Team

My goal after leaving the Greater Nashville Technology Council was to continue to support Middle Tennessee’s technology ecosystem and what I call the innovation economy. The economic development work I was involved with while at the NTC was very gratifying, and I’m proud of the results of that work. The groundwork we helped lay and the support we provided resulted in the recruitment of dozens of tech companies to our region. Those relocations and expansions resulted in thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars of investment in our economy. My new goal was to supplement Nashville’s proven ability to recruit tech companies with a dedicated effort focused on creating a new generation of high-tech companies resulting in hundreds of new jobs and the advancement of an important technology sector. My belief is that these new home-grown tech companies have the potential to far exceed the economic impact of the companies we recruited.

That goal initiated a process that spanned more than a year and involved the research and evaluation of many different ideas to determine which would be the most effective. One thing was certain from the beginning. We wanted to launch and grow new tech companies – but not just any tech companies. High-tech companies that would utilize the latest cutting-edge tools. In so doing we could create new companies while also elevating Nashville’s profile beyond just emerging tech hub and tech enabled companies to that of a leading tech hub and thought leader launching advanced technology companies. We quickly decided to focus on advanced data science, which morphed into AI about a year ago, and finally into what we are calling “industrial AI”. After months of research, we decided on a venture studio model. A venture studio or startup studio includes attributes from incubators, accelerators, and venture funds but it is not any of those. A studio starts by identifying a focus area, in our case, launching high-tech companies that use industrial AI to solve existing problems. We then recruit and hire a core team of experts and instead of starting with an entrepreneur or company, we start with ideas, or problems that can be solved using industrial AI. We then take those ideas through a very detailed evaluation process to prove that they can be turned into successful, impactful, and valuable companies with venture scale potential.

If an idea makes it through the evaluation, then we create the new company, hire a CEO to be co-founder with the studio and write a check to provide the initial seed capital. By repeating this process, we expect to launch 12 new companies in the next four years.

For the past 22 years, I have had the pleasure of helping Vanderbilt to launch startups commercializing high-tech innovations that change the lives of people. I look forward to applying that experience and expertise to building outstanding companies with the Studio founders and the founder teams who will operate and drive our portfolio companies.

We are also fortunate to have an excellent academic/research advisory group with advisers from Vanderbilt, Meharry, and Belmont. This group will help the Studio to stay advised about the latest protocols and cutting-edge techniques in artificial intelligence. We all believe this will be very important as we develop solutions and consider the best markets to enter. More to follow on this great group and its expansion.

There is another exciting part to all of this. We will participate in the further development and diversification of the technology industry in the Nashville region, to establish Nashville as a location where excellent AI and AI companies are being created, and to add jobs in this growing sector. The Studio will be another innovation driver supplementing the region’s high-tech ecosystem.

We are very excited about the launch, and I am proud to be a part of it. If you have questions about the Studio, please feel free to contact me.

When I moved to Silicon Valley in 1987 I remember vividly the rush and excitement bubbling inside the geographic epicenter of technology. It was and remains the source of great new ideas and technology advancement – but the adoption of technology as a competitive advantage inside every company has expanded the scope of great ideas and created new insights into how to leverage technology. Fast forward 3 decades and I have that same sense. I am excited to be part of The Innovation Studio team announced today in Nashville. The Innovation Studio has been designed to capture the best of Nashville’s diverse industry base, academic leadership and vibrant entrepreneurial culture to create new businesses.

With The Innovation Studio’s focus on Industrial AI, I am once again taken back to earlier in my career when I was working with a company called Inference Corporation – considered one of the big 4 AI/Expert system companies commercializing AI. In the late 80s Inference’s AI was embedded at American Express to evaluate credit card applications based solely on data provided – no human intervention. It was viewed as revolutionary.

What has changed since then and today’s onslaught of AI? Everything. Faster processing with GPU’s, faster networking, cheaper memory, real time data collection and streaming, lower TCO to operate these systems. Access to volumes of data necessary to develop and refine AI models on considerably cheaper hardware has opened the world of AI – and the opportunity to build companies around solutions that solve real business problems will benefit from a team that has seen this movie before. Action!

AI is everywhere.  Or at least it seems so.  Brought on by the explosive popularity of ChatGPT and a seemingly hourly new developments in generative AI, it’s easy to conclude AI’s moment has suddenly arrived.

In reality, AI has been a part of computing for decades and while we may have hit a tipping point in popularity, much work remains to be done to realize AI’s promise for business.  I’m very pleased to share that today we announced The Innovation Studio specifically to translate that promise into reality.

My own journey with AI began over 20 years ago in Silicon Valley as a senior executive with Calico, a pioneering application of a LISP based configuration management system targeting the manufacturing sector.  Companies like Dell Computer, Cisco, JLG, GE and hundreds of others used the technology to generate tens of millions is savings each year.

At Eyefi, a venture backed start-up in digital imaging where I served as CEO, we applied machine learning to automate the classification and organization of vast photo collections of over a million consumers and professional photographers – saving them from the hours it would have normally taken to manage their collections.

Over the last five years at Mindful, we deployed advanced customer experience software in contact centers of the world’s leading brands, gaining valuable insight into the opportunities and limits in the application of AI.  Our technology specialized in filling the gaps left in a customer journey that has reached a dead-end or where often the AI was unable to achieve the brands’ objective for the interaction, such as making a sale or closing a trouble ticket.

The Innovation Studio is focusing on building new “Industrial AI” companies.  Our team at The Innovation Studio is not new to AI or enterprise software.  We have seen the hype curve rise, and fall, when new ventures focus too much on technology and not enough of the value realized from its application.  We intend to apply those lessons in creating a new generation of software companies that deliver on the promise of AI.

That is what makes Nashville the ideal home for our new venture studio.  The Greater Nashville Region is one of the fastest growing economies in the United States.  Nashville is attracting companies in a broad range of industries and as such an immense source of real-world problems that AI-based solutions are uniquely able to address.  We will partner with those and other companies, leading universities and tap the endless creativity this is woven into Nashville’s culture.

I hope you will take the time to learn more about The Innovation Studio, where I’m honored to serve on the board.