We chat with Andrew Mason, a serial entrepreneur who has worked on Groupon, Detour, and now Descript. His latest company harnesses machine learning for automatic transcription, but also for more unique features. Messed up a line or mispronounced a name? Descript can generate new words from scratch that match a speaker's voice.
Episode Notes
Mason began his career as a developer, went on to be a CEO, but also found time to produce 80s alt rock album full of advice on how to run your startup.
Slack began life as a video game company, eventually pivoting to make an internal chat tool it had built into its main business. Descript had a similar journey, taking the editing software Mason and his team developed at Detour, and moving it to become the center of a new business after Detour was acquired by Bose.
Headquartered in Montreal, Lyrebird is the AI division of Descript . It was founded by PhD students studying under Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Prize in 2019 for his pioneering research into deep learning and neural networks.
Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Avinash, who explained what to do with a invalid syntax error that arises while running an AWS command