Andreas von Koskull (#021)
We’re also in the business of trying to make the big catches and making sure that we can deal with the consequences when they land on our plate!
Company: Vox AI
Stage: Pre-Seed
Headcount: 6
Tell us your story
I started my entrepreneurial journey while at university. I was active in the mobile game industry for the first 20 years working on both original IP and licensed games. It was a great run but I was lured into the AI data start-up space in 2019 with the opportunity to work at StageZero. I was able to scan the AI data market across a dozen different verticals. This ultimately led to me taking a leap of faith to start something new with a few old trusted colleagues in the speech recognition space.
Throughout my career I’ve had stints at larger organizations and established start-ups but I always tend to gravitate back to setting up start-ups from scratch. It is inevitable that in the start-up world you make mistakes and learn from them. But some mistakes are preventable from the start, especially those caused by “Entrepreneurial Blindness”: a lack of patience, a lack of an honest vision, team friction, validation cycles that are too long, and the illusion that success is a binary event.
I like to get my mind off the day-to-day by spending time rowing and doing other sports. Cooking is also quite therapeutic and helps me to rest my mind. My forte is French cuisine followed closely by Texas Style BBQ and I’m actively looking to add more cuisines to my repertoire.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
I get most of my inspiration for work from non-business-related sources and the latest inspirational book that I read is the short novel ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ by Ernest Hemingway. The story is about an old Cuban Fisherman and his long struggle to catch a huge marlin. There are so many things in this masterpiece that are relevant to the everyday troubles and concerns of a start-up entrepreneur.
Santiago is unlucky for a good while but finally catches a large fish that drags him out further out to the sea. He regrets not taking more gear with him and is missing a young man to assist him. But he quickly adapts to the situation and has to work with what he has at hand. When he finally does catch the fish he has to fight off sharks and drag the merlin back to Havana.
We’re also in the business of trying to make the big catches and making sure that we can deal with the consequences when they land on our plate!
What can't you stop thinking about?
We are super early in our journey at Vox so finding a product-market fit for speech training data is what is on my mind for 23 hours a day, 6 days of the week.
It is early days for AI and speech recognition services and a big booming business is probably far beyond the horizon. As we do not have industry standard metrics as in e.g. the mobile games biz, we put a lot of effort to figure out how to break down this long journey into meaningful short steps. Through this, we hope to learn and improve our navigation towards our goal of category leadership in speech training data.
If I could tell you just one thing...
I don't like to give advice to other people but if I could have a beer with myself when I was 28 I would tell myself to break down the business plan roadmap into really small measurable pieces and then make hard decisions based on those results.
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
I would love to sit down with comedian Conan O’Brien to pick his brain on how he has managed to stay on the top of his game for decades. Comedy is fascinating to me as although comedians sound spontaneous, everything is in fact highly organized and meticulously produced. I’d love to hear more about how Conan and his team manage to do this with such great results.