Douglas Kim’s Post

There is no aspect of the industry that will not be touched, and hopefully improved by #AI. And now this includes the practice of #pathology. Joseph (Yossi) | Chaim | Yair | Chris | Gil | Stuart

I promised my friend Michael Skok an honest assessment of my experience with the super hype machine - the #AppleVisionPro that dominated social media and the tech conversation when it was first announced. I got caught up in the excitement and pre-ordered as soon as I could. I think I checked the order status 2X a day. And when it arrived, I was a kid on Christmas day. It is simply Apple demonstrating all of their sheer engineering prowess: Dual 4K micro-OLED displays with 23 million pixels across both eyes. Advanced eye-tracking technology with over 12 cameras and sensors. Hand gesture recognition with precise tracking for intuitive interaction. Two separate processors working together - M2 chip for core processing and a new R1 chip for real-time sensor processing. Integrated spatial audio system that delivers 3D sound. The first couple of weeks, I was completely immersed in the world of spatial computing. I even Facetimed my mentor Alan with it that evening (he said my AI generated avatar that the Vision Pro renders looked a bit creepy) and I found myself really enjoying the seamless interface with the rest of my Apple devices, the gesture controls, and the keyboard integration. I could go on. No - I didn't go driving with it. No - I didn't go walking around campus with it. No - I never thought of it as some weird flex. But as time went on, the inconvenience of battery life, and weight took its toll. Eventually -it became how I binge watch Star Wars content. The immersive experience and 3D effects are unmatched – it's like having the best movie theater right at home. And yes kids tell me I looked like a dweep with ski goggles on I still think Apple has a game-changer on their hands - IF they can tackle the cost and weight issues, and maybe offload some computing power to the iPhone to lighten the load - we could see a whole new way of interfacing with our devices. Imagine a lightweight pair of glasses that bring the full power of spatial computing to your fingertips. The current incarnation has not been a hit. But I really applaud Apple for trying anyway - and for showing us the "art of the possible". #AppleVisionPro #SpatialComputing #AR #VR

"The hardest thing to do is to do nothing when nothing needs to be done" - A brilliant lesson in exercising patience as an investor, board member, and organizational leader from my mentor Robert Millard - as we welcomed the summer in NYC along with current chair of the MIT Corporation Mark Gorenberg. Many of you in the MIT community will know of Bob as Chairman Emeritus of The Corporation. He currently also serves on the board of L3Harris a company he cofounded and Evercore. Bob's quip was related to how one must exercise restraint in our effort to fill what you might perceive as a void and the challenge of resisting the urge to act when it isn't necessary. Sometimes, the best course of action is to wait and let things unfold naturally - particularly difficult for the proactive amongst us. Knowing when to intervene without being counterproductive and when impulsive actions can sometimes lead to adverse outcomes. Reflecting back - I found this particularly difficult to exercise in my early days as an investor and board member.

Is Google screwed? I mean they already pay Apple $20B+ a year to be the default search engine - against a backdrop that search will change in a big way with consumers. But with Apple’s announcement of native openAI integration this changes a lot of things and complicates matters for Google pretty much immediately I’m pretty sure Apple considered Google Gemini first - but as Apple is a “privacy first” company - OpenAI is the only vendor who likely offered a completely dedicated private environment for Apple - basically walled off from any other public or corporate version #dataprivacy #AIwars

The beautiful thing about #entrepreneurship is that it is a never ending opportunity to unseat incumbent giants. Determined #startup entrepreneurs , #venturecapital will take on any Goliath, beat it, and then when it too becomes a giant, find itself defending itself against the next generation of Davids. It will be just about 19 years ago that Oracle announced the acquisition of Siebel - the giant of CRM - with the promise of dominating the entire customer relationship management industry. It never came to pass. Instead, it opened up massive opportunities for companies like Pegasystems, Rightnow (which Oracle then purchased in 2011 hoping to try again), and of course Salesforce. Marc Benioff wrote this internal email to his staff which predicted exactly what would happen. "Oracle put Siebel investors out of their misery today. We have been doing that for Siebel customers for years. Our announcement today at Dreamforce will accelerate that. It’s the end of software. Client/Server software is being consolidated by Oracle just as mainframe software was consolidated by Computer Associates. Oracle’s strategy is simple, instead of innovating, buy as much installed software as possible, call it all Oracle Fusion, and make sure it all uses Oracle’s database. Now, the same thing that happened to Peoplesoft will happen to Siebel, it will die. Customers will look for new solutions and new providers. Employees will look for new employers. Siebel on Demand, a joint venture between Siebel and IBM, will be the first to be buried. Siebel on Demand is written exclusively on DB2 and Websphere and runs in IBM data centers. Oracle will kill it. Oracle does not sell DB2. Now, the opportunity to be the global leader in the CRM market has opened for salesforce. Our dream is becoming a reality as the world will move to new on demand solutions. Already the fastest growing public CRM company in the world, with over 50% market share in On Demand CRM, salesforce is well poised to become the world’s new global CRM leader. It is auspicious that this is the very day that we are announcing our new strategy at Dreamforce with AppExchange and our Winter ’06 release. Aloha, Marc" Salesforce won on the basis of being #cloud native. Pegasystems won on the basis of process #automation native vs information retrieval. And the next generation of enterprise sw will win by being #AI Native.

Eleos Health is just coming off its best quarter in company history - measured by every metric you can think of: new logos, sales, net revenue retention, product velocity, go-lives, clinician activation, customer satisfaction - the list goes on. Eleos' product suite is on track to help over 11,000 behavioral health clinicians save millions of hours in documentation and paperwork, and opening up #healthcare access to almost 1.8 Million more sessions for consumers seeking care. They put #AI on the map in behavioral health. At this point in their journey - they are THE undisputed leader in AI in #behavioralhealth. No one comes close to the scale they're at today. With an arguably insurmountable lead in building the largest BH data set in the world, they are going to build the future operating system for BH built on trust and explainability. A few things I've admired about this team: 1. A mission-driven purpose across every single member of the team is a unifying theme - on the bedrock mindset of fast learning loops and zero egos about where an idea or improvement comes from. 2. A relentless pursuit of product-market fit - everyone on the product team has developed a deep empathy for the different user personas, and a deep understanding of the individual workflows for each of those personas, and the need to build trust in AI. 3. A go-to-market function that is maniacal about applying the right people, process, and technology - using both data and human judgment to drive continuous improvement. The level of instrumentation is insane - which means the team can navigate and 'fly the plane' - in fair or bad weather. 4. A value delivery function that understands that the job doesn't end with implementation - that customers have to derive and understand the business value they imagined. 5. An #HR function that stays true to the cultural ethos around keeping the bar high of accountable people with fast learning loops - even at the expense of hiring a bit slow - because as Reed Hastings famously opined: a great workplace really comes down to having excellent colleagues that people can count on - not just about espresso bars and flexible work arrangements. Easy to write these principles - hard to execute. Congrats to the team - happy to be your Uber driver :) and grateful to the icon Prof Alex 'Sandy' Pentland for the fortuitous intro. And they are hiring some key roles both in the US and TLV. Check them out! Alon Joffe Alon Rabinovich Dror Zaide #EMR #EHR #PatientAccess #AmbientAI

Why #bestofbreed market still thrives. Here's how my second annual ranking that no one asked for regarding #webconferencing #webmeeting apps : 1. Zoom. Again. Let's face it - if Zoom were the standard, we'd all be happier. The things they've nailed: * Login / authentication is frictionless * Settings have memory * Video quality with backgrounds is flawless * Works through spotty connections * Gallery view, etc work flawlessly * Summarization feature and recording works instantly Nicely done Eric S. Yuan and team! 2. Webex. Essentially tied to meet - Good ol trusty Webex - big leaps forward in usability over the past year - if you're in big corporate world, Webex is a real useful alternative to Zoom and probably more widely accepted than Google Meet. Nicely done Aruna Ravichandran and team! 2. Google Meet - a tie. I didn't think they'd ever get there, but it's really gotten much better over the year and I think a real viable alternative. If you live in the Gsuite world, it's an easy default. Problem is many corporates have Google Meet protocol blocked. 3. And ANYTHING BUT MICROSOFT TEAMS. . . . . Last, at the very bottom, again, is Microsoft Teams. Here is where Teams fails every single time: * Login and authentication is so full of friction and confusion for people outside the organization that the Teams meeting invite comes from, it is a mad scramble to login. * The UI - where do I begin? How do you even know who is on? Why are some attendees in portrait mode and others in landscape? * Why does it not remember any of the settings for me as an attendee? * Why is the video rendering so poor? So much ghost images and pixelation, unless you are sitting 8 inches from the camera and staring head on and not moving. If you are inviting someone to a meeting that you really want to have a good meeting with, and you're not sure they're on Teams - find something else to use. And this, my friends, is why best of breed specialized applications always have a market to sell into. If you're a startup and someone tells you "Oh, what if Microsoft / Oracle / Salesforce / Google does what you do" - ignore them and build your best-of-breed app.

Alex 'Sandy' Pentland , Robert Mahari , Wilson D'Souza and I were honored to receive at MIT Connection Science - Ravi Radhakrishnan : member of the Executive Committee, Officer and Global CIO of American Express. His thought leadership on everything from #customerexperience , personalization and #security came with a much needed, welcome reminder that all the technology tools at our disposal today including #AI, #blockchain, #cloud, #infosec, etc have to be pointed to a business outcome and purpose that drives value for the customer.

Amazing work giving back to the #hourlyworker community with #Benefits they can use, and Benefits that engender retention. Well done Yogesh Shetty | Yogesh Khachane | Lindsey Schuette | Bruce Brotine !