Slater Victoroff - CTO at Indico Data

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) It's difficult to be a technology leader. Here at the podcast, we spend our time making it easier for you, and we've gone even farther on this mission than just the podcast. Our goal this year is to help 100,000 technologists level up as leaders with Leaderbits. This could be as simple as you helping level someone else up on your team, you acting as the mentor, or maybe you're a team leader and you're looking to level up into a VP or director role. We are here for you at leaderbits.io to help you grow as a technology leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) Visit us and ask us all the questions that you have at leaderbits.io. Now get excited because today we are talking to Slater, the CTO of Indico, and we discuss the global race for AI dominance, how they are working to put AI in the hands of nontechnical users, and why Slater made the transition from CEO to CTO. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. Oh, no, dude.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) I feel a little guilty. We got like blue skies and it's like 79.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:01:16) Yep. Of course. You're in SF?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:18) Florida.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:01:19) Oh. Yeah. Well, even better then. Yeah. We got snow like two or three days ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) Do you ski or do you do any of the snow-related activities?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:01:29) No. I don't ski. I grew up in LA, so I kind of missed the whole window for really getting into winter sports in a serious way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) Yeah.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:01:36) And I keep telling myself I'm gonna go skiing, but I haven't done it yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) Yeah. I've been skiing once or twice and it hurt my shins incredibly bad. Yeah. I was so sore. I was walking around crazy for two or three days.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:01:49) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:50) Yeah. But it was an experience nonetheless, right?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:01:53) Yeah. I mean, I figure I should do it at some point. I've tried to go skiing like two or three times, but somehow every time I go, the mountain is closed for some reason.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:02) It's like no escalator. Yeah. But you got the Himalaya one, though.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:02:07) Yeah. Wanna know something crazy?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:10) Mm-hmm.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:02:10) It did not snow the whole time I was in the Himalayas for like two weeks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:16) Oh, man.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:02:19) Yeah. And at that point, I had never seen it snow actually at that point. You know, I was like 18 years old. I'd been to Boston several times, but just somehow by luck, every time I went to places where it's supposed to snow, it would just never snow for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:31) So did you do that as like a group?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:02:33) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Definitely don't wanna go trekking alone. So it was like a group of about 10 folks, all kind of between 18 and 22. So like people taking gap years right before undergrad or kind of between undergrad and some kind of grad school.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:51) Nice. Yeah. So you're just like, this is an opportunity. I'm gonna go do it. You went with a couple of friends or—

(Slater Victoroff at 00:02:56) No. I met them all there. Didn't know them at the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:59) A lot of them, you know—

(Slater Victoroff at 00:03:00) They were all from the US and, you know, we kind of used this thing to group up. But yeah, I mean, honestly, I got to kind of the end of high school and I was like, I feel like I've been too intellectual and academic for a long time. I wanna get completely outside of my comfort zone and just do something I've never done before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:16) Yeah. I looked at your LinkedIn and you had all these courses you've taken. And the one that stood out to me, that was the most interesting to me, was the Identity from the Mind and Brain: Who Am I and How Do I Know?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:03:27) That was a great course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:28) That's my style, man. That's who I am. That's like what I, how I think.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:03:31) Yeah. No. It was wonderful. It was just a lot of case studies and kind of cutting-edge psych. And, you know, like, what is the nature of the self? A bizarrely difficult question to answer. Through kind of the whole course, the professor would hand out these surveys once a week at the end of kind of every set of reading that's on the spectrum between like, I forget exactly, but it was like physical versus spiritual almost. Like, where do you believe the self lies? Like, is this a physical existence or just like a mental construct we've come up with? And you see like everyone in the class kind of followed the same arc as they went through it, sort of pitching between both sides. So it's super interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:14) Yeah. There is a couple—oh, man, there was just one book. I can't even remember it right now. But I read about it and—alright, I'm sorry. I read it and like, the beginning started with this internal dialogue and was like, who is reading this right now? And then they went on to explain like the difference between your—I think it was—oh, there it is. I had to Google it real quick. Untethered Soul. It was awesome.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:04:37) Yeah. Yeah. There were two really incredible like, I guess, sort of case studies we went through. One was just this essay. And the thing that the essay said, you know, it's a little gross, but I think it was actually very interesting, is you swallow like a gallon of spit throughout the day, right? And you have no issue with it. But if you spit into a glass and then drink it, suddenly that's disgusting. And he used that to kind of paint a point around like how fragile the notion of self is, right? Of like, what's inside versus outside, you know, changes just second to second, even if there's no kind of concrete reality. And then one quote that I just always liked that took me, you know, probably like a year to really understand was this—it's like a classic Buddhism quote—is, you know, "I am an eddy in the stream of consciousness." And what I really liked about that was kind of this notion that the stream of consciousness is kind of the base reality and that the self is kind of this temporary swirl that you bring up when you need that concept of self, but that it's not actually intrinsic to the way that you think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) I love it because we're getting crazy deep now.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:05:53) That's the way to do it, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:53) There was a—that is the way to do it. There's this spit study that you brought up that like reminded me of something I watched a while back. They took saliva and they put it into a dish, and then they had the person in the other room, and they didn't tell them that they were doing this. So they separated the person from their saliva, and they had electrodes hooked up to it. And then they scared or shocked the person in the other room, and it spiked the energy levels on the saliva. Really? Yeah. And it made—like I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. I didn't look crazy deep into it, but on the surface, it kind of made sense because we have all these things in our body that are, you know, that our processes are autonomous and controlled subconsciously. And at some point, like, they're communicating with our brain and they're far from our brain.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:06:39) Interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:40) Right? Like, it's an electric signal that goes off from your brain that, you know, makes your hands move and like, it's just interesting because it's not all directly like solidly connected.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:06:50) Totally. You know, the other one that I always hear that I think is along the same vein is when you kind of ask the question, does the mind control the body or does the body control the mind? And there's all these, you know, things where you find, hey, and it seems like it's a bit of both, right? It's kind of this very fluid and flexible two-way path where, you know, the common example they have is, you know, if you've gone through like a near-death experience with someone and your heart is beating really hard and your blood is racing, because those are all the same sort of physiological symptoms of also being attracted to someone. When you go through that with someone, you become attracted to them because your body says—hey, I'm seeing all of these sig—or your brain says, hey, my body is sending me all of these signals. Oh, I'm seeing this person. Oh, I must be attracted to this person, even though kind of the cause and effect is flipped.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:39) Yeah. Yeah.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:07:39) And so it's super interesting stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:42) So then all of this and then you're like, now everyone's interested in like the product you do.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:07:49) Yeah. I know, right? It's like, you're great. I'm interested in your product too, right? One of my professors said, you know, the best way to live life is to change your identity every couple of years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:57) I do that automatically. Yeah. So what's Indico? Is that how you say it?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:08:03) Yeah. Indico. Yep. Okay. So at a super high level, we're a machine learning platform to help subject matter experts automate document-based processes that they do in kind of their day-to-day. It shows up in sort of a lot of different flavors. So let me give just one sort of concrete example to make it tangible. So something like contract analysis, right? As a legal team, we get this contract document, and at a large organization, what we have to do is split it up into various sections and send it to different groups within the organization, right? So I've got to send the fee schedule to finance. I've got to send the derivative restrictions to the investment team, and that's a totally manual process, right? I go through, I read it, I segment it into different kind of objects, and I send it out in emails. So we basically got sort of a machine learning intelligence layer immediately beneath that that works primarily on text, but also on images and kind of other data types, that can learn from those actions you're taking with very, very small amounts of data. So, you know, you give it kind of seven contracts and say, hey, here's how I break these up. Here's how I send it out to people. And it's effectively a platform for kind of nontechnical people to use this machine learning layer effectively to kind of augment their day-to-day activities. That make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:20) Yeah. So what you have is you kind of have like the suite of tools, and then you're applying some business logic to show how you're using some of the tools.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:09:29) Yeah. Yeah. Exactly, right? So it's like you get this kind of visual programming language that says, you know, grab from my email, send it through this machine learning model, and then, you know, send this section over to the finance department.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:42) That's smart. Will it like sort of like split PDFs and stuff?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:09:46) Yeah. Totally. So split PDFs, Word docs, you know, if you wanna do it for like customer support routing, things like that, you know, sort of the whole gamut.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:56) Nice. So this is interesting. There's actually this other company that I was talking with, and they don't do this, but they were doing machine learning on contract analysis, but from a legal standpoint of like the—is it Kira?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:10:11) Yeah. Yep. Yeah. No, I know them super well. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:16) Oh, cool. Cool.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:10:17) Yeah. So we do sort of similar things, and maybe the big difference, because it might be a good comparison, is Kira does a really good job of addressing sort of the needs around that for a law firm, right? So, you know, they've got it built out as a sort of industry solution really for legal, right? And the way that we attack it a little bit differently is that we would use, for instance, that same use case really, but we would do it kind of through the corporate law arm because they're really focused mostly because they have a much more kind of messy flow. It's not as kind of regimented and well-defined as a law firm. So you think of it as a generic version of Kira that is very good at tackling especially messy problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:01) Nice. Yeah. I've had Alex on last week, the CTO of Kira.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:11:06) Yeah. No. He's an awesome person. I really like their company and, you know, honestly, the University of Waterloo, I think is kind of the unsung hero of Canada.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:17) I don't know much about the Canadian university culture to know this, so I'm gonna trust you, though.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:11:23) No. So fun fact about machine learning and kind of like AI in general is that, like, Canada, to be crass, is kicking the crap out of the US. So University of Toronto and University of Montreal are like the number one and number two universities for cutting-edge AI in the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:42) Really?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:11:42) Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And, you know, NYU also kind of like is, you know, is in the top three. And then you've got—and then even like Stanford, which I think gets a lot of press in the US, or like CMU, you know, are kind of a very solid second tier. But they're really specializing in kind of like older or less, you know, hip techniques, if you will.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:03) Yeah.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:12:04) Yeah. And then University of Waterloo has a lot of connections to Montreal and Toronto, and people don't really think about it because people don't really think about Canadian universities at all. But University of Waterloo is really, really sharp and strong kind of machine learning department.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:19) You know, I spend some time thinking about language like other languages, complete like spoken languages, and what they're doing at their universities and like if we're even paying attention to how far ahead people who speak other languages are.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:12:36) It's super—you know, one of the dirty little secrets in ML is we just do everything in English. Like English. And kind of the other issue is just from like a research accessibility perspective. There's so little support if you wanna publish anything that's not in English. The same way English has become kind of the language of business, it's also become the language of academia. And there's a lot of trouble right now, which is that we don't really know what it would take for most of the kind of like modern ML and AI we're developing to bring it over to other languages, right? We've got like a very small amount of insight. You know, are there small little journals? You know, and China is the only really big one because they're huge and they have their own kind of internal journals that are just written in Chinese. Mostly what we do is we just throw up this big barrier in front of people publishing research in other countries and say, look, you gotta submit it in English.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:31) Yeah. So I read an article—this is in some like New York Post or Wired or something—and it was talking about how China is setting out to do like the space race but for AI and to win the race.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:13:45) Interesting. They're behind on that one? No. I haven't. I mean, Microsoft Research has been based in China for quite a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:54) Oh, I was trying to find it real quick. But, yeah, they—well, apparently one of their political leaders announced it similar to how when we announced the space race. You know, we went on TV through the media and we said, we're gonna beat everybody to space and we're gonna do it. And then like Russia came out and was like, we're gonna—like, and then all of a sudden there's all these countries battling over space. Well, China—the article was not about China doing this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:15) It was about how China did this and the US did not respond. That's what the article—

(Slater Victoroff at 00:14:20) I mean, that's super interesting. I mean, have you been following, I guess, what Canada has been doing in a similar way?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:27) No. This is all new for me.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:14:29) Oh, yeah. No. So Canada has made this—I mean, so my guess, and maybe I'm a little jaded, China was probably poking at the US, but who they're really poking at from a research perspective is Canada, because Canada is the one to be. Canada's investing hundreds of millions of dollars just directly granting to research universities. I mean, we work with a bunch of state departments in Canada that are entirely devoted to exercising AI and machine learning as a country advantage. Justin Trudeau, believe it or not, actually speaks more intelligently about AI and machine learning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:04) I like him.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:15:05) He's awesome. He's shockingly technical. He actually knows what he's talking about more than half the data scientists I talk to, to be honest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:12) It's so cool to see a geek up there also running the country.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:15:16) It's totally nuts. I mean, it's awesome. But no. I mean, Canada is just funneling money into these universities because they kind of locked into this massive competitive advantage. And I'll say, I'm disappointed with the US's response in that it's seriously lacking. Like, Europe, like England, they've all got great responses. Their universities have been very quick to adopt. I mean, the US is getting there, but it's so slow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:45) Like, if you go to canada.ai, because I'm just researching this while you're talking—because I'm really interested—at the top of the site, man, you can join their Slack channel. This is like a government-based—I'm like, oh my God, they're gonna move so fast.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:15:57) Yeah. Absolutely. And they already have been. Right? I mean, University of Montreal and University of Toronto just don't need money anymore because the Canadian government is just writing them hundreds of millions of dollar checks. It's like any AI company in Canada, I believe, will get any VC money they raise matched one to one by the Canadian government, which is just mind-blowing. Right? You can never imagine the US working that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:19) You're not battling, you know, Elon Musk having to rip out cash out of his own pocket. Right? You have the country treating it like a race and saying, look, we've got these universities where the smartest people are. Let's just flood cash to them.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:16:32) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:33) So that we can win this AI race. Because I'm telling you what, dude, somebody's winning this AI race.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:16:37) Exactly. And that's kind of the thing. And I think the US just has kind of a habit of resting on our laurels too much. Right? You know, we've been the top dog in academia for so long. We've forgotten what it's like to not be the top dog. And so even when someone's shown up and is eating our lunch, we don't even realize it's happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:57) Yeah. We need more of a technology presence, and we need somebody that's not like an eighty-year-old five-star general leading it.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:17:07) Yeah. No. That's exactly it. Right? I mean, we're kind of trying, but I really think the US at a federal level—right? Because the private sector in the US, right, we're still kicking the crap out of tech. Right? But the government has just lagged so far behind, and they're so reticent to bring anything in. And, you know, it really doesn't feel like we've made significant motion in the right direction even in recent history. It feels like we're still behind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:33) We need the coming together of a common goal. Like, when we did the space thing, the whole country was united. Like, I went back and watched some movies. There's actually a recent movie where it was like the girls behind the space project. It was actually pretty good.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:17:46) Hidden Figures. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:47) Yeah. It was really good. I enjoyed it.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:17:49) That was an incredible movie.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:51) Right. But it showed how, like, the cop literally backed off his racism because they were part of this program that was, you know, it progressed our whole country—all of us together as a society—because we were working together.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:18:04) It did. And, unfortunately, I mean, I think today, so much of this has just been set up as this battle almost. Right? Where people hate Silicon Valley. Right? And Silicon Valley is very isolated from the rest of the country, and they think of it as this crazy ivory tower. And something about that accessibility and something about this notion of just playing for the same team, it feels like it's been lost. I mean, the US feels much more at odds, and I'll say specifically kind of academia. And, you know, the US feels today much more anti-intellectual than it has been at any time in the past. And that means it's really hard to start up any of these endeavors. Right? Because if we say, hey, look, everyone get behind this academic endeavor—which is what the space race was and what the AI race would be—people are kind of sour on it. Right? And I think it's a tragedy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) Well, I think it's also a lot to do with our media. Because if you're in Canada, what you're seeing on TV is you're seeing your leader being very smart, talking about these new things and really trying to make a change and pull the community together for this one common goal. Right? But if you turn on our media, you do not have that. You've got—

(Slater Victoroff at 00:19:13) Monkeys flinging mud at each other. Right? That's what it feels like every day. And it's just a tragedy. Right? I mean, you know, a house divided cannot stand. Right? And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:26) That is correct. Yeah. And when we're always talking about, you know, the divisions in politics or the divisions in geography or just all the negativity, like—I mean, I'm sure bad things happen in Canada.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:19:38) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) For humans, it's a statistical thing when you collect a population. Right? But they're putting smart stuff on the airwaves and putting money into the universities. And now when the next generation thinks, oh, I can make a lot of money by going into AI because that's what they see in their environment, our generation is seeing I can make a lot of money by having sex videos and putting them online or I can make a lot of money—

(Slater Victoroff at 00:20:02) Yeah. And it's just there's so much hate and vitriol. Right? And it's just so much of what I think pervades the discussion today is it feels like people don't know how to have respectful conversations anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:13) Yeah.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:20:13) And, you know, obviously, it's a bit of an exaggeration, but it still feels like that day to day. And, you know, people get so exasperated that they're not even willing to reach across the aisle anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:24) Yeah. Well, at the end of the day, the country has a mood, and we need to be conscious of it, know what it is, and know where we want it to go.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:20:30) Right. And that's the thing is I think that a lot of people aren't willing to shoulder a mantle of blame. And I think blame and forgiveness and kind of moving forward, the nation needs to take a big step because we're not in a good place right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:46) Yeah. Well, so we'll start reaching out to people.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:20:48) Yeah. Yeah. Look. That's the plan. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:50) Yeah. I reached out to this—there's one other outlet that has tremendous exposure in the CTO space. Yeah. And it's this guy CTO Vision. His name is Bob or Robert. And he has, you know, 30,000 plus CTOs that read his content and participate in his site. And so I reached out to him. I'm like, hey. We need to get together and figure out how we can, you know, bring technology people together to do stuff because no one else is out there doing it.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:21:18) Yeah. No. Absolutely. I mean, one thing that I try to be super conscious of is anytime there's another ML or AI company out there, right, whether it's a student that's just trying to get their feet wet or even a competitor, right? I just always try to give advice. Right? Like, anytime I can help—you know, I really strongly believe that rising tide floats all boats, and I think most people get behind that. But, you know, there's definitely—a lot of technologists today are more concerned with making themselves seem legitimate than trying to solve a problem. And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:52) I think that's kind of—

(Slater Victoroff at 00:21:52) Another problem. Right? Is that, you know, you gotta start from a place of compassion and wanting to help one another. And then if you get there and if you all kind of feel like you're rowing in the same direction and you're on a team and not really adversaries, I think that we can do a lot more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:08) Yeah. That's how it works. Right? You can make more friends with honey than vinegar.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:22:13) It's actually—you know, apparently, bees are more attracted to vinegar than—or flies rather are more attracted to vinegar than honey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:20) Oh, well, I don't want fly friends. Oh, yeah. You have the worst—So you were originally the CEO and, I'm assuming, the founder of Indico, and then you transitioned now to CTO. Tell me a little bit about that and how that happened and what came about.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:22:35) No. I mean, it was—so I'll say first off, it's been awesome. I've been really, really thrilled with that transition. I think one of the big changes is that when Indico was founded, we had this big assumption that AI was ready for adoption. Right? We said, hey. Look. You know, people have been working on this for fifteen years. There's been a really big lag in terms of what people are actually using in industry. We think it's ready. And from a technology perspective, we were right. And the idea is if you're bringing just kind of this technology out to developers, which again was kind of the original thesis, you kind of want a CEO that's very sharp on the technical side that could be kind of respected by developers. Right? And that's kind of the primary focus. And I did a good job of filling that role. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:22) And you can—

(Slater Victoroff at 00:23:22) Have a CTO that's much more down in the weeds and driving architecture decisions day to day, producing content, things along those lines. Right? But the content is kind of super technical, directed at developers. And what we kind of realized is that for all the talk about it, adoption is really painfully slow, and the enterprise is absolutely terrified. And the problem is when it's not an established business case, developers don't get kind of the missive to go and adopt it. Right? You know, because the business is still afraid to push for its adoption. So we found that there was a really big desire in the enterprise to kind of adopt things, but it's not developers that were doing the driving. Right? It's not mature enough for that to be the case. So I basically had this realization. I'm like, look, we've gotta go after the enterprise. Right? And that gives us this huge hurdle to pass in terms of sales and marketing expertise and kind of driving what the vision is going to be like if our goal is to really get this into the hands of people who are willing to adopt it. And correspondingly, it also meant that there was this big gap where what we needed to speak to was kind of the enterprise developer. Right? And there was sort of this big need in the CTO role to say, hey, how do I explain to people what on earth AI is? And so it was kind of those two things together were like, hey. Look. We've gotta go after a new market. Right? The vision of this company is changing. And I just sat back. I'm like, you know what? I don't know how to do this. Right? Like, I can speak to developers. I can go after them, and I can build something around that, but that's not what we need. So said, look, let's bring in a new CEO. Right? Let's find someone who's really, really good at solving that problem. And then, effectively, everything I was doing before now fits really well into the CTO role. And so that's about how it went. Made the transition kind of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:11) That's a great way for it to go.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:25:13) Yeah. No. No crazy hostile takeover here. No. I mean, I had to twist my arm a little bit, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:18) Imagine. What's common—what I want is because we have a lot of experienced CTOs, mid-level CTOs, and aspiring CTOs. So your story from that, what I want them to feel is the ability to be comfortable in stepping back or going to a different position and finding where they want to be and then getting others around them and filling their gaps because that's what's successful and that's something you have to go through. So by them hearing how you went through it, that brings value to them.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:25:47) I think one thing that was interesting—right?—I've always been excited about it. Right? I pushed for it, and it's been probably the best change I could have made. But when I first talked about it to people, the reaction I got wasn't, oh, awesome. You found out what the appropriate role is. You're setting in to go up for success. You know, that's your job as a founder. Kudos. Right? The reaction instead was, oh, you know, don't feel so bad that you failed. Right? I'm like, what the hell are you talking about?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:12) But that's what they hear. Right? They're like, oh, you know, you're—

(Slater Victoroff at 00:26:14) Gonna lose face with the board. You're not gonna be able to control the company anymore because you're no longer the CEO. You're the CTO now. I just think it's the wrong mentality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:25) By the way, Slater, you doing that is the most CEO thing you could have possibly done.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:26:30) That's—one person told me that, and that's what finally pushed me over the edge. Right? It's like, look, your job as the CEO and founder is to do what's right for the business. And if you know what's right for the business, then do it. And it is that simple. It is that simple.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:46) Everyone else is just—So how big is the team now? How big is the organization currently?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:26:50) Yeah. So we're including contractors, about fifteen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:54) Cool. And your primary line of business, how you guys are making money, is the contracts splitting and analysis, stuff like that?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:27:03) Yeah. It's stuff along those lines. Right? So we're primarily in kind of insurance, financial services, and a bit in media as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:11) Oh, very cool. We had a guy on the show yesterday from kin.com, Kin.com. They're just—they're an insurance company that's exploding. I mean, they've gone from seven people to almost a hundred in the past year.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:27:23) Oh, awesome. That's—it's always awesome seeing a startup explode like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:27) Yeah. They're cutting out the insurance agent.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:27:29) That's a great idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:31) Yep. But it's already been done for auto, but they're doing it for home now.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:27:35) Got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah. I mean, I think that there's actually—sorry. There's another company in the current Techstars Boston class that's trying to do that same thing, but I can't remember the name to save my life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:46) It's alright. Yeah. But a lot of them, there's room for a lot of them to play. I mean, they're growing that fast. They're only doing it in two states right now, Slater.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:27:53) Oh my goodness. I mean, that's one of the crazy things. I think that people have a very poor understanding of insurance and exactly how it works, right? You know, it's really just a risk pool at the end of the day, and it's a very old industry that hasn't changed much. I mean, Lloyd's of London is still in operation, right? And they still operate the same way they used to. They were the first insurance company. What they were founded in, actually just looked it up, 1871. And insurance hasn't fundamentally changed since 1871.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:27) And it's mind blowing. And it means that both there's a

(Slater Victoroff at 00:28:29) lot of potential for new insurance

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:30) companies kind of radically changing the

(Slater Victoroff at 00:28:30) way that insurance is bought and sold. Insurance companies kind of radically changing the way that insurance is bought and sold. It also means there's a lot of great space for people like us that says, hey, look, we're going to work with the existing insurance companies to bring themselves into the twenty-first century because they're still in the nineteenth, a lot of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:46) Yeah. And all you have to do is find the angle to show them that they can take market share from their competitor.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:28:50) Exactly, right? That's what it

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:51) comes down to at the

(Slater Victoroff at 00:28:52) end of the day. Yeah. Look, you're going to do it better, faster, cheaper.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:56) And then if you convince them of that and show them and they believe it, then they roll with it.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:29:02) Yeah. It's just, now there's one more hurdle of convincing them that the robots aren't going to take over, but we're figuring that one out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:12) What are you most excited about right now with Indico?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:29:15) Oh man. I mean, so our mission has changed a lot, effectively between making this attractive to developers to making this attractive to SMEs and nontechnical users, and that's what I'm really excited about. People assume that it's not possible, right? That you cannot take something as technical as machine learning and AI and actually wrap it in a way that's palatable and accessible to nontechnical users, like nonprogrammers. And I want to prove them wrong, right? I fundamentally believe, you know, it's kind of like think about it like Wix, right, or any of those site building attempts for

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:56) for Squarespace.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:29:57) Yeah, Squarespace. Great example, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:59) It's prettier.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:30:01) For decades, you know, and even still today, people say, look, there's no way that can work, right? You can't make website building, or I guess WordPress is another obvious one. You can't make website building accessible to a nontechnical user. You know, no matter how far you push it, right, it's never going to be accessible to them. And they were proven wrong, right? You look at all of these incredible things and how radically more accessible it is. You know, the fact that WordPress is driving, whatever, like 70% of websites on the Internet are WordPress or something like that just shows that it's tremendously powerful. And I think engineers have a tendency to believe that individuals will just get more technical with time and that'll solve the problem. And I'm excited to actually hold ourselves to a higher standard, right, and actually say, look, because today it is still developers and data scientists using it, right? You know, they're not outside of the process. And I want to maybe not remove them entirely, but I want to bring the SME front and center. I want to make them feel like this is a tool that gives them a bionic arm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:01) And what's the SME? Sorry.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:31:05) The subject matter expert. It's just a kind of generic term that we use for some expert, like a lawyer, right, or someone who's reviewing contracts or sort of the

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) Wait, I just, I've heard the acronym before.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:31:15) I don't know. It's super reasonable. Acronym gets used for a few different things. Yeah. So just a nontechnical person that knows their domain very well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:25) Yeah. Because that's what you want to resource them so that they can build with your tools. And when you get people building with your hammer, you become an awesome hammer company.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:31:33) Yeah. That's the plan, right? No, I mean, I think the same way that, you know, today you see it with a lot of these SMEs that have basic programming knowledge that say, hey, you know, I figured out how to automate my job six months ago, and now I just sit around and press a button once a day, which is, on the one hand, kind of crazy. But on the other hand, is this incredible empowerment, right? The fact that someone can, again, construct this from themselves soup to nuts. And I want to make that possible without four years of engineering education, or ten years in some cases.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:07) Yeah. It should be easier. So with your stuff, you explained the supercharging the document workflow part. You explained that very, very well. But I didn't really get that. And then you also explained this whole goal that you're working towards and the motivation behind it and the why of where you want to go with this sort of very easy way that a SME or common person that's an expert can simply use the technology and interact with it. But I didn't see, like, visualizations of that on the site when I was poking around.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:32:42) That's because we're still building it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:44) Oh. No, no. It's it's very so

(Slater Victoroff at 00:32:46) This transition to kind of the enterprise was like an opportunistic, pretty recent one for us. We actually just opened kind of a closed private beta to some of our power users two days ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:57) Oh, nice. Yeah. So, no, so I mean, it's, yeah.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:33:01) That's why you haven't seen kind of the visualizations. We're also kind of halfway through a big site revamp, which everyone's going through a site revamp, I'm sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:10) Yeah. So there's a, that is so true. Yeah. Look, I mean, yeah.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:33:13) The site always lags behind whatever you're building by six months, just because it takes six months for you to really be sure that the change you've made is the right one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:22) Yeah, yeah, right? Oh man. Thank you so much for hanging out with us.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:33:27) No, no, no worries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:28) You're the best.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:33:30) Always happy to chat. You don't want to talk about voice at all in the last five minutes?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:34) Oh yeah. I didn't know what, I just figured you were having a bad day or something.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:33:39) I was. No, you're right. I also just, I get cranky about voice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:44) You get cranky about voice? Yeah. Let's hear it. But by the way, just so you know, heads up, we got like the leaders of the Alexa team on like next week. So if you want to say anything to them.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:33:54) I think Alexa is a good product. I have no beef with Alexa. The problem I have is that people have this vision that voice is some fundamentally transformative technology that's going to change the way that we interact with our computers, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:12) This is kind of, you know, I hear this pitch all

(Slater Victoroff at 00:34:14) the time of a voice-first operating system where we're going to do everything by talking. The problem is that

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:19) You do. No, I have not.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:34:22) Right, you know? Yeah. I hear people talking about that all the time as a desirable thing, you know, voice-based interfaces. And I think the thing that people fail to realize is nobody wants that, right? You know, do you want to no longer use your finger to interact with your phone and instead use your voice? No. Of course you don't. Because you don't want to be shouting into your phone in the middle of a busy subway. Like, you feel inconsiderate as an individual, and it's just a bad user experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:49) There's, I want the neural net. What about the neural net? What about the, yeah. That's what I want.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:34:54) Yeah. I mean, it's like, look, having something intelligent as an assistant that does, you know, very specific point things for you, like, the thing that's great about Alexa is that it's a very small number of things that it does, and it's things that are actually useful in a voice scenario, right? But I think that people assume it's a more useful interface than it actually is. I think that Alexa is close to the peak of what voice is really going to enable and what it should be used for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:22) I see it as more like you got a keyboard, you got a mouse, you got the Alexa, right? Like, it's not a replacement. It's complementary to.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:35:31) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:31) And there's very good uses for it, like when I'm in the shower and I want to listen to Tony Robbins, right? Totally, right? And then it's great for, like, voice is also getting the line blurred with the things like the podcast and stuff like that where we're consuming audio content, like in the car, yeah, right? So people are mixing voice. I don't see it as a replacement by any means. But what I do see it as, and I have been asking a lot of people about how they see voice fitting into their business because it's a great marketing thing right now because we only have about a 10 to 20% mass market adoption. Over the next five years, we'll probably get up to about 80% of consumers actually having them in their houses, if you look at like the sales trends. So what I'm saying to people is now is the time to find an excuse to make a little sales video of you telling your Alexa to do. Like, I told, I was talking to the insurance guy. I said, why don't you be the first to buy, insure, buy home insurance through Alexa, saying, Alexa, get, you know, secure the fortress. And she'll ask you what the address is, and then she gives you a quote, right? Like, because that's an ama, like, we have us, Slater. We have the people that are in it. And then we have the market, which is the consumers, totally. And they're a decade behind.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:36:47) Yeah, right? They are. So they

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:48) they think it's cool, and they will buy insurance just to tell their friends they bought it through Alexa.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:36:53) Yeah. And I think there's a lot of value there, right? I think there's a lot of really powerful point applications of it, and I think it's going to be, like you said, kind of a good technology. I think the only thing that kind of grates on me, right, is that I think people make it out to be something that it's not, right? It's not going to change, you know, you're not going to, like you said, you're not going to replace your keyboard with a voice interface. Nobody wants that, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:15) Yeah.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:37:15) Super useful for, you know, sending a text while you're driving because, you know, you don't want to be distracted, right? Lot of really valuable point use cases, big implications with consumer. You know, I think that the transformative interface change that we're still waiting for is effectively, you know, the Leap Motion?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:36) No. Tell me about this.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:37:37) It was in like 2013 they shipped, but it was this little thing that they were supposed to build into your computer. And they did this, I think, for a couple people. It was hand tracking, right, and gesture recognition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:47) Oh, I did see that where you, like, you know, do the, I got, I know where you turn the lights on by, you know, putting your thumb and index finger together.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:37:53) That was the Myo. Okay. Similar concept.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:58) Gestures.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:37:59) Yes, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that there's a really big gap in haptic gesture technology, and it's really far behind where people want it to be. The Leap Motion, I only brought up because they were a great example of someone that, like, dramatically overpromised, and their just, like, fundamental technological approach was bad. And I think people don't realize how big that gap is. Like, our most advanced haptic technology today, just in terms of being some kind of tactile feedback, is rumble packs, which we had back in the N64s, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:31) I love that, man.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:38:33) Yeah. It's, yeah. And I just think it's so right for disruption. I think that if you could physically interact with technology, because that's not really possible today, I think there's incredible applications of that. I think that is a much more transformative change that we're going to see actualize in the next five to ten years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:52) I'm excited for it because if you think about it, 130 years ago, we got electricity. Nice. Look where we're at today.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:38:58) Goodness. That is a trip.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:01) Yeah. I loved, that's like one of my favorite lines because I was, you know, reading about how everyone would go to the movie theaters because they were the first ones to have air conditioning, and just before that, we had electricity, right? So it became like commonplace. And so I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, for all the doubts and everything, like that we talk about, about how far things are off and stuff like that, like, if you just think, like, what, 130 years ago. Like, think about it.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:39:28) There's, that means there's people today, alive today, that remember when electricity got put into their house.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:35) Oh yeah. That's just when it was available, right? Like, it definitely took, you know, a decade or two to spread.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:39:40) I just, right? Mind blowing. One of the other things that I just always kind of am stymied by, Internet access today, you know, which, you know, launched, let's say, in '92. 50% of the planet has access to the Internet. And I looked this up. How much of the world do you think has access to potatoes?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) Potatoes?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:40:02) Right. Because you figured everyone has

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:03) to do. Regional. Well, no. Foods, well, you know, I have, I don't know. It's, go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm going to ruin it for you because I have like family all over the world and like certain foods are unavailable in some places.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:40:14) Exactly, right? So it's about 20%. 20% of the world has access to 20%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) Yeah. Wow. Really low.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:40:21) It's mostly the Americas. And 50% of the world has access to the Internet, right? So

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:29) What about clean water?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:40:30) It's like, I think it's more like 50%, I'm sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:32) Less than 50? Oh, wow.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:40:33) I think. I can look this up right now. But kind of regardless, I think that's one of the things that's just been really incredible to me, right, is I think seeing when there is a transformative new technology here and everyone is really rowing in the right direction, in the same direction, getting it implemented, things can happen really fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:52) Have you ever heard of that, the Segway guy, the Dean?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:40:56) Yes. Dean Kamen. He's a horrible human being, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:59) He's a horrible human being.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:41:01) He's an awful human being.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:03) Oh my goodness. You have an interaction with him?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:41:06) Yes. I'll tell one story of him that is public. Dean Kamen was making a new pacemaker, and he and one of the engineers who's a very good friend of mine and an excellent engineer recognized there was a security flaw, an awful security flaw because it was an Internet-enabled pacemaker. And he basically found a security issue in their wireless stack, and it meant that you could trivially make, you know, think of a hand grenade type thing, could be entirely wireless, just put power to a local battery that would just deactivate all of the pacemakers in a wide radius.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:42) Oh my goodness.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:41:43) And that's terrifying, right? Yeah. So he found that, and he told Dean Kamen, and he said, "Hey, look, we found the security issue." And Dean Kamen said, "Great. Don't tell anyone." And I think that really just sums it up. I mean, eventually, he went out to the meeting. He's like, "No, I can't do this. People are going to die, right? I don't care if Dean Kamen, you know, wants his check or whatever it is." And Dean Kamen fired him because he said, "You know, how dare you tell people that they were in mortal danger?" And that's not even the worst thing he did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:13) Oh my goodness. Because, like, here I saw this little documentary, and I was like, "Oh, he's getting water to all the people that need the water."

(Slater Victoroff at 00:42:22) Yeah. He thinks very highly of himself and is very good at pitching himself as an innovator. You also know the hoverboards that everyone wants that they invented in China? Yeah. You want to know why you can't import them into the US? Why? Dean Kamen. Because he's made this claim, and because he's rich enough and ingratiated with the right people, he has asserted that any import of them into the United States violates his Segway patents.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) So they're not coming in anymore because they were here.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:42:52) No. So he worked out individual licensing agreements with some people, but the only way that you could get the hoverboards was through these one-off directly dealing with wholesalers. The US was not legally allowed to import them. That's why they were so hard to get.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:05) Oh, wow.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:43:07) Dean Kamen, not a great guy. It's just sour grapes because no one wanted the Segway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:12) Alright. Slater's best friend, Dean Kamen. No. I'm just kidding.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:43:15) Dean Kamen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:16) Oh, man. That is so—and he is in your area too? Like, is he in Boston area?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:43:22) I don't think he is right now. I don't know. He's close with a couple of close friends of mine, close friends of mine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:28) Yeah. Well, thanks to your friend for, like, you know, saving the IoT pacemaker explosion hack.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:43:34) Yeah. Absolutely. No. He's a great guy and a great engineer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:38) Now do you own an Alexa?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:43:40) No. I don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:41) Do you own any voice thing at all?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:43:43) Nope. No voice thing at all. I've built voice systems, but I've never owned them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:48) So here's what happened. So I only got one at Christmas time. My wife surprised me with one, and I was so reluctant, man. I don't ever talk to the Siri. I don't ever—like, I, for some reason, I guess I'm just old. Like, it feels weird. Yeah. But then I'm getting my haircut, and, like, the person cutting my hair is telling me about how her daughter's in love with Alexa and all her friends, they talk to Alexa. And then my little nephews are in love with Alexa. They always run up to their mom, "Mom, mom, can I ask Alexa to tell me a joke?" And she's like, "Okay. Did you do your chores?" "Yeah." "Okay. You can go ask Alexa." These kids are obsessed with it, Slater.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:44:25) I love that. That's so cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:25) And when I see that in life, I can't ignore it. Yeah.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:44:29) I'm not a normal consumer by any stretch, right? Like, I didn't use a smartphone till, like, three years ago. So, I mean, the fact that I don't use it doesn't mean it's not a great product. Yeah. And I'm officially at the age where I no longer understand kids. Just accepted that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:46) Maybe you'll have some soon.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:44:49) That's a terrifying thought.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:51) Dude, I just had my daughter. If you would have talked to me two years or three years ago, I would have been like, "You're crazy, man." Yeah. But, like, I don't know what happened. It just kind of, like, it just happened.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:45:04) Yeah. I love it. Life, right? Yeah. I've heard that from a lot of people. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:09) You know, it's like, it's not great when you're not in—it's like food. It's not great when you're not in the mood for it or you're not hungry. But, but you can instantly get hungry. Like, you can get hungry real fast.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:45:20) Yeah. Just like you can get, you know, happy to see your daughter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:23) Yeah. No. I got baby fever real fast. Like, I was like—

(Slater Victoroff at 00:45:26) All of a sudden—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:26) I was like, "Oh, man." I woke up one day and I'm like, "I want a kid." Like, it was like a genetic switch flipped.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:45:32) Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:33) Yeah. I'm not kidding you.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:45:34) How old are you just so I can know when the switch is going to flip for me?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:39) My switch flipped, 28, 29. So I'm 30.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:45:42) I've got a couple years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:43) Yeah. Oh, I'm telling you what, man. There was the farthest thing from my mind. I was like, "Never, never, never, never, never." I woke up one day. Boom. I was like, "Yes. I want a kid." And it wasn't like I saw someone or anything. Like, I just woke up that morning, and I was like, "I want to reproduce." It was like a really, a human animal thing. Like, you're hungry, you know?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:46:03) Goodness. Alright. I'll start the clock. I'll watch out for it. Thanks for the heads up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:08) Yeah. It just let it get you by surprise, you know.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:46:11) No. No. I get—not the first person I've heard that from. No. I, and my uncle is just like, "Look. Trust me. I know life doesn't make sense right now. Once you have a kid, everything's going to make sense."

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:22) It's so insane. And I'll tell you what, business-wise, like, I was motivated before in building products and stuff, but another switch flips when you see their face and you're like, "Oh my god. I gotta go out into the—I gotta go out that front door and change the world for this little monkey." You know? That is awesome. Yeah.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:46:36) That is incredible. That's something that I'm holding out for. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:39) So you'll have an Alexa and a little one, and you'll text me. You'll be like, "Joel, you were crazy, man. It happened." Yeah. Look.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:46:45) Hey. I'll have the little one use the Alexa so I don't have to deal with it. See? And everybody wins.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:50) Just like you moved from CEO to CTO, you have the little one run the Alexa.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:46:54) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:55) Awesome. Dude, it was so great hanging out with you. Thank you so much.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:46:58) Total pleasure chatting. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:00) Alright. If people want to find out more about you, how would they do that?

(Slater Victoroff at 00:47:03) Look at indico.io, just Google Slater Boston. I'm the only one here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:08) Or Dean Kamen's number one fan.

(Slater Victoroff at 00:47:10) Oh, yeah. Definitely. No, I should show up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:19) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.