The Accelerator with Michael Conniff

Conversational intelligence can be defined as a combination of machine learning and natural language processing technology. Today's episode is focused on someone who has made an amazing invention in conversational intelligence.

Aleks Smechov is the co-founder and CEO at Wordcab. This is a technology that uses deep learning to automatically summarize conversions at scale. Aleks has a background in journalism and copywriting. It is during his journalism career that he came up with the idea behind the technology. Alecks is on a mission to build the world’s summarisation layer one call at a time with the aim of expanding this beyond calls, but also general business communication.

Tune in for an enlightening episode.

Dr. Nigel Clarke is the Senior IT Professional focused on sales, marketing, and customer success. An Executive with 20+ years of experience in international (Europe, APAC & Middle East, and North America) technology sales and SaaS.

Dr. Nigel Clarke wears many hats. However, he has a special heart for startups, marketing, and capital raising. Since he is in the Startup scene, he gets a lot of pitches. As a healthcare investor, these are some of the qualities that distinguish a potentially successful Startup from the rest include,

Interesting science. The Startup should be able to offer a solution where current treatments are inadequate. Is it going to make a difference? Is the technology going to make an impact globally? Not just in Europe or the Americas.

He is also a member at UNIPLAT. This is a platform specifically designed to help researchers and entrepreneurs worldwide get more exposure and connect with others who want to contribute to improving global research and humanitarian projects.

Rossana Ceccato is the CEO of Redress and Matias Matías Hercovich is, Global Inhouse General Counsel & Board member at Redress. This is a platform for trading slightly used garments. What you need to do is to take a picture of the garment and send it to them where they inspect it for eligibility. Not every dress/clothing item is eligible. Generally, they look for dresses that have been worn either once or twice. When you send a garment, you get points which you can use to redeem other clothing items from the Redress inventory

Maggie Brennan is an educational consultant. She currently works as the Admissions Director at Innovation Experience. One of the programs that she is working on is called Israel 360. This program seeks to create an ecosystem where founders can interact with the Israeli business ecosystem. The goal is to create networking opportunities as well as investment opportunities.

The Israel 360 program has two components. The first is an online academy which is run online on zoom. This component runs for 13 weeks. The second component is a one-week trip to Israel where the participants go through a series of business meetings and also get to experience the Israeli culture which is a huge part of Israeli innovation and creativity.

In this episode, one of the things Apoorva talks about is the untapped use of Web3. He describes Web3.0 as the future of computing.

Apoorva Ruparel describes himself as a Problem Solver, Sales Leader, Entrepreneur, and Growth Catalyst. Additionally, he is a general partner at Venture Rock Capital.

Venture Rock seeks to help Startups at the most critical stages where they are most likely to fail. They invest in multiple rounds from pre-seed to scale, through a metered and auditable process. Based on progress metrics, founders earn equity in the venture.

Diane Bailey is an expert Startup Lifer and Accelerator. She wears many hats including Head of Accelerator Growth & Colorado Director at Founder Institute, Investor, and Community Builder. Founder Institute is The World’s Largest Pre-Seed Accelerator. They specialize in working with early-stage companies and help turn ideas into fundable startups. Diane is also a successful entrepreneur.

In this episode, one of the things she talks about is the Lean Startup Model. This involves, creating something, testing, and then measuring the idea. The findings and learnings are then used to create a better model. This is useful for founders to do before sending their product out in the market. To find out whether the product is really needed in the market. The lean startup model ensures that the startup provides value by meeting a need in the market.

Phuong Phan- is the Regional Manager - East & Southern Africa for Draper Startup House. This is an entity under the Draper Network which was founded by Tim Draper. The vision that Draper Startup House has is to build a global network for entrepreneurs and digital nomads so that they can invest in Startups.

Some of the criteria that they go for in screening companies is they look at companies that are solving real problems in the communities and also companies that are scalable.

In today’s episode, we talk to a service-oriented and impact-driven professional, Manveer Sandhu. Manveer Sandhu is a Venture Capitalist and an intelligent analyst with the Air Force. He is driven to make an impact in his areas of influence. As a VC, he seeks to find companies with promising ideas in order to help foster them to reach their full potential. In addition, he is an elected Trustee to the Travis Unified School District Governing Board. Interestingly, this is where he went to school.

Michael Pastko is one of the co-founders of Satoshi’s closet. The company creates physical apparel on the blockchain via NFT. Satoshi's Closet made its first mark on the blockchain in 2019 as the first project to create ERC-721 tokenized streetwear. The motivation behind the company is to enable the NFT economy in real life. Ultimately, the goal is to enable a full stack NFT solution at sporting events, concerts, art galleries, retail, etc to help in building a decentralized economy.

Vylto enables royalty revenue on all secondary market transactions, product authentication, and more. This is especially great as it connects artists and their audiences while ensuring artists get royalty revenue on secondary market transactions.