Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:06:00 · May Habib
[00:06:00] S0: Yeah, it's, you know, it is fun to really feel like, in so many ways, I've been working on the same things my whole life. And it's hilarious to actually, like, I don't draw a straight line to it, but I spent so many nights at the Crimson, literally like four, five in the morning. And what did you do as an editor? You literally took a red pen and you had like the Crimson style guide on your desk and you like redlined, you know, like mistakes. And it is funny that, you know, now we do it in such a different way and, you know, just literally producing incredible, you know, journalism is still what the Crimson is doing. And in a lot of ways, like, the technology has changed, but what it means, you know, to ask the next great question and, like, question authority. Like, none of that has changed. And I do think, you know, questioning power is also something that comes very naturally to me. And a lot of, you know, what we do at Writer is challenging the enterprise to think differently, right, about so many facets. So, yeah, there are a lot of things that just feel like running themes in my life. And, you know, the the stint at the Crimson and and I've interned in other papers, etcetera, afterwards was was certainly part of it. And then the the threat of language. I've spoken about this before. You know, everyone in our household spoke Arabic. The Arabic is my native language. And when you grow up in the West in a family that speaks another language at home, you know, especially as the oldest child in an immigrant family, not just my family but the whole clan, I was the eldest. You know, you are a translator, not just of language but of culture. I read a paper recently that compared the brains of German native speakers and Arabic native speakers. There were And literally... Your brain is networked differently. The way that the left and right hemispheres connect is very different in a native Arabic speaker than a native German speaker. And you really do... You know, when you think about, you know, how how folks are translating not just language, but culture and value systems. You know, so much of, I think, what we are beginning to learn about the human brain has us much more similar to transformers than we thought, right? Which is very interesting. Language does shape who you become.
00:08:39 · May Habib, Alexa von Tobel
And I think my interests in applying machine learning to the problems of language, you know, do come from those early experiences, understanding, you know, how important, right, being able to communicate, especially if, you know, you come from another culture. [00:08:58] S1: I love that. I wanna go to your origin story of you co founded Qordoba back in 2015, and you'd spent some time in finance and had a really early fabulously successful career, and then you decided to go out on your own. And talk a little bit about that choice to make the jump. And then obviously, Qordoba's morphed in so many ways into Writer, and I I wanna discuss what Writer's doing. But what made you make the jump? How did you know you were ready? What was the compelling reason?
00:09:33 · May Habib
[00:09:33] S0: Yeah. You know, really, like, going into a corporate job versus not starting a company as you did right right out of college was kind of the first big, like, fork in the road. And, you know, for me, I think... And I I don't know if it was the right decision or not. You know, Mark was classmate. I know his contemporary of yours. He was a year above me. I wrote the first Crimson article on Facebook. I started a small e commerce company in college with a couple classmates that we folded during college. But, you know, the entrepreneurial, you know, bug spirit, etcetera, like, was... It's just always been there. I think the, you know, the corporate jobs were the detour, not the entrepreneurship. But I I did end up going to Lehman Brothers and then Mubadala. And while at Mubadala, covered semiconductors and this little chip startup called Nvidia that I kept trying to get us to invest fifteen years ago. We really should've. And... Yeah. And, you know, it was a... Like, a now or never kinda thing. Like, I really... This is... These these jobs are so interesting. Right? And, like, you get to do such high stakes stuff. But I knew that if I didn't leave and really start, you know, start something, I never would. Like, they would just keep throwing more money, more responsibility. Right? More perks at you. And And so it wasn't like, gosh, I had already started something. But I really felt like I just needed to go and pursue this. And especially meeting Waseem, I mean, that was really the game changer for me. And, you know, it had been really a few years of kind of, like, batting around ideas, you know, kind of, like, founder dating. Right? Like, both, you know, kind of, like, ostensibly and figuratively, right, in terms of like seeing and trying to understand what made other founder partnerships work, right, that I was observing friends who, you know, had started companies and things that had really worked, things that hadn't. And so when I met Wassim, you know, we were such different people, but it all just kind of clicked together. Like the timing and the person. And so we moved to San Francisco. We were both in Dubai in early twenty fifteen, and started started Qordoba.
00:12:01 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:12:01] S1: I wanna talk a little bit about Qordoba morphing into Writer, and then I wanna talk about everything the Writer's doing because it's fascinating, and you're really on the edge of a movement, quite literally. Quickly talk about the decision to change the name and just give us a sense of what that happened. And and and I wanna give you the chance to talk about that because I think, you know, for all founders out there thinking, and I like to discuss the things that are not typical because I think it just helps people realize now you're a $2,000,000,000 plus and growing rapidly company, things don't always come perfectly easily. So talk a little bit about the the decision to to to transform into Writer.
00:12:45 · May Habib
[00:12:45] S0: So our our first company was focused on machine translation. And it's so funny because we we do a lot of translation now. Right? Writer is an agent platform for front office, and a lot of what people do when they go to market is, you know, modified by channel, modified by language. But, you know, back then, I mean, we were building statistical machine translation models. And even in some of our first, you know, more like, you know, just deeper machine learning models that we built on translation, we had different models for, like, one language direction than another language direction. Right? Like, this was, like, very, very primitive early days. And the big inflection point for us was the models we were building being able to generate English language. And that, you know, I remember the first all hands. We were across the street from where we are in San Francisco now. The first all hands where we presented a haiku on a slide that one of our models had had written. And it was like, what the fuck is this? And and that's a very different business, right, in terms of, you know, translation to, we called it, source language, right, creation. And so, in an ideal world, we would have sold the first company and that would have been like a very clean exit, and then we would have started our first, our second company. But it really didn't happen that way. And me and Wassim just had such high conviction that we needed to run this transformer thing. You know, these were encoder decoders. And we were solving, like, just a completely different problem. And, like, you know, we didn't know what the product would look like. We didn't know who the buyers would be. You know, we were even, like, we would take long walks and try to think about and imagine we were selling near the enterprise in our first company. Like, should this be a consumer company? Should this be a prosumer company? And after ChatGPT I thought, oh fuck. Like for a few months it was like, maybe we should have done consumer. Now I am very happy, right, that we are pure play and just so focused and so successful on delivering you know, really unmatched value to the enterprise. But that gives you an idea of just like, you know, how differently Mean Wasine thought about this new technology and how different it felt from what we were doing before.
00:15:15 · May Habib
And, you know, now I am very excited, right, that we get to serve so much of our original founding mission of Qordoba around, you know, really making language a non issue for people and for businesses. But it did feel like we were abandoning something that we had, A, worked really hard for and that we had raised money on, promised a lot of people things, and also made a lot of promises to customers. But you know, really over the course of about an eighteen month period, right, we've we've sunset all of that revenue and really built Writer from from the ground up. It definitely meant also from a people perspective, right, we rebuilt the team and started something new. And I am really grateful that we made the jump when we did because I I think, you know, now we are the only pure play full stack generative AI company in the enterprise that's not a hyperscaler or like a massively funded research lab. And so much of that is because, you know, we were able to spend a couple years before the hype cycle really focused and really the only player in town in terms of what we were able to offer the enterprise. And so we've been able to, you know, just bring, like, just build customer reference after customer reference in highly regulated industries doing, you know, pretty complex agentic implementations now. But it's a five year history of being able to serve the enterprise with AI. And it was a tough transition. It was definitely a tough first year or two in terms of like just the eating glass pane of transitioning customers and humans, right, out of the business. But you know, by early twenty one, right, we had really found our way as Writer and raised that first A, that first kind of big round in the fall of twenty twenty one, just as generative AI was becoming a thing. So yeah, I'm grateful for the whole journey, but it's been ten years in natural language processing and machine learning to get here. And now I get to talk about our research road map when I meet customers and potential partners. And, you know, there's just so much depth having really been a team that's been in so many innings, right, of this revolution and having the depth of being the only research lab that, you know, for years has focused on problems that real companies have. And, yeah, that started a decade ago. I love that. I'm