Clint Betts
Dr. Maskey, it is so great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on. You recently took your company public via SPAC. You went IPO via SPAC in January. Tell us about your company, how you got to where you are, and what that whole process was like. That must've been kind of fascinating.
Sameer Maskey
Thank you for having me on the show, Clint. I just want to say that we haven't gone public yet. We announced our BCA signing in January, and now-
Clint Betts
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sameer Maskey
Yeah, we're in the process.
Clint Betts
What is that process like? Tell us what it's like to go public via SPAC.
Sameer Maskey
So basically, SPACs are already publicly listed. They're an entity on its own that goes out, raises money, and creates this public vehicle. And usually, they are looking for a target. If they find the right target, the target company, in conjunction with the SPAC, comes to an agreement on various things, from valuation to growth, to the businesses, business model, and all of that. Once that is agreed upon, there's a step, what's called a business combination agreement, that gets signed, and after that, we file the S-4 and wait for SEC approvals. Yeah, essentially-
Clint Betts
Ah, I see, okay. For some reason, I was thinking as soon as you announced it, you were public, because the SPAC was already... Apologies. Tell us about Fusemachines, though, and how you got to be the CEO, and what you guys focus on.
Sameer Maskey
Sure, so my background is in AI and machine learning. Been doing it for about 20-something years, before all the hype now. I got my PhD in computer science, focused on AI, worked on IBM Watson, and then started teaching various AI courses at Columbia University. As I was doing it, I wanted to start a company, and I started Fusemachines. And when I started in 2013 for me, the idea was, "Okay, what can I build as a product that I know I have a certain advantage on?"
And that was in dialog systems because all my life, I'd been doing research on natural language dialog systems, question/answering systems, and so forth, and that's what I did. I wrote the first version of the code myself, tons of lines of code, and it was a customer service automation system because that's what I thought dialog systems, AKA chatbots these days, could create a lot of value for customer service sellers, and that was the genesis of Fusemachines.
Clint Betts
And so given that, and given that you have been involved in this, like you said, AI isn't new, but everyone thinks it was just invented like a year ago, right? This isn't a new thing, or a new technology, or a new challenge. It has just now become more mainstream, thanks to companies like OpenAI and Google, which have joined this space.
As somebody who's been working on it for as long as you have, what do you think about the growth and what do you think about it now being talked about daily, as you've got to have an AI strategy as your company, and also, it's not even just within the business world that it's being talked about? It's being talked about in the political world, every world, all of society is talking about this thing, whether it's going to kill us all and all of those types of things. And so I wonder what that's like for you, somebody who's been working on this, and studying this, and building with this for as long as you have?
Sameer Maskey
Yeah, a lot has changed, obviously. So I built my first Nepali to English, English to Nepali speech to speech translation system in a limited domain, in my undergrad in early 2000. That was like 20 something years ago. It was very limited domain, could only translate few things and so forth, versus now, when you see GPT-4.0, keep capacities on just doing translation so fluently, on the phone, at the same time, with no lags.
For researchers in the AI field, it's like a Holy Grail. It's like almost getting to a point where you've been trying all these years to build a system like that, and now suddenly, the technology has matured to a point where it seems possible, and it seems feasible, and it seems possible to be really used in the real world and so forth. So, from a research perspective, especially for language researchers, it's matured a lot, and it's very, very good to see it.
Yeah, now, from a business side, when we started ten years ago, for example, when we sold our system in the beginning, one of our first clients was New York City, and we were doing demos all the way up to deputy mayors at the time, and our investors at that point and advisors were saying, "Oh, don't even say it's an AI company," because AI still didn't have that [inaudible 00:05:36] at that point.
In fact, some people actually didn't even like if it's an AI company because AI has historically been, at many times, thought to produce a lot of value; there would be a lot of hype, and it wouldn't produce value, the funding dries up and so forth. So when we went and demoed our system, we said, "It's a natural language dialog system," which is the case, but without really using AI word a lot.
Clint Betts
Part of your mission is to democratize AI. That's the mission of Fusemachines. What does that mean to you?
Sameer Maskey
So, democratizing AI for us means making AI education highly accessible for everyone and making AI accessible for all organizations. Particularly, I think we have a view that talent is everywhere, but opportunities are not, especially in the fast-paced environment today, where AI skills can produce a lot of value for a lot of people, especially those who live in underserved communities, to [inaudible 00:06:44] their skills and compete in the world market, I think fulfilling emotion of democratizing AI, to bring opportunities for everyone in all parts of the world, has a chance to reduce poverty, bring a better quality of life for everyone, and that's what democratizing AI is for us.
Clint Betts
So, did you grow up in Nepal?
Sameer Maskey
Yes, I did. I did. So, I grew up in Nepal. I was born and raised in Kathmandu, grew up in Nepal, and after high school, I had applied for colleges here, and got a scholarship to come to the US, up in Maine, so Bates College, to study math and physics.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. I assume you still have family out there.
Sameer Maskey
Yeah, yeah, my mom, my brother, sister, most of my relatives are still there, but I mean, now, my wife, and kids, and some relatives are here.
Clint Betts
Oh, that's great. What does a typical day look like for you as CEO of this company?
Sameer Maskey
It has changed, especially since the announcement, because a lot of the focus has been on finance, audit, S-4 filing, and so forth. So these days, it's a ton of meetings, mostly to do with finance meetings, but typically, otherwise, in a more regular day, a typical day is a sequence of things from the morning, afternoon, and evening. And especially, our company has a lot of distributed employees, so a lot of the morning time gets spent on communicating with employees from different time zones.
So there's a lot of stacked sequence of meetings in the morning, but I try to wake up earlier, before all the meeting starts and try to get through all the emails, chat messages, and so forth. So early in the morning, catch up with all the emails, chat messages, and so forth. Then, meetings, especially with employees that are in different time zones. Then, usually, some strategy meetings and metrics meetings, then external meetings during the daytime. So that's usually how the sequence goes.
Clint Betts
And then, how do you decide each day where to spend your time? In what aspect of the company and what area of the company, each day, how do you make that decision, like, "This is where I'm going to spend my time"?
Sameer Maskey
I wish I had a more strategic way of being able to decide on, "This is where I'm going to spend each day," and every week, at the beginning of the week, I try to do that so that I look at the calendar and say, "Well, I'm supposed to spend 20% of time strategy, 20% on external CS-related meetings," and so forth, and try to see if the week looks like that. If it's not, how do I balance it out? But a lot of it is already, on a weekly basis, pretty much already set with a lot of canned invites on what the day is going to look like.
But one thing I do try to make sure on a daily basis is I do make sure that I spend time with the senior executives on strategy and metrics, particularly on how we are looking forward, from a growth perspective and so forth. And I also do sometimes... I used to do more office hours as well, in which employees can come in and chat.
Clint Betts
I want to go back to the AI thing just real quick, what do you think the future of that is? What does AI look like in 10 years, and how will that change our lives as human beings? I know that's a giant question.
Sameer Maskey
That's a giant question. It's hard to predict even ten months these days, with the speed at which development is happening, let alone ten years. But I think some of the automation that's coming, particularly with language and vision being integrated with our daily lives, will be much more integrated and fluid. It's taken decades, essentially, to get to a place where AI systems, particularly language systems, are really able to understand what we are asking for and be able to provide fluent answers.
The new LLM and GenAI systems are able to do that. As those become even more capable of doing external actions for you, so for example, in ChatGPT, you can ask, "Where do you want to travel?" or let's try for a trip to Europe and say, "Give me a really good itinerary for four-day vacations," it will give you a really good itinerary, but you can't really just say, "Okay, just book all the hotels. Here's the rough parameters on the spending side here at the hotels, airlines," you can't do that yet. And people are trying to do it with agents and so forth, but I think in 10 years that probably becomes much more fluid, where you're just having a chat, it will able to do all of it as if your assistant was doing it. So I think these assistant systems will be able to automate and help big chunks of things that you do in your daily life.
Clint Betts
And then, as you think about the rise of AI and the way that it's going to change things, what do you think about what starting a company will be like? Will you need as many employees, obviously? I mean, there are just so many questions that go around this for entrepreneurs and people who are building in this thing. I believe it was Sam Altman who said, "We're about to see the first solo founder of a $1 billion company." Do you think that's possible?
Sameer Maskey
Solo founder, with everything else being machines helping?
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Sameer Maskey
I'm not 100% sure when that is possible because, building a company, there's still a lot of humans involved, from relationships, when you talk to potential clients, just even having a lot of employees be part of a culture where there's a common goal, and sometimes, we as humans, sometimes efficiency goes up even more when two of you are doing the same thing together, and you are gaining from each other's energy, and your efficiency goes up, right?
There's something about a team building a company. Does it have to be as many people as it is right now, hundreds, or is it just a team of tens of people that can build a $1 billion company? Those are some of the questions that probably become very apparent as the number of people required to build and scale a company reduces a bit. But accompanying this with just one founder and everything else being an assistant system, I think it'll be a while before we see that.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What are you reading these days?
Sameer Maskey
I'm reading a book called Atomic Habits. I got it as a gift for Father's Day from my daughter, and I was talking to her about how she needs to improve habit of cleaning her room and so forth. Then, she gave me an Atomic Habits book. It's a good book, sort of one third way into it.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that's a great book.
Sameer Maskey
Yeah.
Clint Betts
In your opinion, what are the three most essential traits of being a leader?
Sameer Maskey
Three most important traits. The first one, I would say, is grit. Basically, as a leader, you're going to go through lots of ups and downs, especially downs, and especially as a CEO, you are quite lonely. And having grit so that you are not too low when things go wrong and too ecstatic when things go up high, being able to manage that lows and highs, and particularly lows, if you have grit, then you are able to manage lows very well, and you are able to keep going through lots of issues and try to come out winning on the other side. I think that I would say that's an important value from an entrepreneur's perspective.
The second one, as a leader, I would say is empathy, because especially as a leader, you will have teams reporting to you or you have senior executives reporting to you, and there will be a lot of people who don't report to you, and there are people whom you don't know as well. Like, right now, in Fusemachines, there's 400 plus employees, I don't know everyone. But having empathy allows you to listen, and listen, really listen, right?
When somebody's saying, "This is not working out," and they are, let's say, just interns, or for trainees, or employees who joined just two months ago, you can brush it off, saying, "This is first six-month employees, they tend to complain," or instead of brushing off, people request and ask, if you have empathy, then you're more inclined to listen, and that allows to build up a really good culture, where people are listening to each other, and working together to solve problems instead of fighting with each other. That's number two. Those are the top two, I would say.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, you don't have to give three. Those two are incredible. What do you know now that you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?
Sameer Maskey
What do I know now that if I knew in the beginning... Sales are very hard; I did not know how hard sales are. So, as a company, growth is one of those fundamental metrics that defines success. If there's no growth, then people don't get excited. Not employees, not investors, not market, and even for you, as fulfillment around the potential bigger and bigger impact in the world, you need that growth. For growth, and particularly for revenue growth, sales are quite important.
A lot of technical founders like me tend to undermine how hard sales is. In the very beginning, I was able to sell to the government entity, and I was like, "Oh, sales are easy," and so there was a sequence of mistakes I made because of this, not appreciating how hard sales are. So I think that's something I underestimated in the very beginning, and I wish I knew how important sales growth is, how setting up the structure and team around it is, and so forth.
Clint Betts
What are some products, apps, or tools that you use every single day that kind of help and benefit you as you're leading this company or just your life?
Sameer Maskey
Obviously Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive. So some of those is obvious, because everybody uses it. So besides that, for chat, we use, actually, unlike a lot of companies, we use Slack, we use Work Chat, but that might be changing as we move to Teams. I use Notion quite a bit.
Clint Betts
Oh, yeah.
Sameer Maskey
Yeah, it's a very good mix of to-do that allows you to create to-do in many different ways, and also with all the project management tools embedded in it, and team features in it, that allows good communication between teams, for our projects and so forth. Then, I use ChatGPT, like many people are starting to use. Yeah, and then, obviously, some of the Teams, and Zoom, and so forth.
Clint Betts
How do you stay grounded and stay focused on your mental health?
Sameer Maskey
I guess I've been trying to go to the gym more, like everybody is, running, going to the gym. The one thing I've started to do, about nine months ago or so, which I've been very consistent on, and which helps a lot, is I go for a walk in the morning, for about 30 minutes, without fail, and that's been quite good. That's been quite good because, during that time, you're able to sort of think through things and just run that mental model on what I think needs to be done, some of the strategy-related questions, and so forth.
Clint Betts
Yeah. What do you think about the state of the world and the economic environment? You're obviously really deep in this now, as you're trying to take your company public. Where are we going here this year, and how does it feel out there?
Sameer Maskey
I think the market is doing quite well, which is good. The market seems to love AI companies these days. You see the Nvidia stocks and so forth; that's the talk of the town. And from a macroeconomics perspective, especially if there are rate cuts that come through then, which probably will at some point, that should keep the market in a pretty decent shape, which should keep the economy humming, which is good for all the businesses. Particularly for us, it's even more crucial because as we try to go public, from private to public transition, how the market is doing around that time is quite important.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Finally, we ask everybody who comes on the show this question to end the interview, and that is at CEO.com; we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. I wonder when you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Sameer Maskey
My mom. She's been my best supporter throughout all these years, for a kid from Nepal on being given that confidence to take a chance and come to the US when you had never flown an airplane before, and being able to just make that trip, and providing that support and confidence throughout the years.
Clint Betts
Sameer, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really, it means a lot.
Sameer Maskey
Thank you so much for having me.
Edited for readability.