AI powered self serving BI with Ryan Janssen & Paul Blankely - Zenlytic

The Minhaaj's Podcast

Ryan is an entrepreneur, data scientist, engineer, and former VC. He is the co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a SaaS business that makes a next-generation AI-powered BI tool that uses LLMs and Semantic layers. He previously co-founded Ex Quanta AI Studio, a full-service data consultancy. Ryan started his career as a software developer in his native Canada, before moving to the UK. He then worked with London’s AGC Equity Partners venture capitalist and private equity investor, investing in technology businesses with check sizes of $1-$50m. He has also worked as a consultant with McKinsey & Co. and Ernst & Young. He has master's degrees from Harvard University and Oxford University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Alberta. Paul is the Co-founder / CTO of Zenlytic, a self-serve BI tool that uses LLMs to provide a simple chat interface to complex business data. He's worked in data for 7+ years and is passionate about all things data and AI. He has a master's from Harvard in Data Science, and while there, he worked with the Minor Planet Center on algorithms to detect if previously untraceable asteroids were going to hit the Earth. Before Harvard, he worked for Roche developing algorithms that run hand-held blood glucose meters. He lives in Denver, CO, where he spends his free time snowboarding, running, and rock climbing. Zenlytic has raised seed round funding from Sequoia Capital and Bain Capital Ventures among others for over $6M. It is revolutionizing how AI is changing the business analytics and visualization powered by plain self-serving chats with its AI assistant Zoe. transcript 00:00 Intro 02:15 Zenlytic, Dashboards and Self-serve Tools 04:42 PowerBI, Tableau & Why Another Tool 06:29 Semantic Layer on LLMs and Self-Serve Analytics 13:00 Replacing BI Analysts, Yann Lecaun & LLM Hallucination 15:19 Zoe, Zenlytic AI Assistant & Use Cases 23:24 Chat-based KPI Dashboard Making 26:312 Meeting at Harvard & Friendship outside Harvard 30:00 Role of Ivy League Network in securing VC Funding 34:50 Ingredients for landing VC Funding 37:32 Webapps vs Mobile Apps & Slack Integration 43:20 Cloud vs On-Prem, Security vs Flexibility 47:03 Snowflake vs Databricks 51:12 Cost per Acquisition & Burn Rate for Start Ups 57:01 No-code vs Code, Bubble for Web Design 01:01:31 AI doomerism and Future of Work 01:08:22 Grad School Project on Telescopes Monitoring Asteroid 01:11:00 Horse betting and Gambling Algorithms 01:19:30 AI race between US & China and its Impacts 01:34:50 EU AI Act, Regulation vs Innovation, Prevention vs Experiment 01:39:10 Generative AI and Societal Challenges 01:45:14 Start-Up Hiring and Quality of University Grads and Education 01:57:00 Future of Zenlytic & Upcoming Features Guest links: Ryan Janssen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janssenryan/ Paul Blankley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulblank... Zenlytic: https://www.zenlytic.com/