#30 Elisenda Bou: from Barcelona to building robots in MIT & NASA, founding AI startup, and being acquired by Apple
Head of Media Knowledge and Content understanding at Apple, Co-Founder & CTO of Vilynx (1st Apple acquisition in Spain), Technical PhD by UPC & MIT
We are Pol Fañanás and Gerard García, two friends passionate about tech, startups, and VC, getting views from exceptional people building the future and sharing it for free with those who lack access. Thanks for reading!
Elisenda Bou, recipient of Princess of Girona Award 2022, currently is the Head of Media Knowledge and Content understanding at Apple, focused on leveraging multimodal AI and Knowledge Graphs to enhance experiences and products worldwide.
Previously, Eli was the Co-founder & CTO of Vilynx, Spanish AI tech startup that ended up becoming the 1st ever acquisition of Apple in Spain. Vilynx, founded between Barcelona and the US, was devoted to the creation of one of the 1st AI self-learning multimodal architectures for video processing, and it turned out to be the-facto standard for video summarization and understanding, serving 100M+ daily videos worldwide with a 40+ people team, and raising >$10M from Kibo Ventures, Caixa Capital Risc and Ridgewood Capital.
Academically, Eli also works as a Professor at UPC (The Technical University of Catalonia), providing support in teaching related to Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Complex Software Architectures, and Autonomous Satellite Systems. She additionally led the Software Architecture group at UPC NanoSatLab, a laboratory involving more than 30 students and professors working on scalable distributed software architectures.
Eli holds a PhD from UPC and MIT focused on system architecture for satellite constellations and exchange of resources among them (wireless energy transfer), and worked as a Research Assistant for the MIT in a number of NASA projects tested on the International Space Station, receiving multiple recognitions such as the Thales Alenia Space fellowship or the Google Faculty Research Award.
She graduated with Highest Honors in a Telecom Engineering degree at UPC, in an Electronic Engineering degree at ULPGC, and in an Aeronautics and Astronautics MSc in MIT (where she won the Best Aeronautical Thesis Award by GMV Aerospace and Defense).
Eli is from Barcelona and loves technology, science, working on positive impact projects, teaming up with good people, and helping others.
Summary
👤 Story: engineer from Barcelona, MIT, NASA, AI founder, Apple
🥇 Win: kindhearted help from good people along the way
🚫 Fail + lesson: bad situations out of your control + there is always a silver lining
🚀 Great founder: good/kind person who wants to help others
💸 Great investor: trustworthy “unblocker” alway supporting no matter what
📈 Markets: AI based self-supervised learning able to work with lots of dirty unstructured data
🦄 3 startups: ChangeDyslexia, MiCuento, Marsi Bionics
👍 3 investors: Kibo Ventures, Nina Capital, Pear VC
📖 3 books: “The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty” by Peter Singer, “The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society” by Frans de Waal
What is your story?
From a very young age it was really clear for me that tech was my thing. I always felt like an outsider in the “normal world” but at home with tech and science. Specifically I loved programming and maths, but to be honest also had no clue of what I wanted to focus on.
I was born and raised in Barcelona, and had always lived there. So eventually I began to study Telecom Engineering at UPC (Technical University of Catalonia). In my second year, I wanted to try to live somewhere else, and decided to move to Canary Islands. What started as an exchange period at ULPGC (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), ended up with me working for a really interesting tech research institution linked to this university named IDeTIC, where I was given the chance to take part in so many different projects. I loved it so much that I decided to stay there. However, my exchange period was coming to an end and I was already in the middle of another degree in Barcelona.
What can I do? - I thought. No problem, let’s enroll in Electronic Engineering at ULPGC and continue with the Telecom Engineering degree at UPC remotely, just attending for the final exams.
Then, I believe that it was around the same time when I saw an opportunity to take part in the NASA X-Prize Space Elevator Centennial Challenge. I had read about the concept of Space Elevator in Carl Sagan’s science fiction books and thought it was really cool. It is about the concept of a new type of planet-to-space transportation where there is a cable anchored to the earth surface and extending into space, with a design that would permit vehicles to travel up the cable from a planetary surface, directly into orbit without the use of large rockets. The contest was about testing some capabilities that would later become technology enablers for this, which was super exciting, so we formed a team and decided to participate.
We didn’t have any money at all to begin with nor any sponsor to reach out for help. I loved to read science books, at that time there were very few Spanish authors publishing that type of stuff in Spain (one was Jorge Wagensberg and the other one José Manual Sánchez Ron, I was a fan of these two true pioneers of the Spanish science scene with a strong focus in physics), and we decided to do reach out to one of them to ask him for a sponsorship. Best case scenario, he would be and we would go to the US and build a robot for this NASA contest. Worst case scenario - I thought - at least I had an excuse to meet one of my idols. And surprisingly, Jorge Wagensberg said yes, and he even let us space in CosmoCaixa (one of Europe’s most renowned science museums) to use as a lab - my favorite place in the world at that time!
So there I was, with 19 years old, building a robot in my beloved CosmoCaixa, with my idol Jorge Wagensberg as sponsor and ready to go to the US to compete in the challenge. But … something happened when we were shipping all the hardware to US ... our robot got stopped at customs in some country, so it didn’t arrive to New Meixco. Bye bye robot. We finally got there but we couldn’t compete without it, so I decided to join another team and help them anyway.
While competing, some MIT talent scouters reached out to me, told me they were building up a research team within MIT where I could be a fit and asked me if I wanted to join them. I really didn’t know much about MIT but enough to be aware about the fact that legends like Richard Feynman studied there and that it was a very special place. However, I was already doing 2 degrees at the same time, MIT (and US in general) was super expensive, my family never had money to pay for that type of uni and cost of life, and me neither. But again, fortunately a new way opened. I was invited to join them during the summer period (from June to October) for the following years, UPC helped me with some financial support, and I also received a scholarship from Vodafone. That help was instrumental for me and I’m deeply thankful for it.
And yes, all that was good. Yet, to be transparent, not everything was so clear as it may seem now. I loved to do a bunch of different things from robotics to electronics, software or satellites, but I did not know yet what I wanted to devote my career to. I started to gravitate more towards distributed software architectures and AI for space. Particularly, applying them to what was back then a new paradigm: satellite constellations (versus the old paradigm of bigger satellites and fewer number of them) and focused my PhD on that, but also started to feel like I wanted to come to Spain and have more of a local impact.
But what could I do? In the EU the tech that we were building was simply not there, they were years behind and I could not just simply take my experience and work somewhere else. Then a friend connected me with Juan Carlos Riveiro, who also studied at UPC, had experience with AI and just sold Gigle Networks (system-on-chip integrated circuits for home networking applications) to Broadcom (NASDAQ listed global tech infra company), and we started to talk about how we thought the paradigm of AI had to change.
When I was working in satellite software, there was no way to manually retrain our systems, and it didn’t make sense to apply supervised training. Juan Carlos had a very similar experience in his company too. We both agreed that the future of AI would be through autonomous self-learning systems, which are systems that can evolve even when the data is unstructured or dirty, and we both wanted to work on this.
At the same time, there was a big problem in media, since companies had huge catalogs and very tough access to the data in them (for instance, they couldn’t search for specific content in thousands of hours of videos based on a quote that someone important said). But with autonomous learning, we could create a system that would read a feed of data and extract knowledge, potentially being able to develop really exciting new services on top.
Juan Carlos and I clicked on that vision and we founded Vilynx. Juan Carlos moved to California to focus more on sales, marketing, etc as a CEO. I remained in Barcelona as CTO, where we had most of our team (mainly engineers). We struggled a bit in the beginning because the Spanish ecosystem back then was not very much focused on deep tech, but eventually got great backers such as Kibo Ventures and started to progress.
We worked in Vilynx for 8-9 years and finally got acquired by Apple.
What is the biggest win in your life?
The people along the way who have helped me without expecting anything in return. I won’t be here without those small details of kindhearted help. I am deeply thankful and I appreciate it very much.
I couldn’t have gone to the NASA competition in the US if it wasn’t for Jorge Wagensberg saying yes to meet at CosmoCaixa and talk about the sponsorship. I never ever could have been able to attend MIT if UPC didn’t help me with a sponsorship when I needed it most. And those are just a few examples!
It’s crazy to think that those simple and humble gestures played a role in my career, in eventually building Vilynx, and in being acquired by Apple.
That’s why I always try to provide these opportunities to those coming behind. The impact of such small stuff that you can think doesn’t really matter at all, can be so huge.
What is the biggest failure and lesson?
Being in bad situations that in part are out of your control and kind of failing in the sense of seeing it as just a really negative moment. The lesson? realizing that failure happens a lot of times and pretty amazing things can be at the other side of it.
As an example, a couple of moments come to my mind.
First, when I went to Canary Islands for the exchange and ended up studying there. Everyone said to me that I was crazy, that I was going to lose opportunities in a key moment of my academic career, etc. In part, even I started to think it. But I ended up meeting Rafael Perez who was leading the IDeTIC, learned tons and had the chance to work in the coolest tech transfer projects ever for me at that time. No one can take away from me the exceptional learnings and experiences I had during those years.
And second, when we lost our robot at customs while traveling to the US for the Space Elevator competition. It was a huge failure for us. You are so young, you have this extraordinary opportunity that means the world to you, you have been working super hard on it for a lot of time, you manage to get people who trust in you and supports you … and you fail because a super silly and unfair reason! But also you learn to do what you can with what you have and it obviously ended up as a key moment in my life anyway just because being able to be there, help any other team and connecting with the MIT for the first time.
What is your description of a great founder?
For me the best founder is a good and kind person. Because good persons create good opportunities and make good things happen.
I have had the luck of meeting a lot of nice people along the way and they positively impacted me in a big way. Also, kind people always look for a way to help others which tends to act as a catalyst for the growth of individuals, companies, ecosystems and societies.
What is your description of a great investor?
An “unblocker”. Someone who is always paying attention to you and helps you avoid blockages. Also the first person you call when you have a problem.
It’s like parenthood. There are two types of parents, the ones that make you think “damn, I have a problem how I am going to tell them now? they’re going to get mad”. Or the ones who you know for sure are always there supporting you no matter what. And the first thing that comes to your mind when you have some challenge in the road is to talk with the latter type.
For instance, before starting with Kibo Ventures at Vilynx we were connected with a few of their portfolio founders. And I remember talking with one of them that said to me - “look, in my phone, if you click #1 you call my mum, and if you click #2 you call Aquilino (one of the Founding Partners)”. That’s a signal to detect a great investor.
What markets are you most interested in?
Obviously biased but I’d say AI. Specially self-supervised or autonomous learning. I believe the key in AI is the stuff that can work with a bunch of dirty unstructured data.
There are use cases for clean data like for instance an AI that can differentiate among cats and dogs. But if we are talking about applying AI to more ambitious problems like fighting climate change, improving energy management or curing rare diseases, you end up finding current solutions quite limited. Why? Because now you are facing a significant increase in complexity and superior need of lots of different data models. Improved self-supervised learning can unlock exciting new value in this sense.
On top of that (and very related by the way), I’m very interested in systems able to understand more. We are seeing a lot of language models in AI making noise lately, but the truth is they don’t really truly understand much. These new sexy models have great statistical training but from a technical perspective is not as impressive as it may seem.
The fun thing though is that stuff like GPT-3 from OpenAI is surprising the world, when in reality it is just scratching the surface of what it’s possible. Going from systems that require very clean structured data to new groundbreaking ways of self-supervised learning is an opportunity I find super interesting.
3 startups you like and why?
3 companies come to my mind founded by women and with a cool tech for good angle:
ChangeDyslexia. Tech tool focused on helping kids with dyslexia improve their skills related to reading and writing through games.
MiCuento. Startup working on encouraging kids to read more thanks to high quality personalized books/stories.
Marsi Bionics. Company doing R&D and production of exoeskeletons for optimal personalized physical therapy to people who suffer musculoskeletal complications as a result of different health disorders, including a specific product for pediatric care to help children with this type of problem in a way that it’s easily adjustable to the child’s growth.
3 investors you like and why?
Kibo Ventures. Obviously. My investor at Vilynx. Specially Sonia Fernandez and Aquilino Peña, who always treated us extremely well and helped us tons.
Nina Capital. I find their positioning refreshing and I think there is great value in how they are bringing an exciting health angle to the Southern Europe ecosystem.
Pear VC. It’s really cool to see exciting American VCs start to explore new high potential ecosystems like Barcelona. Also, having Pepe Agell as lead in our geography is awesome. Interesting VC and interesting successful founder turned investor. Also, a kind person!
What books do you feel everyone should read and why?
“The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty” by Peter Singer. Great book about how our current actions against world poverty are insufficient and immoral, and what we can do about it. It helped me see the world in a different way. I believe sometimes as entrepreneurs we are extremely focused and obsessive about our stuff, and sometimes we forget about working on important problems.
“The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society” by Frans de Waal. This one is about the importance of empathy from an anthropological perspective. From how empathy comes naturally to a great variety of animals to humans themselves.
WILDCARD QUESTION
What advice will you give to young people coming from underprivileged backgrounds wanting to make it in tech/science?
Two things.
First, when we are young we tend to worry a lot about what we are going to do. However at the end of the day it can end up being less about what we are doing and how, and more about with whom we are doing it. For instance if I am a great specialist in a specific area (whatever it is), but I’m working in a place where there is a bias against women or against people coming from low socioeconomic backgrounds, my options to prosper will be reduced. Being in a certain type of environment that increases your odds of coming across the right people who would get out of their way to help you somehow, it’s a big factor. Being with the right people can change your life. Maybe you can’t fully control that, but you should try to increase your exposition to this type of good people as much as you can.
Second, don’t be afraid to knock on doors. And that being said, and being honest - I was scared of it. But I managed to do it and what I found on the other side of fear and shyness was that there are people out there willing to help. On top of that, based on my experience, the people I've loved working with the most have been people who if you do some cold reach out, they’ll answer one way or another. And if not, who cares. Overcome the fear. Ask for help. You are not less of a person for asking for help. Yes, it feels weird. Spoiler - it probably will feel weird in the future too regardless of how many times you have done it, let me tell you that. But it is great to recognize you need help and to ask for it.
Big thanks Eli for sharing your views with us!
Big thanks to you, reader, for your time and interest!
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