Clarifai is a New York City based visual recognition company. Clarifai has raised over $40M from Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital, Nvidia, and Menlo Ventures. Clarifai APIs and technology allows companies to understand image and video content at scale since 2014.
I joined in January 2016 as the first product manager responsible for building and training new image recognition models with our research and applied machine learning teams. These 'domain' models were production ready and publicly available to our developer and commercial users. Each domain model had a narrowly focused purpose (identify common foods, filter out NSFW content, identify objects and people, etc) that required input from potential customers. The neural net's taxonomy, training data, and ultimate product and business value were all areas we needed to strictly define upfront.
When I started, our team consisted of a COO, non-technical AE, myself, and a staff of 20 engineers across front-end, back-end, infrastructure, and research. "Artificial Intelligence" and "Deep Learning" were en-vogue buzzwords splashing the covers of Wired, Techcrunch, and the New York Times. Every article mentioning a machine learning company featured a stock photo of a futuristic brain 🧠. Most developers, PMs, and operations teams had never been exposed to production-grade computer vision capabilities. Clarifai tech was early, real, and being called magical during a customer demo wasn't too uncommon.
This general state of confusion and unawareness amongst the early and fragmented 'market' at the time led me to go on the offensive with our early commercial teams. It wasn't a matter of "how to build and serve" an image recognition API, rather, it was a matter of understanding who may need or want the service, how they would use it to improve their product, and how much they may pay for the capability to understand the content flowing through their app, website, or business.
A trickle of noisy inbound interest wasn't going to allow us to know what our near and longterm roadmap should look like. This forced us to go hunting to talk with those whose perspective was most valuable, the people outside our office walls.
Internally, I would serve as the "voice of the customer". My responsibility was being able to explain, evangelize, and sell our capabilities on a tech, product, and business level. "Ryan at Clarifai" became a primary touchpoint for prospects, enterprise customers, developer users, and business partners.
I would ultimately lead the thinking and work around:
A. Strategy
Commercial: Creating vertical specific approaches to sales and marketing once we had identified a large enough opportunity for a valuable workflow within a segment.
Market: Assessing and explaining the rapidly developing competitive forces from large incumbents, open-source projects, and vertical-specific competitors.
B. Partnerships:
Working with technical and business partner on marketing and selling our integrations.
C. Public Analysis, Writing, and Evangelism
Visually explained and demonstrated the applications of computer vision through demos, blogs, and speaking.