In this episode, Alex is talking to Tamara Nelson, founder of Barometer, a platform that empowers organizations to extract data-driven insights from their text data quickly and consistently.
Tamara Nelson is a human-computer interaction researcher and machine learning engineer. She enjoys researching problems at the intersection of human-computer interaction and health. Tamara graduated from UCSD with a B.S. in Cognitive Science, specializing in machine learning and neural computation. She completed her honors thesis in human-computer interaction Tamara is a registered yoga instructor, and co-founder of a yoga web app, HapiFlo.
In this episode, Alex is talking to Tamara Nelson, founder of Barometer, a platform that empowers organizations to extract data-driven insights from their text data quickly and consistently.
Tamara Nelson is a human-computer interaction researcher and machine learning engineer. She enjoys researching problems at the intersection of human-computer interaction and health. Tamara graduated from UCSD with a B.S. in Cognitive Science, specializing in machine learning and neural computation. She completed her honors thesis in human-computer interaction Tamara is a registered yoga instructor, and co-founder of a yoga web app, HapiFlo.
Alex Romanovich (00:18):
Hi, this is Alex Romanovich, and welcome to the Global Edge Talk podcast. Today we have a wonderful guest from Chatanooga, Tennessee, Tamara Zubatiy, right? Am I pronouncing your name correctly?
Tamara Nelson (00:32):
Perfect.
Alex Romanovich (00:33):
Perfect. Excellent. It's May 4th, 2022. And Tamara is the CEO co-founder of the company called Barometer. We'll talk about that. We will talk about her entrepreneurial spirit, her path to where she is right now. We will talk about a variety of different topics. Very interesting topics involving women in tech, women entrepreneurs, artificial intelligence, and so forth. Now, Tamara, before we go, before we continue, I looked at your LinkedIn, and I couldn't help but notice that you have a degree. First of all, you have a degree at the University of California, San Diego, in cognitive science. We'll talk about that, but then I noticed that you are a Ph.D. Candidate from the Georgia Institute of pathology and in human center computing, which is a fascinating topic, but we'll talk about that as well. So what an accomplished, amazing entrepreneur you are. Let's talk about, first of all, what possessed you to go after cognitive science, human-centered computing at the Ph.D. Level, a developer, a UX/UI person, and now the CEO of an artificial intelligence company. Tell us more.
Tamara Nelson (01:57):
Yeah. So I guess the very start of it was I think my first love was the brain, so I'm really, I've always been really interested in like neuroscience. Biology was always my favorite, not so much chemistry, but really it was my interest in getting kind of at the frontier of neuroscience research that launched me into this trajectory. And it all started with this internship that I got in high school; In my junior year of high school, I got to work at the salt Institute in Dr. Tatiana Sharpie's lab, working on trying to understand how monkeys listen to bird sounds and like it, what area of their brain do they add most of the information for how they're gonna process that bird sound. And it was just such an abstract and like weird problem, but it was such an interesting like story because it was kind of concrete of the fact that there was this monkey actually at this lab.
Tamara Nelson (02:51):
And we had their actual like neuron recordings, and I was doing machine learning at the time. And it was like the very first experience ever doing that at an industry level. They called me back. I was able to work there for the next summer. And then UCSD is actually just across the street from that lab. And then what's going on on that, like a plateau in San Diego in terms of like frontier basic neuro research is really amazing. Second maybe like the biotech scene in Boston. So I was really excited about staying there. Cognitive science was... I like to try to get like the best experience that I can get out of a place. And UCSD has the first cognitive science department in the country, and I think it's the talk department.
Tamara Nelson (03:37):
And I just had like the most amazing experience meeting the faculty there. I came in as a physiology and neuroscience student but immediately switched to the cognitive science track cuz I could take all the neuro classes but also take all the computer science classes and take all of the psych classes. And what's interesting about cognitive science is it's kind of like a like human-computer interaction, like a discipline that crosses into all of these other disciplines. And what's cool about it is kind of the underlying assumption of the like theory of mind and also the duality between the people that think that like the mind is the brain and then the mind is not the brain. That's always like a really fun conversation. And in general, artificial intelligence is kind of bold because you're like, what about the spirit? Like, could you really create an intelligence that isn't just the brain? All of that, from a philosophical level, is really interesting to me.
Tamara Nelson (04:30):
But I feel like what doing cognitive science allowed me to do is be more pragmatic in like the problems that I'm solving. So it really is a pragmatic discipline. And my focus is I had kind of two specializations. So I did my honors thesis at UCSD to understand how to design user interfaces for older adults who have a hearing impairment. And so we were making an open-source hearing aid and a phone app that they could use to control their hearing aid settings cuz apparently they need to change them throughout the day because the same setting doesn't work in different acoustic environments. It is this whole thing. But they're older, and they don't really love the phone. And anyway, it was like this whole interesting process, and it was a real environment. And so, I feel like that's kind of a theme in my life. I've worked on a lot of hands-on projects where there's like a real pragmatic goal that we're trying to get to. And that's what has kind of fueled my passion for entrepreneurship. I don't really like theorizing about stuff. I like to just like build a thing, see how people react to it, and then improve it. So yeah, that's kind of been the journey from two cognitive science and kind of the fuel for the entrepreneurship.
Alex Romanovich (05:39):
A pretty amazing, pretty amazing, and a great accomplishment. First of all, I just heard you told me that you recently got married. Congratulations.
Tamara Nelson (05:48):
Thank you.
Alex Romanovich (05:49):
Which is a great accomplishment as well. Best of luck. And I also noticed that your latest adventure venture company called, Barometer, is a company you co-founded. And says when you look at Barometer website and LinkedIn profile, it says "artificial intelligent powered brand suitability nutrition label for podcast advertising". Wow, that's a mouthful. Tell us a little bit more about that. What does that mean?
Tamara Nelson (06:22):
So one of the things that we've learned by studying machine learning and by studying people together is that people are remarkably inconsistent, and they are actually uniquely bad at consistency. And they're also uniquely bad at not being biased because that to be biased is to be human. And it's like a basic way in which we operate in the world. Everything that our brain does is a bias. So it only makes sense to leverage machines for things that we're really bad at. So basically, what we had been doing at Barometer before we launched into podcasts was analyzing news and trying to provide some kind of like a consistent nutrition label for people who are trying to ingest large amounts of news, real information, heavy people, but then, this podcast problem presented itself, and we learned that the current alternative to like there's no solution to this problem.
Tamara Nelson (07:14):
And people literally have interns listening to podcasts, trying to decide like what show they're gonna advertise on or what show a new brand should work with. And it's like this weird human problem. And I was almost convinced that there were no more of these like human, like labor type problems. But in fact, this was like an amazing use case for this technology that we had been building for news that was really less applicable in the news space. And so what we tried was, well, there are actually set definitions in brand suitability through the Gar framework and through other kinds of guiding frameworks, but they haven't really been operationalized into audio, and our experience doing like machine learning, problem-solving, user experience, problem-solving that's, it's like a classic problem to operationalize some framework. And then you build an expert system that executes that framework.
Tamara Nelson (08:05):
So we felt that it was kind of a great way for us to both build really robust data sets from this podcast content and its user-generated content. So it has all of these unique qualities that aren't present in the text that's written down, for example. And so it's a great data set. And then also we are really accurate at being able to predict, detect the presence of these different brand suitability components, everything from like adult language to mentions of drugs or obscenities and understanding the context in which that information is presented. So not just being able to say, oh, you used, you talked about climate change, but it's like, how did you talk about climate change? Was it in a way that is, glamorizing polarization, or was it in a way that's dramatizing the issue in this time because it's current, or is it just like an information piece about the science of climate change? Like there are so many different contexts that are possible, and then the world is changing. So our tool, unlike others, is also informed by real-time news. So we are tracking what the world is saying and then refining the things that we're looking for in content, um, to be more aligned with that. So that's like the podcast brand suit, suitability product of Barometer, and then Barometer has like this whole other secret business that it's not so secret, but we just don't have a pretty smart...
Alex Romanovich (09:25):
It's secret anymore if you tell us, right?
Tamara Nelson (09:28):
No. Yeah, I guess secret it's. It's only secret in that. Like we really like our front end for the brand suitability product. It's so nice. The weight that you can search and make dashboards that align with your values, it makes it really easy to find shows that have absolutely no risk for anything, but then it also makes it easy to, even if it says that there's a risk for something like you can dive deeper in and you can look at every episode, and you can say, oh, you know, maybe it was just that one episode that I don't agree with overall, this is a great show. Like our goal is not to have, is to make people more confident in their engagement with this media, right. Not to make them throw it away or like throw entire categories away, which is like what our clients had been seeing.
Tamara Nelson (10:10):
And then when they started, when we started like presenting this to people and now like we're in our beta people are really excited by it. So like, I'll keep you posted on how everything is going. But yes, our secret business that doesn't have a front end is kind of just that piece of it that allows us to query the real-time news. So we're tracking different entities in the news. So everything from like a brand name to like a podcast host. And then we have other projects where we're tracking different types of entities for different groups that care about different things. And so you can basically give us a list of entities though. Then we can with like 99% certainty find you only the content that's actually about those entities give you like an estimate of like really, what is it just mentioning that person in passing or like, is it really about that person?
Tamara Nelson (11:02):
And then get whatever metrics you want to be extracted from that a common one is like the sentiment. There are all sorts of questions like, what if the entity is mentioned in the title? What if the entity is not mentioned in the title? Like all of that stuff is really fun to try, to use. That's where some of the user research pieces come in. So it's like, we know we have data about users on the news feed and that they don't click on articles and that they really only see the title and maybe the description. Should that be a factor in how you wait for sentiment if the entity is mentioned in the title or not mentioned in the title, right? Like all of these fun sides, questions are what is interesting to me about our business and the nuance of the complexity, really of like the signals that we're trying to collect. I think it's really interesting and so I think that's why we're having so much fun doing it. <Laugh>
Alex Romanovich (11:54):
It sounds like you're having a lot of fun because you're so excited and passionate about this, but, you know, let's give it another shot because I'll be honest with you. It's a very complex topic for a layman like myself. So help me understand. In simple terms, not in geek language, and even though I think of myself as being technically a student sophisticated, I'm not still grasping this a hundred percent. So maybe if you help me go through a use case, right. A very simple use case of how the barometer platform can aid may be an advertiser or a podcaster, or even somebody like myself, right. What could I do with this platform? I'm assuming it's B2B. It's for businesses. It's not for the consumer, but it's probably for using, yeah. It's probably using consumer data that you're collecting, or you're concerned about. And so if, what takes me through a simple use case.
Tamara Nelson (13:07):
Okay. So I'll go through the discovery use case first. So if to say you're a brand and, or, and you're looking to advertise on podcasts and you sell diapers, and you want to find good podcasts. And so say there's another brand, and they're selling vodka. So the definition of what a good podcast is to those two brands is completely different. What we do is help you find the podcasts that are suitable for your brand. So diaper brands can say, I want no adult content at all. And you can slide the slider for adult content to zero. I want no mention of obscenity and profanity at all. I also don't want any debated, sensitive social issues. I'm really just looking for moms who are getting their like weekly content about like science or fashion or whatever they're listening to. And we make it really easy to find shows that meet those criteria.
Tamara Nelson (13:57):
And you can literally like enter your criteria. And then, it filters the discovery feed for all of the shows that meet your criteria. You can save that. Then you can make a whole dashboard of things you never wanna appear on. So it's really good, like media planning and communications tools. If you're a brand working independently, if you're a brand working with an agency for agencies managing brands with a diversity of requirements, even within a brand, different products can have all sorts of different requirements. And so we're really solving that brand suitability problem, which is a funny one because there's no real definition of it, cuz it's so contexting specific.
Alex Romanovich (14:31):
Got it. Oh, I got it. Excellent. Let's switch topics a little bit. You are a very accomplished individual about to become a PhD from one of the top universities in the country. If not the world you're running, you're a CEO of a artificial intelligence machine learning company. Did you always have a dream of doing something like this? Is this something that you always wanted as a little girl? Like you were, you know, 8, 9, 10, whatever, and says, you know what, I wanna do this, what was it later or so what was the impetus for choosing this path? I'm just curious.
Tamara Nelson (15:15):
I think like a really big factor where my parents, like both of my parents, have upper education degrees. And so, like, I feel like growing up the way that my dad kind of ran my education, it wasn't really a question that I was going to grad school. It was more like, well, undergrad doesn't even matter that much. We just gotta do well and then go to a good grad school. And so, I feel like that was always like my perspective. The whole company thing came when I started having work experience and realized that I really didn't wanna be working for other people for extended periods of time. And I didn't feel as motivated to exert myself fully. And I feel like doing. Basically, it was the people in my undergrad. And then, later in my grad school, those who were working on their own projects, which were really inspiring, actually really inspired me to pursue that path.
Tamara Nelson (16:04):
So like my undergrad advisor, he was the one in charge of that lab making the hearing aid. That was a really interesting project. He seemed really passionate and like alive with what he was doing. It really didn't seem like a burden, and he had left Qualcomm. And so I found myself in this position where like everybody I looked up to, I wanted a job at companies. I didn't respect Facebook or Google, or all of these companies. And I was like, why are you doing this? Like, why are you doing this to go work there? Like it just didn't click for me. And so, I realized that that's not what I wanted to do. And I kind of found entrepreneurship was something that we like, I don't think I ever like planned specifically, but I was certainly interested in, I was participating in like different entrepreneurship programs and undergrad trying to, like, we founded a yoga audio-guided yoga company with grant before we founded Barometer.
Tamara Nelson (16:58):
We gave it away to the braille Institute in San Diego. They can plug in any audio file. It does guide yoga. I don't know. We just did these different projects, but Barometer, we won a Hackathon. So it was like this event that we went to at U C S D on the weekend. And it was like this collaborative thinking, like, I don't, it wasn't like a singularity event, but like the one, the person who was facilitating it was a part of singularity. And so it was really like this very growth mindset event. And there were all of these experts there that we were able to bounce ideas off of really quickly and kind of get to, oh, like that's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. And then found one thing that would work, which was kind of that nutrition label for news concept. And then that's kind of what we kept rolling with. That was 2018. So we incorporated Barometer in 2019 and have just been kind of like running at building the core technology. And we didn't get venture-backed until last November. So not this November that just passed, but the one before that we got our preseed, and then this last November, we just closed our seed round. So it's been kind of like a long time coming to actually be able to say that we're like an entrepreneur, but, yeah, it's been a fun journey.
Alex Romanovich (18:18):
Apparently, not only, you know, not only you're a CEO of a sophisticated company, but you also raised money. Tell us about that experience. I'm just curious about what you had to go through as an entrepreneur. You know, in the environment where I guess during COVID there was a sentiment that you know, what it's gonna be difficult and so forth, but some companies said, you know what? It was actually easier. It was actually easier to raise money. What was your experience in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 up to now? I mean, you said there was less November. How was it? Tell us more.
Tamara Nelson (18:55):
Yeah, it's. I think it would be the latter case for us. I feel like COVID really like empowered our business because all the people we wanted to talk to that couldn't, we couldn't get meetings with where suddenly their calendars were available to us. We got really lucky. The Georgia tech thing set us up really nicely. Georgia tech is, I think so. I really have trouble with this because both of my Alma maters are competing to be the top startup university campus in the country. So it's Georgia tech and UCSD. They both have these mass innovator programs, but Georgia Tech is currently, I think, the top entrepreneurship school in the country. They launched the most companies a year. There is this accelerator there called Create X that's run by this guy, Chris Klaus. Um, I knew Chris Klaus because there was a building named Dr.
Tamara Nelson (19:38):
Him on campus, in the computer science building that looks like a stadium. And it's amazing. And like going there makes you feel like, it makes you feel like the nerds are like the athletes type of a moment. And he ran that program, and he was actually like made himself available to participants. And I learned that you couldn't like win the program because they have to support everybody that participates in it. But like three companies actually get investment from him at the end of the thing. So I was like, oh my God, we have to do that. So we did the program, of course, we won the program. It was during COVID. We were the first, and only I think, no, there was one year after us that did a virtual demo day. And because we did a virtual demo day, all of these other investors were able to show up.
Tamara Nelson (20:19):
And actually, we met two of the investors in our through Chris Klaus on that virtual demo day. And then we just like raised the preseed then with them, those people that we're working with, there are some angels we're working with Outlander labs. They were the first to check into Barometer after the Create X. They're just an amazing team. They've brought us so many opportunities. They helped us. Uh, we got like ten beta customers between like November and the end of the year. When our first, that first couple of months. And that was a really exhilarating time. Some of those people are still our customers. So I feel like those early investors, it was really all about the people for us. And they believed in the potential of the technology and also like our potential to carry that out.
Tamara Nelson (21:08):
And I feel like it was that mutual kind of like we execution on the things that we said we were gonna do to build that trust with them that gave us the confidence to continue. And so this most recent round, we were going into it without the podcast product. Like we didn't have it, but we knew that that's what we were building. We knew that we were becoming like Equifax for brand safety. Like that was the direction, but we really didn't even have like a beach head or anything. And we had to raise the round because we were running outta money and we were like, look like you can trust us because we did this in the past, but like that thing's not gonna work this new thing's gonna work and we're gonna pitch it at south by Southwest, and then we're gonna win. And then we're gonna get all of these clients. And then that's literally exactly what happened. And so now I feel like we have a really good rapport with our investment team, and now it's really getting fun cuz we're actually doing some of the things that we set out to do.
Alex Romanovich (22:03):
That's a great story. Great story, by the way. I'm very curious about your location now. I think we talked about this before. Georgia Tech, UC San Diego, very close to Silicon Valley, very close to, you know, large metropolitan areas, uh, with lots of brands and lots of, you know, lots of great opportunities, but you're in Chattanooga, Tennessee. What's up with that.
Tamara Nelson (22:30):
So, okay. San Diego is like LA the way that Chattanooga is to Atlanta. That's how I think of it in my head. So like I can't live in the bigger cities. I don't know why. Maybe I'm just like too ridiculous. Like I must be too sensitive or something. It just like gets to me after a couple of years. And so I really like living in a smaller city like San Diego and Chattanooga Chattanooga's close enough to Georgia tech. It's close enough to Atlanta to be dangerous but far enough for me to have nature time and isolation and be able to get my work done. Also, shout out to Brickyard. One of our investors in the seed round was actually our first check into the seed round. Um, they run a fund that's based here, and they have opened a, uh, like founders club.
Tamara Nelson (23:14):
Basically, if you're a founder and they've invested in you, you can work out of their building. That's like designed to support your wellness in Chattooga, which is already a much less stressful environment than other cities. And there are lots of really cool founders that we've met, who have moved here from all over the country, like New York City, LA, San Francisco, all these places that you wouldn't have expected. Of course, we fled from Atlanta, but other people are moving from like beautiful places with like stuff going on too. So I think they were a really large motivator for us to come and just like fully immerse.
Alex Romanovich (23:48):
Interesting. Interesting. I've been to Tennessee a couple of times. I did my sales education with IBM and Atlanta, Georgia. Beautiful spots. I love Tennessee, so I don't necessarily blame you, but I was just curious if Chad Noga had maybe an entrepreneurial environment, accelerators, or, you know, obviously, you have to have access. I mean, I'm not sure if you're, if you're using, if your resources are local national or they're international, in terms of development and so forth and so on. Um, so is this something that you're also combining is Chattanooga for leisure and living only, or you're also combining some of the local, you know, resource allocated type things.
Tamara Nelson (24:34):
Yeah, certainly. So, they have a very strong, multi-generational now startup community here, and our investors are actually like the second generation. So they were involved in like the very first accelerator at, in Chattanooga. And we work with their investors too. So it's like a very cool environment, lots of people that have launched and scaled successful companies around lots of people working remotely at really big companies that we get access to. It's a great space from that point of view, and like the network. But also, it's like, I feel like it's like the less flashy founders that are actually doing stuff. And that's really important to us too. There's a lot of noise in like Miami and in Silicon Valley. So we really like it here. I definitely think that it's primarily that we moved here for those, for the accelerator, for their founder program, and the lifestyle benefits were like part of the perks on how they sold us on moving out here. But now that we're here, it's really a remarkable place to be.
Alex Romanovich (25:36):
It's actually a great topic to chat about it for a few minutes. So yeah, we're used to very large metropolitan areas. You know, we're used to Austin, Texas, we're used to Silicon Valley, New York City, Boston, you know, Miami, as you mentioned, are you actually seeing and do you believe that there is a movement towards the, you know, less well-known cities in terms of entrepreneurship, in terms of startups investments and so forth? Are you actually seeing more of that, and is that because of COVID, or is that because of other factors?
Tamara Nelson (26:13):
Okay, I'll start off by saying that my perspective is probably like, not statistically significant, but yes. I've noticed that it's certainly become easier to convince people to leave San Francisco or New York. I think it's like a combination of things. I think COVID was a big deal from the point of view of like isolation and lack of access to stuff. But I also think crime is not a negligible aspect of it. There's just like a huge amount of crime in all of those places right now. I can't say that there's less crime in Chattanooga. I really haven't done the math, but I haven't noticed it as much. Um, yeah...
Alex Romanovich (26:50):
Well, certainly New York, New York City, we're seeing a lot of it here. We see a huge spike, and our new mayor is hopefully gonna be doing something about this.
Tamara Nelson (26:59):
Yeah. Yeah. I know San Francisco has an issue with their DA. It's a demarcation policy, so they basically put like a label on the city that says come, you can do any non-violent crime here. So it's just like, it's hard, it's a really tough situation, but I also feel like it's really expensive to live in those big cities. And it used to be a really big benefit because you could have the in-person networking and stuff right now. There's a lot of like fear in, especially there still. And so there's kind of like a lot of like, I don't know, shaming for networking. And then like, it's just like a really weird environment in terms of like the moral aspect of what COVID has done to society and like, what is it socially acceptable to like be networking and like, what are the risks of that?
Tamara Nelson (27:46):
Like, all of those are important conversations. What I find here is there's, you can do whatever you want. You can be in person. You can be remote. I'm still fully remote. We have the office. I really never go because I'm always in meetings, and I've been sure you've seen that meme of like people coming to their office and sitting on zoom meetings all day. Like, it's, it's just an art like it's gonna be hybrid maybe forever. Um, so I think that now is an opportunity for people to think about where do they wanna live for this time that they're taking meetings all day and what do they wanna do after they're done after their butt leaves the chair at the end of the day, it's like, I, I wanna go, paddle board, 10 feet out of my apartment, you know, like that, that everybody's different. Um, yeah.
Alex Romanovich (28:34):
So let's talk a little bit about how you and I have met. We both belong to the organization called the chief marketing officers club. I think you were a function at the south by Southwest, I believe, right? Yes. And the other thing I noticed is that next to your name on LinkedIn, you have a Ukrainian flag. So do I, and that means that we both support Ukraine, and you are Ukrainian American, from what I understand. So tell us a little bit about that and tell us about what association you have with Ukraine. If I mean, other than, you know, your parents or you know, born there, or maybe you were born there, but tell us more about that.
Tamara Nelson (29:16):
Yeah. Yeah. So I was born in Ukraine in 96, and we moved in 2001, and I'm from Kharkiv. So when I was living there and leaving, we were speaking primarily Russian. I, actually, really had never heard Ukrainian, honestly. Um, when I left, and then I would come back in the summers after I was like eight, my parents would send me back every summer until I was 12. And I had a grandma who lived in like Belgorod or just outside of, and then I had a great-grandma who had like a village or farm in the village, some family in Kharkiv still, and a lot of friends of my parents went to university.
Alex Romanovich (29:54):
Belgorod is right across the border in Russia, actually, right?
Tamara Nelson (29:58):
Exactly. Yeah. So I would summer half and half, I would spend some time at my grandma's in Russia, then we would go together to Crimea, and then we would stop by Kharkiv or Kyiv on the way back. And then I would either depart from Kyiv. I would usually depart from Kyiv. And so that was like the vibe every summer. And so this was like, when this whole thing happened, it was really confusing for me because I'm like a Russian-speaking Ukrainian with family who's technically Ukrainian. Like my mom was also born in Ukraine, so it was my dad, but her family, her father was in the Russian military, and they traveled all over. And so it's just like a very confusing time. And I have, I still have family who lives in Moscow and family who lives in Kyiv. And it's just like a very tense situation.
Alex Romanovich (30:42):
Is it a tense situation because the family members do not discuss this, or they, they have opposite opinions about the war or what it is?
Tamara Nelson (30:51):
They have opposite opinions, and it's like, I definitely have family that is completely like, in my perspective, delusional about the situation, and there are different reasons like their jobs or like their things that they do, which is more related to Russia, I don't know. I kind of understood, I guess. And so I, I feel like, at this point, it's just like really tough cuz they're calling their brother or sister on the phone and like denying their experience basically and saying things like, isn't it stupid that like the Ukrainians are bombing themselves and it's just like you've been related for 60 years. Like, what are you talking about? You know, it's just like these radical moments where you actually can't believe that this person is like your blood.
Alex Romanovich (31:40):
It must be difficult for you for a different reason also, because, and for me to a certain extent, I was born in Ukraine as well, lived in the United States for over 40 years. So you know, I've been in the states for quite some time, but it must be difficult for you. And maybe you should talk about this as a person in technology. And you know, this war actually showed that tech and war and information and this, you know, recognition of the actual events, the truth, so to speak, is so much different these days, especially when it comes to maybe artificial intelligence and machine learning and technologies like that. Um, what can you say about that?
Tamara Nelson (32:31):
I think that one of the fundamental assumptions of our organization is that we don't live in a neutral information ecosystem, and we do live in a weaponized information ecosystem. The term that DARPA uses is called reality jamming. So like, we everyday experience this reality that different actors are trying to impose on us. And ultimately, like, our brain is really none the wiser. So it's very important. These environments that we surround ourselves with and like social media and things like that, that's where the nutrition label metaphor comes from. It's like your intake into your brain. So if we are feeding ourselves all of this information without really giving it a second thought, actually, every single data point that we take in permanently affects our perception of every future event. So it's really, it's really critical to be critical of what you allow into your brain.
Tamara Nelson (33:20):
And I think that the challenge that we're facing is we in this country are taking freedom of speech for granted. And so we have these free environments. And then, we look at like countries like Russia or other countries with controlled information ecosystems like China, where people are forced to listen to certain news and certain information. And they're immersed in a much more controlled information ecosystem. And you can see the results of that in some of them, like these, some of these people genuinely believe the things that they think are real and they don't really, they could Google it, but it's literally like their biological drive to reject that information that doesn't confirm their existing perspectives. So there's a lot of this, like weaponized cognitive science basically in, in play in these social networks. And I think like the impact of that, there's so much research now that's been done on the power of like the Twitter algorithm and redirecting outrageous language.
Tamara Nelson (34:20):
Like the most outrageous tweets are the ones that get spread the most. There's also a lot of research that gets done about how people like foreign actors can infiltrate domestic networks very easily. And these systems are just like not really designed to be so critical. And I think that's like one of the failures, but I also think that it's right now what we're seeing is this reaction to that where we're seeing some people getting de-platformed or like censored. And that's also a really, really scary thing to watch. And it's like for now sometimes it's like, like the Alex Jones example, I think I'm quoting David Sachs or somebody when I'm saying that nobody's gonna stick their head out for Alex Jones, but what happens when the next person that they try to censor somebody that you do agree with?
Tamara Nelson (35:02):
You know, and once you start setting that precedent, it gets really hard to step away from it. And like, yeah, I never personally lived through like the Soviet Union, but my parents have told me about it. And that is, it sounds very similar to some of the things that they experienced. And that that's what gives me the most pause is this, like these problems that people have with freedom of speech. Some of the challenges that that's bringing people actually ask me, Alex, all the time about living in Chattanooga. And they're like, aren't you scared about like, living with all of the Republicans? And I'm like, honestly, like, no, it's actually kind of refreshing to live in a state where freedom of speech goes in two directions, you know, it's not just like one-directional, so yeah.
Alex Romanovich (35:50):
What are your thoughts on Elon Musk buying Twitter?
Alex Romanovich (36:44):
Final question. What is your advice to a young woman entrepreneur who's trying to, maybe decide on the, you know, tech track or decides to open a company, you know, worldwide, it could be anywhere based on your experience, what is your advice to that girl, that woman young woman who wants to or maybe not a young woman, maybe somebody who just left the corporate world and wants to start a new business or something. What are some of the insights that you wanna share?
Tamara Nelson (37:23):
I feel like the biggest thing for me has been networking, like connecting with people and just making new connections with people in who I'm genuinely interested. And part of that is figuring out what you're genuinely interested in and then finding people that are doing that. And I think I've learned so much from those conversations with people that I've been able to connect with. And I've been surprised that people will usually take the time to talk to you for like an hour if you reach out to them and have some compelling reason why you wanna talk to them. But yeah, I definitely think that the biggest game-changer in my like life trajectory has been certain individuals with who I've connected with who had some insight about what I was doing. And then I was able to listen to them and do that, and like, not resist that.
Tamara Nelson (38:09):
And yeah, so I think that's another part of it is like, I don't, I can't tell you how many times we've pivoted at this point. I'm very ambivalent about like the process itself. I'm just very set on like the thing that I wanna accomplish. And then I kind of like try to allow things to happen, but I am a very type-A person. So yeah, I would say et things happen for you, and the other really good piece of advice I got when I was fundraising that I think really helped me. There were two or four women fundraising. The first one is just a general mindset check. Like the people you're looking for are looking for you too. It's not just that you are out here in a vacuum. People are looking for you. And then the second thing is this weird growth mindset advice.
Tamara Nelson (38:50):
I thought I saw it in a Ted talk about like, statistically, women are more likely to be given deficit-minded questions in, uh, pitch in investor pitches. And so you might get a question, like, what is your burn or what is your, or that's a bad example. Of course, you'll get asked that, but like, what is your turn? That's what I meant to say. And the apparently what you're supposed to say is you're supposed to flip it into like a growth-minded question, and you're supposed to be like, we're adding like X number of new customers every quarter, and we're only losing like 0.01% of them, or like, whatever. So you answered their question almost as an afterthought after you've reframed it as a growth mind question actually successfully did that a couple of times. And I think it's just about, like, it just changes your confidence when you're talking to these investors.
Alex Romanovich (39:35):
I think it's a great tip. Wonderful. Thank you so much for that. Um, Tamara, it's been a fascinating discovery for us. It's been a fascinating conversation. I wanna wish you lots of luck with your endeavors with Barometer, obviously in Chatanooga, Tennessee, and we will feature a lot of supporting information for you on our landing page after we're done with processing this podcast. And I want to thank you for spending some time with us.
Tamara Nelson (40:06):
Thank you so much, Alex. Thank you for the opportunity and for all of your thought-provoking questions. It's been really fun.