments, local and federal, for example, who are creating the conditions, the economic conditions for all, all of this to thrive and putting the right incentives in place. And you have you know, professionals that surround a particular industry.

Accountants and lawyers, et cetera, who specialize and understand that industry they're in market day to day, they can be very helpful in filling those gaps for you kind of don't underestimate that. So that, that, you know, if you look at it kind of holistically, you know, there's a couple of key components that you need that are, for example, like top university, top technical universities to give you a kind of top, top talent.

You know, a few years ago during COVID, everybody got excited about Miami. But that was kind of fool's gold because there's not a top 20 technical university within a thousand miles of Miami, right? So how are you going to get all those engineers? Are you going to put them into five star, high rises, it's just not going to happen.

And you can see the results now, right? Things kind of hyped up and they kind of slowed down and they're growing, but they're not really on the level of obviously of Silicon Valley, New York, LA. Or Boston for that matter, right? 10 years ago, you know, the hype was about Austin and at least Austin has, you know a couple of colleges, not too far and, and a really interesting environment that's, that's you know, a fun city for relatively young people.

So you, you can see how that developed internationally, you know, it's, it's really interesting what happened in, in the UK. In Estonia, which is a tiny country where there was a Skype mafia, which was a group that built Skype and then started investing in all the other startups that were coming out of it.

In the, in the region the type of things that were the type of support that the Singapore government gave to the ecosystem and the type of laws they passed, where, for example, Most technology companies that are founded in Southeast Asia are incorporated in Singapore, right? It's going to become the Delaware of Southeast Asia.

So there's a lot of different things that can, that can happen. And when you're you know, if you're a young person and, and you're thinking, okay, I want to, you know, I'm ambitious and I want to do something big with my life. You know, and you happen to come out of a small town in the middle of kind of nowhere or, you know, in an industry that specialize in the industry that you're not interested in and you're interested in tech, you know, if you're going to be an actor you going, you're going to move to Hollywood to try to be, you know, a world class actor.

If you're a world class technologist, And you have the opportunity, you're probably going to move to Silicon Valley or to one of these other areas, right? So for example, financial technology, FinTech insurance technology, very strong in New York anything around media and content, very strong in LA. And then obviously any kind of deep technology that has global appeal will be in Silicon Valley, you know, for the foreseeable future, not to say that other areas aren't producing great companies, but if you have to flip a coin and say, okay, I need to move, where am I going to move?

You know, the highest potential areas are pretty obvious. 

Jeanne Gray: So Vitaly you're in the pilot phase. Are you looking for early stage companies or established companies to be part of the pilot? 

Vitaly Golomb: So that's why we're doing a little bit of a media tour now is that we're kind of opening the kimono and we'd like to invite companies to join our pilot. They can do so on our website, Sofielabs.

com, S O F I E L A B S. com. And we'll reach out to them and talk to them and figure out what their sales process looks like and how we can integrate Sofie Engage and show them a lot of value, give them a step up, you know, on their competition. 

Jeanne Gray: If they're a good match, is this a, when you do a pilot is you, are you paying, are you paying customer or.

It's handled differently. 

Vitaly Golomb: During the pilot where it's, it's completely free and it's important for us, you know, we're getting a lot of value out of it because we're getting the feedback to tune our product. And then eventually we'll be announcing our kind of commercial commercial accounts and, and all of that.

Jeanne Gray: Well, Vitaly, you have shared a lot of information in our short time. So I want to thank you for being on Experience Voices and being so forthcoming about your background and where you're taking Sofie labs. So thanks for being here. Thanks 

Vitaly Golomb: for having me.

Jeanne Gray: You have been listening to the podcast series, Experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit americanentrepreneurship.com/podcast, where you will also find a form for listener feedback.