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Full Transcript below.
Sometimes, the best insights can come after an interview ends.
That’s exactly what happened when Madrona Partner Jon Turow wrapped the official recording of our recent Founded & Funded episode with Douwe Kiela, co-founder and CEO of Contextual AI. The full conversation dove deep into the evolution of RAG, the rise of RAG agents, and how to evaluate real GenAI systems in production.
But after we hit “cut,” Douwe and Jon kept talking — and this bonus conversation produced some of the most candid moments of the day.
In this 10-minute follow-up, Douwe and Jon cover:
- Why vertical storytelling matters more than ever in GenAI
- The tension between being platform vs. application
- How “doing things that don’t scale” builds conviction early on
- The archetypes of great founders — and how imagination is often the rarest (but most valuable) trait
- Douwe’s early work on multimodal hate speech detection at Meta and why the subtle problems are often the hardest to solve
- Why now is the moment to show what’s possible with your platform — not just sell the vision
- It’s a fast exchange full of unfiltered insight on what it really takes to build ambitious AI systems — and companies.
And if you missed the full episode, start there.
This transcript was automatically generated and edited for clarity.
Jon: One thing I’m learning about, I talked to a lot of enterprise CTOs, as I’m sure you do, and a lot of founders, as I’m sure you do, and I feel like even when this kind of technology is horizontal, we say you go to market vertically, or by segment, or whatever, but I don’t even think that’s quite right, I think the storytelling is the thing that becomes vertical or segmented. When you speak to a CTO of a bank versus a CTO of a pharma company, or the head partner of a law firm, or whatever it would be, none of these people, their eyes will glaze over when we start to talk about chunking. But if we can talk about SEC filings and the tolerances in there, and a couple of really impactful stories that are in the language of those segments, that seems to go so far. I’ve seen it myself, and even when a student, customers will realize it’s the same thing. And so storytelling at a time like this, where there’s opportunity in every direction you look, feels like a thing that can be a superpower for you.
Douwe Kiela: It’s not easy, because it’s like, how vertical do you want to go? We don’t want to be Hebbia or even Harvey; we want Hebbia and Harvey to be built on Contextual, but the only way to do that is to maybe show that you can build a Hebbia and Harvey on our platform.
Jon: I’ll tell you about when I’ve done it right and when I did it wrong. When I did it right was in early days of DynamoDB, the managed NoSQL data store, and we said, “Dynamo is really useful for ad tech, for gaming, and for finance, probably.” It’s because there were key use cases in each of these domains that took advantage of the capabilities of NoSQL and were not too bothered by the limitations of NoSQL, we only have certain numbers of lookups and things like that. Astute customers could realize you could use Dynamo for whatever you wanted, but we didn’t say that ever. All of our market was we had customer references, and we had reference implementation, and that helped us, like you plant your feet really well. When I’ve done it badly, also shows the power of this technique. I remember I did a presentation about Edge AI, this was like 2016, at AWS re:Invent. Edge AI, we shipped the first Edge AI product ever at Amazon.
We showed how we were using it with Rio Tinto, which is a giant mining company doing autonomous mining vehicles. We chose that because it’s fun and sparks the imagination, and we thought would spark the imagination across a lot of domains. This is a re:Invent, so it was on a Thursday, I want to say, a Wednesday or a Thursday, that I did that presentation. On a Friday morning, before I was going to fly out, I got an urgent phone call from the CTO of the only other major mining company of that scale, saying, “I have exactly that problem. Can you do the same thing for me?” I thought, “Well, gee, I aimed wrong,” because I picked a market of two, I already had one. But it shows that if you really put it in people don’t necessarily use imagination, but if you put it in terms that are that recognizable, they can see themselves.
Douwe Kiela: Yeah. So I heard that, maybe it was Swami or someone senior in AWS, said, “The big problem in the market right now is not the technology, it’s people’s lack of imagination around AI.”
Jon: That sounds like a Swami.
Douwe: Swami or maybe Andy. Yeah, I don’t know.
Jon: It could be. I would also say that that’s a major role for founders on this spectrum. There will be, put you in a group with Sergey and Larry, right? And so there’s the Douwes, Sergeys, and Larrys, there’s the Mark Zuckerbergs who are only PHP coders, and there’s the domain experts who are visionaries, they’re missionaries about solving a real problem, and they understand the problem better than other people do, and they are not necessarily nuanced in what is possible, but they can hack it together, they can get it to work enough that they can get to a point to then build a team around them.
Douwe: Who’s the archetype there?
Jon: I would think about, this is not a perfect example, but I would think about pure sales CEOs.
Douwe: Benioff or something?
Jon: Yeah, or the guys who started Flatiron Health and Invite Media. They were not oncology experts, they understood their customers really well. Jeff Bezos was not a publishing expert, nor did he wrote code at all at Amazon, I’m not sure he ever checked one line of code in a production, but deep customer empathy and conviction around that. The story with Jeff is that the first book that was ordered on Amazon.com from a non-Amazonian was not a book that they had at stock. And the team told Jeff, “Sorry, we got to cancel this order.” And Jeff said like, “Hell, we do.” And he got in his car and he went to every bookstore in the city.
Douwe Kiela: Barnes & Noble, somewhere.
Jon: Yeah and he found it, and then he drove to the post office and he mailed it himself. He was trying to make a point, but he was also saying, “Look, we’re in the books business now and we promised our whole catalog. In the first order, you better believe we’re going to honor it.” So that’s what I think about. And you do things that don’t scale and the rest.
Douwe: Doing all the crazy stuff. All the VCs are saying, “Just do it SaaS, no services. Focus on one thing, do it well.” And all of that is true, but if you want to be the next Amazon, then you also have to not follow that.
Jon: Do things that don’t scale, and you figure out, you know and I know, eventually, you can get things to scale. One of the reasons, and you would know this so much better than I do, one of the reasons Meta invested as early as it did in AI was content moderation.You would like a social media business to scale with compute, but it was starting to get bottlenecked by how many content moderators, and that’s a lot slower and more expensive. How quickly and effectively can you leverage that up?
Douwe: That’s why they needed AI content moderation.
Jon: That’s why they needed AI.
Douwe: We’re doing all the multimodal content moderations. That was powered by our code base.
Jon: Wow. And what year?
Douwe: It was around 2018. We did hateful memes. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, the Hateful Memes Project, that was my thing. Where that came from was content moderation was pretty good on images and it was pretty good on text, like if there was some Hitler image, or whatever, or some obvious hate speech.
Jon: That’s kind of an easy one.
Douwe Kiela: Exactly. The most interesting ones, and people have figured this out, is like multimodal. It’s like I have a meme, so on the surface, to the individual classifiers, it looks fine, but if you put them together, it’s super racist, or they’re trying to sell a gun, or they’re dealing drugs, or things like that. Everybody at the time was trying to circumvent these hate speech classifiers by being multimodal. Then I’m on it, and I came in and we solved it.
Jon: How did you solve it?
Douwe Kiela: By building better multimodal models. So we had a better multimodal classifier that actually looked at both modalities at the same time in the same model. We built a framework, and we built the data set, and we built the models, and then most of the work was done by product teams.