Henry: Square acquired Khosla-backed ML startup around 2018 for AI tools
Alyssa Henry · No Priors Ep. 44 | With Former Square CEO Alyssa Henry · Dec 14, 2023 · at 15:28
Former Square CEO Alyssa Henry explains how Square acquired a machine learning startup introduced by board member Vinod Khosla around 2018 to build early AI and GPT merchant tools.
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“Vinod Khosla was on our board for years and he had a portfolio company that was being courted by another company to acquire them. And Vinod called me up and said, Alyssa, you should go talk to these guys. And see if maybe, like, Square might be, ah, an interesting place for them. So, I met the two founders, Stanford Machine Learning, PhD folks, and they walked me through kind of what they were doing. It was slightly different context, but just got super excited about the potential there, as well as the two people on their team, and so we acquired that company in, I want to say, 2018 or something, and put them to work on kind of stitching together, but some of these customer facing experiences leveraging some of the early work that they'd done”
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