Inside the GeekWire Awards: What's next for AI, the economy, and startups

This episode provides an in-depth exploration of the GeekWire Awards, focusing on the future of AI, the economy, and startup innovation.

1. AI is revolutionizing traditional processes across industries, notably in contract management and customer intelligence platforms.
2. The current economic conditions are challenging but also present opportunities for well-prepared startups to thrive.
3. Strategic acquisitions, like Lexion's by DocuSign, showcase the importance of synergy in tech advancements.
4. The Seattle tech scene is poised for significant growth, leveraging its leadership in cloud computing, AI, and other technologies.
5. Innovators emphasize the fundamental business principles, efficient growth, and the importance of adapting to technological advancements.

1. Opening Remarks

Todd Bishop introduces the GeekWire Awards, setting the stage for discussions on AI, the economy, and startup culture. Notable quote: Todd Bishop: "Welcome to the special GeekWire Awards episode."

2. Lexion's Milestone

Discussion on Lexion's recent acquisition by DocuSign and its implications for the AI technology landscape. Garav Oberoi shares insights into the integration and future plans. Garav Oberoi: "Joining DocuSign marks a pivotal step in our journey."

3. Economic Insights

Experts and entrepreneurs discuss the current economic challenges and opportunities for startups in navigating them. Linda Leann comments on resilience and innovation in tough times. Linda Leann: "Turmoil breeds opportunity."

4. AI and Efficiency

Exploration of how AI is being used to improve efficiency in workplaces, with examples from various companies. Todd Bishop discusses the broader impacts on industry workflows. Todd Bishop: "AI's role in enhancing productivity is undeniable."

5. Closing Thoughts

The episode wraps up with reflections on the future of tech in Seattle and the ongoing impact of the GeekWire Awards. Todd Bishop highlights the community's role in fostering innovation. Todd Bishop: "The GeekWire Awards spotlight the region's tech prowess."

1. Leverage AI for efficiency: Implement AI tools to automate routine tasks and improve operational efficiency.
2. Focus on fundamentals: In uncertain economic times, prioritize building a solid business foundation.
3. Explore strategic partnerships: Look for opportunities to align with larger players to expand market reach.
4. Stay adaptable: Continuously evaluate and adapt business strategies in response to technological advancements.
5. Encourage a culture of innovation: Foster an environment that encourages experimentation and embraces change.

This week, we go inside the GeekWire Awards, our annual recognition of the top people, companies and innovations in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, which drew a sold-out crowd to the Showbox Sodo on Thursday May 9 in Seattle. We talk with finalists about AI, the economy and key trends in their industries, and we hear from some of the winners on stage during the program.

People

Garav Oberoi, Linda Leann, Todd Bishop

Companies

Lexion, Common Room, GeekWire

Books

"As if Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence" by Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Todd Bishop
You and your team at Lexion just sold your company to docusign. What are you going to do next? I'm going to the Geekwire Awards.

Welcome to Geekwire. I'm Geekwire co founder Todd Bishop. This week we go inside the Geekwire Awards, our annual recognition of the top people, companies and innovations in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, which drew a sold out crowd to the showbox Soto on Thursday, May 9 in Seattle. We talk with finalists about artificial intelligence, the economy and key trends in their industries, and we hear from some of the winners on stage during the program, which started with a musical shout out to the technology of yesteryear from Rob McPherson, aka the drunken tenor. Check that once had its day, but now it's passe.

Garav Oberoi
Furby would talk to me tennis on Nintendo Wii, Galaxy note seven, heaven's exploding into flames. See the show notes for a link to the full video of that performance by Rob McPherson, the drunken tenor, at this week's Geekwire Awards, along with a full list of winners and highlights from the event. We'll have more highlights from the stage later on in the program. One of the finalists in attendance was Garav Oberoi, the CEO of Lexion. It's an AI powered contract management software company that three days earlier announced an agreement to be acquired by Docusign for $165 million.

Todd Bishop
You've just had a pretty big week here for people who haven't seen the coverage yet. You and your colleagues sold Lexion to DocuSign. The agreement is in place. It's $165 million deal. What's your week been like and what do the weeks ahead look like for you?

Garav Oberoi
It's been an incredible week. We are just absolutely thrilled. It's a wonderful outcome for our team, for our customers, for our investors, and for our families. What's coming is joining the Docusign family, integrating our teams well, and moving forward towards success. What is it, to the extent you can say at this point, that made sense in this deal for you and for the team?

Todd Bishop
What made it a good fit and what went into the decision to enter into this acquisition agreement now, when we. Started this journey five years ago at the Allen Institute for AI, it was abundantly clear that technology is going to change how people work with contracts forever. And that's what we've been doing for the last five years, and we've made it a reality with over 300 enterprise customers. But to take that technology to the world stage with the largest player in the agreement space and to be able to distribute it to their one and a half million customers is super exciting. It makes sense from all the cool things we're going to be able to do with the resources we have there to the distribution we have there, and the fact that we're going to be leveling up how people work with agreements worldwide using cutting edge technology.

Garav Oberoi
That is exciting. So for people who haven't heard of Lexion at this point, there's probably relatively few of those in the Seattle tech industry at least. But you were very early on. The company was founded in 2018. This is years before people had even heard about chat GPT before it was a gleam in Sam Altman's eye.

Todd Bishop
You extract key information from documents, and the idea at the beginning was that it was venture capital term sheets that Wilson Sani had you extract information from. What is the promise of AI in what you do? How are you seeing it play out for your customers and the ability that they have to do things with documents that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do. Imagine asking your lawyer, hey, I'm meeting with this big client tomorrow, where's our NDA? And now waiting for that answer versus just going into slack or teams and getting that answer right away.

Garav Oberoi
Imagine sending in an email saying, hey, what's our parental leave policy again? And that gets triage to an AI that knows how to respond. Or maybe you're a salesperson and a red line has come back and you need to respond quickly. Imagine AI does a first draft and makes it so much faster for your legal team to respond. These are the kinds of things you can do once you can understand what's inside, inside of these documents.

And so part of it is extracting this insight, but part of it is making it useful for companies so they can speed up the contracting process, they can identify where they're wasting money would spend and where they can manage risk and obligations. And I think today so many of those things are done super manually. People dig through file folders looking for that old agreement. They're hitting control f to be like, hey, are they allowed to use our logo on the website? I don't know.

Let me go check. But these are the kinds of things that can turn into a simple query, allowing you to go about your day and actually focus on building your business. That's exactly the kinds of value that we provide today and we hope to bring to millions of people. Via docusign there was just a report. From Microsoft this week saying that usage of AI in the workplace has just skyrocketed and power users are saving in the realm of 30 minutes a day in terms of their own efficiency.

Todd Bishop
What kinds of things are you doing inside your company, independent of Lexion as a product that are changing your own workflow as an individual or your team's workflow? One of the biggest areas is around customer questions and internal triage. So you can imagine questions come in. Our support team handles them, but sometimes they're complex. Maybe it's a new feature, maybe it's a weird edge case.

Garav Oberoi
And so they're asking teams on internal Slack channels, like what happens here? Some of those questions get asked again and again. And so we've put in plugins to various pieces of software that aggregate information from our support site, from previous questions asked on Slack, from emails that have been sent to provide those answers quickly, speeding up the whole process. And of course, we can curate them and provide some thumbs up and thumbs down. But it's a perfect example of AI taking the knowledge that's already there, collating it and spitting it back out in a way so that teams can operate faster.

Todd Bishop
So Lexion is nominated tonight for workplace of the year, and you're nominated for CEO of the year. Ironically, you're not in the deal of the year category. Maybe that'll be the 2025 Geekwire Awards. But this market is so interesting right now in terms of capital raising exits. We've seen kind of a deceleration over the past couple of years.

In many ways, what you experienced this week was an exception. What would be your advice or your message to the other entrepreneurs here tonight who are still slogging it out with their startups earlier in the process than you are now? My advice is fundamentals matter now more than ever. If you're building a solid business that's efficient, that generates money, you're on a good track. And if you're on your path to doing that kind of thing, great growth still trumps if you are on the VC bandwagon, you are going to need to show great growth for your next round.

Garav Oberoi
And that still matters even today, but not at all costs. So you need to run your business a little more efficiently. There's plenty of capital out there, don't worry. But continue to grow your business and show that growth. It is so cool to have you here on this week.

Todd Bishop
I'm glad it worked out with the timing and everything to have you here and congratulations on the deal. Thank you so much for having me, Todd. And thank you to the Geekwire team for today's event. See Geekwire for coverage of Lexion's acquisition by docusign and a deep dive on Garav Oberoi's journey as an entrepreneur. Later, as the crowd filed in, I caught up with the leader of a past startup of the year in the Geekwire awards, Linda Leann of Common Room, who was a finalist for CEO of the year in this year's Geekwire awards.

Linda Leann
Having, you know, one startup of the year, we've gone through the ups and downs. I think it's been two or three years later and I'm back. You know, I think to me that's a win. Linda, for people who have not familiarized themselves with common room yet, how do you describe what you do? So common room is a customer intelligence platform.

Platform. We help software companies find through AI who they want to build relationships with, who they should already know, who they want to know, and then we enable them to have the AI driven tools to execute with their go to market teams. So sellers. So what have the past couple of years been like? Because it's been a rocky time in the capital markets, things have been choppy economically.

Todd Bishop
Give me a sense for where common room is today compared to where you were when you won startup of the year. We got our seed round into the bank account the day the markets shut down because of COVID You know, we had to build our original team all remote. There really hasn't been a playbook for our cohort of startups to kind of go through COVID and then the macro kind of fallout of last year. And I think that that's really made the startups of our vintage resilient. We've focused on having to, you know, find product market fit in a non zero interest rate environment, which means as founders, you have to be really honest with yourself about like the pain that you're solving for the budgets, how you're going to commercialize this.

Linda Leann
And frankly, I think it's made us a lot stronger. Like we're better off now than we were would be if, you know, times were always easy. Turmoil and change breeds so much opportunity. To what extent are you incorporating AI into your own daily work and into the work of your team? So we have built with AI from the very beginning.

You know, we were early beta testers before GPT-3 or GPT four was even out on the market. And OpenAI has been one of our earliest customers as well. But I definitely think that the tech around AI is accelerating at a fast clip in that customers really want to find those productivity gains. So there's a lot of experimenting, there's a lot of really incredible ideas that we are rapidly testing with our customers. And we have some exciting announcements coming out soon about AI powered go to market.

So lots more to come. It's been great. I mean, it's not rocket science to build AI products today. That's amazing. Five years ago, can you imagine yourself having said that?

No. And I was, you know, working on cloud infrastructure at AWS and, you know, we thought we were seeing the renaissance of developer productivity, but I think we're seeing another one very quickly and very soon after the original one. Well, Linda Leanne, CEO at Common Room, thank you for talking with me and good luck tonight at the Geekwire Awards. Thank you, Todd. Linda Leann is the CEO of Common Room.

Todd Bishop
Stay tuned for more interviews with finalists and special guests at the Geekwire Awards. And coming up next, more highlights from the stage. Technology moves fast. I need to move faster. Wgus competency based education puts me in control of how fast I move through my IT degree program.

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Todd Bishop
Welcome back to our special episode of the Geekwire podcast, recorded this week at the Geekwire Awards, where Electric era CEO Quincy Edmund Lee spoke to the potential of the Seattle tech community as he accepted the company's award for sustainable innovation of the year for its power node electric vehicle fast charging stations. I also want to take a brief moment to reflect on the rare opportunity Seattle has to become a leading global city over the next century, which may sound odd, but it's true. You may not realize it, but Seattle is simultaneously the global leader in cloud computing, aviation, Starlink, satellite, Internet, which is here in Seattle as well, fusion energy and in AI services. As a city, we have an amazing opportunity to propel our city to global prominence with our technological advantages. The event was also a chance for the region's startups to connect and compare notes.

Here's Alyssa Vernon, product designer for financial app copper, accepting the award for UX design of the year for its app that makes it easy for teenagers to learn the basics of investing and money management. I'm beyond proud to be here representing copper, especially our powerhouse three woman design team. Huge shout out to Annemarie Stevens and Tara Durio. As we all know the star, your startup journey can sometimes feel like you're building the plane as you fly it. I'm sure we're all familiar.

Linda Leann
The only way to navigate the wild ride is with a mission you believe in and a team that dreams bigger than the sum of its parts. For a deeper dive on what's ahead in investing and the economy, we caught up with one of our special guests, Gordon Pan, the president of Baird Capital, which is part of the Baird wealth management and private equity firm. Gordon, it's great to have you here. It's an honor to have you here. Thank you.

Quincy Edmund Lee
Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity. Well, it's great. Baird is supporting the event tonight as one of the sponsors, you're sponsoring the vip reception, which we're about to go into. You're going to be talking with my colleague, Jonathan Spasado.

Todd Bishop
For people who are not familiar with Baird Capital, how would you describe your focus, what you do and your role in particular as president? Yeah. So I oversee all of Baird Capital. It is the direct private investment arm of Baird. What we do is we manage two distinct investment strategies.

Quincy Edmund Lee
We got a venture capital fund and we got a global private equity fund. They sit side by side at each other. The key thing is that they both invest in business to business technology and service oriented companies. So we are investing across the maturity spectrum. Right.

So we're investing in companies all the way from mid stage venture all the way to late stage buyout. And the key is that we need to find ways to help these companies. So we will not invest in a company if we can't help them professionalize, can't help them grow, can't help them expand markets. Right. So we need to find ways to increase the revenues and ebitda these businesses in order to generate the returns that we want.

Todd Bishop
You know, it's such an interesting market right now for deal making. And that is one of the focuses of this event, honoring some of the deals over the past year. What are you seeing in the realm of your area of focus as it relates to deals and interest rates? What are the big trends that you could identify right now? Yeah, I would just say that the market hasn't completely cleared yet.

Quincy Edmund Lee
Right. There's still buyer seller divergence on valuations, and I think in order for the market to really clear, that has to start to unlock. Right. So you got buyers that are basically saying right now we got higher interest rates, we've got slower growth, we got geopolitical risk that negatively affects valuations. Right.

On the other side, you've got sellers who are just haven't capitulated completely to the new realities of lower value, lower valuations. Right. And until that kind of equilibrium starts to happen, I think we're not going to really see a lot of deal activity now. Importantly, we are seeing momentum. We are starting to see deals starting to percolate.

Talk activity is increasing. And I think it does bode well for the back end of 2024 and into 2025. I think it's going to be a really active market over the next few years. One of the things that we saw this past week was a study by Microsoft that said that the usage of AI inside many workplaces is just skyrocketing. Of course, that's in Microsoft's interest to see those things.

Todd Bishop
But ostensibly it was a neutral study. I'm curious, in your field, in your company, in your own life, what kind of role is AI playing? Is it changing the way you work, or is it something that you're still taking a wait and see approach to? It clearly is coming. The practical uses are not there at a level that you're fully commercializing it, but everybody's preparing for it, right?

Quincy Edmund Lee
So when we think about investments, we're not necessarily sitting there saying we're going to put all of our capital into AI today, but every investment we're making, we're trying to anticipate what the impact of AI is, both in terms of a direct impact and the net effect of AI. So it is definitely there. Right. But we don't, at least within our group, we're not investing in the infrastructure or the data centers or the real, we're focused on investing in really what I would call the picks and shovels into AI. AI is the benefit of it is that it's going to create other opportunities and other service lines that we want to take advantage of.

That's how we're playing it. Last question here. What advice would you give to some of the startup leaders here who are just hanging on trying to get through this period you alluded earlier to potentially better times ahead in terms of the capital environment. Are there any things you would pass along to them? Yeah, I think that what has happened over the last five to seven years in our industry is I think we got away from fundamentals, and I think people have to get back to fundamental, the fundamentals of running a good business, right.

And focus on metrics, focus on, you know, capital efficiency, focus on net revenue retention, focus on how do you grow a company with the appropriate amount of capital. You just need to ultimately get to a business, right, that has good management, good markets and good products. If you can get there and you have good fundamentals, venture capital firms will want to invest in you. And then it comes down to finding the right partner for you? Because not all firms are equal.

Right? And you want to find the right firm that helps you accomplish the goals that you need to accomplish and solve the problems that you're going to be confronted with. And so do your due diligence. Build a fundamentally sound business and then find the right partner. Gordon Pan, the president of Baird Capital thank you very much for talking with me.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Gordon Pan is the president of Baird Capital. We'll be back with more on AI and the economy. This geekwire podcast is sponsored in part by Yale University Press.

Are you concerned about the rise of AI and how it will impact our society? Every day, artificial intelligence presents us with urgent ethical challenges. How do we harness this extraordinary technology to empower rather than oppress? Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson have written a how to for building ethical machine intelligence. Their new book, as if human Ethics and artificial intelligence, is now available wherever books are sold.

Todd Bishop
Welcome back to our special episode recorded this week at the Geekwire Awards and Seattle, here's Rhythms co founder Madan Subas accepting the award for Deal of the year, a $26 million seed round for its AI platform for analyzing company habits and patterns. It is an exciting moment and a transformational time in all our lifetime. Because of the way Gene AI is kind of taken the industry by storm today. It has changed industries. It has changed the way I live every day.

Quincy Edmund Lee
Rest is the way we work every day. The winner of Innovation of the year was Allen Institute for AI for its open language model, or OMO, which increases transparency in AI while improving energy efficiency. Here's iz Beltaji, lead research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, accepting the award on behalf of the team. I remember when we first started this project and we were wondering if there is a space or a place for open research and open AI models in an ecosystem where proprietary models are dominating the environment. A year later and it's clear that open source models are playing an active role in advancing the research and engineering of AI.

Todd Bishop
Next up, a startup of the year finalist. We caught up with Todd Owens, CEO of Kavala, which helps senior living and healthcare organizations manage staff scheduling. Kavala is one of the finalists in startup of the year. For people who have not heard of your company before, can you describe the basics of what you do? Sure.

Todd Owens
If you think about healthcare, it is the largest sector of employment in the world. The cornerstone of healthcare is its staff, and managing staff is terribly complex. And so what we do at Kavala is we build software that helps them to drive a more productive workforce, get people into shifts, keep labor costs down, take care of employee preference. So at its core, it's a scheduling and it's an optimization problem. So kind of bringing together scheduling with.

Todd Bishop
AI, what's the past year been like for you in your startup journey, and how does it compare to what you might have experienced in the earlier days of the company? Night and day? Let's just say that it's not a straight line. We had a huge run up during the COVID years and obviously the same challenges that most startups have had for the last year. But you know, arguably, you know, when you come through it, come through hard stuff, it's all the better, right?

Todd Owens
It's more rewarding. So the market has, has contracted a bit, but we've sort of hunkered down and focused on team and building our product and, you know, and thankfully it looks like we're almost out of it. To what extent are you using AI in your own daily workflows, independent of your product? And to what extent is your team using it? And how has that changed even in the last six months?

It's cool, I would say. You know, we have early adopters that are using it for simple things like job descriptions. Increasingly, it's more of a daily conversation than it is a once a month kind of a thing. I'm not having to push quite as hard. It's just kind of happening.

And so I am really, really bullish about generative AI. I don't think this is like another nanotech. It's not even blockchain. Like, this is going to happen a lot faster. And so, you know, it's actually not Kavala care anymore.

We're moving to Kavala AI, and it's largely because AI and optimization and data is what makes our applications smart. And I think these days if you're not investing in a smart application, you're probably a year or two behind. Todd Owens is the CEO of Kavala, a finalist for startup of the year in this year's Geekwire Awards. I spoke about all of these topics, funding AI and the economic outlook with Steve Helmbrecht, CEO of Treasury Four, a finalist for Deal of the year, which raised $20 million last fall to help manage financial and treasury processes for enterprises and public sector professionals. Treasury Four is a company based in Spokane, a part of the state that I've been covering lately.

Todd Bishop
Steve, for people who are not familiar with Treasury Four, how do you describe what you do? Treasury Four is a fintech startup focusing on delivering financial technology for the Office of the CFO, particularly in entity management and in treasury, traditional treasury cash management forecasting. And we're former practitioners that are building the kind of tools we wish we had when we were practitioners. So Treasury Four is nominated for Deal of the year here at the Geekwire Awards tonight in Seattle. It's been a tough environment for funding.

Can you give us the backstory, to the extent you can, on how the, this particular deal, this funding of yours came together and what it's meant for your company? Yes, we, we started the process with equity operating equity firm called Westcap that's based out of San Francisco, reached out to us in early Q two of last year and really took a liking to what we're doing in building treasury technology. They were interested in that, and so we started a process together that led ultimately to a successful, successful series a financing they led that we announced in September. And what it's meant for us is it's been huge because we've got the financial capital now to be able to accelerate our product development, go to market. And in addition, the financial capital, they've brought a bunch of resources to really help us with that acceleration.

Steve Helmbrecht
So we're excited about partnering with Westcap. So one of the questions that I'm asking folks here tonight at the Geekwire Awards is about their own use of artificial intelligence in their daily work as individuals and also inside their company. There was a study just out this week from Microsoft that said use of artificial intelligence in the workplace has about doubled in the past six months. To what extent are you using artificial intelligence in your own work? And also just broadly inside treasury four.

We'Re just starting to see the opportunity to utilize artificial intelligence at treasury four, because what we're all about is how helping companies unlock the power of their treasury data. We use a small t that's their legal entity, organizational data and others that highly fragmented. So what we're doing is bringing that together in a more consistent way. And then we're looking at ways to have the overlay of artificial intelligence to really provide deeper insights to organizations. It's going to be an important part of our strategy going forward.

Todd Bishop
When you look at the economy going forward in terms of your customer base demand for your product, how are you looking at the next six months as compared to, say, the last year or so? What's your economic outlook as CEO of Treasury for? We're very bullish about the opportunities we have, and a big part of that is what's happened with interest rates having gone up so high that cash is now an earning asset class again. And so what is happening is within organizations are understanding the importance of cash and having the right technology to be able to better leverage that investor more effectively and really understand the movement of cash in the organization. So on a macro level, that's very beneficial for us of what we're doing.

Well, Steve Helmbrecht, CEO of Treasury four, thanks very much for letting me pull you aside and ask you some questions here at the Geekwire Awards. Thank you, Todd. I appreciate it. Congrats to all of the finalists and winners and thanks to all of our sponsors, partners and everyone who joined us this week at the Geekwire Awards, which were presented by our longtime sponsors, astound business solutions. If you missed the event or want to relive the highlights, see links in the show notes to our full coverage on Geekwire.com.

I'm Geekwire co founder Todd Bishop. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Geekwire podcast.