Adam Liska: Sales, AI, and Startup Success | Primer 13

Nothing Ventured

In this episode of the Nothing Ventured Primer, I had the pleasure of speaking with Adam Liska, the co-founder and CEO of Glyphic, a company that's revolutionizing the way sales teams operate with AI-driven task automation and personalized pre-meeting briefs. Before diving into the entrepreneurial world, Adam honed his skills as a research scientist at Spotify and later at DeepMind, where he worked on projects like protein folding and large language models (LLMs).
Adam shared his journey from his early days as a paper boy to becoming a software engineer with a focus on machine learning, even before the deep learning revolution took off. His move to found Glyphic was driven by the desire to create a product that could make a real impact and the serendipitous partnership with a colleague from DeepMind who became his co-founder.
Glyphic stands out by tapping into the vast amounts of underutilized data within sales teams, structuring it to inform strategic decisions and augment day-to-day operations. Adam explained how Glyphic's AI assistant can summarize key points from sales calls, identify customer pain points, and provide actionable insights, all of which are already being used by several organizations.
We also discussed the challenges of starting up outside of a big tech company, the importance of moving at the right pace, and the dynamics of having two technical co-founders. Adam believes that if he hadn't started Glyphic, he'd still be at DeepMind, working on large language models and possibly developing a research assistant for academics.
As for the future of AI, Adam highlighted three trends: the need for better evaluation of increasingly complex AI models, the search for new data sources as we exhaust easily available data, and the development of AI models that can perform actions autonomously.
Adam's insights into the AI space and his vision for Glyphic were truly enlightening. It's clear that the intersection of AI and sales is ripe for innovation, and Glyphic is at the forefront of this transformation. I'm looking forward to delving deeper into these topics in the main podcast episode.

🕒 Time stamps -
01:08 - Introducing Guest Adam Liska
01:50 - Adam's First Job and Entry into AI
03:09 - Founding Glyphic and the Co-founder Story
04:36 - Building Slowly in Big Tech vs Startups
05:24 - The Technical Co-founder Dynamic
07:13 - Adam's Alternate Career Path
08:05 - The Concept of Research Assistants
09:32 - What is Glyphic?
11:58 - Glyphic's Market Presence and Funding
13:33 - AI Trends: Evaluation, Data, and Autonomous Agents
16:06 - AI Accessibility for Non-Technical Users
17:14 - Voice Chat with AI and Future Possibilities
18:03 - Closing Remarks and Thanks