Yesterday, K9 Ventures portfolio company, Forethought AI, was declared the winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 Startup Battlefield competition.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 07: (L-R) TechCrunch Editor in Chief Matthew Panzarino, Jordan Crook, winner of Battlefield, ‘Forethought,’ and TechCrunch team onstage during Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 at Moscone Center on September 7, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch), used under CC BY 2.0
You can watch the video of them presenting to the panel of judges featuring Cyan Banister from Founders Fund, Roelof Botha from Sequoia Capital, Jeff Clavier from Uncork Capital, Aileen Lee from Cowboy Ventures, and Matthew Panzarino from TechCrunch here: video (sorry, couldn’t find a way to embed the video).
I was SO pleased to see the Forethought team win. Not only because IMHO they so deserve it, but for one other reason that nobody talked about, or potentially even knew about at the conference. The entire founding team at Forethought is made up of immigrants.
Immigrant Founders
Deon Nicholas, a co-founder of Forethought, grew up in some of the toughest neighborhoods of Toronto, Canada. And as he writes in his blog post On the nature of talent, it was his passion for computer science and problem solving that gave him access to opportunity and brought him to Silicon Valley. Deon attended the University of Waterloo, where he did a Bachelors in Mathematics (with Distinction), Honors Computer Science and Combinatorics/Optimization — how’s that for a mouthful? (Some of the smartest computer scientists I’ve met have been from UWaterloo and I consider it to be one of the top schools for Computer Science right up there with Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, MIT and UC Berkeley.) Deon was a competitive programmer and two time finalist for the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition. He interned at Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, and then worked at Pure Storage. He is a husband, a father, and an entrepreneur.
Sami Ghoche, a co-founder of Forethought, is originally from Lebanon. He came to the United States to attend Harvard University, where he studied Computer Science scoring a mere 3.99/4.00 GPA. He then did a Masters in Computer Science at Harvard as well and this time he didn’t miss a beat with a perfect 4.00/4.00. And wait, he actually did both his undergrad and masters concurrently and graduated with both at the same time in 4 years! And his thesis was on a new algorithm for clustering of text documents that is being used at Forethought now. Sami interned at and worked at LinkedIn before joining Forethought. He knows more about the guts of models, training, and the guts of AI, NLP, and Machine Learning than most of the people I know (and I think I am lucky to know a lot of smart people!). Sami is an engineer’s engineer.
Colm Doyle, a co-founder and the Chief Commercial Officer at Forethought, is originally from Ireland. He attended Trinity College in Dublin, and the Dublin Institute of Technology. Colm is a veteran in the Enterprise Search space, having worked at Autonomy (Autonomy was acquired by HP in a multi-billion dollar deal) and Blinkx. Colm understands both the business and the technology behind enterprise search and he understands enterprise sales. And he does all of this with hints of his delightfully charming Irish ways. Colm is a foodie and a restaurateur, and he brings doughnuts to The Kennel! (even though I’ve tried to convince him not to!)
This is a team of immigrant founders. A Canadian (eh!), a Lebanese, and an Irishman walk into a bar… sorry, I digress. But yes, a Canadian, a Lebanese, and an Irishman are the co-founders of Forethought AI, the winner of TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2018 Startup Battlefield. What was that about immigrants getting the job done?
In our current political climate that demonizes most immigration, and has actually been taking steps to make even skilled immigration harder (I also see this through the lens of other K9 portfolio companies with immigrant founders) Forethought is just one reminder that skilled immigrants come to the United States to build lives, careers, and companies. Companies that create more jobs and more opportunity right here. I’ll end my political tirade here.
Enterprise Search
As Deon points out in the opening of their pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt, today, we can access an enormous amount of information at our fingertips just by doing one Google Search. But the same is not true inside organizations. Enterprise search has become an almost forgotten space. There are very few companies innovating in this area leaving almost a vacuum.
For a long time people thought that Google was going to dominate all of search. After all they had the technology and the resources to do just that. Google tried. But even the mighty Google has struggled with enterprise search. They have sunset their Google Search Appliance.
Building enterprise search is not just about search. It is about workflows. That is one of the most brilliant insights that the Forethought team has uncovered. In an enterprise use case it isn’t sufficient to just be able to find the right information; it is important to find the right information, at the right time, for the right person, in the right form. That in my opinion is the key to getting enterprise search done right.
The Forethought team gets this. This is why we didn’t just start by building a generic search product to replace the Google Search Appliance. Instead it’s about embedding the search ability into business workflows. As Deon said to me, his goal is “To make everyone a genius at their job.” And you do that by augmenting human abilities, with the right information, at the right time, and in the right form.
Forethought has started with customer support as their first foray for this. They can demonstrably make customer support agents more efficient at their jobs almost overnight. The choice for customers is clear. They can either increase their customer support staff by 20-30%, which would probably take time to do, and cost a lot of money, or for 1/10th of the cost, they could increase the productivity of their existing support staff by 20-30% (and in some cases as high as 1.5x!). If you’re running a support team using either Zendesk, Salesforce, or Front, you should be talking to Forethought.
Behind the Scenes
I’d like to thank Sumeet Gajri, for introducing me to Deon. Sumeet gets the credit for recognizing Deon’s brilliance and connecting us when it was still incredibly early, or as some have described as — when the concrete was still wet.
When Deon and I first met, the ideas and the thinking behind enterprise search above, which feel so clear in hindsight were still fuzzy. Deon always knew he wanted to “make everyone a genius,” but we had to still figure out and add the “at their job” to that statement to focus and define the mission of the company.
Forethought was the first investment for K9 Ventures III, K9’s new fund that was announced in 2017. The company has come a long way in a short time, not only having figured out what to build, having built some of the best technology in the world for it, and having brought on an impressive list of customers as well.
I’m incredibly excited about what the future holds for Forethought, and I’m honored to work with this team. Onwards!