#328 - Matthew McGrory, CEO at Arwen AI, on solving a problem of global scale.

Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on the entrepreneurial journey to make social a positive place again - for everyone. My guest is Matthew McGrory, CEO of Arwen AI.

Matthew is a tech- entrepreneur on a big mission. He has held tech leadership roles: IT Director at Logicalis, Director Managed Services at Acora, and Managing Director at Carrenza (a cloud service provider acquired by Six Degrees Group),

In the period from July 2018 and September 2020 he took a break from his corporate life to become a House Husband. In that period he developed a passion for using AI to drive positive change.

That led him to cofound Arwen AI in September 2020. Arwen AI is a platform that helps its customers actively moderate and manage their community, across both paid and organic.

Their mission: to make social media a more positive place by filtering out hate speech and toxicity.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Matthew to my podcast. We explore what's broken in today's Social Media world. Matthew shares his vision to make Social a place without toxicity and spam. He then elaborates on his hard-won lessons from his journey to speed up direct sales and benefit from using ecosystems to grow even faster. Last but not least, he shares his framework to increase resilience across the organization.

Here's one of his quotes

I thought, 'This is great, we'll create some technology, fix the problem and everyone will buy it.' I was so wrong on that part. I got to about demo number 200, it was with a US broadcast news organization. And the head of digital said, 'Listen, I'm protected by the First Amendment, I can let anything go up on my channels. I don't have to get rid of it. You're giving me an extra job to do. An extra cost. Tell me why this is valuable to my business. Tell me how it makes me money or saves me money.'

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. How he gained traction in a market where customers resisted to buy because they saw the solution as an extra job and an extra cost.
2. What he did differently to gain technical and commercial momentum.
3. What he invested in early on to get access to strategic accounts and speed up the commercial contracting process in enterprise sales situations.
4. How he goes about to keep the business humming, and keeping everyone aligned and motivated - especially in tough times.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Matthew McGrory
• Website: Arwen AI

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