Asian Tech Leaders Justin Pang

Jae Lee is the Founder and CEO of Twelve Labs, a video understanding platform that uses AI to help developers and companies search and understand videos quickly. Using its state-of-the-art multimodal foundation model for videos that can accurately and instantly search exact moments within petabytes of video archives, generate coherent text summaries of videos, perform prompt-based video generation, and many more. Jae and his co-founders started the company in 2021 and has secured funding from prominent VCs including Index Ventures and Radial Ventures, and has been recognized as one of CB Insights' AI 100 companies.

Prior to starting Twelve Labs, Jae was an award-winning cyber security leader for the South Korean army and he previously spent time as a software engineer at Amazon and Samsung. Jae graduated from UC Berkeley where he studied computer science.

In this episode, you will learn:


Where Jae is seeing the highest value from multimodal GenAI applications


Why Jae believed that multimodal AI was the future and decided to start Twelve Labs


How building Twelve Labs with a geographically diverse team is an edge


Jae’s upbringing in Seoul and moving to the US with his uncle who sparked his imagination in math and statistics



You can follow Jae on Twitter and learn more about Twelve Labs at https://twelvelabs.io/

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Timestamps:

(00:01) Early Trends in Generative AI Technology

(11:55) Building Multimodal AI

(23:27) Exploring Curiosity and Statistical Learning

(28:31) Navigating Career Choices and Company Culture

(42:12) Online Presence and AI Influence

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Transcript

https://justinpang.com/jae-podcast-transcript

Vivian Sun is the Head of Automated Driving at Amazon and an accomplished autonomous vehicle and AI expert. Vivian previously served as the Chief Commercial Officers at Waabi and the VP of Business Development at TuSimple, two leaders in autonomous trucking. In this episode, Vivian shares more about the current state of the AV industry, the potential of generative AI, and how her upbringing shaped her career path.



Chapters:

(00:01) Autonomous Vehicles

(14:08) Hardware and Software Integration in Self-Driving

(19:03) Future of Self-Driving Trucks in Industry

(24:37) Curiosity, Industry Connections, and Staying Ahead

(30:29) Importance of Deep Conversations and Reflection

(45:20) Self-Growth and Future Plans

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Transcript

https://justinpang.com/vivian-podcast-transcript

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Follow Vivian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vivian-sun-0a22772a/



Learn more about Amazon's Middle Mile Product: https://www.amazon.science/latest-news/how-amazons-middle-mile-team-helps-packages-make-the-journey-to-your-doorstep

Albert Tai is the Founder and CEO of Hypercare, a VC-backed healthcare technology company that helps connect the right healthcare providers at the righttime to improve patient outcomes in hospitals and community settings. Albert started Hypercare in 2016 when he realized how challenging it was to communicate efficiently in the healthcare space. He hasn’t looked back since then and Hypercare has launched in over 100 organizations across North America from large hospital systems to small community health centers. I had a lot of fun chatting with Albert about his upbringing that saw him move from Canada to Taiwan and back, how he convinced his parents to work in tech, and what advice he has to those trying to figure out what to do with their career.



Timestamps:

(00:01) Tech CEO's Takeaways and Childhood Experiences

(10:10) Early Technology Exposure and Parental Support

(15:12) Career Choices and Starting Software Company

(26:11) Journey of Starting a Healthcare Company

(35:58) The Importance of in-Person Brainstorming



You can follow Albert and his work at Hypercare here:


https://twitter.com/alberttai
https://www.hypercare.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alberttai/



Transcript: https://justinpang.com/albert-podcast-transcript

Francois (Frankie) Le Nguyen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Staging Labs, a startup that secures crypto and NFT assets by intercepting dangerous transactions in real-time. Frankie previously built and launched startup incubator Entrepreneur First in Canada and served as GM in both its Toronto and Singapore location where he helped build 50+ venture-backed startups valued at over $400M. Frankie started his career in product management at software companies LightSpeed and Holmusk, and is an angel investor on the side.



You can follow Frankie's latest work and thinking at:


https://www.francoislenguyen.com/


https://twitter.com/flenguyen
linkedin.com/in/francoislenguyen



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Timestamps:

(00:01) - Halloween, Bitcoin, and Childhood Memories

(08:28) - Asian Immigrant Families and Career Expectations

(15:22) - Frankie's Unconventional Path to Entrepreneurship

(23:28) - From Ambition to Accidental Tech Career

(29:41) - Entrepreneur First

(38:11) - Building Resilience and Creating Connections

(46:11) - Exploring the Journey of Staging Labs

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Transcript:

https://justinpang.com/frankie-podcast-transcript

Jaclyn Ling is the Co-Founder of Hatchways, a Y-Combinator-backed startup that is modernizing the technical interview process for start-ups and developers looking for their next great job. Prior to starting Hatchways, Jaclyn was the co-founder of a fashion bot company Blynk which was acquired by Kik Interactive in 2016. Jaclyn grew up in Vancouver, Canada, studied finance at McGill University, and had her first taste of success as a YouTube fashion influencer that had thousands of followers.

In this episode, you will learn:


How Jaclyn’s love for competitive nature was first sparked as a kid playing board games 


How Jaclyn knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur at a young age


How Jaclyn translated her dislike for interviewing into building Hatchways - a company focused on making interviews better 



You can follow Jaclyn on Twitter and LinkedIn and learn more about Hatchways at hatchways.io

Ivan Zhang is the co-founder and CTO of Cohere, a leading GenAI startup that provides natural language processing models to help developers and companies build new products and unlock business value with language AI. Cohere’s models power interactive chat features, generate text for product descriptions, blog posts, and articles, and capture the meaning of text for search, content moderation, and intent recognition. Cohere recently closed a $270M series C round and is valued at over $2B. 

Prior to co-founding Cohere in 2019,Ivan founded FOR.ai, an independent AI research group and worked in the biotech and MLOps space as a software engineer. Ivan dropped out of his undergrad University of Toronto and he is a proud Torontonian, Chinese immigrant, and League of Legends player.

In this episode, you will learn:


How Ivan first fell in love with computer science in high school


How Ivan made the mental calculation to drop out of university (and convince his parents it was a rational idea)


Where Ivan thinks we are in the GenAI hype cycle and why Cohere is here to stay


About Ivan’s favorite Chinese restaurants in Toronto 



You can follow Ivan on Twitter and learn more about Cohere at www.cohere.com



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(00:01) Tech Trends and Personal Background

(16:55) High School, Computer Science, and Support

(27:26) University, Hackathons, and Career Path

(36:08) Founding a Startup and Building Technology

(47:03) Recruiting Strategies and Cohere's Vision

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Transcript: https://justinpang.com/ivan-podcast-transcript