2015
May Habib founded her first company, Cordoba, in 2015 after years working in venture capital.
“After years of working in venture capital, May founded her first company, Cordoba, in 2015.”
Topic
May Habib
12 facts from 1 episode, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2020
Writer, the AI company led by May Habib, was founded in 2020 and is valued at $1.9 billion.
“Writer, which May founded in 2020, is now valued at $1.9 billion.”
2023
May Habib says that in 2023 Writer described the dominant design for generative AI as language models plus retrieval, guardrails and an AI studio.
“in 2023, we said dominant design and generative AI looked like LLMs and retrieval and guardrails and an AI studio”
Undated
The arrival of transformer neural networks, the architecture behind large language models, led May Habib to see opportunities beyond translation.
“But when transformers hit the scene, a kind of neural network architecture that bred LLMs, May saw new opportunities.”
Undated
Rana El Kaliouby says May Habib was born in Lebanon and grew up in Canada, which Habib confirms.
“You, I believe, were born in Lebanon and then grew up in Canada. Is that right?”
Undated
May Habib says Writer builds 'blueprints' for agents rather than fixed workflows because workflows are too deterministic for goal-oriented agents.
“in Writer, we build blueprints, we don't build workflows, because that's that's very deterministic”
Undated
May Habib says conventional search is keyword-based while language models prefer comprehensive paragraphs and sentences, which shapes generative engine optimization.
“So much of conventional search is keywords based, but LLMs really like nice, comprehensive paragraphs and sentences”
Undated
May Habib says Writer's top thirty or so customers have a net revenue retention of 217%, meaning they are roughly tripling their spend.
“our top thirty-ish customers are at 217% NRR. You know, this is customers that are tripling spend with us”
Undated
May Habib says Writer does not train its models on customer data and that they are trained on synthetic data.
“We don't use their data for training, or the models are actually trained on completely synthetic data.”
Undated
May Habib says not training on customer data has become standard, and that OpenAI also no longer does so after a certain level of customer spend.
“it's become table stakes to not train models on folks's data, right? OpenAI's not doing that either anymore after a certain level of spend”
Undated
May Habib says Writer's most successful customers roll AI out to large groups of clinicians in healthcare and use it to grow their business.
“The most successful customers, right, that that we have seen are going to groups of 300, 400, 500 in healthcare, nurses, doctors, clinicians”
Undated
May Habib says Writer's workforce is more than 40% women and balanced across teams.
“we're more than 40% women, um, and pretty even across all teams”
Episodes