“Working with so many talented people has been simply amazing. I told Stephen Hawking about it a few months ago at a party and he thought this was a very interesting project”
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Alex Ross from BlooSkai and discussing their innovative new technology that is shaking up the advertising and digital media world. I was amazed to hear about Alex’s work in the film industry and how these experiences led him to create a technology company. Alex is a brilliant entrepreneur and BlooSkai could be a real game changer in the digital marketing world.
Gene: Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your “backstory”?
You are very welcome Gene and thanks so much for your interest in BlooSkai. I spent years working in Hollywood and as an academy member still have to attend a lot of screenings. What got my interest was listening to people’s conversations afterwards, not about the great script, directing, acting etc. but about the cool outfits Angelina Jolie was wearing or Tom Cruise’s leather jacket or the beach Leonardo was frolicking on… People wanted to find out about these things, maybe buy them. Ever tried to trace product by scanning through end credits?
Gene: Please tell us what exactly your company does?
We have created a platform, which makes objects in video fully interactive with the device of your choice. By pointing your camera at the video you’re watching and snapping a shot, you get everything you would ever want to know about that particular video scene you’re watching. We can push you all kinds of information, from film-critic discussions about movie scenes and educational information, to how to buy the dress Angelina is wearing or plane tickets to that beach. What’s more, you can even push your own stuff about that scene upstream and engage in a social-network discussion. The video could be playing on your laptop, a TV in a sports bar, a cinema screen or an airline’s entertainment system. Turns out anything anyone would ever want to buy or sell is already included in the video the average US adult spends 5.5 hours a day on. We solve 3 major industry pain points: Scale, Accuracy and Search cycle time. We employ a B2B licensing model and retain 4% of every sale.
Gene: What do you think makes your technology stand out?
Traditional competitors (e.g. Blue Chip ads sellers) would approach the problem as object recognition: I.e. how to detect a particular dress or location. This will just never scale up; current object recognition can handle maybe a few thousand classes of objects while we want to identify billions of different products, people and places. Our patented technology cleverly looks at this as a massive image search problem to which we have come up with an innovative and scalable solution. This allows us to search in thousands of movies with a retrieval accuracy of more than 98% according to our latest benchmarks. Let me also say, there are some new developments on the R&D front using a Deep Learning architecture, that give us orders of magnitude more capacity to effectively be able to index every movie ever produced! More on that in a couple of months!
Gene: What are your thoughts on bitcoin / crypto currency?
Uhm… Evidence suggests that what has gone up as rapidly, has ended up going in the other direction even faster. Will regulation make the difference? Who knows. It’s the Wild, Wild West out there.
Gene: Is there a person or mentor who you want to thank for helping you obtain your goals?
Absolutely. Nick Bertolotti, the former managing director of Credit Suisse. We were introduced by Prof Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. Nick has been amazing, few people have had as much experience with media IPOs, so his advice has been invaluable. Plus he is also a Harley dude, so we speak the same language.
Gene: What is the most innovative project that you have ever worked on?
Without doubt this one. I mean we have a team of R&D engineers who are virtually redefining computer vision. We have already been approached by a number of entities from other sectors such as medtech, anti-terrorism programs, education, the food industry, gaming etc. No one wants to read anymore. Increasingly all communication and sales are driven by video. But passive video is dated, we are making it fully interactive. Working with so many talented people has been simply amazing. I told Stephen Hawking about our technology a few months ago, at a party and he thought this was a very interesting project!
Alex Ross with the legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking
Gene: Many times when starting a business we face terrible disappointments. Tell me about a time when felt like you lost all hope. How did you motivate yourself to get back on your feet and keep going?
How much time do you have? Keeping the team together with often no money in the bank has been interesting. What really helped is that my guys are totally motivated by the work we are doing. We started off in England and I literally pitched to every VC and Angel group out there. I have never seen such risk aversion. There are great startups going out of business all over, which is really sad. Fortunately we were one of the few companies to get a UK government SMART grant to cover the real high risk proof of concept research. I remember, meeting with potential investors one night and was about to throw in the towel walking back in the dark through some park. I opted to listen to one of the awesome Stanford Thought Leaders podcasts, some dudes sharing their stories on how they were nearly crushed by a multinational, but managed to fight it off and that really motivated me to keep going. I have had to listen to a lot of those pod since!
Gene: What are your “5 Tips From The Founder Of A Technology Startup”?
- Time wasters put start ups out of business. Make sure the angels and VC’s you are talking to have experience in your sector. Talk to the founder of their most recently funded company.
- Do not leave your office if these two don’t pan out. Do not waste a week reading up on the investors, making your slides specific, rehearsing your pitch etc.
- Avoid larger companies when going to market, they are too slow to respond and peopled by executives who tend to be risk averse. (A large corporation invited us to fly to their headquarters in Sweden. They start work at 6am so we needed to get up at 3.30am to get there in time, which was interesting. They totally picked our brains and told us to come back eight months later. Something to do with innovation cycles etc. Then they refused to pay for the trip. Note to big corporations: Startups go out of business waiting for you to get your corporate act together.
- Contests are a mixed bag. We lost a big one because a judge recused herself, because she had bought us dinner. We were invited to the Startup World Cup in Austin. There were more judges in the room than the promised VCs and angels. The guy who won had a fully established company, which negates the accepted definition of “startup”. Walk out of a bad meeting. If the person you are pitching to does not get your elevator pitch, the version you created so even a six year old could understand it, is barely awake, keeps checking his/her phone. Walk, with your self-respect intact. Don’t get so desperate to take a meeting with anyone under any condition.
- Networking via LinkedIn does not work. You need personal introductions.
- Surround yourself with the right people and things will fly. Do not micro-manage your engineers, give them an optimal work environment and you will be amazed.
- Concentrate on finding clients and making them happy. Money earned is so much more satisfying than money borrowed. Once the income is there, a lot more people will want to invest with better terms.
Gene: If you could jump in a time machine and change one thing about your life, what would it be and why?
I have been an entrepreneur since I was seven and should have done an engineering degree at Stanford and gotten into innovation much sooner. I ended up doing economics at Cambridge and going into the movie biz. There is so much piracy, it is virtually impossible to make money.
Gene: If you could spend one day with any person (alive or not), who would it be and why?
That’s easy: Michael Moritz at Sequoia. The guy’s track record is stunning + he is a Mensch- and responded to my emails with courtesy (despite the fact that he went to Oxford!). One of the few VC firms that have fully backed real early stage teams, not just with money, but with direction, ideas and protection from predators.