Becoming Founders & CEOs: Women in AI Ireland explore “Path to Entrepreneurship” with leading Irish entrepreneurs in collaboration with IBM
By: Iva Simon Bubalo
Tags: Startup Lessons, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Artificial Intelligence, IBM

The same research highlights how only 36 percent of startups with a female founder rely on VC funding, versus 42 percent of startups with no female founder. On the contrary, startups with a female founder count more on organic growth, support from friends and family, crowdfunding and government grants as compared to startups with no female founder.

To bridge this founder gap and guide women who are considering a career development as startup founders, Women in AI Ireland gathered a panel of experts who framed the risk and reward picture of female entrepreneurship in the technology industry.

WaiTALK Path to Entrepreneurship

Concluding our WaiTALK 2020 journey in Ireland, “Path to Entrepreneurship” WaiTALK was held online on the 12th November 2020 in partnership with IBM, and sponsored by Insight Centre for Data Analytics.

Alessandra Sala, Ambassador of Women in AI Ireland and the Director of Data Science & AI at Shutterstock hosted the event together with moderator Swathi Ishwarya Vijayasekaran, Data Scientist at CarTrawler.

“Path to Entrepreneurship” brought together Women in AI and the leading and successful Irish tech entrepreneurs Patricia Scanlon and Ger O’Keeffe who shared their entrepreneurial success stories along with some insights into how they approached major challenges on that journey.

Albeit a new technology in a commercial setting, not everything in AI startups is done from scratch. AI platform support is out there to accelerate that process. Angela Bates, IBM Startup & Developer Programme Lead presented the “Startup with IBM” and “Call for Code” programs aimed at developing tech-entrepreneurial talent in the community. Next to implementing AI into their products, executives can also use AI to augment their own decision-making. Yufang Hou, IBM AI Research Staff member, presented IBMs next milestone, Project Debater, AI system able to debate world-class human debaters.

With the support of IBM Ireland’s CTO & Chief Technical Architect Ronan Dalton and our renowned speakers, Women in AI Ireland have successfully initiated an entrepreneurial discourse in our Irish AI community and opened doors to current and future female entrepreneurs with leading examples of the Irish tech startup scene.

Taking a leap

Patricia Scanlon started out her career as an engineer and with a vision she had since childhood to become an inventor. She was driven by the idea of how engineering and tangible research in speech recognition can touch human lives. After her PhD, Patricia had the opportunity to see the differences between academia and business working at IBM and Nokia Bell Labs. What initially prompted her to start thinking about entrepreneurship was that within large organisations the research decisions are often made on a much higher level, so she felt the drive to take the lead and make those kinds of decisions on her own. All her previous experience with big and small companies and multinationals she used to understand where they fail and why they are slow to move, in order to use those examples to compete.

“Taking the leap into entrepreneurship was the biggest leap I’ve ever done. When making a decision you often don’t understand what it really means until you do it.”

Space to innovate: “Adult voice tech won’t work for kids”

Patricia found a spot for innovation in speech recognition by looking at how her daughter was interacting with digital apps. She founded SoapBox Labs 7 years ago to focus on speech recognition for reading, language learning, toys and robots, for 2–12 year old kids. Patricia anticipated how data privacy is going to be important even before it became a hot topic in technology. On investment into data privacy Patricia says:

“It certainly wasn’t cheaper, and it wasn’t quicker to do it that way, but I knew if we were going to do this we had to do it right.”

The power to unlock innovation: Corporate and Startups Collaboration

On this WaiTALK, IBM Developer Programme lead Angela Bates considered the perspective of a collaboration between startups and the corporate world, based on her ten years’ experience leading IBM Business Partnership Programs. According to Angela, in fact the entrepreneurial spirit behind startups is a driver of innovation for the corporate environment.

What an amazing time to be a technologist!

The reach of the business of technology is becoming increasingly broader thanks to the widespread use of the Internet, the cloud and open-source software. With their command of technology, not only developers and data scientists have the potential to become successful entrepreneurs in the current business environment, but they can be the driving force in changing the world for the better. This is why IBM supports technologists through various tech-for-good programs.

Angela Bates, IBM Startup & Developer Programme Lead

Angela Bates introduced us to “Call for Code”, an annual competition that attracted over 400,000 developers so far and it aims at finding inspiring ideas that make technology work to counteract climate change and natural disasters. Each year the winners of the competition get the support they require from IBM to make their dream of changing the world come true, by developing technological solutions that help those affected by calamities.

Angela also highlighted the type of support IBM can offer to entrepreneurs through “Startup with IBM”. This is a Program aimed at both empowering business owners to build their solutions with technology free credits, and at developing tech-entrepreneurial talents in the community through the IBM Developer educational platform.

Finally, new tech-entrepreneurs can find the perfect partner in IBM to present their solutions in front of a business network of over 25 million potential customers, who participate in the IBM Provider Workbench and IBM Marketplace platforms.

Project Debater to augment executive decision-making

Known for its history of pushing the boundaries in artificial intelligence, in 2019, IBM presented their new milestone called Project Debater. Project Debater was the first computer to successfully live-debate champion human debaters in an Oxford style debate.

Yufang Hou, Research scientist at IBM, described to the Women in AI audience how a research project becomes a product. Project Debater augments executives’ decision-making in a way that it serves as a channel between a decision-maker and those impacted by the decision. Project Debater is able to generate a pro and con sides out of all the arguments that are passed to it. The documentary on this technological marvel is available on YouTube (watch).

Yufang Hou, Research Scientist at IBM

Market knowledge, Innovative product, and a strong Co-founders Team

Ger O’Keefe’s startup Allwayswithyou is addressing the needs of family members and their older adults. Enabled by sensors and wearables, AI models predict the wellness of older adults, and monitor their wellbeing. AI models also recognise the abnormalities and if the health conditions of an older adult are declining the app automatically sends an alert to the family. Allwaywithyou also allows for content exchange between family members, photos, videos, and video calls, in an efficient way that ensures easy access.

Ger shared with us critical few steps on any path to entrepreneurship, starting with establishing a market perspective with a problem statement. Market perspective, as Ger explains, doesn’t develop overnight, it accumulates with time and around industry people. Knowing the market allows you to identify gaps, find co-founders with the right skill sets, and come up with potential novel solutions. That’s where it takes time, and after one has identified a sweet spot, the minimum viable product has to be pushed out quickly with a focus on UX/UI. His strong recommendation is:

“Do not dwell on go-to-market strategy, test your product on the market first”.

Ger also gave us advice on how entrepreneurs should plan for failure and always have a plan B. Failures are inevitable, however, through valuable business partnerships and startup programs entrepreneurs can reduce potential risks and be better prepared to tackle those risks.

Women in AI is the first global community of women in Artificial Intelligence with over 3,000 members in 90 countries. We aim at shaping gender-inclusive AI that benefits global society by increasing female representation and participation in AI. Our global platform empowers female AI-visionaries and practitioners by providing access to educational resources, networking opportunities, and hands-on support, while accelerating a community of global pioneers in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

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