Joining a startup is pretty much the way I’d imagine it’d be getting shot out of a cannon; which wasn’t surprising, as I’ve been fortunate to be on the ground floor of a few startups. And after spending my last ~5 years in senior leadership at two mature technology companies – I missed the energy, pace and potential that’s at the heart of a startup.

First, an introduction – my name is Mike Ross, and I am VP of Engineering at Tetra Insights. After a slow and deliberate search for my next opportunity, I found a home with the Tetra team – joining in 2019. As I said, I had come to really miss a startup culture, and I was determined to find the right fit; to help build an exciting company and product. 

While the technology in our stack is very familiar, our product and space are relatively new to me – so I’ve spent my first few months soaking it in. Though I still have much to learn, I’m anxious to share some of the exciting initiatives we have planned for 2020. Though our technical initiatives are exciting, they’re no less so than our initiatives to build our company and culture. 

As our company and product are focused on making qualitative (emotive) data more accessible, we strongly believe in a work culture that’s healthy (physically and emotionally), transparent, accountable and supportive. These shared values had much to do with my choosing Tetra Insights.

My next post will discuss the work we’re doing with Natural Language Processing (NLP) within our product. Though still a nascent technology, there are quite a few NLP services, or ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) that integrate NLP – and we’re actively researching and prototyping how we might use these rapidly maturing services to fortify our ability to extract valuable emotive analytics from text (transcribed or otherwise).

Just beyond NLP, Machine Learning (ML) is waiting in the wings to help us increase the quality of our qualitative data. 

I’ll stop there for now, and just say ‘stay tuned’ for my next installment. While Michael Bamberger (our CEO) and I (and potentially others) will post here, you can expect my NLP post soon. We really appreciate your interest in Tetra Insights, and I’m excited to open the curtain a bit and share what’s coming.