Simple Emotion — The Stanford Journey
Today we are excited to announce our investment in SimpleEmotion. As a company, they provide a novel way of doing not just sentiment analysis, but true emotional analysis. What’s exciting about SimpleEmotion is their proprietary acoustic models and machine learning algorithms. Their analysis of audio generates emotional and demographic information directly; whereas, competitors do transcription and then text analysis. Humans communicate with more than just words; and SimpleEmotion is helping computers do the same.
Before I jump into why we invested in SimpleEmotion, let’s talk about how I met the team. To do that, we need to rewind the clock four years.
O-T-E-R-O
Four years ago I was a Resident Assistant in a dorm, at Stanford, called Otero. My job was simple, make 80-ish kids feel at home, welcomed, and part of something bigger. My job was to bring together 17–19 years olds from across the country and across the globe.
Sounds easy right?
That turned into an experience I’ll never forget. I learned a lot about myself during that year, but what I didn’t know at the time was that I was laying the foundation of a future investment.
You see, in that group of Frosh, that I welcomed to Otero that day, were Matt Fernandez, Mark Schramm, and David Beam. Their introduction to me, and to Stanford, is summed up by the video we showed them during their first dorm meeting, later that night, after all 80-ish freshman had settled into their new rooms and met their roommates for the first time.
Embarrassing introduction out of the way. The rest of that year showed me how incredibly intelligent not only Mark, David, and Matt were, but how intelligent Stanford students could be. In Otero, during that year, companies were born, friendships were made, and community forged. One of those companies was SimpleEmotion.
The Team
While my story with the SimpleEmotion began with Stanford, the founding story of SimpleEmotion actually started in high school. Matt and Akash began SimpleEmotion as a high school project their senior year. They continued working on the project throughout their summers while at Stanford and MIT. When graduation time came around, the team had expanded to include David Beam (Stanford), Bradley Reyes (Stanford), Mark Schramm (Stanford), and Zachary Shute (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
Besides all attending extraordinary schools and studying computer science & engineering, the team also all turned down amazing job offers to work at SimpleEmotion. Why?
Why would a extraordinary UI/UX developers, Front-end/back-end developers, and data scientists turn down high paying jobs?
Because they all see and understand the same thing that led Storm to invest.
Investing in SimpleEmotion
They understand that there’s a voice to digital revolution happening. That this revolution has led to new technologies that allow the human voice to control our access to digital information and to control our physical environments. Our voice is becoming the bridge that our keyboards have played for decades, and really we are only in the first innings.
Voice is becoming the bridge that our keyboards have played for decades.
With the increased use of voice enabled technologies comes a whole new era of information extraction. Before, our machines were relegated to text commands — commands that are cold and emotionless. But in the world of voice comes the ability to understand a level of emotional situational awareness. This emotional situational awareness is used by humans daily. It’s what allows us to understand sarcasm, fear, happiness, and sadness.
Think about the following exchange:
Mom: “How was your day?”
Child: “It was good.”
A computer today would take the child’s response literally — that the day was good. But as humans, we know that the way in which that response was said— the emotion and tone behind it — can change it’s meaning. It changes how the Mom will respond, drastically. That’s exactly what SimpleEmotion provides, emotional awareness.
Today is nothing but the beginning of a long journey for the SimpleEmotion team. As a firm, we’re excited to be backing and working together with such extraordinary engineers.