A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI, the current zeitgeist, and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.
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Good morning. I love talking to AI founders of all types, from the early stage to those on their second companies after having success. It’s important to showcase the varying paths, perspectives, and philosophies.
While the current AI conversation is about maximizing efficiencies and reducing employee costs, this week’s founder is focusing on a specialty of AI that relies on retaining people and boosting profit.
He’s a trend spotter, that’s for sure.
Let’s jump in.
This week in AI:
Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion
This landmark AI copyright settlement is a win for authors, whose material was used to train Claude without permission.
Gemini #1 on app store
Thanks to the new AI image model, Nano Banana. Have you tried it yet?
YouTube announce AI generative tools for Shorts
Creating Shorts is about to get easier with Veo3, a text-to-video model and an “Edit with AI” feature.
From Llama Farmer to Deep Tech Founder

Ross Finman grew up on a llama farm in Idaho, homeschooled by his engineer parents who also ran their own defense start-up. An entrepreneurial spirit was schooled in him from the start.
Finman went onto study robotics at Carnegie Melon and MIT, where he found himself enthralled by the start-up world. Finman was always most interested in the intersection of computer vision and the real world. But in 2015, drones weren’t “cool” and self-driving cars seemed like a generation away.
Finman founded a company, Escher Reality – the back end of augmented reality (AR) – that got him into Y Combinator’s 2017 class. On that same day, Apple launched AR kit. “I like to tell this to anyone who feels like they’re worried about competition. We were a tiny, insignificant startup going against the largest company in the world. They just nuked everything that we were doing,” Finman said.
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But it worked out. With something like 500 million AR-enabled devices soon to come out, and Pokémon Go launching the following year, it breathed a huge amount of life into the space.
“We became a hub of AR knowledge because we were already players in the space. It was a very small industry back then.”
Within a year from inception, his company was acquired by Niantic, creators of the location-based Pokémon Go. He was 28 and never had to work again.
The Y Combinator community
Finman referred to YC as “startup therapists.”
“We were deep tech founders that had no idea of the venture capital world and couldn’t market things for the life of us.” They got to practice pitching, crystallize their positioning, and when the time was right, helped create a “feeding frenzy with investors.”
It’s important for early-stage founders to filter out advice, because most people don’t think about the nuances of a specific market. During his time at YC, an advisor warned Finman that he was in a “niche of a niche of a niche” and that the business wouldn’t succeed. Three months later, it was acquired.
Timing & trends, noise & naysayers
Finman said they were paddling in the right direction and when the wave hit, they rode it well. He’s also been on the wrong side of timing, where you’re facing headwinds as a founder.
In 2023, as a new father, Finman had an epiphany about ecommerce during the baby formula shortage. Target would list it in stock, but then it would be substituted for skim milk at pick-up. The “retired” entrepreneur wondered why retailers couldn’t tell what was truly on their shelves.
“What if you could map all these products in real-time? That was a computer vision problem, which I knew how to solve,” he said.
Enter Augmodo: A spatial AI assistant for retail, the largest workforce on the planet. Augmodo tracks every product in store using wearable cameras on retail associates to improve inventory and the customer experience.
Again, when he started, spatial computing wasn’t cool and certainly not deep tech hardware for retail. He faced that same stigma and even had someone say to him “you had such potential” because he went into retail.
But Finman could see the physical workforce as one of the biggest areas of opportunity for wearable AI tech. Meta is launching smart glasses this week that’ll have an AI assistant built into them and a small display.
Finman foresees a shopping experience that’s much more seamless and personalized. Augmodo recently raised $37.5 Series A to catch lightning in a bottle. He likes the wearables space because the conversation is about augmenting the workforce, not replacing it. They’ve already had interest from factories, hospitals and other environments that involve physical work.
Clarity & conviction
One of the biggest lessons he learned from his first startup was the importance of being very clear on what you’re trying to achieve. “Clarity as the precursor to execution,” Finman said.
Founders need the ability to break down problems in terms of what actually moves the needle. A lot of this is just trial and error. Testing out goals and iterating as fast as possible.
For example, “augmenting the workforce” is ideal internally, but hard to understand outside of the organization. Instead, it’s asking questions like “is the product on the shelf? Is it in the right location? Is it the right price?”
Before Finman hired his first employee at Augmodo, he spoke with over 250 people within the retail industry to understand their problems and test his value proposition. “It’s a brutal process to try to build up that level of clarity, but it’s critical.”
Because you can iterate the tech faster than ever before, you need to spend more time with your customers, he said.
As an entrepreneur and human, Finman has learned that his goal isn’t to live a happy life, but to live a life worth suffering for. This means finding fulfillment matters more than ephemeral happiness. “I chase after things that are multi-dimensional and have very complex problems.”
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Amanda
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