Spotlight On

We first got to know Daniel Sturman during his time at Cloudera, and have always valued his insights on building great technical teams. Daniel was part of Accel’s original "Spotlight On" series, which debuted as a blog back in 2019. His insights on Building Great Teams were as salient then as they are now. In this episode of Spotlight On, we expand upon the subject of team building, by examining it through the lens of today's rapidly evolving AI landscape. The company name Roblox is ubiquitous among all humans under 13 and many over that. The 3D immersive platform allows users to create their own experiences, or participate in those created by others—and they’ve been building AI into the platform for years. Daniel Sturman, who is now Roblox’s CTO, believes the recent surge in AI progress has significantly enhanced trust & safety on Roblox and further democratized the platform for its creators. But challenges persist, and for many CTOs like Daniel, hiring top technical talent is a critical priority. Daniel teams up with Accel’s Talent Partner, Pete Clarke, to talk about the hiring philosophies he’s used to build exceptional teams at IBM, Google, Cloudera, and Roblox, as well as the transformative journey of Roblox’s AI development. Conversation highlights: 00:00 - Introduction to Roblox and Daniel’s background 03:21 - Where Daniel and the team at Roblox see the most immediate impact of AI, in trust & safety and creator-assistance 12:45 - Advice for talent acquisition during today’s AI era where technical talent is extremely competitive 17:17 - How Roblox’s Generative AI capabilities like Material Creator and Code Assist empower creators on the platform 27:43 - Daniel’s advice for building great teams that can advance and adapt to new AI technologies 37:00 - Advice from Daniel for making the best Barbecue Sauce, based on a recipe from Franklin Barbecue with a few special touches including a base of bourbon, reduced sugar, heightened spiciness, and his secret ingredient: a dash of fish sauce! Host: Peter Clarke, Talent Partner at Accel Featuring: Daniel Sturman, CTO at Roblox Learn more at www.Accel.com/SpotlightOn/Roblox

Dylan Fox, founder and CEO of AssemblyAI discusses the profound changes to the AI landscape over the past eight years, gives insight into where he thinks AI is going as a category, and offers advice on how founders should approach hiring, problem identification, customer interaction, and more. In 2015 Dylan Fox was a machine learning engineer at Cisco. Amazon Alexa launched earlier that year, taking the world by storm, and creating a significant demand for companies to add voice controls to their products; Cisco was one such company. Dylan had to get familiar with the various speech recognition software solutions in the market. Much to his frustration, they all had poor developer experiences. He knew there was an opportunity for advanced speech technology. Soon after that, AssemblyAI was born. Today, AssemblyAI is used by enterprises like WSJ, NBC, and Spotify to access state-of-the-art AI models to transcribe and understand speech and build AI-powered features faster. Highlights from the conversation: 00:00 - Intro 06:15 - AssemblyAI's origin story and Dylan's journey as a solo founder in YCombinator 08:10 - Advice for founders around hiring and product improvement 19:26 - Advice for founders during the AI development process 29:40 - The change across the AI landscape since AssemblyAI started 27:34 - Best practices for cutting through the noise as an AI-native company 35:45 - Predictions about the future of AI apps Hosts: Sara Ittelson and Steve Loughlin, Partners at Accel Featuring: Dylan Fox, CEO and Founder of AssemblyAI Learn more: www.accel.com/SpotlightOn/AssemblyAI