 Hi, Jefferyk here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto offices and we love to get founders of companies and really hear and bring to you what's going on here in Silicon Valley. It's an exciting time and I'm really excited for this next segment joined by a long time friend. We were just talking off camera. I think I've known Ben for almost 20 years. Ben Chung, the co-founder and CEO of Genie. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. Absolutely. So I want to give everybody just kind of a quick update. What is Genie? Genie is a scheduling service, but it's completely powered by artificial intelligence. It plugs into your messaging system so that you can call upon it to get a meeting schedule and it gets it done instantaneously right away and just like a real assistant would. So Genie's one of these great little applications. It seems like a very simple process, scheduling meetings, right? It's a nightmare that we all have to do all the time. Turns out it's not a simple process at all. As a human or as a computer. And as we were talking before, the value of getting meetings done well, done right, done efficiently is actually really high and much greater than people probably perceive it to be. So it's a great problem space for you guys to attack, but you're attacking it a little bit different. Because as you said, scheduling has been around forever. So what are you guys doing different at Genie? Yeah. The big thing that I think many people have tried, you know, I think there was a company pretty well known called Tungal that people love that tried to be for, but didn't really go very far. I think what's really different right now is that the artificial intelligence technology behind that is already reached a level of sophistication to a degree that we can actually impersonate a person that so that we can have Genie plug into your email or your messaging system, for example, and you can just use natural language in English to tell Genie to schedule a meeting and Genie can actually take a look at your calendar and also consult your invitees and taking a look at their availability and actually come out with a meeting time and get that book on your calendar instantaneously. So we believe that what people has been missing is really that simple, easy experience where you just tell Genie to do it, Genie will just do it. Like you have an admin that would cause a lot of money. And a lot of people are familiar with Siri, right? It's probably their first kind of interaction or at scale interaction with kind of artificial intelligence. So what are the things that you can do with that type of horsepower, both on the hardware side, Ben and I used to work with big horsepower microprocessors back in the Intel days, you know, both on the hardware side, but then also on the software side that you just couldn't do before the way that you do it now through the natural language. Yeah, I think the big, yeah, like you mentioned, most people have experience with natural language processing through Siri or Google Now. I think many people quite honestly have not had the best experience there because the issue is that they try to make it look like you can do so many different things. But in fact, the artificial intelligence technology is not there yet to be able to really act like a complete human. So the way that we approach it, say let's kind of see if we can focus the context on just scheduling meetings. Can you build a similar person that understands scheduling meetings so well, understand the language around scheduling meetings so well that it can actually, you know, gets you perfect meeting times and understands you perfectly versus sometimes you tell Siri to do something that doesn't understand. Right, right. So it's very similar analogy to like, if you say like, can I buy a robot today that does all the house cleaning and does everything? No, but you can buy a robot that only does full cleaning and it does it pretty well for a reasonable price. Right. And that's kind of what we think the AI technology is today with the service kind of work like scheduling meetings. Right, and you talk about it on the website at genie.me, you know, the language that you use. It's coffee meetings, it's a breakfast meeting, right? It's a hangout, it's lunch. It's like regular language and it's this week or next week, you know, really using that natural language. How, in your experience, when people use it, right? I'm sure people say, well, there's no way this can work. How do you see their behavior changing after they interact with the application a little bit? Yeah, actually the interesting thing that we find is that when we started building the system, we say, well it has to be like taking account of all the corner cases. Who knows what people would say and who knows what exactly they would, the way that they would express themselves to genie to get a meeting schedule. Actually what we find is that people are like creature habits. So once they start telling genie a certain way that they like and they just keep doing it consistently. So in a way that the artificial intelligent layer, yes, it requires some kind of good amount of sophistication but it's not why it was not crazy. We tend to be creature of habits and we use similar vocabularies that other people use. So that part, it took a little bit of time but it wasn't insurmountable. Right, and we talk a lot about in this machine learning space about machines starting to teach themselves. Where are you guys on that kind of journey in terms of how much of it do you have to teach? How much does it pick up on its own? How does that kind of get sorted out? We are still at a stage where we're more focused on we are teaching the machine the human sensibility so that when it comes out with a meeting time it doesn't seem like irrational to the person that is serving. So the teaching aspect is still more predominant right now because we are a small company who's starting out. We can see the learning aspect become more and more predominant as we have more users and we get to know the users more intimately. Just like a real person would and we can start using their habits and the learnings and maybe start applying it to similar demographics. Right, now the next thing is we talk a little bit offline is really how you're able to build on the backs of a lot of other technologies that's out there specifically obviously mobile and cloud and big data and APIs, right? Because usually within kind of a typical world and Outlook world or even a Google Calendar world you have to grant people access to your calendar and there's this whole, do I let people in my calendar? I'd love for them to see my business stuff but I don't want to see when I'm going to the dentist or whatever. How do you deal with kind of the whole permissions and how does the application actually interact with someone who maybe they don't have access to the shared calendar? Right, yeah. I think that's one of the great things that have been happening out there in the industry is that pretty much any service that you that are available out there, they have built pretty good APIs and I have to kind of command Google for doing this. For example, for Google calendars, it actually gives very, very good APIs that have good level control so that we can just ask for just the bare minimum permission that we require and then it's a one click solution, one click experience for the use of the grant as a permission and thereafter we can just kind of pull everybody's calendar availability together and come out with the best time for you. Versus before, first of all, you can't even access people's calendar because they're stored away in a service and where they're blocked by firewall. And even if you can access, there is no API for it but now, even with exchange calendar, Google calendar, even Apple iCloud Client calendar, there is APIs available and we spend a whole lot of time engineering ourselves against those systems so that we can provide a very simple experience for the users. Right, right. And what about kind of some of the softer nuances within calendaring in terms of, I don't want to do it right after I get back from lunch in case I'm running late or conflicts back to back, time zones, how about all those types of nuances? How do you work with those? Yeah, those are some of the things that we did extensive training to the AI system and we actually trained ourselves by interviewing a lot of admins who are really good at scheduling meetings and who gets really good praises from the executives that they serve. So we kind of learned some of those nuances about like, for example, you probably don't want to schedule a meeting right at nine o'clock because sometimes traffic people run late, you don't want to schedule a meeting late in the afternoon right before people leave for work because they want to wrap a few things up and they don't want to kind of just go off and then have to rush out to their car. So we take a lot of those kind of nuances, you probably don't schedule a meeting back to back in a row with four different meetings and exhaust your executive out. So we take a lot of those into account. We have like probably thousands of algorithms that weigh the different things, time zones, and what if you have these special students that with the time zone and that it's right next to lunch, what would you do? So we did a lot of analysis and kind of trained the machine to make the right decision. Excellent, so just before we get off this topic, where do people go to sign up? Yeah, it's just simple. Just go to genie.me and we'll get you going. Simple, so now I want to shift gears a little bit. Like we've known each other for a long time. You were at Intel, VMware, you've been around the block in the Valley, hardware, software, and then you decided to go out on your own. Talk a bit about how you came to that decision. What was it that kind of pushed you from the comfort of ESOPs and everything kind of taken care of to this kind of bold new adventure that really powers Silicon Valley. Is it guys like you that are leaving the comforts of successful companies to branch out and do your own thing? Yeah, I think I have to kind of attribute that to the Silicon Valley culture here, where going out and taking risks is not something that would be viewed as dumb later on. And if you didn't succeed, it's actually a batch of honor rather than saying that you completely failure. So some of that culture here really kind of helps a lot in terms of helping make a decision. The other thing that I kind of learned from the process is that for people that haven't gone into it, you think about it, you always stop with the financial questions like, well, what if this happened and I have no income for this amount of time, this and that? And actually, the thing that I learned from is that after starting the company, I realized that the job market is so good here and if you have technical talent, you are in so much demand, the financial question is actually more. It's really a question about are you willing to take on the challenge? Are you going to be persistent enough to take on the challenge? Do you have enough courage to carry it through when it looks like it's going to hell? Would you be able to do that or are you going to just give up? You're going to be crying. Would you be able to always be optimistic and just say, I'm going to just make it happen no matter what? I think that is kind of, to me, like after starting the company, it's like a growing up experience to say, I felt like I finally grew up. Right, that's funny. I want to shift gears, talk a little bit about Wharton. We both went to Wharton together and it's just funny you say that when I worked at the Entrepreneur's Center at school, we would have these local entrepreneurs come in and I basically always tried to talk them out of it as aggressively as I could and then at the end of the meeting, I would say, well, if I can talk you out of it after 10 minutes of not knowing anything about your topic, you probably shouldn't go into it because you don't have the perseverance to really push it on through because that's a hard part. So talk about business school. Was it a good thing to do? Is it a bad thing to do? I think a lot of people always wonder, should I go to business schools or a good ROI? Now you've been out of it for a while, you've done some big companies, you've done some little companies, looking back, was it the right decision? Yeah, I think that is, I don't think there is a right answer for everybody per se. I mean, for me personally, I do feel like it's the right decision but the way that I look at it is not about economics. I mean, because economics is really hard to attribute. Like, you know, I got a certain amount of income from this job, was it because of the business school or it wasn't? I think it's really, looking back, what do you feel like you had, what kind of experience that you had first of all? Did you look back and say, well, I have really found memories of those two years I spent over there at one? Or number one, so I do feel that I have that. And secondly is that do you feel like at that time you really kind of help you to build your skill set as a person? And yeah, maybe some of those skills will yield to big monetary rewards. Some of them don't. Maybe just make you a better person, more approachable by people and understand broader set of topics better. I felt that yes, for me that definitely helped in terms of giving me the broader skill set that I need as a founder of a company. Excellent. So before we go, I'm going to give you the last word. What are you excited about? What are some of the next hurdles you're trying to climb over the next several months? Yeah, we're just coming out of stealth mode right now. So what's really exciting is really kind of start opening the Gini up to the whole wide world of people. We have people from non-English speaking countries using Gini and I really didn't expect that but now they're on the system so we have to figure out how to make it work for them. So I think what's exciting is really, suddenly we get the exposure to this broader set of people and you're seeing the metrics ramping up and you kind of frantically just make it work. Make it work like you promise. That's great. Well, thanks Ben for stopping by. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much. Absolutely. So I'm Jeff Frick. He's Ben Chung with Gini. You're watching Cube Conversations. Thanks for watching.