Jepson Taylor
- Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer at Zeff
GetLatka interview
How Zeff Built an Enterprise Deep Learning Platform with 3 Customers and $30K Monthly Burn (Interview with Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer Ben Taylor)
Jepson Taylor (Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer of Zeff) spoke to Nathan Latka on July 9, 2019.
Zeff figures from the interview
- Customers (2019)
- 3
- Monthly Burn (2019)
- $30,000
- Team Size (2019)
- 5
“So we wanted to make deep learning easier for the enterprise. And so we we chased AutoML. A lot of people are doing that, but we focused on unstructured data. So image, audio, video, and text. So those are the datasets that we're focusing on. The revenue model is a subscription based platform. So people pay an annual subscription to get access to the platform to build these models.”
“We scaled up on on our customer counts. I think we hit five or six, and then we've scaled back to three. And one of the interesting things with AI... So so two quick points. One point with a SaaS startup, and this is true not just for us, for other people, you'll land into vanity brands. So think about like a Facebook or some some top Fortune 50 company that's sexy. They might come across your plate, and you'll be tempted to entertain them as a customer.”
“Until you have a customer... Because our customers right now, they're kind of scattered, we have a product customer, we have a marketing customer. Until you have repeat customers in a vertical, I would argue you have not found product market fit. And so that's what I'm hoping to have in the next six months is I can say, look, have two insurance customers, two assessment customers. These are real verticals that are growing.”
Bio
Jepson Taylor, who went by Ben Taylor at Zeff and DataRobot, co-founded the deep-learning AutoML company Zeff with David Gonzalez in 2017 and was its chief AI officer. DataRobot acquired Zeff in 2020, and Taylor became DataRobot's chief AI evangelist before joining Dataiku as chief AI strategist. Before Zeff he built process-control and fault models for Intel/Micron, worked as a quant at a hedge fund, and ran the data group at HireVue.