theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Actai Maui | Dave Li, DeckBird.ai

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Dave Li

Founder & CEO

DeckBird.ai

play_circle_outline Genesis of DeckBird idea during COVID pandemic

play_circle_outline Description of DeckBird AI product transforming static presentations into interactive webinars

play_circle_outline Maximizing Engagement with DeckBird AI: The Power of Storytelling in Presentations

play_circle_outline Building authenticity and trust with AI-generated presentations

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Dave Li, DeckBird.ai

Dave Li

Founder & CEO DeckBird.ai

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>> Hi, I am John Furrier with theCube pod. We are here in Maui, Hawaii for the Acti Global. Dave is here, serial entrepreneur. Deckbird is the company. Big part of the show here. Appreciate you being part of the team here. I'm first time here as well. We're both learning how to kite surf.

Dave Li

>> Yes, I did.

>> Thanks for coming on the pod.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, thank you, John. Thank you for having me. I did just have my first kite surfing lesson yesterday, it is just wonderful.

>> The community here is very chill, but they're very smart. So it's a great venue to get in and meet folks. I've met people that I never would've met before here, and it's like a smart networking/intellect, problem solving world problems. It's a huge aperture, and the reach of this community is global and super impressed with Acti Global. Deckbird, you guys are a key part of this event. It's not your first rodeo in starting a company.

Dave Li

>> No, no, it's not.

>> Talk about your background and then I want to get into DeckBird and some of the cool things you're doing with AI because it has a global impact.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, John. Just to your point, since I got here, the people I talked to, people flew in from Singapore, from South Africa, really all over the world, and ideas and the stuff they are doing it's just very fascinating.

>> So your last startup was a big company. Talk about your last success.

Dave Li

>> So the last company I did is event registration and payment platform in China. Now it's growing to be one of the largest platforms in China. We do probably $1 billion RMB in ticket sales every year. So that's my first startup.

>> A lot of transactions.

Dave Li

>> Yes,

>> Yes. We talked about it last night. I had a podcast with a company out of South Africa, they're doing OLTP, open source. And what was the motivation for DeckBird? What was the genesis of the idea?

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. DeckBird is actually one of the things that came out from COVID. I would say the good things. It was the tail end of the COVID. I was stuck like everybody else, but still you have to do lots of online meetings and online calls. So after repeating myself over and over again, I said, there's got to be a better way to do this with AI. So that was an idea. And then fast-forward three years and now we have users in almost 73 countries worldwide, almost 10 languages.

>> Talk about the AI product. What is the product? It's an agent, so it's got some value. Talk about the product and the problem that you were solving.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. So DeckBird is a little tool, AI agent that transforms everyday PowerPoint or pitch decks from static files, into self-running webinars by adding AI-powered voice, video and user interactions. So the idea or the problem we're solving is for a lot of the companies, the PowerPoint or the deck.

>> Nobody likes PowerPoint.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, nobody likes it.

>> It's the worst.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, exactly. When you send it without any narrating, when people see it, they look at a few pages, it just goes right into the garbage. People don't read it. However, though, I think the PowerPoint is still the centerpiece of any sales and marketing company. The first thing people always say is, "Send me your deck."

>> Send me your deck. Yeah.

Dave Li

>> Exactly. So with DeckBird, the problem we are solving is if you look at the life cycle of a deck, there is a designing aspect of it, but that aspect has been solved by companies like Canva, like Microsoft PowerPoints and a lot of the AI-generated tools as well. But downstream you have, how do you narrate your deck? How do you share your deck? So DeckBird is solving problems.

>> We've all been in that position, Dave. It's like, "Hey, who's going to lead the presentation?" I remember him back in business school and even in undergraduate in computer science. "No, no, I'll present. You're not as good as me." Narrating the presentation is the story.

Dave Li

>> Absolutely.

>> And you're seeing success now with Notebook LM, is a great example. I wrote a white paper the other day where I thought it was pretty damn good. Four pages, very dense content notebook, Notebook LM, it tells a story. Is that the vibe you guys are going with here?

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think there is a saying-

>> That's audio only.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, I think there is a saying that John, the reality is actually created and perceived only through a narrative. So the narrative is actually very important when you have your voice, or your video guiding your audience through that just makes a huge difference on how your audience will receive, and perceive your company and your product. So that's what DeckBird does.

>> You're taking static data and narrating it. In this case it's presentation material, it's potentially sales material stuff would go to market. It could be recruiting. It could be anything.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. We have applications in a wide range of industries, sales and marketing for sure. Your company deck, your sales deck, but we have lots of applications in real estate. People are selling houses. The first thing they want to do is to make a good presentation. Training you just mentioned, that's actually a very big market. Employee training, customer training, customer onboarding, financial services. You are selling insurance product. So any scenario where you have somebody you have to explain something to somebody else, you would need a tool like DeckBird.

>> I think I remember back in the day, I'm old enough to remember, I used to work for IBM and HP back in the day, and they had great training programs and they had the laser discs, the self-service training Study how to deal with tough personalities, social styles, all those good things. Those soft skills.

Dave Li

>> Absolutely.

>> Computer-based training's been around for a while. Where's the generative AI making an impact? What's the big breakthrough in your mind? Is it generative? Is it more contextually relevant? Is there more data sources coming in? Can you just share your vision of how this progresses?

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. I think the generative AI is going to play a big part of it. But on the other hand, I think generative AI, we see the playing field, the competitive advantage and also the evolution paths. What I think something that's more interesting is what I call transformative AI, which is taking what you have and add to it, make it much more powerful, and transform it into something that is more effective, more personal and more quantifiable. So that's what DeckBird is doing.

>> What's the coolest thing you've done with DeckBird AI? Because I'm sure you've seen a lot of scenarios where you'd bring something to life. Can you tell a story of where it's, "Hey, that was unbelievable. What a surprise." Was it like the human characteristics of an actor or a person? Was it the voice? Was it insights? Tell a story of something cool.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. So I'll just use my own example and also one of my clients. DeckBird also needs to do the pitch deck. So our own pitch deck is narrated with DeckBird AI. The coolest thing about it is, I can record maybe a ten-second audio of my own voice, and the deck will speak in my own voice. The advantage of doing that is I don't have to go through it repeating myself. And if I find something is wrong, I can update the script. I don't have to re-record it. I can just update the script in real-time. When we first started, the voice cloning wasn't that good. You upload your audio sample. The audio-

>> I have a lot of audio samples with the cube, I can make a lot of voice out there.

Dave Li

>> And then it came out, it's 60%. But now when you record a ten-second sample, it came out almost exactly like your voice, and I think it's going to get better, and better and better.

>> How do people know it's real? This has become deep fakes, we all know cheap fakes is just editing. But there's real value in this because it's the classic example. We've all been in that situation. We get the same question over and over again. I just wish I had a tape recorder, hit play. Answer the question. That's what you're doing in some cases, but adding more flair to it with presentation. The webinar thing I could see great ROI for corporations. Webinars are a big part of the B2B landscape, or just any company about tutorials, information. Is there authenticity, seal of approval? How do people know it's real?

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. I think, John, I think you hit a very important point, which is how do we know AI is trustworthy? How do we know the content is real? How do we know the people behind it is real? That's why I call it DeckBird AI, really, it's transformative. It's taking what you have built already. You generated the deck using Canva or some other tools, but our tools transform it. We don't really add anything generative, but we just add on top of that. We go through each slide, summarize it. We record your voice so it will speak in your own voice. You can have a video. All that element just bring another layer of authenticity to the presentation.

>> Yeah, the hot trend, Dave, is reasoning, multistep agents. We hear the term one-shot answers versus multistep reasoning, reasoning is throwing off more token demand. Obviously we cover that a lot on theCUBE. But is there a reasoning element here where you can get feedback and learn? Because a lot of times I use Notebook LLM to test how bad my presentations are, because based on how they narrate them, I'm like, "Oh, that's terrible."

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. Actually on the back end, we plug into LLM such as Notebook LLM, so we get advantage of whatever LLM is progressing. That's number one, the reasoning capability. And another aspect is in addition to the LLM reasoning, we built in a little feedback loop so that our agent is monitoring how users are interacting to the presentation, and also get the data so it can make it more engaging.

>> Awesome. Well, I can't wait to try the product, and give an update on the status of the company, where you guys are at, size, funding levels, goals, what's your focus?

Dave Li

>> Well, that's actually one of the reasons I'm really looking forward to be in this Acti global, because as you know, Acti Global helped launched two companies that I admire very much. One is Canva and the other one is Zoom. And those two companies have something to do with presentations.

>> And transformative.

Dave Li

>> Exactly. They are transformative as well. So for DeckBird, I'm really excited about the future of it just based on the customer feedback.

>> And product is shipping now?

Dave Li

>> Of course, it's live in 73 countries already.

>> How many countries?

Dave Li

>> 73.

>> 73. All language-based?

Dave Li

>> 10 languages.

>> That's nice. Yeah, that's hard.

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. So it's live, and we have a very small team, less than 10 people. Yeah,

>> That's the new start-up mojo. You don't need to have hundreds of people with AI.

Dave Li

>> No, no, no. I think we live really in an amazing age. All the resources are there, and so the next step for us is actually just build a product, get a viral aspect of it, and then go to market.

>> It was really great to know you because this event is as a multi-entrepreneurial, multi-time founder environment, diverse. You got athletes here, you got people operating at elite levels. And so as a multi-turn entrepreneur, you got to love this environment because remember when we started companies before, you'd have to get the funding, build the product. Now you can build the product, get it to the market, then get funding, a little bit different cost structures, more leverage, operating leverage with technology services gets better. Everything gets better. You don't need the huge staff. As an entrepreneur, what's your reaction to the current market situation? And for the first-time founders out there, how good do they have it?

Dave Li

>> I think now is a great time to start something either in AI, or some other areas precisely because what you alluded to, the resources are there. You can get something up and running. You can go to market that much quickly. So for the entrepreneurs, I wish them all the luck and this event is just wonderful.

>> It's funny, I've seen all these waves of innovation as I get more senior in the industry, I love the market. I feel like I'm 18, 23 again because it's so exciting. But back in the other ways, they weren't as transformative where old and young can actually come together. Back in the old days, it was like the old folks were like, "Get off my lawn, or I walked to school and bare feet in the snow." Those war stories. It was hard to build computer science back in the '80s and '90s. Now it's a melting pot of experienced and young computer scientists, and engineers and just creatives. Because the tooling and the ability to build software is much different. That's a huge advantage. One for staffing, and two for more opportunities.

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. I think the landscape really changed. I still remember that my first startup, I have to literally carry a big server, a Dell server right into a data center. Literally, I did that.

>> Command line in, security guy's looking over your shoulder, give him this part of the network. It was really tight.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, you wouldn't have to do that now. Just on that small note, you can see the whole startup ecosystem is very different.

>> Dave, great to chat with you. Thanks for coming on the pod here. Short abridged version. It's a special appearance of theCUBE here in Maui. It's part of Acti Global where leaders come together in a micro community. Of course, connecting all together with NYSE, Wired and theCUBE, bringing you all the action. Again, just all the conversations together, come together, help everyone out in the open. That's our mission and we hope to bring more of that to you. Thanks for watching.

Dave Li, DeckBird.ai

search

>> Hi, I am John Furrier with theCube pod. We are here in Maui, Hawaii for the Acti Global. Dave is here, serial entrepreneur. Deckbird is the company. Big part of the show here. Appreciate you being part of the team here. I'm first time here as well. We're both learning how to kite surf.

Dave Li

>> Yes, I did.

>> Thanks for coming on the pod.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, thank you, John. Thank you for having me. I did just have my first kite surfing lesson yesterday, it is just wonderful.

>> The community here is very chill, but they're very smart. So it's a great venue to get in and meet folks. I've met people that I never would've met before here, and it's like a smart networking/intellect, problem solving world problems. It's a huge aperture, and the reach of this community is global and super impressed with Acti Global. Deckbird, you guys are a key part of this event. It's not your first rodeo in starting a company.

Dave Li

>> No, no, it's not.

>> Talk about your background and then I want to get into DeckBird and some of the cool things you're doing with AI because it has a global impact.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, John. Just to your point, since I got here, the people I talked to, people flew in from Singapore, from South Africa, really all over the world, and ideas and the stuff they are doing it's just very fascinating.

>> So your last startup was a big company. Talk about your last success.

Dave Li

>> So the last company I did is event registration and payment platform in China. Now it's growing to be one of the largest platforms in China. We do probably $1 billion RMB in ticket sales every year. So that's my first startup.

>> A lot of transactions.

Dave Li

>> Yes,

>> Yes. We talked about it last night. I had a podcast with a company out of South Africa, they're doing OLTP, open source. And what was the motivation for DeckBird? What was the genesis of the idea?

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. DeckBird is actually one of the things that came out from COVID. I would say the good things. It was the tail end of the COVID. I was stuck like everybody else, but still you have to do lots of online meetings and online calls. So after repeating myself over and over again, I said, there's got to be a better way to do this with AI. So that was an idea. And then fast-forward three years and now we have users in almost 73 countries worldwide, almost 10 languages.

>> Talk about the AI product. What is the product? It's an agent, so it's got some value. Talk about the product and the problem that you were solving.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. So DeckBird is a little tool, AI agent that transforms everyday PowerPoint or pitch decks from static files, into self-running webinars by adding AI-powered voice, video and user interactions. So the idea or the problem we're solving is for a lot of the companies, the PowerPoint or the deck.

>> Nobody likes PowerPoint.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, nobody likes it.

>> It's the worst.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, exactly. When you send it without any narrating, when people see it, they look at a few pages, it just goes right into the garbage. People don't read it. However, though, I think the PowerPoint is still the centerpiece of any sales and marketing company. The first thing people always say is, "Send me your deck."

>> Send me your deck. Yeah.

Dave Li

>> Exactly. So with DeckBird, the problem we are solving is if you look at the life cycle of a deck, there is a designing aspect of it, but that aspect has been solved by companies like Canva, like Microsoft PowerPoints and a lot of the AI-generated tools as well. But downstream you have, how do you narrate your deck? How do you share your deck? So DeckBird is solving problems.

>> We've all been in that position, Dave. It's like, "Hey, who's going to lead the presentation?" I remember him back in business school and even in undergraduate in computer science. "No, no, I'll present. You're not as good as me." Narrating the presentation is the story.

Dave Li

>> Absolutely.

>> And you're seeing success now with Notebook LM, is a great example. I wrote a white paper the other day where I thought it was pretty damn good. Four pages, very dense content notebook, Notebook LM, it tells a story. Is that the vibe you guys are going with here?

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think there is a saying-

>> That's audio only.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, I think there is a saying that John, the reality is actually created and perceived only through a narrative. So the narrative is actually very important when you have your voice, or your video guiding your audience through that just makes a huge difference on how your audience will receive, and perceive your company and your product. So that's what DeckBird does.

>> You're taking static data and narrating it. In this case it's presentation material, it's potentially sales material stuff would go to market. It could be recruiting. It could be anything.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. We have applications in a wide range of industries, sales and marketing for sure. Your company deck, your sales deck, but we have lots of applications in real estate. People are selling houses. The first thing they want to do is to make a good presentation. Training you just mentioned, that's actually a very big market. Employee training, customer training, customer onboarding, financial services. You are selling insurance product. So any scenario where you have somebody you have to explain something to somebody else, you would need a tool like DeckBird.

>> I think I remember back in the day, I'm old enough to remember, I used to work for IBM and HP back in the day, and they had great training programs and they had the laser discs, the self-service training Study how to deal with tough personalities, social styles, all those good things. Those soft skills.

Dave Li

>> Absolutely.

>> Computer-based training's been around for a while. Where's the generative AI making an impact? What's the big breakthrough in your mind? Is it generative? Is it more contextually relevant? Is there more data sources coming in? Can you just share your vision of how this progresses?

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. I think the generative AI is going to play a big part of it. But on the other hand, I think generative AI, we see the playing field, the competitive advantage and also the evolution paths. What I think something that's more interesting is what I call transformative AI, which is taking what you have and add to it, make it much more powerful, and transform it into something that is more effective, more personal and more quantifiable. So that's what DeckBird is doing.

>> What's the coolest thing you've done with DeckBird AI? Because I'm sure you've seen a lot of scenarios where you'd bring something to life. Can you tell a story of where it's, "Hey, that was unbelievable. What a surprise." Was it like the human characteristics of an actor or a person? Was it the voice? Was it insights? Tell a story of something cool.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, absolutely. So I'll just use my own example and also one of my clients. DeckBird also needs to do the pitch deck. So our own pitch deck is narrated with DeckBird AI. The coolest thing about it is, I can record maybe a ten-second audio of my own voice, and the deck will speak in my own voice. The advantage of doing that is I don't have to go through it repeating myself. And if I find something is wrong, I can update the script. I don't have to re-record it. I can just update the script in real-time. When we first started, the voice cloning wasn't that good. You upload your audio sample. The audio-

>> I have a lot of audio samples with the cube, I can make a lot of voice out there.

Dave Li

>> And then it came out, it's 60%. But now when you record a ten-second sample, it came out almost exactly like your voice, and I think it's going to get better, and better and better.

>> How do people know it's real? This has become deep fakes, we all know cheap fakes is just editing. But there's real value in this because it's the classic example. We've all been in that situation. We get the same question over and over again. I just wish I had a tape recorder, hit play. Answer the question. That's what you're doing in some cases, but adding more flair to it with presentation. The webinar thing I could see great ROI for corporations. Webinars are a big part of the B2B landscape, or just any company about tutorials, information. Is there authenticity, seal of approval? How do people know it's real?

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. I think, John, I think you hit a very important point, which is how do we know AI is trustworthy? How do we know the content is real? How do we know the people behind it is real? That's why I call it DeckBird AI, really, it's transformative. It's taking what you have built already. You generated the deck using Canva or some other tools, but our tools transform it. We don't really add anything generative, but we just add on top of that. We go through each slide, summarize it. We record your voice so it will speak in your own voice. You can have a video. All that element just bring another layer of authenticity to the presentation.

>> Yeah, the hot trend, Dave, is reasoning, multistep agents. We hear the term one-shot answers versus multistep reasoning, reasoning is throwing off more token demand. Obviously we cover that a lot on theCUBE. But is there a reasoning element here where you can get feedback and learn? Because a lot of times I use Notebook LLM to test how bad my presentations are, because based on how they narrate them, I'm like, "Oh, that's terrible."

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. Actually on the back end, we plug into LLM such as Notebook LLM, so we get advantage of whatever LLM is progressing. That's number one, the reasoning capability. And another aspect is in addition to the LLM reasoning, we built in a little feedback loop so that our agent is monitoring how users are interacting to the presentation, and also get the data so it can make it more engaging.

>> Awesome. Well, I can't wait to try the product, and give an update on the status of the company, where you guys are at, size, funding levels, goals, what's your focus?

Dave Li

>> Well, that's actually one of the reasons I'm really looking forward to be in this Acti global, because as you know, Acti Global helped launched two companies that I admire very much. One is Canva and the other one is Zoom. And those two companies have something to do with presentations.

>> And transformative.

Dave Li

>> Exactly. They are transformative as well. So for DeckBird, I'm really excited about the future of it just based on the customer feedback.

>> And product is shipping now?

Dave Li

>> Of course, it's live in 73 countries already.

>> How many countries?

Dave Li

>> 73.

>> 73. All language-based?

Dave Li

>> 10 languages.

>> That's nice. Yeah, that's hard.

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. So it's live, and we have a very small team, less than 10 people. Yeah,

>> That's the new start-up mojo. You don't need to have hundreds of people with AI.

Dave Li

>> No, no, no. I think we live really in an amazing age. All the resources are there, and so the next step for us is actually just build a product, get a viral aspect of it, and then go to market.

>> It was really great to know you because this event is as a multi-entrepreneurial, multi-time founder environment, diverse. You got athletes here, you got people operating at elite levels. And so as a multi-turn entrepreneur, you got to love this environment because remember when we started companies before, you'd have to get the funding, build the product. Now you can build the product, get it to the market, then get funding, a little bit different cost structures, more leverage, operating leverage with technology services gets better. Everything gets better. You don't need the huge staff. As an entrepreneur, what's your reaction to the current market situation? And for the first-time founders out there, how good do they have it?

Dave Li

>> I think now is a great time to start something either in AI, or some other areas precisely because what you alluded to, the resources are there. You can get something up and running. You can go to market that much quickly. So for the entrepreneurs, I wish them all the luck and this event is just wonderful.

>> It's funny, I've seen all these waves of innovation as I get more senior in the industry, I love the market. I feel like I'm 18, 23 again because it's so exciting. But back in the other ways, they weren't as transformative where old and young can actually come together. Back in the old days, it was like the old folks were like, "Get off my lawn, or I walked to school and bare feet in the snow." Those war stories. It was hard to build computer science back in the '80s and '90s. Now it's a melting pot of experienced and young computer scientists, and engineers and just creatives. Because the tooling and the ability to build software is much different. That's a huge advantage. One for staffing, and two for more opportunities.

Dave Li

>> Absolutely. I think the landscape really changed. I still remember that my first startup, I have to literally carry a big server, a Dell server right into a data center. Literally, I did that.

>> Command line in, security guy's looking over your shoulder, give him this part of the network. It was really tight.

Dave Li

>> Yeah, you wouldn't have to do that now. Just on that small note, you can see the whole startup ecosystem is very different.

>> Dave, great to chat with you. Thanks for coming on the pod here. Short abridged version. It's a special appearance of theCUBE here in Maui. It's part of Acti Global where leaders come together in a micro community. Of course, connecting all together with NYSE, Wired and theCUBE, bringing you all the action. Again, just all the conversations together, come together, help everyone out in the open. That's our mission and we hope to bring more of that to you. Thanks for watching.