This Founder Is On A Mission To Clean Up The Internet.

Helping on this journey, Haco was a part of Amazon Web Services' CTO fellowship program, which was designed to give MVP-stage tech founders and CTO's expert insights whilst navigating their business journeys and creating a road map for the next ten years.

Here we caught up to discuss the future of the business, how she plans to clean up the internet and what it was like to work with Professor Stephen Hawking…

Can you tell us about your time with Stephen Hawking?

During my undergraduate and masters degrees, I studied maths and physics and became increasingly fascinated with the topic of General Relativity. I decided to do a PhD working in this area. At around the time that I was starting my PhD, my supervisor, together with Stephen Hawking and another colleague at Harvard, came up with a theory about a possible resolution to a big problem in physics known as the black hole information paradox. It is trying to answer the question about what happens to things that fall into a black hole. I was in the right place at the right time to jump on board, so then we started working on this potential solution to the problem - which we initially thought was a simple and easy calculation but ended up taking years.

What was one of the highlights from this time?

I learnt a lot. It taught me perseverance because we really thought this equation would be solved within a week, but it ended up taking years. It’s a bit like a startup, you never solve a startup, you just keep building on it and improving it. What we initially thought was a finite problem ended up becoming a seemingly infinite endeavour, where the more you know the more you realise you don’t know. It prepares your mind to solve an infinite problem.

What’s your mission?

Our mission is to understand the internet with a view to making it safer. Today, people post online all the time and while a lot of it is great, some content is also very harmful. We build tools that understand content, and identify if something could be harmful. We’re particularly focused on visual content, especially as the internet is moving more towards video, the potential to do harm is very high. We’re using AI to understand and automate the process of content classification.

Why is this so important to you?

I knew I wanted to do something with a strong mission that felt like I was having a positive impact. At Entrepreneur First startup accelerator, I met my co-founder James who is a specialist in computer vision and had previously worked with Facebook and as a community moderator on Reddit. The more I learned about the internet and the world of online content moderation, the more grim I realised it was. We realised that AI is moving so quickly that it can really be used now to help with the moderation of content.

What were the biggest challenges of the Entrepreneur First program?

Working out what exactly it is you want to work on for the next 10 years.

Does this feel like the right thing?

Yeah, it feels like a big enough problem. It’s not just going to be solved overnight. There’s so much to unpack and unravel that I feel like it’s something I’ll be stimulated by for a long time.

What was the biggest challenge when raising your seed round?

On a personal level, we got so many rejections. That was really tough, and although everyone said it was normal it was still so hard going into loads of meetings and hearing people give you reasons - that feel quite valid - for not wanting to invest in your company. Facing that rejection every day, leaving one bad meeting and going straight into another one, it was so tough.

One thing that was so wonderful about the Entrepreneur First program was that it introduced me to the whole startup ecosystem. It was a crash course in entrepreneurship. There were people on hand to help with everything, whereas before I wouldn’t have even known where to begin with investors. They provided a network, guidance and even a co-founder.

What would you change about the startup industry?

Every investor is looking for the outliers. But all too often these outliers end up being very similar. I want to see more diversity in the companies that are being invested in.