The Voice of the Customer Cubed: Meet Monterey AI CEO and Founder, Chun Jiang

Startup Tri-Valley Podcast – Chun Jiang

 Yolanda  

So today I’d like to welcome Chun Jiang.

She is the CEO and co founder of Monterey AI, which is a Tri-Valley company located here in Dublin. Chun, welcome to the pod. 

Chun  

Thank you for having me. 

Yolanda

So let’s start off. If you could just tell us about who you are. What your company does and what you do in the company. And a little bit, not to reveal too much of your secret sauce, but your technical innovation or business innovation that makes Monterey AI unique in the market.

Chun

Ooh, that’s a lot of questions. Yes, awesome. I’ll start with myself. My name is Chun Jiang and I’m CEO and Co-founder of Monterey AI. I come from a data and ML background. And so my first job out of college was doing product and design at the autonomous driving department at Uber. And after that, I went to a small company called Scale AI.

And now they’re like, I don’t know, an 8 billion or 10 billion dollar company. They’re doing this kind of data labeling for machine learning. And then about one and a half years ago I started Monterey AI with my co founder, Ben Kramer. On helping enterprises and helping companies to really make sense of this like unstructured data.

So what Monterey AI does, we call it a co-pilot for product insights. So we help companies to make it super easy to aggregate all your support tickets, sales transcript, user feedback, social media mentions, service, to put them all together and to generate product insights for product teams.

So usually this would take a lot of manual hours. And then we all know, like the biggest leverage for customer certification and resolving customer tech issues is to improve the product and service. Traditionally all this data is buried in this kind of really large amount, large scale of messy data.

And then we make it more obvious and easy to consume. So yeah, that’s what we do. I think for a technical secret sauce I don’t know. I think our whole team comes from this kind of large scale of  data analytics background. So spending a lot of our resources and time to make the platform works, right?

Because right now every company is like an AI company, but if you dig a little bit deeper into what everyone is building there, what is it working, what is not, what is just like a marketing stunt, what is like really putting into the production. I don’t know. We just spent a lot of time talking with our customers leveraging a variety of in-house models, our open source models or closed source models.

And to make this like product experience and platform, I really work for customers. 

Yolanda

Wow. So it sounds like what you’ve taken is a very deep voice of the customer approach and brought that into how you develop your AI. 

Chun

Yeah. We are taking the voice of customer approach to develop a voice of customer programs for voice of customer teams.

Yolanda

That’s amazing. Voice of the customer cubed. 

Chun

Exactly. 

Hazel

So tell me a little bit about what made you venture out and create your own business. Like what was the. Impetus for that. 

Chun

Yeah. And then I think my first entrepreneurship try was when I was at kindergarten trying to sell customized stickers to kids.

And I even invented this kind of like waitlist mechanism that parents needed to pay me more to get their kids like stickers, like faster. So I don’t, I think I grow up like really wanted to Doing my own business and then after college, of course, I was like one to learn more from like startups from really successful startups in the world first to understand like what it takes from zero to one and one to 10.

And then after being in this training a while, I think like I’m ready. And then my co-founder Ben Kramer, he’s actually also my partner. So he’s always also grown up in that kind of underprivileged family. So we’re like, Hey, I was like, Ben, we should do something together. Cause we both just wanted to, do something and test it out.

Learn a lot about being a business owner, being a company owner. And here we are. 

Yolanda

Wow. So, did you grow, you and Ben, did you grow up here in the Tri-Valley or did you move here? 

Chun

I grew up in China. I went to Cornell for college, so I moved to the U. S. about 10 years ago. Ben grew up in Pittsburgh and then he moved here a couple years, seven years, eight years ago.

Yolanda

Wow. What attracted you? 

Chun

Which one? 

Yolanda 

To the Tri-Valley. Sorry, both of you. 

Chun

Yeah, got it. So, when we moved to California, we spent like two or three years in San Francisco. And then during COVID, it was, the city itself was definitely not like feeling very safe for Asians there. And then at the same time, we really wanted a dog.

So we’re like, okay, what are some areas like or cities that we really like that we can move to, right? And so we did this kind of tour in the South Bay around   Foster City or   San Mateo but also in the East Bay. And the thing like, The thing that Dublin really sticks out to me is it’s very clean, safe and new.

And then not taking too much of the bias of  my personal experience or leaving the space, but I do think there are really few cities that you see this kind of massive investment in like infra in development a lot. And then at the same time, another thing I really like is I can see when we were tooling around areas we saw a lot of things, like activities that were organized by the government.

So all those, all the things and  festivals or school or afterschool programs. I never experienced that in living on the East coast or living in San Francisco. And that was the thing that stuck to me. I’m like, Ben, I think this city is like really growing there. And this was like four or five years ago when the city was not that popular yet.

But for the past four and five years,  we saw that it’s always the fastest growing city there. And then this is really good to pair with our company. Cause when we want to grow the company, we wanted to find a place that gave us this kind of like pro growth mentality there.

Right. But yeah. It’s a bit of a ramble in there, but I definitely love the city. 

Yolanda

That’s amazing. 

Hazel

That is great. So talk to us a little bit  for our audience, talk to us about defining some of these terms like artificial intelligence and machine learning and such. 

Chun

Yeah, so, I will say artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Sometimes they are used interchangeably. But in general, like artificial intelligence, you can think of it’s definitely not human intelligence, but it learned from human intelligence. So really allowing the computers or allowing the programs to perform the task or perform complicated tasks for you.

So, for example, like recognizing it’s like a water bottle and understanding what needs to be done today. Helping you like organizing different life schedules. And then you also see cars moving self self-driving in themselves. So letting the machine tool learn about performing complicated or complex tasks for humans.

This is like artificial intelligence. And the other point is like, artificial intelligence can always learn and improve by itself. So it’s like teaching a kiddo, right? Like growing up, like. Once you lay the foundation for them, they can start exploring the world by themselves.

And then machine learning on the other side is more like a more practical term used by computer science society. And so it’s like, okay, how do we put together the data? How do we architect the models to allow this kind of artificial intelligence to happen? ’cause if you wanted to teach a computer about something like: 

Okay, when you see this water bottle, it is a water bottle. For that you need to have, like millions and trillions of water bottle images there for the machine to learn. So the whole process of collecting data, cleaning the data, building a model on top of it, and then iterating on top of that is called machine learning practice there.

The other term that might be helpful for the audience to understand here is the large language model that the term has, like, been so popular in the market right now. So a large language model is mainly to focus on, like, machine learning, but for the language part, so really allowing the model to, like, understand what you’re talking about using the text, like, input. And then when the model I communicate back to you, when the AI communicates back to you, it’s also in the form of text. So yeah. 

Yolanda

Thank you. That’s really helpful. So I want to loop back to your kindergarten story. Awesome. Because that’s what it shows is, obviously then you weren’t doing AI, but you had this idea of paying for the waiting list, which is a business.

Chun

That was the early 

concept of NFT, I think. Yeah. 

Yolanda

So I’m really, we’re really interested in kind of the piece of what in your life do you think has prepared you to innovate? And also, how has some of that innovation translated, whether it’s technical or business into Monterey AI? 

Chun

Yeah I think in early childhood, when Ben and I talked about this a lot cause investors would ask us, right? Like, why do you start a business? What is motivating you? Lot of things that how we observe, like our parents be their like own business, how they like really putting like customers on the centrics, how they like iterate business models, how they are pivoting, how they struggling, how they like getting things like working off this, like those of our parents are.

Really humble people, they don’t, they never educate us or tell us that this is how you should do things, but we  observe everything and remember everything. And then when we are growing the team, when we are testing that idea, when I’m talking with my customers, all this memory will flood in and we’re just like, feel very natural of doing the right thing there.

I think that on the innovation side I grew up trying to do things the easiest way. So it’s like, trying everything to automate the things that I need to do. So one of the reasons that we started Monterey AI was when I was at Uber, every time I had product ideas, oh, I want to test it.

It is so hard for me to get relevant data and evidence to support my idea. I need to wait for a data scientist. I need to wait for customer success. I need to wait for a sales team to give a little bit of silo data from their department and try to merge things together. I don’t like wasting life and time doing this kind of back and forth and the waiting, and then.

And getting to do things together is the way to manual for me. So I will always think from the automation side, like, okay, how do I automate this? How do I make my life easier? I was, that is probably one of the innovation, like forces 

myself. 

Yolanda

Interesting. So if you find yourself doing something more than once, your first thought is, how do I not have to do this then if I know I’m going to do it?

Chun

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 

Hazel

Yeah. And I love that you want to make your life easier. Yeah. Many of us do. 

Chun

Exactly. 

Yeah. Yeah. The other day I was looking at our washing and the dryer machine. I’m like, why did you do that? There hasn’t been a huge market for combining these two. Why do I need to spend time switching the laundry from one side to the other one?

So yeah. From big things like business to small things like life. I always think about how to automate it. 

Yolanda

So automate and optimize. 

Chun

Exactly. Exactly. 

Yolanda

And bringing it back to that ethos you grew up with and that your partner grew up with, which is this customer focus, which is really amazing.

Not everyone has such an external focus. So it’s an interesting combination of knowing what you yourself want. Like I want my life to be easier. And at the same time, Having the humility to say, I don’t know how my customer thinks their life would be easier. I have to listen to them.

That’s a very unique and strong combination. 

Chun

Thank you. 

Hazel

So as we go into how you’ve raised your seed funding, I’m just curious, the name Monterey AI, where does the name come from? 

Chun

I bought that domain about Four years before we started the company. I knew it would be something around AI. So, I picked AI as the domain, like ending there and then Monterey is always some place that I would love just to drive there during the weekend.

If I want to, some like personal time and then let the ocean calm, calm me down a little bit. So that’s like my favorite area. So yeah, that’s a location. Yeah. I love that. I love that.

Hazel

I always like to understand the naming behind a business 

Chun

Not much behind it, but, well, I come in and 

Yolanda

It’s really personal, it’s like naming a child.

Hazel

So talk to us a little bit about your seed funding and how that has gone. 

Chun

We raised about 3. 4 million about one and a half years ago. So we went through Y Combinator and then after Y Combinator, we raised a seed round from a lot of my favorite angels and like really good, like safe funds there.

Yeah, we’re being really capital efficient. I think that is. Another thing that the current wave of AI startups have learned from the last  boom, about two years ago, is like, if you’re building something really good, people will pay for it. And then at the same time with all this AI innovation the team can get more and more efficient there.

Yolanda

So your capital efficiency is built in. 

Chun

Yeah, it’s the same with automation. I’m like, okay, how do I optimize? 

Yolanda

What do you think besides the innovation of your company itself, what about the Tri-Valley ecosystem contributed to your success? 

Chun

Location is really good. I think travel is in the sweet spot close to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

But it fits into my personality more. It’s humble, but also growing really fast. So we have this kind of advantage of getting close to all the resources we need but also can get away from all the distractions there. So that’s like my favorite part about Tri-Valley.

And again, like, the investment that the city is putting into all the programs all the like new buildings all the like, malls and the restaurants. I love growing with the city. This is something I definitely didn’t expect before we moved here, but now I’m appreciating it every day.

Yolanda

Nice. 

Hazel

Wonderful. Talk to us a little bit about your clients. Like, what are some of the projects you’re working on and your clientele? 

Chun

Yeah. One of the biggest clients that everyone probably knows is Comcast. So Comcast spends tons of time and money on really helping their customers, like, improve their experience there.

So what we do are two projects. The first one is working with their  customers, say from the Xfinity team to aggregate all the site data from  support tickets, instant reports, social media mentions and tell them like, Hey, how many people are having issues with using the streaming devices on this iPad because they need to update. How many people are having issues in this area versus that, and then are they a representative group or are they having issues because of the reliability of the provider there. So a lot of this kind of analytics on top of a really large amount of data.

And that’s something we help them to do. And the other use case would be helping them to better serve there internal employees. So they actually have a really large scale of employee survey data coming from their operation teams. And then if you think about how much companies are spending on training and making their operation team more efficient, that’s just massive.

So we gather all those data together and then tell them, Hey, this is what are the top opinions or feedback their tech operations have versus their retail operations. So the leadership, like, no, okay, where should we spend more resources on, what are some like repeating issues that we definitely need to solve there? How do we provide more support for specific areas like is that a local issue or is that a national issue? So a lot of great insights are getting mined from this data.  

Yolanda

That’s amazing. It’s a very powerful listening tool. And you’re listening to something that’s very unique and orthogonal to what, say, a PR listening tool would listen to, which isn’t so much related to the actual performance.

Chun

Yeah, that’s. I really, really like that analogy and we call it like listening at scale. So traditionally companies or organizations are spending a lot of time launching surveys, working with agencies. Everyone wanted to create this kind of personalized experience or trust with their customers.

But the biggest challenge there is that, okay, how do I listen to customer feedback at scale? And to help me build that relationship, and then we make that happen with AI. 

Yolanda

That’s amazing. I think especially what I really like about what you’re saying here is the personalization with AI, because I think that there’s often a perception that AI is removing a personal experience instead and taking the place of relationship and what you’re describing is applying AI to build a relationship to take things that are at large scale and create a customer experience that is actually very personal and to also use that having something happening at a large scale is important. It’s important for a company to know, for example, everyone is submitting the same complaint at this time or with this process or has experienced a slowdown and that there’s some power in addressing something that’s affecting a lot of people. It’s going to feel personal because that’s how it feels when you try and do something and it doesn’t work. It feels like the universe is frowning on you. So that’s I love that, that you’ve recognized the power of AI in creating and building relationships. 

Chun

Yeah, it’s definitely about how to use the AI and I think private sectors and public sectors have definitely had more responsibility to train that from . And like you said, like my guess is when people talking about AI is like taking away the personalization, is that okay, we are getting the same responses from support tech care, like all the time.

Or when you’re using AI you’re like getting, or you’re asking like chatGPT. The way they communicate it, communicate back to you, is like exactly the same across all the audiences, unless you’re prompting it really hard. Right. So I think about how to use the AI for the right thing and then what are the risks, what are the things that we can improve?

That’s like everyone’s who are building it and you should  communicate with the public more. 

Yolanda

That’s really, that’s really insightful. 

Chun

Yeah. 

Thank you. 

Hazel

And speaking of insightful, what are some of the things that you were surprised by as a founder, thinking of our audience in mind, those that our founders or looking to start up a company?

What are some of those challenges, surprises that you encountered?

Chun

Again, I think like building things in a scalable way, I am still learning more about it like every day. So I have, like, I do things extremely fast and then. I’m also very good at, like, connecting dots from different, like, concepts there. But, like, when you are communicating with the team, when you are growing the team, it’s important for me to break down things and to expand things one by one.

My co-founder is really good at it and I’m on the extreme side. Sometimes I get frustrated. I’m like, Ben, why can’t you understand me? I’m being very clear about this, right? But actually like from point A to point B people have different ways of understanding how the route is going from point A and point B.

And maybe, I’m the one who’s not providing enough of the environmental context for why I think this way of going from A to B. So a lot of like, communication, a lot of like, okay, how do you manage a team? That has been the biggest learning or personal growth I’ve ever built.

And it’s really fun. I think. Like, again, like we are trying to build a tool to allow the companies to, like, personalize this relationship with their millions of users, right? Like, it’s human, we should be better at AI. So, like, AI  can learn from us. 

Hazel

So, It’s a common theme, though, what you’re, what you’re sharing is the common theme, because many founders are used to doing the work and that’s what they want to do, but not leading the team and leading everyone in a direction, building the company.

Chun

Yeah. Sometimes you need to like, just forget about all the small tasks that you really wanted to do, like, shut myself from it, but really focus on the big picture. Yeah. What else? 

Hazel

What about lessons learned? Like, if you could go back and start, 

Yolanda

I want to jump in and ask because you’ve obviously learned a lot and I’m curious, what resources, how did you use to gain this skill that you’re, that you’ve built in managing teams and communicating and also that self awareness?

Because those two things came from a place of deep self awareness and most people don’t start with that.

Chun

So, yeah. I’m always very, like, brutally honest with myself. And then if taking all the emotions that way, I’m training myself, like training a model. If I’m not good at this part, I just need more data and practice to do it.

So it is optimizing myself and growing myself without getting like offended by that. Our team can yell at each other all the time. I don’t take, I don’t feel offended. Like whatever feedback they gave me but I was, I spent time thinking about, okay, if there’s a problem, how should I be better?

And then once you get used to it, it’s just like a routine for you. The same as when you’re doing a workout, right? Like you want to set a goal. And then if you’re not performing here, then you go online to find out. Okay. Why am I not getting the speed I’m doing yet?

Another really useful resource is talking with successful founders who are years ahead of us. Ask them about things like, Hey, when you were on that stage, how did you stop like this problem? And honestly, every company is different, but all the problems are pretty similar.

It’s like the angel founder, and then I was like, learned a lot from talking to them. 

Yolanda

So how did you find these founders? Was it through Y Combinator or just, you’ve just cold called people on LinkedIn and said, Hey. 

Chun

Yeah I’m definitely very lucky. I think since the very early stage of my career, I’ve had a really good mentor and  help from all the people that I admire.

Yeah, and then that’s another thing, another like tips for folks that want to start a company. Just don’t be afraid of reaching out to people who are maybe I don’t know, five or six levels above you in big companies. Because if you have very concrete questions people will love to help you, And, of course, like Y Combinator it’s giving us a lot of our resources to, like help us think through problems there.

And then, yeah. And then other than that, it’s a personal network, like all my angels. Yeah, as long as I have a very concrete, like things to ask they will have really sharp, answers right away. 

Hazel

Yeah. And that’s a common question is always the network. Like, how do people tap into that network? How did you create the network? So thank you for sharing that. 

What about here in the Tri-Valley? Like Livermore, Pleasanton, Dublin, San Ramon. Have you tapped into a network here? Or is this just across the state, across the country? 

Chun

Yeah. Across the state, across the country. I think we got reached out by some like teams and organizations or Tri-Valley AI Group and capital ventures after we’ll be closest around so excited to connect with them.

Hazel

Oh, that’s somebody we may want to tap into, right? For the AI summit.

Yolanda

Definitely. And I know  I did interrupt you Hazel, but I think what you were going to ask was related to who or what has been the most helpful to you and for your company’s growth, and we may have touched on that a little bit. But if there’s maybe any anything you haven’t talked about related to that?

Chun

Again, like the person I look up to the most is the CEO of Vercel.

Vercel is this kind of developer platform, and they’re a couple billion dollar unicorn. So their CEO’s name is Guillermo Rauch. He is the one. That show me like how a really good, like CEO and founder is always like hyper responsive, always like love helping and supporting people and always very focused on like a product of focus on like a serving the customers.

Sometimes I wonder how he has so much energy, like every day to always be on top of everything. But the way he likes it. Really help the team grow, help, like, his portfolio companies grow. And that, that is just someone that I really want to be one day. 

Yolanda

That’s amazing. It’s great to have a specific person to model.

Chun

Yeah sometimes, like learning by copying, right?

Yolanda

It’s definitely easier. Back to your, I want to make my life easier. 

Hazel

So where do you see Monterey going in the next three, five years? What are your goals, your long term goals and short term goals? 

Chun

Yeah, honestly, it’s just keep growing, serving customers. We have a lot of things on the roadmap from a product perspective.

So. I always talk about the vision of a product development simulation system. So right now the whole process of developing a product in tech companies involves like, okay, we need product managers. We need designers. We need engineers. And when you run a lot of like A B testing and to deploy to users and  get data from them for feedback.  A lot of  product improvements will be autonomous very soon. And then one of the reasons is that, okay, we are holding all this like real precious data gathered directly from the users. And then we know, like with the AI help, like how much prediction or how much correlation we’re going to have.

Between user feedback or to all the set productizations to like business outcomes. So building the platform to the stage that we can help serve generative, generative product design, generally customer responses that is super exciting for me. And then I think we’re definitely on the right path to it.

Yolanda

That’s amazing. 

That’s so powerful. Thank you. So taking generative to the next level, really. 

Yolanda

So, before I move on to my next question, actually, you’ve referenced your team a lot. How many people are you guys right now? And what’s the breakdown of sort of skill set backgrounds from your team? 

Chun

Yeah, we have seven people, mostly engineers. We’re also actually hiring another customer engineer. So who can help customers understand more about their data warehouse.

About how to use AI. So that’s an active role. If anyone has any like referrals, definitely find me. Yeah. So I think again, like with all AI innovation there are a lot of automations that we are putting on like marketing or sales outbound, engineering,  testing.

So, I think growing the team in the most efficient way, that is  my, and then like a passion there to see how efficient we can get there. But at the same time, not to burn everyone out. Right. Yeah. 

Yolanda

That sounds like a challenge. And that kind of brings me to what challenges as you look at your company’s future.

Chun

Yeah. I think one of the biggest challenge that we’re facing right now is like the whole education of AI there for the very early stage with like enterprises. And so we spend like – like a software company, right? Like we’re spending a lot of time doing consultants’ work. Nothing like we are selling the product like consultancy, but like we are spending time, a lot of time, like with customers helping them understand:  “Hey, if you want to deploy AI, if we want to deploy AI into your company, this is what we need.

This is the engineering resource we need from you to help clean the data.” And then how do you see Monterey AI will be on your, in your company for the next few years all this like deployment plan onboarding plan iteration just need a lot of time and resources from like both sides.

So again, like, how do we make that process repeatable for Montreal AI? That is. Something that I’m still thinking about. Sometimes it would be like, okay, yeah, this is just a common problem with data lakes, but. We wanted to find a way to solve that problem.

Yolanda

Do you see that as something that’s unique to Monterey AI or do you think other AI companies that are looking to serve the same types of customers are not direct competitors, but just similarly, do you think that’s probably something they’re encountering or is this very specific?

Chun

Definitely. This is. Definitely an industry problem. It is more challenging for us because Monterey AI is taking in a lot of sensitive data. So it’s just more stakeholders to align with.

Hazel

You answered some of the questions I was going to ask. I was curious about the team and understanding how big the team was and what are some things on the horizon. And what are some advice that you would give to someone that’s wanting to branch out and start tobe a founder, 

Chun

Keep going.

Like the biggest reason the company dies is because the founder gave up and the founder gets burned out. So definitely. Take care of yourself. And then,  if there are problems, then try to solve the problem. Keep it going. Don’t think too much about it. Okay. Am I going to fail?

Am I going to let this point anyone by really focusing on spending your mental resources on the product and the customers. And then, yeah everything will be okay. And just keep, keep refining and keep finding a way out. 

Yolanda

How do you create that balance yourself so that you’re not experiencing that burnout?

Chun

I think I definitely grew up in an environment where everyone put very high pressure and expectation on themselves. I was reading this book, like Excellent Sheep about, I think like 10 years ago. It was a book talking about how, like, people who go to Ivy League usually live pretty miserable, like mentally, because you’re always trying to hit the expectation that the society has for you.

But if you think on the other hand, I’m just like, I’m just like, okay. Whatever happened to me, actually, probably no one really cares, except from either 10 or 20 people who are really close to me. Right. And then on the other side, like, what is the source of my happiness? It happens when I’m building, growing and serving customers.

As long as you have like these two points click, you just fear nothing. Yeah. And then sometimes. I do think I would get carried away by emotion a little bit. Sometimes waking up one day. I’m like, okay. Oh my god We’re gonna be a billion company tomorrow.

Sometimes I’m like, oh, what oh, what are we doing? So I intentionally shut that emotion off and think about like, okay, what are the things that are driving the emotion? That will help me focus a bit. I know it’s a little bit more philosophical, but I’m trying to make it concrete, like tips for people.

Yolanda

That’s really helpful though. Using your emotion as information instead of getting drowned by it and asking some getting super curious about it is what you’re talking about. Getting curious about your emotion and leaning into the curiosity and not the emotion. 

Chun

Yeah. Yeah. 

You are putting that much better than I do.

Yolanda

So we covered a lot. Is there anything that you’d like to talk about that we didn’t ask about? 

Chun

Yeah, I think Monterey AI definitely has grown a lot in the past, like one and a half years. And then we’ve witnessed a lot of the industry change, especially in AI. So. For everyone in the audience, if you have, like, any feedback, if you want to try the product out, if you are looking for joining the team, definitely, like, find me, and I would love to take you out for coffee, especially in Tri-Valley.

Yeah, other than that, like, if I can be, like, any helpful to anyone in this area, let me know. 

Yolanda

That’s amazing. We will make sure and put how to get ahold of you in the show notes. 

Chun

Awesome

Hazel

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today and share your insights that are valuable.

Chun

Thank you so much. 

Yolanda

It has been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. 

Chun

Thank you.