Startup Interview with Changsu Lee, Allganize's Founder and CEO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Prior to becoming CEO of Allganize, I had previously founded another company that utilized deep learning and process automation to develop an advanced analytics platform geared for mobile developers. The success of that company allowed for an acquisition in 2014 by Tapjoy.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Allganize, Inc. is an AI solution that uses natural language understanding to automate business workflows. Our AI assists service representatives in customer support centers to provide better answers, enhances the search experience on company websites to find answers quicker, provides 24/7 customer support through an automated answer bot and automatically extracts important entities from text documents.

What is the origin story?

With my serial entrepreneur mindset, I founded Allganize in 2017 with the vision to use technology to enhance people’s lives. Combining my expertise in natural language processing, I was able to develop an artificial intelligence solution meant to automate business workflows. The AI is not here to replace human employees but instead automate repetitive tasks for employees to utilize their time on more innovative tasks.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I love that we are all dedicated, hard workers that view the product as if it was their own. We all work very collaboratively together, even though we are all working remotely across multiple countries! The talent that each individual brings to the table is unique and specialized to his or her skillset. We have been able to produce a solution that is extremely competitive within the market while also providing tremendous value for businesses.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

As I have mentioned, I am definitely a serial entrepreneur. If I was not building Allganize, I would probably be building another business involving natural language processing. I truly do love working on natural language processing as a full time job.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We currently measure success with the amount of customers that are utilizing our AI solution. Alli answer bot is our automated chat interface that is used to alleviate the amount of customer support tickets through automating answers. To measure success, we take into account how many support tickets were resolved instantly and how many hours agents saved by these automations.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Our growth has been astonishing! I’m very proud of our team that has enabled this to happen. Through our accelerated growth, we have been able to have offices in the Bay Area, Japan, South Korea and soon are going to expand into Europe!

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I’m definitely excited about artificial intelligence technology. Each year, new solutions are released and they get more powerful. I can’t wait to see what it will bring. Technology is fascinating so I would not say I am worried about any of them.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

The content here at HackerNoon is fantastic! I have been able to learn more about emerging startups and also see what other technologies that are out there in the market.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

I would tell myself to shoot for the moon and continue working hard. Anything is achievable if you set your mind to it.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

2021 has been a crazy year but there’s a lot to look forward in terms of advancing technology. The pandemic will not slow us down to achieve our goals.

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