Last Friday, I got out of the house again! I attended Group Mentoring with Llew Jury (which I wrote about in more detail in a different post) and the newly revamped River City Labs Pitches, which are now called River City Labs First Friday Bytes.

The big change was that the first talk of the afternoon was a from an entrepreneur who had “made it”. Last Friday the found was Bradley Rasmussen of Sizztech. He shared some tips and tricks he learnt along his journey. He explained that his current business grew out of his first business. He also explained that Sizztech was self-funded. I think a lot of people miss opportunities when they become too focused on their current business. Also, too many get caught up in raising capital, when they can create a perfectly viable business by bootstrapping. So it was great that River City Labs highlighted a business that opted not to raise money.

Finally, we went onto the pitches for the night, and AI was over-represented. We first AI pitch from a founder who has created a sleeve that is looking help people with upper limb loss to have fine motor control of their robotic prosthetics. It’s interesting, and I am keen to see how the startup grows and evolves.

The second AI pitch was from Red Realities whose pitch is that they want to free creatives from doing low-value artwork. So one way of putting it is that “AI is now after artists jobs!”

The AI heavy pitches prompted a man with a gorgeous beard to go up and pitch his business Blue Life AI. He offered those in attended a free trial of his training program. During the questions, he mentioned that he has already taught millions of people online and mentioned his main business is called SUPER DATA SCIENCE!

It was then that the penny dropped and I realised the speaker was Kirill Eremenko, or as he is known to my brother and I “the R guy”. I clearly blanked out when they announced his name. So yes, I got to meet that man whose online course my brother and I took to learn R. It was like meeting a minor celebrity. It was fun; I took a selfie. 10/10 would go to another First Friday Bytes!