Startup Spotlight #11: Datasaur

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I got the chance to speak with Ivan Lee, co-founder and CEO of Datasaur, about what he’s working on at his startup and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Lee serves as the Founder and CEO of Datasaur.ai. Datasaur builds data labeling software for ML teams working on NLP. After graduating from Stanford with a Computer Science degree, he has spent his career working in the machine learning, search and gaming industries. Lee's driven by building cohesive teams and crafting technological breakthroughs into meaningful user experiences.

Startup Spotlight: Datasaur

Problem: Today, we see most companies relying on Excel spreadsheets or half-baked internal tools to handle their data labeling. These methods are not only slow (sometimes taking days to label simple datasets) but they are error-prone and hurt the performance of the final machine learning (ML) model.

Market: As ML becomes ubiquitous over the coming decade, organizations will need to find an efficient and scalable process to label their existing data to train their ML algorithms. Since ML is a "garbage-in, garbage-out" technology, quality training data is critical to deploying accurate solutions.

Solution: Datasaur's software comes with ML-assisted labeling and workforce management features, giving you the tools you need to generate higher quality data, greater visibility into your team’s productivity, and significant cost savings. On average, our clients have been able to label data over 100% faster and, more importantly, with fewer errors.

Team: Datasaur's second-time founder Ivan Lee graduated with a CS degree from Stanford and is backed by YC, Initialized Capital, and the CTO of OpenAI. The full team of 10 has been remote from the start and spread across 5 different cities, from San Francisco to Bali.

Recent Success:

Lee: I think we've been diligent about listening to our users and building the core feature set they need. We started by optimizing our interface for basic text labeling. We next observed that workforce management was a big issue for many of our users and fleshed out that side of the platform. We now spend a majority of our time continuing to build out workforce management and system intelligence, and our feature set is unmatched by any other solution in the market. When customers discover us, they're thrilled to find we've built what they would have spent the next three years building out internally! 

Recent Struggle:

Lee: It's been an interesting challenge shifting gears from business-to-consumer (B2C) to business-to-business (B2B). While a lot of my learnings around product and engineering practices have been transferrable, sales definitely pulled me out of my comfort zone. It's been an interesting exercise to balance optimizing sales pitches with my own personality, but I think I'm finally getting the hang of it. I have loved that our product roadmap is simpler to prioritize - our users are not at all hesitant or unclear about stating what they want! 

Founder Advice:

Lee: Founding a company is hard during normal times. It's even more challenging given the current atmosphere. Make sure to take the time and space to take care of yourselves, so you have the ability to look after your team.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Lee: Here are three founders you should check out next!

• Thariq Shihipar, Founder of Multiverse: Multiverse is a next-generation tabletop RPG platform, inspired by Roblox and Dungeons & Dragons.
• Melissa Du, Founder of Cadence: Cadence replaces boring meetings with daily, async updates.
• Mathew Pregasen, Founder of Battlecard: Battlecard enables companies to document, practice, and share their sales playbooks.

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Looking for a job with the hottest startups delivered to your inbox three times per week? Subscribe to my newsletter, Founder to Founder (F2F): f2f.substack.com. Check out my latest F2F story: Startup Spotlight #43: Index.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out my other work on LinkedIn and my personal website, frederickdaso.com. Follow me on Twitter @fredsoda, on Medium @fredsoda, and on Instagram @fred_soda.