We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarah Nagy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarah below.
Sarah , so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
I struggled to find a purpose or didn’t think about it. Freshman year of college I started to think about what is the purpose of anything, what is reality. I ran into big questions and didn’t know how to answer them. I took an astronomy class and learned that there will be a day in the universe that there will be a day when all the stars burn out and there is just a void.
That changed my perspective on life and there was a part of me that wanted that to be false. So I studied astrophysics to try and understand the big picture. I thought people had figured it all out, but realized no one knows anything about anything. This was another perspective shift.
I made a big change and decided to work on wall street as a quant. I enjoyed working hard, learning about finance and finding alpha. I became interested in startups and started thinking about purpose again. With large language models coming out my interest in the universe and my purpose peaked. I know that data is being collected every day from CERN and other places and I realized that if AI could automate working on the data, then maybe we could learn about life and the universe.
My career was analyzing data by hand and now AI could help automate my job and be a start of building something bigger that could automate learning about the universe.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
As the co-founder of Seek AI, I mostly focus on work right now. Seek provides organizations with a natural language interface for data, empowering anyone in a business to ask questions and receive data-driven insights, fast. Seek’s workflow not only protects against hallucinations and guarantees that business teams only see accurate results, but also allows the product to learn from human feedback over time. Seek also holds the record for most-accurate model in our space, having been the first to break 90% accuracy on the Spider benchmark.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I studied astrophysics and economics at UCLA for my undergrad. I think those both gave me broad ways to think about the world. My masters was a lot more specific as I studied to become a quant on Wall Street. Studying broad topics and then getting specific training has served me well as a founder to be able to think big picture and then get focused when needed, sometimes on back to back calls throughout the day.
Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?
When I feel I need to learn something, I ask advise from people who know it much better than me. I’m fortunate to have a lot of amazing advisors I can talk to about things going on in the business who give amazing advise and insight into any problem that the company is facing.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.seek.ai/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-nagy/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/sarahrnagy
Image Credits
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milky_Way_Galaxy.jpg
