CEO Update December 2024

This year was an incredible one for Ozeki.  We started on the development of our technologies; participated in the Techstars NYC Fall 2024 Cohort; and raised our first-money-in friends and family round.

Techstars

Techstars was a complete success. For me, it was a transformational period of personal and professional growth and development. Ozeki was selected out of more than 2,000 applicants to be 1 of the 11 companies to participate in Techstars NYC Fall 2024 Cohort. Ozeki spent 13 weeks in New York City which flew went by in a blur of meetings, workshops, mentoring, practice, and learning. I was continually inspired by the vision, talent, and intellect of my fellow founders, Ryan Burgoyne, Kai Boyd, Robbie Cargill, Daniel Gilligan, Daniel Goodwin, Dan Haffner, Navin Kumar, Timothy Li, Connor Murdock, Taylor Pearce, Charles Randall, Daniel Rees, Cihan Sahin, Chadwin Smith, Imran Syed, Robbie Thompson, Markus Wilson, Sam Xia, and Pi Zonooz.

We received incredible input from the accomplished and passionate mentors with whom we fortunate enough to work. Elise King, Angel Montesdeoca, Shannon Sali, and Nir Perry, helped us to refine the Ozeki pitch, our product, and go-to-market strategy. I have to credit the indomitable Andres Barreto for creating and fostering such a constructive and collegial environment.  All of the cohort was supported by the terrific Techstars team Edy Yazmín Giraldo Aristizábal, Vance Dekker Vargas, and Cordelro Brown.  

The Techstars program culminated in Demo Day on December 6^th where we pitched Ozeki to more than 300 VCs and industry professionals at Google’s Hudson Square offices. Ten days before Demo Day Ozeki really didn’t have a compelling demo.  We’ve had some technical delays and we’re having trouble showing contract negotiations which occur automatically inside a computer. On that Saturday afternoon, my phone buzzes. It’s Dan Rees, the CEO of Demandly, another company in our Techstars cohort.  “I've made you a rough and ready prototype this morning...”  Then comes a screen recoding of a contract being uploaded and negotiated by AI.  Dan and his co-founders Dan Goodwin and Robbie Thompson have spent the morning building a demo for Ozeki.  It shows the hero functions of the Ozeki core product.  I hadn’t asked for help.  Another team, facing a looming deadline of their own, took the time and effort to help a colleague out.  That’s what it’s like to be a Techstars founder.  You are at your best when you are kind, thoughtful, and generous.  

Now, with this demo, I can tell the story I want to at Ozeki’s Demo Day pitch.  I can put my audience in the shoes of a quota-carrying sales rep so they can empathize with the pain of contract negotiations while trying to close their deals. It goes without saying that Demo Day and the help we reviewed from Demandly was a high point in my professional career.

Product

We have continued to make good progress on Ozeki’s software, since I took overrunning engineering in November. We now have all of the infrastructure and functionality for our EEA (embarrassingly early alpha).  We have developed a proprietary database of over 2 million contractual clauses from every type of contract from stock purchase agreements to employment agreements to real estate agreements.  The database comprises tens of thousands of clauses, including between 3 and 20 negotiated permutations of each clause.  We are using this to train our AI as to how to understand contractual language and as to what constitutes a preferred contractual term.

Our first design partner has already provided Ozeki with a trove of contracts, each with different negotiated outcomes.  We are using these contract as a datasource to create an AI agent for the customer.  By looking their history of contracting we can generate a statistical mode of what the customer values including and excluding from the final agreement. A second step is then to compare the output of our analysis to the customer’s existing negotiations playbooks and precedent library of fallback clauses. We can generate actionable insights for the customer to better negotiate so that the remain closer to their “true north”agreement or your standard terms in all outcomes.

Ozeki will finish the development of what we have dubbed our true MVP in lateJanuary. The MVP will include the negotiation strategy from the EEA and employ it against real live red lines. This version of the Ozeki’s product will be able to compare a proposed agreement to the strategy in the customer’s OzekiAI agent, and then optimize that so that we can give the customer the best possible contract – all automatically.  Not only will the customer get a good deal, but more importantly will conclude its contracts in the fastest way possible.

What’s head for 2025?

We are doubling down on everything for growth.  First up, we are going finish turning up service for our alpha customers. We will then expand to service paying customers from our more than 100 customer waitlist. Ozeki is looking to expand our pilot program in the New Year. If you are interested or know someone who is likely to be, please be in touch. Ozeki will return to fundraising activities for our pre-seed round in the first quarter. 

I am looking forward to all that we can accomplish in the coming year. Stay tuned.