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$110 million startup CrowdFlower founder learned from Travis Kalanick

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Lukas Biewald
Crowdflower founder Lukas
Biewald

Lukas
Biewald





If you"ve bought something on eBay, searched a home improvement
store"s website, listened to music on Spotify, or watched a video
on YouTube, you"ve come in contact with CrowdFlower.



"People don"t realize it, but you touch CrowdFlower every day,"
says founder and chief data scientist Lukas Biewald with
more than a little pride.



Today CrowdFlower employs more than 100 people, has "tens of
thousands of users and thousands of customers," including
Autodesk, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Cisco, Github, Mozilla,
VMware and
others.



CrowdFlower has raised $58 million and is valued at $110
million by its investors,
according to PitchBook,
the database that tracks such things.



The future is looking bright. Biewald wouldn"t share a sales
figure but said, "We almost tripled revenue this year and we work
with almost all the big machine learning teams in Silicon Valley
and financial services."



Companies use CrowdFlower after they write a machine learning
algorithm to automate a task.



Computers learn by example. Training them requires
gargantuan numbers of examples. CrowdFlower helps companies
get the training data they need for their algorithms from their
own stores of data. It then helps the program figure out
what tasks it can do itself and what tasks require human
intervention. Companies use it to improve catalog search results,
approve photos, support customers, fight online bullying and so
on.



A phone call from Travis Kalanick 



Today machine learning and AI are the hottest technologies. But
back when Biewald founded the company in 2008 at age 25 –
the height of the financial crises – machine learning was
considered a boring, geeky thing, pooh-poohed by
investors. 



"Machine learning was really not cool," he laughs now.
When investors heard the term machine learning, "they thought,
"research project,"" says Biewald, who got the idea for the
startup from his time working at Yahoo.




travis kalanick uber ceo
SUN
VALLEY, ID - JULY 10: Travis Kalanick, CEO and Co-Founder of
Uber, arrives for the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference
on July 10, 2012 in Sun Valley, Idaho. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates
and Mark Zuckerberg have been invited to attend the conference
which begins Tuesday.

(Photo by Kevork
Djansezian/Getty Images)





The other thing that wasn"t particularly prized back in 2008:
being a startup founder. This was a couple of years before the
launch of 500 Startups, and a time when Ycombinator was a
fledgling thing.



"It wasn’t cool to be a young founder. People were saying that
Zuckerberg was going to get fired. I remember my parents
thinking, "Do you actually have a job?,"" he says.



And while Biewald clearly knew the technical problem he was
trying to solve – supplying training data for AI apps 
– he had no clue on how to run a company.



He was searching for customers with nothing more than a
website with his phone number.



Then one day the phone rang. It was a guy named Travis Kalanick,
who had seen the website and thought the idea was amazing.



"We met at the food court at the mall. I had no idea who he was,"
remembers Biewald.



That was for good reason. Kalanick wasn"t anybody back then. His
track record was Scour, a file sharing startup that went bankrupt
in the face of an insane $250 billion lawsuit from movie and
music industry trade groups, and Red Swoosh, another file sharing
company that was eventually sold to Akamai for $19 million, but
after a lot of struggle.



Today, Kalanick is best known as the cofounder
and former CEO of Uber, the ride hailing giant that has
grown into the world"s most valuable tech startup with a $69
billion private market valuation. 


Before Uber took off though, Kalanick was angel
investing and running what he called The JamPad, the name for his
San Francisco home. He opened his house to entrepreneurs to hang
out, eat healthy food, sometimes sleep on the couch and learn
about running their companies from other invited guests.



Travis tips



After that first food court meeting, Biewald and Kalanick
became friends and Kalanick began to mentor Biewald.



Kalanick spent hours helping Biewald perfect his
investor pitch. And he was loaded with practical, tactical advice
like which words to use for each investor and
which ones not to use (for instance, he
told Biewald to take the "machine learning" out of the
deck because investors "wouldn"t understand it."). He was full of
other tips like how to get into important trade conferences for
free (find a way to volunteer) and how to attend other shows on a
shoestring budget.



More than that, Kalanick taught Biewald to operate his startup
with a sense of urgency. He advised him to set a deadline for his
first round of funding and tell investors to be in or out by that
date. When investors or customers seemed
interested, Kalanick told him to follow up
immediately, not even wait an hour, preferably in person.



"I didn’t have a car. He would drive me to investor
pitches," Biewald remembers.



Kalanick himself invested about $50,000 of seed money, one of the
first to invest, Biewald said.



By the end of 2009, Biewald and his startup were on their
way. He had raised a $1.15 million seed round and had landed some
well-known angels like Dave McClure, early Facebook employee
Jeff Hammerbacher (who went on to co-found Cloudera), and FF
Angel (operated by Peter Thiel"s Founders Fund).



"There were other people that helped me," he said. "But the thing
that was unique about Travis"s help is that it was for long
periods of time. Like every day, every week. That"s key. It"s
easy to drop in and give advice. But like, when nobody cares and
you"re not making money, that"s the challenge. He really cared."




Source link
http://www.wahmmo.com/110-million-startup-crowdflower-founder-learned-from-travis-kalanick/

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