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Startup and product leader with a track record of building and scaling platforms from 0→1…
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David Sokolow shared thisLove this new feature from our Copilot team. CX knowledge on how an agent should work often lives in a diagram or PDF script. Now, you can upload it directly to Copilot and build the agent from that. It's the little things that make a big difference. Great job Copilot team Kelly ChenDavid Sokolow shared thisCopilot now supports file uploads! 📄 Upload a PDF script, and build a new agent from it: prompts and logic included. 📊 Upload a CSV of test scenarios, and run simulations to validate your agent before it goes live. 🔀 Upload a flowchart image, and turn it into task steps for your agent. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gmy5qSPG
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David Sokolow posted thisIn a little over 2 weeks, I get to sit down with Teri Yu, product lead for multi-modal at OpenAI, and Will Mapes, leader of FDEs at LiveKit, to discuss where VoiceAI is going at Regal's first ever user conference, Regal Rise. Putting together the agenda for this has been one of the more fun tasks I have had in recent weeks. We're going to discuss GPT-Live, Open AI's latest voice model with their new full duplex architecture - meaning it can listen and speak at the same time. We'll talk about what LiveKit is seeing in how companies are changing how they build agents. And, it wouldn't be a good conference if we didn't predict the future ;-) Link to register is in the comments!
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David Sokolow shared thisI love it when we get to merge really old technologies with new ones. IVRs and AI agents is exactly one of those cases. One of the less intuitive use cases that is taking off with Voice AI is using it for internal operations. For example, if you are a health insurance company and need to navigate to the right provider. This usually involves navigating painful IVRs (e.g. press 1 to speak with a human), but Regal is an expert in that, and we've built our product to seamlessly navigate these with AI agents. Learn about it below!David Sokolow shared thisIVR menus are built for humans, not AI agents. That's why teaching your outbound AI agent to navigate other companies' IVRs is a less intuitive, but necessary use case. IVRs also vary by company, sometimes by department. Rather than relying on one-size-fits-all synthetic IVR scenarios to improve navigation, Regal users can build test cases anchored in the real IVRs their AI agents encounter. One pharmaceutical company used this approach to take their AI agent's IVR pass rate from 80% to 96%. See how: https://lnkd.in/gg5hXt3y
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David Sokolow posted thisThere's a lot written about consumer and SMB product management, but much less written about product management when your customers are large enterprises. At both REGAL and Check in my career, large enterprise customers present a distinctly different product prioritization dynamic. Some key principles I have developed to think through this: 1. Find ways to say yes: In many cases, especially with AI, debating the feature often takes as much time as just building it. The best leaders I have worked with are usually those who just find a way to make it happen 2. Build things that are on the path to your long term vision: First, it's important to have a long term vision! And, when you do, a large customer may be pulling up a feature you wanted to do in 6 or 12 months. That's okay. Don't fall into the trap of building something way off the path. This can cause drag on the company for multiple years. It's important to know who your company is, and who it is not. 3. Treat your customers like partners: If you are building a custom feature for them, what are they doing to support you and your business? Enterprise customers come with deep relationships (and many great friendships), and I have found with transparency and directness, great customers are willing to work with you to support your business. Customers know that in order for them to be successful, you have to also be successful
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David Sokolow posted thisI found myself reflecting this week on what make a truly great candidate when I am looking to hire talent. I realized it often comes down to, "Did they teach me something in the interview? Did I learn something new?" All of the people that I have hired and have gone on to become incredible leaders (you know who you are), when I interviewed them, they all taught me something. They all pushed back on something I said and thought to be true, and helped me learn and get better. I am not sure why, after that, they decided to work for me, but, I am so lucky they did. Note, this applies regardless of career stage. Many of the most interesting things I have learned have come from the most junior people.
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David Sokolow shared thisToday, Regal took a huge step forward with our product: Copilot Canvas. Canvas allows users to visualize changes they are making to their AI agent while they are iterating with Copilot, making building Voice AI with AI that much simpler. Canvas can be used to see what tasks your agent is prompted to do, actions and is where we're investing in dynamic UIs for agent analytics (and a lot more coming soon). See the full post below for more details. Shout out to Kelly Chen and the rest of the Copilot team for the great work here.David Sokolow shared thisBuild, test, and iterate on your AI agent, all in one place. Now, Copilot Canvas opens a dedicated tab right next to the chat, so you can make manual edits, test logic, and preview audio without switching tabs or losing context. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eDZWjFmr
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David Sokolow posted thisRegal is hiring! We're adding a Product Designer and Product Manager to our best in NYC Product team. I'm looking for people who go deep, operate with urgency, seek truth on what the best solution is, and can take complex ambiguous problems and solve them with simple, elegant solutions. If you want to be around smart people who love what they do, and operate at the frontier of AI, these opportunities are for you. Regal was just named one of the fastest growing companies in America by Inc 5,000 and we're early in the game with how Voice AI is transforming customer experience, come join the team (or forward me smart people you know!). Job links in comment.
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David Sokolow shared thisLast week, Regal signed the Open Weights letter, along with AI-industry pioneers like Amazon, a16z, Microsoft, and OpenAI. As I have participated in AI up close, it's clear open weight models present the best opportunity for an ecosystem that benefits the many, not just the few. Open weight models allow applications like Regal to customize models directly to our use case. It means frontier AI can be in the hands of more people, to create more innovative applications, as supposed to those who can only afford it. Read the response from our CEO Alex Levin here: https://lnkd.in/gyBsijec
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David Sokolow shared thisThe latest trend in Voice AI is separating the conversational model and the reasoning model. Voice AI, unlike traditional coding use cases, requires models to think on their feet. This is a fundamentally different problem than what many frontier labs are pushing for, which is primarily deep reasoning for tasks like coding and other knowledge work. If you are asking Claude to execute a database query for you, most people are comfortable waiting. If you are on the phone trying to resolve an auto-collision claim, no one wants to wait. Separating these two models and creating an orchestration system to use them when needed allows the models to respond fast, but use higher levels of intelligence when needed. But, it's an art to get this right. We evaluated GPT Live, and while the approach is right, their latest models struggles performing in a conversation with action invocation (i.e., calling an API to look up a policy) and latency (i.e., awkward pauses while the model is thinking). Read more in our post about it. We're evaluating every new model as it comes out to identify what's best for the real world.David Sokolow shared thisEarlier this week, OpenAI launched GPT-Live, a full-duplex voice model: it separates the model that has to be instantly responsive from the model that has to handle reasoning. GPT‑Live processes input while generating output, and for anything that needs real reasoning or a web search, it hands the task to GPT-5.5 in the background. It reflects a broader industry desire: AI agents that can take on deeper reasoning, without following a script or sacrificing latency. We tested the new model, and what it reveals about where Voice AI is headed → https://lnkd.in/gaAWKy9p
David Sokolow commented on a post
20h
Register here: https://events.zoom.us/ev/AvdJMZFs9Ogp5zjLis9eAU36GDhT1cyqUiwQPb6awUx3WQ3MOpZx~AqV827rIAFMWen8izj2TnY-YHvGEC3YU7zvA6IFv0nrYeeVNkDi8kt3XAA
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David Sokolow liked thisDavid Sokolow liked thisLast week we celebrated the groundbreaking of The Grand Victoria (thegrandvictoria.com), a 90 unit, ground up, market rate apartment building with 3 new commercial suites and 121 structured parking stalls at the intersection of Grand and Victoria in St. Paul. This was the honor of my professional life and I'm deeply grateful to all of the many project partners who made this happen. Pete Keely, Chelsea Brinkman, Rachel Brown, Lukas Van Sistine, Joshua Jansen at Collage Architects designed a building for our future residents, our city, and our region to be proud of. Ironmark Building Company is capably bringing it all together. Kari Glaser and the Nimble Project and Development Services team keep us all running on time. Civil Site Group, PC and MEYER BORGMAN JOHNSON have been creative, flexible, and top notch. We are grateful for the trust and support of our financing partners at Huntington National Bank and the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC). Thanks also to Maslon LLP and First American Title Insurance Company for a smooth transaction. And to JUUT Salonspa for anchoring our new commercial space. Joining Juut will be two new and exciting commercial spaces, to be announced soon! Special thanks to our Mayor Kaohly Her, Council President Rebecca Noecker, and State Representative Meg Luger-Nikolai for joining us to celebrate this major investment in our city's primary commercial corridor. And yes, that's my dad Jon Parritz in the third picture. A very proud moment together. Great press from the Pioneer Press here: https://lnkd.in/gYF3anSv
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David Sokolow reacted on thisDavid Sokolow reacted on thisMy co-founder disliked me when we first met. Now we're running a successful company together. We didn't meet as founders. Rebecca Greene and I both decided to join the same startup, Handy HQ, in 2014 in our mid-twenties. I became GM responsible for the New York market, and Rebecca was the GM for San Francisco. It was set up for all the GMs to compete. And as we are both quite competitive, we pulled out all the stops. I think there was a stretch where she flat-out found me annoying, difficult, and in her words, a bull in a china shop. Rebecca moved to NYC to work at Handy HQ and we ended up becoming “work proximity associates” (and then real friends). We became close over six years of working together at Handy. By the time we were both independently thinking about becoming founders, we knew each other very well enough to decide to work together. After deciding you want to be a founder, finding a co-founder is the most important step. Before even finalizing the business you want to be in. I haven’t done a real study, but I bet that founders who worked together for more than five years before starting have a much lower chance of falling out later. And sticking together is a big part of being successful. Most people are surprised when I tell them that I'm technically the CEO, but we are 50/50 shareholders in everything - the company, decisions, the other investments we make together. We’ve found a balance based on trust: I have final say on go-to-market, Rebecca has final say on product and engineering. If I feel strongly about her side, I'll tell her - and then it's still her call. There's stuff I disagree with her on, and stuff she disagrees with me on, but in the end, I trust her judgement.
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David Sokolow reacted on thisExcited to share that I’ve joined XR Extreme Reach as General Counsel. It’s been a great first few weeks getting to know an incredibly talented team and a dynamic global business with so much opportunity ahead. Grateful for the warm welcome—and very excited to build together.David Sokolow reacted on thisWe’re excited to welcome Amanda Kauth as XR Extreme Reach’s new General Counsel. Amanda comes to XR with 15 years of experience building and growing Legal & Compliance functions at high-growth tech companies, helping teams navigate complexity and build strong, values-driven organizations. Most recently, Amanda served as General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer at Check, a leading embedded payroll infrastructure company. Previously, she was General Counsel and Head of People at Buzzer, a sports media company reimagining live sports consumption and fan engagement. Amanda holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School and a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. We’re thrilled to have her expertise and leadership on the XR team. Welcome, Amanda!
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David Sokolow liked thisDavid Sokolow liked thisEvery month I try to fire myself from another part of my own company. It's the only way I know to grow this fast without becoming the thing everyone is waiting on. When I started Warp I was customer support. Bug fixer. Sales, ops, recruiting, all of it. That's normal early and there's no way around it. Since the beginning I've made it my actual job to eliminate myself from as many roles as fast as I can. That only works if you find people who don't need you. My test for a team lead is simple. Can they own a whole function and make calls in it that I wouldn't have made, and be right? Not "can they execute my plan well." That second one is a very good employee. The first one is the only thing that takes the job off my desk permanently. Adam Rankin runs engineering. Gabriella G.ng. Gabriella G. runs ops, hiring and brand. Thiago Bocayuva runs sales and GTM. Nicole Chinuntdet runs customer support and account management. Every one of them has made decisions I would have made differently, and most of the time they were right. The uncomfortable part is that handing something off means watching it get done in a way you wouldn't have done it and saying nothing. I'm still bad at this. I've caught myself reaching back into functions I'd already given away, and every time I did it the person got worse at their job, not better. There's no trick to any of this. You find people who learn fast, you give them the whole thing instead of a piece of it, and you get out of the way even when it's itchy. Then you go find the next job to fire yourself from.
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David Sokolow reacted on thisDavid Sokolow reacted on thisThe datacenter buildout has officially gone too far. It's reached my local vegetable aisle. While everyone is gatekeeping their model weights, Mannan Halal on Coney Island Ave charges $2.99/lb for data shak! TIL: this is stem amaranth. "Shak" means leafy green in Bengali, "data" means stalk. It's named for its thick stems, which get sautéed along with the leaves with garlic, onions, and chili peppers and is delicious. According to my plant app, amaranth also grows like a weed in a Brooklyn backyard, so I now have a summer project. Still no word on GPU allocation.
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Vizio Ventures
What’s really stopping early-stage startups from building the next big app? It’s rarely tech. It’s rarely funding. It’s building before validating. As Vizio Ventures, we see this pattern often: Strong teams move fast into development, without confirming urgency, clarity, and real market pull. Before writing a single line of code, we validate three things: • Is the pain urgent? • Is the target persona clearly defined? • Is there real external proof of demand? Because building isn’t the objective. Validation and scalable growth are. If you have a new product idea and want to pressure-test it before investing time and budget let us help you through! 👉🏼 https://lnkd.in/dzpcyFiT
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