Kaustubh (@_ofkaus) and Prashant (@primaprashant) sit down with Hazumu Yamazaki (@HazumuY), co-founder and co-CEO of Empath, to talk about challenges in building an AI product - from getting initial users to serving 3100 customers in 50 countries, from starting with zero data of their own to creating their data supply chain, and more.

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Topics:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:17 - What's Empath all about?
• 02:31 - How Hazumu's PhD research led to Empath
• 04:37 - Market research and validation for emotion recognition API
• 07:47 - Getting initial users and longer B2B sales cycle
• 09:55 - Founding team
• 11:11 - Becoming sustainable
• 12:16 - Improving productivity of online meetings with JamRoll
• 16:55 - Interesting feature requests like lie detection
• 18:15 - Problems with emotion recognition in videos
• 21:48 - Collecting data for a new AI startup
• 23:47 - Adding labels to the collected data
• 24:45 - Recognizing emotions in different languages
• 26:05 - Sarcasm and hidden contexts in conversations
• 27:49 - What distinguishes Empath from publicly available models
• 30:06 - Tech stack at Empath
• 32:02 - Adoption of AI Japan
• 33:40 - Advice for the initial stages of building an AI product
• 35:11 - Organizations that support AI startups in Japan
• 37:10 - Going global
• 38:54 - How to make a great pitch
• 41:23 - Funding rounds
• 42:00 - Biggest challenge in reaching the next milestone
• 43:46 - Long term vision for Empath

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