Omar Tawakol

Co-founder & CEO, Rembrand · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestor@otawakol ↗LinkedIn ↗rembrand.com ↗

Omar Tawakol is an enterprise AI entrepreneur who founded data platform BlueKai, acquired by Oracle, and Voicea, acquired by Cisco. He currently serves as co-founder and CEO of AI startup Rembrand and as a partner at super{set}.

10statements → 5claims → 0claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential →

1 not yet assessed 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 assertions · 4 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Omar argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

268 words/min while actually speaking · 24.7 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Omar Tawakol: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,817 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said10 Episodes1

Everything Omar Tawakol said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Tawakol: Multitasking during meetings drops your cognitive performance by 20 IQ points

“You are literally 20 IQ points dumber when you are multitasking, and everybody's multitasking, and that's the problem.”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 4:37 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Insight

Tawakol: AI data flywheels take years to build and create strong moats

“So you start to get much more nuanced and better algorithm results, which lets you extend the surface area of what you're doing way beyond your competitors, which then gives a better experience, and you get a virtuous cycle, and it takes years to develop these…”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 10:10 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Tawakol: Most AI companies forget to label false negatives in their data

“False negatives are harder And most companies will do solutions like this and forget to figure out how to label the false negatives.”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 11:47 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Insight

Tawakol: Enterprise AI demands significantly higher accuracy tolerances than consumer AI

“If you tell Alexa to play a song and she plays the wrong one, no problem. You tell Eva to update Salesforce and automatically update Salesforce record, and it's the wrong record, there's a problem.”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 23:11 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Insight

Tawakol: AI transcription needs human-in-the-loop systems for acceptable user experiences

“What they don't realize, it's pretty hard for a human to understand the last few percentage points of accuracy, how that impacts the experience, and typically in many areas, like in transcription and other areas, it's a pretty bad impact if you're not, you kno…”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 3:37 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Assertion Not publicly verifiable

Tawakol: Oracle Data Cloud grew into a $500 million business

“By the time, you know, we went into the Oracle data cloud and continued to grow the business and make acquisitions, it was a five hundred million dollar business.”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 9:13 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Insight

Tawakol: AI development teams require statistics experts, not just software engineers

“So these kinds of judgment errors are just very commonplace, and that's why you obviously need people on the team who aren't just You know, ah, really good at writing the code, and you also knew people very familiar with statistics.”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 14:03 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Tawakol: Voicera uses human error correction for 1% of processed audio

“We end up doing the error correct about one percentage of the audio time.”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 22:39 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Tawakol: Over 200 companies are building meeting infrastructure software

“There's like, 220 companies doing that.”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 4:26 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Disclosure

Tawakol: Voicera bootstrapped its voice AI using phone transcripts and Mechanical Turk

“Buying available data assets in terms of You know, voice that's out there, voice over the phone, transcribed voice over the phone, which we did, and then we went out and we bought labels through things like Mechanical Turk.”

Omar Tawakol Sep 28, 2017 ▶ 10:50 AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
AI and a Different Type of Competitive Advantage // Omar Tawakol, Voicera (FirstMark's Dat	Sep 28, 2017	21m

Omar Tawakol

The record, in short

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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