From Dark Matter to Voice AI with Deepgram Founder Scott Stephenson

Today Madrona Managing Director Karan Mahandru and Scott Stephenson, Co-Founder and CEO of Deepgram, a foundational AI company building a voice AI platform providing APIs for speech-to-text and text-to-speech. From medical transcription to autonomous agents, Deepgram is the go-to for developers of voice AI experiences, and they're already working with over 500 companies, including NASA, Spotify, and Twilio. Today, Scott and Karan dive into the realities of building a foundational AI company, meaning they're building models and modalities from scratch. They discuss the challenges of moving from prototype to production, how startups need to out-fox the hyperscalers while also partnering with them, and, of course, how Scott went from being a particle physicist working on detecting dark matter to building large language models for speech recognition. This is a must-listen for anyone building in AI. Full Transcript:  http://www.madrona.com/founded-funded-deepgram-scott-stephenson Chapters:  (00:00) Introduction (01:15) From Particle Physics to Voice AI (03:16) The Birth of Deepgram (03:40) Building a Developer-Centric AI Company (06:11) Challenges and Early Decisions (09:49) Navigating the AI Market (13:33) OpenAI's Whisper and Deepgram's Response (17:30) The Future of AI and Speech Recognition (21:59) Deepgram's Real-World Applications (31:19) From Prototype to Production  

Om Podcasten

Listen to conversations between Madrona investors and entrepreneurs, founders, and startup personalities who talk about some of the key moments in building a company. Designed to give would-be founders and others interested in working with or for startups a view into the struggle and the lessons learned, these conversations are informal and informative. With more than 25 years of investing in early-stage technology companies, Madrona has worked with founders from day one to help build their company for the long run. We invest in seed and Series A companies in the Pacific Northwest building across the information technology spectrum and in Acceleration (B and beyond) stage companies building with AI, regardless of geography.