Entrepreneurship

Bio

Pamela Lipson is the CEO of Imagen Incorporated, a maker of computer vision software packages that allow computers to recognize objects and per-form some of the same analytical object validation assessments that human vision systems do naturally. Pamela received her B.A from Harvard University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the MIT. Her doctoral research was honored with the George M. Sprowls Award for Exceptional Research. After winning the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition in 1997, Pam and her colleagues founded Imagen Incorporated. Pam has been named by the MIT Technology Review as a TR100 – ‘one of 100 innovators under 35 whose work and ideas will change the world’. She was also recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer in 2004 and 2005. Her work has been profiled in publications and TV shows nationally and internationally, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, and Good Morning America. Beyond Imagen, Pamela has been working with Prof. Pawan Sinha, on Project Prakash, a humanitarian and scientific initiative to facilitate the treatment of congenitally blind children. Recently, Pamela has been recognized for developing a technology for encoding alphanumeric and graphical information with high density on crystalline substrates. Pam and two of her colleagues demonstrated this technology by writing the entire text of the King James version of the New Testament of the Bible on a crystal just 5mm by 5mm. This feat landed Pamela a spot in the latest edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.

Interview

Forum Link: How do you go from having cool technology to running a successful company?

Pamela Lipson: Having a great technology that is unique and protectable is an important foundation for a company. However, it is only 25% of the equation. The second 25% is determining a market need which requires it. Ideally this market should value your solution at a high price. Surprisingly, determining what to do is often actually harder than figuring out how to do it. The third 25% is putting together a good team combined with a sufficient amount of capital to develop your product or service and to fund your sales and marketing efforts until you achieve revenue or the next fundable step. Finally, the last 25% is the execution of your idea, with emphasis on the marketing and sales. While determining what to do is very hard, once you decide on the path, your entire team must be committed to the singular mission of doing that one thing well.

Forum Link: Tell me about imagen.

Pamela Lipson: Imagen is a supplier of vision and learning algorithms to a variety of markets across the world. Imagen was borne out of the work my colleagues and I did at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, which is now part of CSAIL. The company was launched when our team won the prestigious MIT $50K (now $100K) entrepreneurial competition. Imagen’s offerings at the outset were a generic way to match images and to learn from feedback. The technology was applicable to many fields. Since winning the competition, we have developed groundbreaking technology for such applications as printed circuit board inspection, face detection, image recognition from cell phones, and pattern analysis for non-visual domains. We are now one of few companies that have demonstrated that its core technology can solve the needs of multiple markets.

Forum Link: Algorithms you have created for image recognition are applicable to so many fields. how did you decide where to apply it in the market place?

Pamela Lipson: This was one of our most difficult decisions. The success of any pattern recognition or “Artificial Intelligence” technology depends entirely on the domain to which you apply the technology. When choosing which domain to work in, we needed to balance the strength of the technology in the domain (e.g. could it solve 100% of the problem) and the value customers would put on such a solution. We also needed to see if there was a discontinuity in the marketplace that would make our offering even more valuable. Printed circuit board inspection fit all of our criteria. The technical problem was very hard due to the large amount of variability in how boards looked. Customers felt real pain with the current offerings because it could take up to a year to program the machines to get them to perform to acceptable levels. In addition, customers were looking to do more than just defect detection; there was a new need for machines that could measure the process and provide feedback. Our technology was ideally suited to solving this “pain” and providing the new type of measurement ability. Given that the number of printed circuit board lines was forecast to grow at tremendous rates globally, this first application met both the scientific and business sides of our decision process. Finding an application that met all of our requirements was very satisfying from an entrepreneurial perspective.

Forum Link: How important is focus to achieving business success?

Pamela Lipson: Focus and actually “de-focus” are both important elements in running a business. Focus is critical once you have decided what path to follow. However, de-focus is important when you get to the stage where you want to grow your business or look for other opportunities.

A startup is something you must feel passionate about. It requires resources and personal drive that can only come from within.

Forum Link: How does Project Prakash fit with your long term strategy of applying vision technologies?

Pamela Lipson: Our technology is inspired by our research into the brain; that is, understanding how humans learn how to see informs the design of our computational algorithms. In order to understand this process, much of the work that has been done so far has been with children and adults who have normal vision. A few years ago, we became aware of a humanitarian opportunity that also offered unique and unprecedented insights into the scientific question of visual learning. Thirty percent of the world’s blind population are in India and, sadly, very few of them ever receive treatment, even though over half of the cases have curable conditions. The goal of Project Prakash is to give sight to blind children, to follow their progress as they learn how to see, and to provide rehabilitation tools so they can maximally utilize their new visual abilities. In providing sight surgery to the children, we are gaining some remarkable clues about how the brain begins to make sense of complex visual information. Thus, Project Prakash, which in Sanskrit means light, has proven to be a deeply satisfying synthesis of important humanitarian and scientific missions. We have been able to merge our desire to advance science with our desire to help people in need.

Forum Link: Being a successful entrepreneur gives you freedom to develop projects you feel strongly about. do you see entrepreneurship as a win-win proposition for creating both commercial value and having a positive social impact?

Pamela Lipson: Rarely do these two things coincide. More often successful companies decide that they want, as a separate endeavor, to create a positive social impact. We are extremely fortunate that our scientific work also has broad humanitarian applications.

Forum Link: Has being a woman entrepreneur in the technology field been an asset, a hindrance or a non-issue?

Pamela Lipson: Initially, this was a non-issue for me. However, with the birth of my first child, I see that balancing work and family is definitely a challenge, especially when I feel so passionately about both.

Forum Link: What advice would you have for someone considering a startup?

Pamela Lipson: A startup is something you must feel passionate about. It requires resources and personal drive that can only come from within. It requires unfaltering enthusiasm and the will to keep going in both the good and bad times. In addition, the journey must itself be rewarding, because the financial outcomes, which are often defined as the metrics of success, are highly variable and uncertain. If you have a vision, lots of self-confidence, the talents of an evangelist, and a hunger for new experiences then a startup is a good option.

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