Skychain Global at AI Camp
Skychain Global took part in AI Camp — one week intensive course focused on project development in AI. That was an awesome experience! We would like to share the details about our participation in the event.
AI Camp was held on the basis of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology — one of the best universities in Russia. This university has its own Phystech accelerator, which was actually the organizing side. The general partners of the camp were Data Monsters — a Palo Alto-based R&D lab and consulting company, which provides professional services with AI and Real-time Big Data.
It all started on Monday, 19th of August with the warm welcome speech from Artemy Malkov, CEO of Data Monsters, who has shared the program details of the camp. After the welcome speech there was some free time to meet and greet for the residents of the camp.
Right after lunch everyone went deep into the educational part of the program. Mikhail Burtsev, the Head of iPavlov project, delivered a speech on how his team managed to create one of the largest and most successful AI project in Eastern Europe — iPavlov. Its product DeepPavlov is an open source framework for dialog assistants creation and text analysis, which is highly competitive on global market. iPavlov team members also delivered some presentations on how they manage to work in situations, when they don’t have enough data.
Later it was time for Dan Lesovodsky, cofounder of Data Monsters, to take the floor and talk about customer discovery and development. The key idea of his speech was that by deeply understanding the main pains of the target audience, it is possible to adjust the product so it could perfectly solve them.
On Tuesday we had an all day long practice with Askhat Urazbaev — a true expert, which is known as one of the best coach in software development methods and practices and is responsible for Agile transformation in many large Russian companies.
Askhat shared his knowledge in project management. He underlined the necessity of some factors, like incremental approach in development and mutual understanding of common goals with the client. Training also included a lot of practical tasks, like forming a proposal for a potential customer or creating a joint project charter.
Wednesday was the Sales day. Artemy himself shared his insight on how to manage sales processes, attract right customers and generate the overall value of the product.
After lunch there was a speed-dating session with representatives of many famous companies, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Megafon (Russian telecom) and X5 Retail Group. I had 5 minutes to tell them about what Skychain is and I was glad to find out that a lot of companies already know who we are and what we do.
On Thursday we prepared for the final day. All camp residents had free time to prepare their pitches for Friday. Mentors assisted everyone in a free format and also advised on business models of each and every startup.
And finally here comes Friday. The day when we summarize our efforts throughout a week and present them as a pitch on the stage in front of potential investors.
It was awesome to receive positive feedback afterwards from English-speaking visitors, since I was the only one pitching in English.
After pitching session has finished, there was time to develop the network with the investor guests and say some kind words to our mentors, who taught us pretty much throughout the whole week.
We are extremely grateful to Phystech Accelerator, Data Monsters, all the mentors and to Artemy Malkov personally for all the knowledge and expertise. We will surely do our best to implement it into our working process and achieve great results! Looking forward to our cooperation in the nearest future!
Best regards,
Alexander Oksanenko, Skychain Team
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If you have any questions about Skychain, don’t hesitate to write to Alexander Oksanenko on Telegram and on email: aoksanenko@skychain.global.
