“I realized that this is the end”: how the Creator of “Alice” resigned from “Sber”, emigrated and builds an AI startup (AI column)

I saw it. curious Konstantin Kruglov, what he gave Elizaveta Osetinskaya, a foreign agent. Before leaving Russia, Konstantin managed to work at Tinkoff Digital, where he built a platform for programmatic buying, at Yandex, where he was engaged in Alice, as well as at SberDevices, where he also made iron for speakers and voice assistants. After the events 22 He went abroad and co-founded Aiphoria, an enterprise platform for voice-activated AI agents. By the way, this is a popular topic - for example, Bret Taylor. told About the fact that Sierra is currently building such a platform, and he is ex-CTO Meta, ex-CEO Salesforce and ex-Chairman of the Board of OpenAI:)

The interview lasted almost two and a half hours, so I will not talk about everything, but I will highlight interesting thoughts for engineers and founders of technological start-ups that can be extracted from it. 1. How to make iron and why it is a lesson in speed Konstantin told about the launch of the column in Yandex A battle for market share, not technological purity. The idea of a “smart speaker” was born as a response to the possible entry of Amazon in Russia Engineering moves that were used in the development: reverse engineering of existing devices; purchase and refinement of technology (Cubic AI) To build a microphone grille, a multi-month crunch to work out the technology.

• Outcome - working device, stable demand 2. Organizational design and speed of decision-making The guest compared between Yandex and Sber in terms of culture Yandex: horizontal organization, high friction between teams - you have to "sell" the feature to each neighbor. Sber: The “honed German machine” is a vertical where decisions and implementation can go faster. (Gref) Personally, and remember the context. I think the guest rates Sber on how he worked with Gref's top priority when there was a green wave on his initiative - that's what ensured the speed of change:) What would happen if it wasn’t a top topic? 3. Reasons for leaving Russia There were personal reasons, but the guest did not name them, but he talked about the workers. It was important to him that he was engaged in fronting things, and then 24 February is no longer a reality. As a result, in a few days, he decided to change the environment to one where there is a density of talent, capital and customers. 4. What about the startup Aiphoria, which co-founded the guest This is an enterprise-class platform for voice-first AI agents: voice agents, messenger agents and email. There is support for different languages, on-prem for customers such as banks, examples of scenarios for automation: customer support, foreclosures, sales, recruiting, etc. The launch strategy was to first prove business value in production and make a profit, then raise capital for scaling.

In general, a very interesting interview, from which you can still learn about the work of advertising technologies, the complexity of iron design, how to raise investment in startups and all that.

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