Company Founders

"At the end, we always ask: How are you feeling, better, the same, or worse? We look at the failed transcripts and try to troubleshoot on what went wrong — we try to minimize people feeling worse. It’s hard to figure out what we can do for those feeling the same. When you get it wrong people are not shy about telling you — when a button doesn’t cover everything users want to say, users will tell you."

"We are planning an iOS and Android app so people have extra privacy and to be HIPAA-compliant. There’s a good reason to keep it with text and to NOT do it in voice. You cannot see a negative thought in voice, but in a text chatbot you write it out and this externalization helps you overcome it. Messenger was a great launch platform — they make it easy to create and launch a bot. Users loved our prototypes there and we decided to launch there as it was easy."

"I really like ParentSpark — it helps parents with parenting. Their storytelling is great. It’s a mom coaching her kids and they help you as a parent. I also like Jeyant for medical screening; they have over a million users and screen for Zika and other diseases. PullString has done some nice character-based chatbots like Dr. Who. The Mabu chatbot, with eyes that follow you, is neat and I think IDEO designed it."

"The only strategy that we’ve done is press — that has been reasonably successful. Interestingly, we got far more conversations as a result of blog article reviews than mainstream press. Bloggers just seem to find us. The tongue and cheek name helped and launching with data and the study helped. Some of the other mental health bots are less than useful and possibly dangerous — so having actual data from a study was important."

"The first is to just ask people if they want to converse. I’m not sure if we’ve nailed the invitation. Some of our push navigations were like “beep boop” — we are trying to understand the re-triggering schedule. [Note: Checking in to see what someone’s mental health is is a great reason to re-engage — Woebot naturally does this.]"

"We learn all the time and have learned to keep track of our learning. If you have two buttons, they should represent genuinely different pathways. If there is no natural response or utterance, we use an emoji as an easy button filler. We’ve learned a lot about images. We used to have a black and white image of a bomb and we found it was triggering for certain people, so we had to remove it. Generally I like the black and white images. Many people really dislike minions. There’s a lot due to personal taste here — some people are into videos, others aren’t into it. We have veered away from videos, but we may make some to help teach people difficult techniques. When people are upset, they can only process a little — so our language and scripts have to be really short. We find it easier to have many chat bubbles with 1 or 2 lines — we try to keep it lean and bouncy. There’s almost a rhythm to it — there are a few flows where we can capture help."

"It was a nice to have a paywall at first to get validation that people would pay for it. We had a decent conversion rate, but I wanted to gather data. Direct to consumer will be the longer term model. People were emailing us saying this is less expensive than our therapist; they were the ones who valued us the most. Convenience was a huge value proposition."

"Some users want to be served something else. We always issue an invitation to engage in a conversation. There’s no assumption people want help. Some people just want to chat, they don’t want help. So we try not to explicitly ask people what they are looking for. There really isn’t a lot of open chat away from buttons in Woebot. People may want a past video or lesson."

"Initially it was myself and Pierre building web prototypes and games. We tried to make video games for CBT for 9 months, things like interactive fiction prototypes for dynamics of engagement. They all had so much dialogue it made sense for us to move to chatbots. Pamela Fox stepped in as our head of engineering and helped rebuild the stack."

"It’s all completely de-identified and anonymized data — nobody in the company can ever see anyone’s Facebook profile. It was to protect the user and to protect us. The guiding principle is transparency. There is no open ended generative conversation — everything is scripted. We want to launch an app to have more privacy."

"We use AWS Lambda and NodeJS. Our app will have an animated Woebot tied to NLP that can respond to verbal language with animation. We do our analytics in house as we move to HIPAA compliance for our apps. We don’t want a 3rd party looking at data. We built a dashboard over the summer. It’s hard to find really good data scientists and AI people, and Android engineers."

"My background is in clinical psychology research and I reached out to the best in the field. We all agree that our work doesn’t scale. Athena Robinson, a former Stanford psychiatry professor just joined as our Chief Clinical Officer. Other than that, some of my other colleagues or friends have joined too — people who really care about mental health issues. It makes for a really great workplace — this idea is bigger than any of us. When you look at the data and what people share, it’s so personal and you don’t even hear things like this in human therapy."

"Of course the first initial reaction is to deny everything, and to come out making sure your side… when I saw the way I’m objectified and dragged through the press with all these misquotes and misinterpretations of who I am. If I’d looked a different way or if I was a man, I wouldn’t be objectified this way…”"

"It’s incredibly important for a CEO to have the whole plan in her head which is very different than her to-do list."

"As a founder and CEO, you’ll be pulled in a million different directions at once. Without a game plan for the day, quarter, or year ahead, you’re bound to be a slave to your inbox, the Slack chats, calls, coffees, and speaking opportunities you field on a daily basis"

"Africa could be the best place on earth, but instead our best and brightest minds are leaving the continent in the millions."

"Never put all your eggs in one basket” Never give too much work to one employee or vendor. It can leave you very vulnerable if something goes awry."

"The biggest things I learned were that there is so much work to be done in Africa and that Africans must help themselves. We can no longer afford to rely on rich countries to provide us with foreign aid. It’s the person who the shoe pinches who knows how it needs to be adjusted."

"On the bus, he had a book of short stories. I think it was Voltaire, I remember striking up a conversation about classic literature and Shakespeare, we immediately bonded over this kind of mutual love of classic literature and particularly Shakespeare.”"

"Encouragement goes a long way! Recognizing people’s hard work and dedication only makes them want to give more to you and their job. You’re only as good as your employees are so giving them what they need to be their best is only going to help your company in the end. Bosses that are belittling or controlling to make themselves look better only end up hurting themselves in the end"

"I’m a strong believer in business with a purpose. I actually create specific SKU’s that are committed to giving a portion of proceeds to causes such a breast cancer treatment, children’s causes , the environment, Veterans, Puerto Rico to name a few. My company is green conscience and leaping bunny certified. Every bottle someone buys not only helps them feel more beautiful but has a purpose behind it."

"Boris never, ever gave me favouritism. Never once did I ask him for a favour. Never once did he write a letter of recommendation for me. He didn’t know about my asking to go to trips. He only knew me as an extremely passionate entrepreneur of the London tech scene."

"Sometimes the best deals you’ll make are the ones you won’t.” Sometimes moving past disappointment is tough but I’ve come to realize if something doesn’t work out, later on I’ve seen why it was best."

"Sometimes no just means not right now. Once I set my sights on something, I am locked in and pressing for the best possible outcome. As such, it can be disheartening for things to not go as planned, despite the hard work. As I’ve grown in my role as CEO, I’ve had to take a step back and analyze why “right now” wasn’t the “right time”. It’s this perspective that maintains my optimism and allows me to press on to continue innovating for our consumers."

"Nobody retires from these jobs. You will be fired at some point."

"One of the most interesting aspects of working in this industry, and one that never gets old, is the consumer buy in. It’s much easier to measure buy in through sales reports. But, when it comes to grassroot events, forecasting turnout is always an unknown. For us, our first Target in-store event"

"Because it's one of the great jobs," in a recent interview for Business Insider's podcast, "Success! How I Did It."

"I made multiple leaps where there were no guarantees that I was going to be successful, By the way, I was not always successful. But I think if you go into something new with an open mind, and you let people around you know what you don't know, for the most part they're going to link arms with you."

"So if you are somebody who is not afraid of risk and you love the creative process, it's great," she said. "Why would you not do it?"

"I see many, many young women now — and that's part of what excites me about the startup world — who have left great jobs and said, 'I think I can build something,'" "Eighty percent of them will probably fail at it, but they'll learn a ton, and they'll either be much better when they go back into a corporate job or they'll start a second company and they'll succeed. That's the way that we learn. We learn by making mistakes."

"If you genuinely want to have a multifaceted career that takes you into multiple industries, then I think you have to be willing to fail."

"Intelligence is ten million rules. This refers to the prior and tacit knowledge that authors presume their readers all possess (such as "if person x knows person y, then x's date of death can't be earlier than y's date of birth") not counting the vastly larger number of "facts" such as one might find in Wikipedia or by Googling."

""What we needed, is nothing less than an “AI Manhattan Project”, a full frontal assault on common sense: the challenge is to create an Encyclopédia of Common sense", Michio Kaku citing Lenat."

"The time may come when a greatly expanded Cyc will underlie countless software applications. But reaching that goal could easily take another two decades."

"Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to mankind before writing."

"Sometimes the veneer of intelligence is not enough."

"If computers were human, they’d present themselves as autistic, schizophrenic, or otherwise brittle. It would be unwise or dangerous for that person to take care of children and cook meals, but it’s on the horizon for home robots. That’s like saying, ‘We have an important job to do, but we’re going to hire dogs and cats to do it.'"

"“The more we can be our best selves' (which includes becoming less attached to our “selves” as traditionally conceived) in the coming period, the more likely we are to make judicious choices as we move toward AGI and then ASI.”"

"“We do not have a clear picture regarding how much influence our specific actions will have on the nature of the Singularity we get. It may be that certain sorts of AGI or ASI are very likely to emerge without close dependence on the details of their early stages. However, it seems intelligent to at least pursue the hypothesis that, by being purposive about the nature of the early-stage AGI we create, we can nudge the following stages of AGI evolution in beneficial ways.”"

"”Current AI technologies like LLMs and convolutional neural networks are focused on effective absorption of large-scale training data and fulfilment of queries based on the information in this data.”"

"“The economic and value of increasingly powerful — and increasingly generally intelligent — AI has become clear both to major socioeconomic actors and to everyday people.”"

"“While there are those who want to pause or radically slow down AGI R&D for fear of its consequences, it seems very unlikely these “decels” will hold sway. There is just too much obvious and broad value already being generated by AI development that is explicitly intended as part of the path to AGI.”"

"“This sort of technology, on its own, seems clearly not capable of producing HLAGI — but does seem very promising as a component of integrated multi-module AGI systems. This sort of technology is also not capable of real moral agency or ethical understanding.”"

"Interactive storytelling with the robot helps the AI enter into the same mind space as a human child while being there in the same physical space."

"The main bottlenecks in humanoid robotics are actually software bottlenecks, not hardware bottlenecks."

""There's still this one big heroic task for humans to come together and cooperate in building AGI, but now is the time to do it. We're at a very interesting time for AI developers to jump in... within a couple of months the super fast version is going to be dealing with practical problems”"

"The human-level AGI barrier is arbitrary, more like the escape velocity of Earth... it's just a milestone in AGI's progression as they get smarter."

"“I think it's entirely possible that a decentralized AI project can cobble together the data and compute power to make something smarter than anything big tech has done in the AI space leveling leveraging intellectual effort from people all all over the planet right and indeed that's what we're trying to do in SingularityNET and in the ASI alliance”"

"“I am actively working to bring BGI about, sooner rather than later. And I think you probably should be too.”"

"“The concept of open-ended intelligence is also important to reflect on. The fundamental nature of AGI systems is to pursue the complementary and sometimes contradictory meta-goals of individuation (maintenance of system boundaries) and self-transcendence (growing beyond oneself and leaping into the great unknown) … and this means that whatever algorithms one uses to seed an AGI, it is highly possible that as it grows and learns and reflects on its own nature and improves its own software and hardware infrastructure, it will end up with different algorithms entirely.”"