Building An AI Wearables Startup In Silicone Valley | Shai Unterslak | Compass

The SA connection

Okay, okay, this is a San Francisco-based startup, but with strong South African connections, which makes it a cool story to cover today.  

Co-founder Shai Unterslak, is a UCT grad who started his first business, Dado, while still studying.

That business eventually exited to Yoco, which set Shai on a journey to the US to work on something big. That’s where he started working on Everything Bagel — an AI startup that plugs into all your online profiles (think Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok) and then analyses your content to show you how much you’ve changed or grown over time. This didn’t work, and Shai explains why here on this week’s podcast.

However, a random engagement with someone who stayed over at their commune in San Francisco led to them merging companies to develop Compass.  

The device sells for $99, and it does a limited number of minutes of transcription per day, forever free. Alternatively, you can upgrade to premium, which allows unlimited recordings and transcriptions for $20 a month.

The future

Right now, they are building on workflows. Wanna be more positive in your communication? It will listen in and give you pointers. They’re also working on auto-creating diaries and digests you can keep or make TikToks from. Pretty neat.

AI all up in all our conversations is quite new, and many people might have concerns about “are you recording this?”. But to be fair, it's very easy to record anyone using your mobile phone these days. With an AI wearable, at least, you are showing respect by making it obvious…

We had Shai on the podcast this week, and apart from sharing his interesting journey, he shared some gems like:

• How to get more opportunities in the startup world
• Why going all in is the way
• And many more… it's a good one… go check it out.