Podcast appearances and mentions of alexa accelerator

Join host Nataraj as he sits down with Aviel Ginsberg, the founder of Simply Measured (acquired by Sprout Social), managing director at Amazon's Alexa Accelerator, general partner at Founders Co-op, and now co-founder of Foundations, a shared workspace and accelerator designed to bolster Seattle's VC ecosystem.About the Episode:This episode explores Aviel's journey through the Seattle tech scene, from his arrival during the 2007 recession to his current venture. He discusses the evolution of Founders Co-op, their investment strategies, and the challenges faced by startups in the Pacific Northwest. Aviel shares insights into his investment philosophy, emphasizing the importance of founders' motivations and the long-term vision for their companies.Aviel also delves into the creation of Foundations, a community-driven space aimed at connecting founders, investors, and mentors. He discusses the need for such an anchor in Seattle's ecosystem and how it addresses the unique challenges faced by startups in the region. The conversation touches upon the changing landscape of venture capital, the impact of large language models, and the future of Seattle's tech community.About the Guest and Host:Aviel Ginsberg: Co-founder of Foundations, founder of Simply Measured, managing director at Amazon's Alexa Accelerator, and general partner at Founders Co-op. → LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avielginzburg/→ Website: https://seattlefoundations.org/Nataraj: Host of the Startup Project podcast, Senior PM at Azure & Investor. → LinkedIn: / natarajsindam→ Twitter: https://x.com/natarajsindam→ Email updates: ⁠https://startupproject.substack.com/⁠→ Website: ⁠⁠⁠https://thestartupproject.io⁠⁠⁠Timestamps:[00:00] Introduction[00:30] What is Foundations?[00:51] Aviel's journey with Founders Co-op[01:21] Navigating the 2007 Recession[03:22] Early days in the Seattle tech scene[03:36] Transitioning from employee to founder[06:46] Founders Co-op's current focus[08:16] Evolving investment thesis[08:45] The art of investing in founders[10:47] The importance of people over product[11:07] Investing strategies and FOMO[14:23] Deal makers and breakers[14:36] The motivation of founders[16:47] De-risking entrepreneurship and motivation[18:56] The rise and fall of first-time funds[20:18] Exaggerated opportunity sizes[21:16] The realities of early-stage investing[22:20] The distortion of valuations[22:57] Winners bias and trillion-dollar companies[23:13] The illusion of constant growth[26:37] The Ally acquisition and Microsoft Viva Goals[27:50] Was the acquisition a fund returner?[28:32] The Clubhouse story[29:23] The importance of knowing when to sell[30:20] The trend of secondaries[30:50] Incentivizing founders[31:25] The future of secondaries[32:50] The vision behind Foundations[38:33] What else does Seattle need?[39:05] The need for pre-accelerators[40:38] Lack of pre-seed funds[41:02] Accessing Bay Area capital[42:41] What are you consuming?[43:14] Podcasts, books, and movies[44:31] What do you wish you knew about investing?[44:39] The long feedback loops of investingSubscribe to Startup Project for more engaging conversations with leading entrepreneurs!→ Email updates: ⁠https://startupproject.substack.com/⁠#startupproject #seattle #startupecosystem #venturecapital #founders #foundations #simplymeasured #founderscoop #amazon #alexaaccelerator #techstars #innovation #entrepreneurship #podcast #youtube #technology #investing  #davidishim #readai #ai #artificialintelligence #meetings #productivity #hybridwork #remotework

So much of what happens in the startup world comes from serendipitous moments, random interactions that lead to fresh insights and new collaborations. And so much of that has traditionally happened at events, meetups, coffee meetings, and other in-person gatherings. Two years into the pandemic and remote work, what are the implications? That's our first topic on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, with entrepreneur, software engineer and investor Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Seattle-based seed-stage venture fund Founders Co-op. The former Techstars Managing Director for Amazon's Alexa Accelerator, Ginzburg was co-founder of social analytics platform Simply Measured, acquired by Sprout Social in 2017. Before that, he was one of the first software engineers at Appature, which was later acquired by IMS Health. We also dive into NFTs, crypto, Web3, and the Metaverse, getting his take on each as an investor and entrepreneur (and longtime World of Warcraft gamer). We discuss how he and Chris DeVore, the Founders Co-op managing partner, are looking to differentiate themselves from other VCs and investors at a time when so much funding is sloshing around. And we take a look at our newly published list of unicorn companies in the Seattle area, which include some of Founders Co-op's portfolio companies, as well as one big one that got away.  With GeekWire's Todd Bishop and John Cook. Edited by Curt Milton. Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jay Hsueh is the CEO and Founder of Roby, a conversational AI service that streamlines the modern office. Roby's mission is to create an engaged, productive workplace by making customer operations efficient, simple, and personalized. Before Roby, Jay served as the Analog Design Engineer for NXP Semiconductors and participated in Techstars' Alexa Accelerator program. He has also founded two other companies, LiWi LLC and Room2music. Jay attended the National Cheng Kung University and the University of Southern California. In this episode… Are you getting distracted in your work environment because the room is too hot or too cold? Is your company spending too much time, energy, and money on employee requests and facilities management calls? We may have the solution for you: Roby.  The AI service hub, Roby, is transforming businesses across all industries. The platform automates employee requests and uses energy-saving equipment and data analytics to keep everyone in the office comfortable, happy, and productive — while saving your business money. So, how exactly does this service work, and how can you implement the software into your company today? In this episode of Watching Paint Dry, Greg Owens and Katrina Stephenson sit down with Jay Hsueh, the CEO and Founder of Roby, to talk about how the platform is helping companies become more efficient. Jay breaks down the Roby process, shares examples of how the software is supporting innovation for both legacy companies and small businesses, and talks about his predictions for the future of AI. Stay tuned!  

Aviel Ginzburg is a General Partner at Founders' Co-op and former Managing Director of the Alexa Accelerator. In 2010 Aviel co-founded Simply Measured, one of Founders' Co-op's first investments, and was later backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, and MHS capital. When Simply Measured sold to Sprout Social at the end of 2017, Aviel transitioned into his current role as General Partner. Aviel is one of the most intelligent, sincere, and colorful investors I know.

Today on the Voicing Startups podcast I am talking with Joseph, Co-Founder and CEO of Voicehero. Voicehero ultimately is a suite of tools that helps customers create better voice experiences. This is done by giving users the ability to immediately discover actionable insights, and identify conversation patterns in user behaviors that otherwise may be overlooked. Voicehero was also a member of the 2019 Alexa Accelerator, ran by Techstars, that focus on startups in the voice space. In this episode, we cover many different things about both the Voicehero business, but also the world of voice. To start off the show, we cover why Voicehero was started in the first place and ultimately what the product is. As mentioned above, Voicehero was apart of the Alexa Accelerator this year so we also talk about that experience in detail as well. Following this we dig into the actual Voicehero product and the different features that it has for its customers. As we start to wrap up the show we start to talk more about the big picture. Joseph gives his outlook for the years ahead for both his business and what he sees in the world of voice. Check below for the best places to follow Voicehero and the Voicing Startups Podcast! If you liked this episode, please Subscribe, Review, and Share it with someone! Follow Voicehero: Website: voicehero.ai Twitter: @VoiceheroAI Follow Joseph: @josephtruong77 Follow Voicing Startups & Collin: Website: VoicingStartups.com Twitter: @CollinBorns LinkedIn: @Collin Borns Have your own startup in voice? Pitch: VoicePunch.VC

Today on the Voicing Startups podcast I talked with Dylan Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Pulse Labs. Pulse Labs aims to help developers, designers, agencies, and brands create the best voice applications they possibly can. They do this today by providing a platform and panel to deliver real user feedback and insights for voice applications. They are extremely excited about the emerging voice ecosystem, and do everything they can to help create great user experiences within it. Their work has gained the attention, support, and investment of companies like Amazon and Google. In this episode we cover everything from the origin of Pulse Labs to how they see the entire voice market unfolding in the future. To start the show we touch on how Pulse Labs was able to gain the interest of Amazon and join the first ever Alexa Accelerator program. After talking about some of the different things that you are able to test your voice app for, Dylan gave his insights into why he believes anyone building a voice experience should consider iterative testing and starting as early as possible. Later, we talk about the target market for using Pulse Labs and what the process is like for getting started with testing your voice apps. As we get to the end of our conversation we talk about the entire voice ecosystem and how Pulse Labs is positioned for any product that Amazon or Google may come up with (Ring and microwave, I am looking at you.) To wrap up the episode of Voicing Startups Dylan gives his vision for the future of both the company and the world of voice. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did! Check below for the best places to follow Pulse Labs and the Voicing Startups Podcast! If you liked this episode, please Subscribe, Review, and Share it with someone! Follow Pulse Labs: Website: Pulselabs.ai Twitter: @PulselabsAI Linkedin: @Pulse Labs Follow Dylan: Twitter: @pulselabs_cpo Follow Voicing Startups & Collin: Website: VoicingStartups.com Twitter: @CollinBorns LinkedIn: @Collin Borns Have your own startup in voice? Pitch: VoicePunch.VC

Amazon Alexa Accelerator Programhttps://developer.amazon.com/alexa-fund/alexa-accelerator See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Host Bradley Metrock discusses the #VoiceFirst news of the week with special guests Rachel Batish (VP Product, Audioburst) and Mark Webster (Director of Product, UX/UI, Adobe). Stories include the Alexa Accelerator's just-announced third cohort, Google's Nest mic problem, Cedars-Sinai's new Alexa pilot, smart speakers are apparently better than "mediocre," and a new Australian smart speaker for children called Birde. This Week In Voice is part of the VoiceFirst.FM podcast network.

Show: 387Description: Aaron and Brian talk with Armon Dadgar (@armon, Founder/CTO @HashiCorp) about the problems service mesh can solve, the underlying technologies, control plane vs. data plane considerations, and who is making decisions about service meshes within an IT organization.Show Sponsor Links:Liquid Technology - IT Value RecoveryTry CloudLast Service, get a free t-shirt and chance at Amazon Gift CardDatadog Homepage - Modern Monitoring and AnalyticsTry DataDog yourself by starting a free, 14-day trial today. Listeners of this podcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirtCloud News of the WeekJFrog acquires Shippable, adding continuous integration and delivery to its DevOps platformAmazon launches third Alexa Accelerator for conversational startupsAzure Kinect DK - Build computer vision and speech models using a developer kit with advanced AI sensorsFollow the CAPEX: Cloud Table Stakes 2018 Edition (Charles Fitzgerald - Platformnomics)Show Interview Links:Hashicorp - http://hashicorp.comWhat is a Service Mesh - https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/what-is-a-service-meshConsul - https://www.consul.io/Show Notes:Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. It’s been a couple years since HashiCorp has been on the show, so give us an update on the company - big round of funding ($100M) in November.Topic 2 - A couple months ago we saw you in a video called “What is a Service Mesh?”. It was intended to be a “let’s make this simple” and you realize that a Service Mesh could be a lot of things - L4-L7 routing, Proxy, Encryption, Authentication, Application patterns. Is a Service Mesh solving a new problem, or is it pulling together lots of things that have existed at L4-L7 and application stacks in the past? Topic 3 - “Service Mesh” has become a pretty crowded and fragmented market over the last couple years. HashiCorp Consul has been around since 2014 (was originally “Service Discovery”) and now there’s Linkerd, Istio, Envoy and a bunch of variations. As you talk to people in the market, how are they evaluating the options out there? Topic 4 - Consul has evolved from Service Discovery to Service Mesh, and seems to have come from more of an authentication and security perspective (some others tends to be more routing-centric). Are there use-cases when one Service Mesh is a better fit than others, or should we expect that all/most of them will more or less converged on features over the next 12-24 months? Topic 5 - Can you give us some examples of how companies are using Service Meshes today (parts or all of the capabilities) and what teams are usually driving the adoption (infra/ops, security, app-dev, etc.)?Feedback?Email: show at thecloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet and @ServerlessCast

Accredited Investors, Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Star founder Bryanne Leeming is back to update us on all the exciting stuff Unruly Studios has been doing. Alexa Accelerator, Inc. Magazine feature, adoption by the City of Somerville and more. Listen to this scrappy young founder who’s done a lot with very little. Topics include: What they learned at Amazon’s Alexa Accelerator that is run by Techstars. How they came to be featured in Inc. Magazine. UPS/Inc. Magazine Prize. Amon Milner & crucial early pivot that really made Unruly Studios. Dealing with rejection while fundraising or selling. AT&T sponsored pilot turned into a live deal with the City of Somerville’s school system that has adopted Splats! The “STEM Toy Burn” and how to avoid it. Find out about cool new things in the Unruly Studios product roadmap.

An all-star panel (Brian Garr, Daniel Gonzalez) join host Bradley Metrock (CEO, Score Publishing) to discuss the growing competition for multi-modal supremacy, 61% of Alexa skills have no ratings, Google Duplex on the new Pixel phone, the newest cohort of Alexa Accelerator companies, and over a million people proposed to Alexa last year! This Week In Voice is part of the VoiceFirst.FM global podcast network.

Voicebot recently traveled to Seattle to meet with some of the company founders in the 2018 cohort of the Alexa Accelerator Powered by Techstars. I also had the opportunity to speak with the Alexa Accelerator's managing director, Aviel Ginzburg (3:54) about how the organization recruits new companies and how things have changed between year 1 and year 2. The three company CEO and founders interviewed include Milkana Brace (18:39) of Jargon, James Rhodes (28:30) of Helix AI and Michele Meyer (39:53) of Presence AI. This week's episode offers a glimpse into the future of the voice industry by telling the stories of three entrepreneurs helping drive the change. 

Alexa Accelerator 2018 featured startup, Voiceitt, gives people with speech impairments their voice back. Today, we're joined by co-founder and VP Strategy, Sara Smolley, to hear all about it.The There are millions of people across the globe who have non-standard speech. People who've had a stroke or who have multiple sclerosis or cerebral pausey, for example. Voiceitt's advanced speech recognition system, which is deployed through an app, allows those people to speak and be understood.Once it's configured, all you do is speak through the app and Voiceitt will do the rest, handling speech to text and displaying the text on-screen whilst a synthetic voice speaks the words to you.For all that's said about voice being accessible, Voiceitt's mission is to open up voice technology to the rest of the world.Our GuestAfter working in Hong Kong and South Korea in marketing and startup consulting, Sara moved to Tel Aviv to help build and establish Voiceitt. Sara travels across the globe working on the strategic side of the business, building relationships, gathering insights and bringing the powerful mission and technology that Voiceitt posses to the world.Where to listenApple podcastsSpotifyYouTubeCastBoxSpreakerTuneInBreakerStitcherPlayerFMiHeartRadioLinkshttp://www.voiceitt.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Pulse Labs co-founders Abhishek Suthan (CEO) and Dylan Zwick (CPO) brought their crowdsourced voice app testing service into the first Alexa Accelerator class operated by TechStars in 2017. Since then, they have assembled hundreds of pre-screened voice app testers and provided UX feedback to nearly a hundred voice apps on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Along they way, the company raised $2.5 million from venture funds at both Amazon and Google and Jeff Bezos' personal investment fund. Abhishek earned CS and CE degrees from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Emory University. Dylan earned a PhD in Math and Masters degree in data science from the University of Utah along with Masters and undergraduate degrees in statistics and math from Stanford. 

Episode 10 of The Alexa Podcast, presented by VoiceFirst.FM, features special guests Aviel Ginzburg (Alexa Accelerator, Powered By Techstars) and Rodrigo Prudencio (Amazon's Alexa Fund). The discussion spans what constitutes success for a startup coming through the Alexa Accelerator, how both of our guests assess companies, a history of Alexa Accelerator alum Novel Effect, and a broad discussion around voice-first technology with two key players at the center of Amazon's efforts. The Alexa Podcast is hosted by Bradley Metrock (CEO, Score Publishing) and Kevin Old (software developer, LifeWay).

Melissa and Matthew Hammersley co-founded Novel Effect in 2015 to use voice recognition combined with sound effects to enhance story time for parents and children. Since that time they have appeared on Shark Tank, completed the first edition of the Alexa Accelerator, closed a $3 million funding round, launched an iOS app, closed deals with major publishers and expanded their application set beyond stories to other use cases. Melissa is the former owner of Figure One Design and is now Chief Design Officer at Novel Effect while Matthew is a former engineer and patent attorney and is currently CEO.  

Aviel Ginzburg is a Managing Director of the Alexa Accelerator here in Seattle, Partner at Founders Co-op and Co-founder of Simply Measured. We talk about the founding of Simply Measured, what it’s like to be a new dad, and how to survive high-stress work while having a baby. As always with other founders we will talk about his startup story and touch a little bit on what it’s like to be a venture capitalist. Lastly, he will share some tips on traveling with your little ones. Let’s jump right in it! Simply Measured Alexa Accelerator Founders Co-Op Startup Weekend

In this episode Dave chats with with Rodrigo Prudencio from Amazon's Alexa Fund and Aviel Ginzburg, Managing Director Alexa Accelerator powered by Techstars. The Amazon Alexa Fund provides up to $100 million in venture capital funding to fuel voice technology innovation. The Alexa Accelerator, powered by Techstars, is a startup accelerator created by the Alexa Fund and built around the belief that voice will fundamentally improve the way we interact with technology. The companies chosen are taking part in a 13-week program in Seattle to work with technologists and product leaders from Amazon and Techstars. Don't know what an accelerator is? What about the difference between an incubator and accelerator? This episode will get you started and offer examples of startup voice innovations happening right now. Links: Amazon Alexa Fun: http://alexafund.com Amazon Alexa Fund Signup: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-fund/fund-signup Alexa Accelerator powered by Techstars: http://www.techstars.com/programs/alexa-program/

An all-star panel (Karen Kaushansky, Ahmed Bouzid, Brian Roemmele) discuss the latest in voice technology news, including Amazon's new Alexa Accelerator in partnership with Techstars, China being "slow" to embrace smart speakers, the launch of the HTC U11 with built-in Alexa, Inc magazine reporting that marketers are "scrambling" to catch up to AI and voice technology, Google Home launches in Australia with a masterfully-orchestrated release, voice-first technology expands horizontally with Bespoken's new "Silent Echo" tool and Opearlo's Sound Owl tool to publish 'shortcasts,' Chattanooga (and the state of Tennessee in general) goes all-in on voice technology by supporting The Alexa Conference, and Amazon moves to disrupt food marketplaces by marrying Alexa with food delivery service. Hosted by Bradley Metrock (CEO, Score Publishing) and part of the VoiceFirst.FM podcast network.