Machine Learning at MIT to Entrepreneurial Growth and Fundraising Success | David Morczinek, Ep 08

On discovering that engineering firms paid by the hour had no incentive to adopt efficiency tools

“The biggest learning personally is what are the incentives for people, and for your direct customers. While we may think it's a great idea to collect aerial data autonomously, analyze the world and spin out a lot of products and sell those, but who is then consuming those products and are those people having a benefit from what you're doing?”

“There was too much of a depth change from going from 100% manual to 100% automated. We realized that pretty quickly. It really took us a year to build and like three months after launch we had a conclusion of like great, people are using it, we have a lot of interest, but there's a difficulty going from AI for our customers and interpreting the results and using it in their own business processes.”

“I've always felt we had an overload of advice at MIT. And that's really a surprise for other entrepreneurs. It's hard to get advice. At MIT it's the opposite. You have probably 10 smart people for every topic. So the question is they don't always say the same thing. So what do you actually believe in? What do you decide to do?”

On MIT's entrepreneurship methodology that inverted his engineering training

“The teaching was like you flip that right, so you find a problem and people that really have pain, right, and then you try to see is there something you can sell them and what they buy and what kind of the business economics around that. And then once you've kind of figured all that out, so almost like you don't even build a product, you try to sell them something that you kind of somewhat piece together, right. And then once you figure out there's a market that people are willing to buy, then at some point it's the last step I think. Building the product is like step 23 out of 24.”

“I took a very conscious decision a year and a half, two years ago of like, you know, if I'm not in the right shape mentally and just be stable in life, I won't be able to do this for the next five to ten years. So I started prioritizing workouts, getting time for fitness. But also I have two small kids—the first one six years ago and the second one three years ago. This really opened my eyes that obviously we have to do the most important things and we need to make sure work's done right, but we'll never be at completely at inbox zero.”