Layla Li (#027)
This is more for all the aspiring female entrepreneurs. If I could tell you just one thing, you can do it, whatever it is, you’re probably more competent than you think.
Company: KOSA AI
Headcount: 7
Stage: Pre-Seed
Warm intro from Alma Moya Losada (#023)
Tell us your story
I was born in a small town in northwest China (near Tibet) and went to Boston University, then Harvard. I’ve spent the last 7 years building tech solutions at Tesla, Philips, among others. In that time I’ve lived in Boston, Kyoto, London, Amsterdam and Tokyo and I’m now in Nairobi, Kenya. I have degrees in psychology, communication, fashion design, Japanese literature, and computer science. In short, I’m all over the place!
My company KOSA.ai builds multi-stakeholder AI governance software that detects and mitigates bias throughout the machine learning lifecycle.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
I read about this somewhere on Reddit a long time ago. An employee of a regional hotel chain (fuzzy on the details here - it might have been a restaurant) was recounting how their town has a higher rate of high school and college graduates and lower crime rate than neighbouring towns because the owner pays for tuition of all employees’ children to stay in school. And the owner was well respected in the community even though he probably could have used the money to expand his empire. I couldn’t really find a news story about this after hearing it.
But there are similar cases like the CEO of Boxed (Chieh Huang) paying for his employees’ kids’ college tuition, or the CEO of Gravity Payments (Dan Price) setting a $70,000 minimum wage. Raising the cost of business doesn’t seem like a good strategy, but these companies are doing well partially because they take care of their employees.
When I read this years ago, I was thinking: “If I have my own company one day this would be pretty dope - just building a company that pays it forward.”
What can't you stop thinking about?
I follow a couple of socially conscious accounts on Instagram and Twitter. Every day, just when I start to feel good and optimistic about life, they come out with facts like: “did you know there’s microplastic in your tea bags, and it’s killing penguins”; or “hey, people are still dying/starving here, did you forget?”. It’s like no matter what we do, it just doesn’t seem to be enough to save ourselves.
The doomsday feeling can be quite paralyzing. But if you read books like ‘Factfulness’, you also know the world is not as bleak as the news makes it out to be. We actually live in the most peaceful time in history. Sure there are problems but there’s also a lot to celebrate.
I think about this a lot. About how we can approach the world in a way that is philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned.
If I could tell you just one thing...
This is more for all the aspiring female entrepreneurs.
I read that men apply for a job when they meet 60% of the qualifications, and women apply for a job when they meet 100% of the qualifications.
So if I could tell you just one thing, you can do it, whatever it is, you’re probably more competent than you think.
A little space for shoutouts
My partner. He always believed in me even when I had doubts. We had a really bad fight one time, but still went to a friend’s party afterwards. I didn’t really talk to him the whole time, then later someone I was talking to said “Oh yea, I’ve heard a lot about your company. I was just talking to your partner, he’s so proud, it’s amazing!” For that, I will always be grateful.
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
I don’t really know. It’s like asking if you meet your childhood hero or your favourite celebrity: what are you going to say? Probably nothing. But in all honesty, as an early-stage start-up CEO, I would just love to get intros to any tech company that cares about AI ethics enough to pay for a software solution so they can be our customer!