Faces of Silicon Alley – Claudio Fuentes

I’ve always been into technology since I was little. I’ve been building little websites and programming stuff on my free time, so I kind of grew up with, you know, the Internet age and always been passionate about fiddling with stuff. When I was in high school I also focused on music production which was, I think, a curiosity that I had at the time – pursued it for some time and even did it professionally, which led me to be able to travel around the world and tour and sign to a few labels. Ultimately, I also realized that I want to kind of go back to my roots and go back to, like, the stuff that I was really passionate about which was originally programming and technology, in a sense. So, I left music and I worked for Apple for about a year. I worked for WeWork for another year and then I launched my own startup in enterprise analytics, which was an incredibly rewarding experience, that led me to where I am today, now at Pypestream

The most exciting thing about conversational AI is really being able to transform and design the future of interactions and experiences that brands have with customers. So, I think it’s incredibly powerful to be able to take part in and be at the forefront of how us as individuals are going to be able to communicate with the brands that we love going forward. The second thing on that, is that I think if you look at the trends in technology and where we’re headed, currently consumers prefer to interact with with brands through a text-based medium, but in the future I think that might change. So, if you look at the adoption of, for example, wearables or augmented reality or mixed reality, I think those will be really interesting mediums by which we can definitely continue to innovate and pursue what it is to lead in the conversational AI space.

An essential part of the product management role is to really work closely with every team in the company. Whether it’s sales, marketing, design, engineering, really take time to understand the interactions that everyone has with our customers and then map out those needs as we’re building out our requirements to deliver the most value to our customers.

One of the most rewarding things about being in Pypestream is really being surrounded by so many amazing people. Everyone around us is incredibly skilled at what they do and you really get to learn from everyone just by spending time with them. For me one of the most important things when choosing a company to work for was really finding a space that allowed me to grow, that allowed me to really expand my limits, and that allowed me to be challenged in a day to day basis, and I think Pypestream achieves that. Another thing that’s incredibly rewarding about Pypestream is the stage that were currently at as a start-up, we’re really growing so fast, and that presents its unique challenges when it comes to, like, thinking about scalability or thinking about how to solve the next immediate challenge, and that’s something that’s incredibly welcomed and, again, continue to expand my boundaries, and it’s something that’s very very interesting on a day to day basis.

I think one of Pypestream’s unique competitive advantages is really it’s people. I think we have exactly the right mixture of both youthful and energetic and creative employees, but also enterprise executives that allow us to both innovate but also work in very complicated markets. I think now, more than ever, building products and launching startups is as easy as it’s ever been, and that presents unique challenges for companies. So, it’s not just innovating on the products side that it’s important, but also being at the forefront of delivering an excellent service. Conversational AI allows companies to do just that at scale.

In my free time I like to read a lot of nonfiction stuff – so whether it’s business books or strategy books or biographies from different founders and influential figures – I definitely think there’s a lot to learn from them, from their examples and that you can apply on your day-to-day life. I also like to stay active and work out, so that’s I think very important for me in order to build habits and also stay at, you know, my peak performance both in and out of work. On the side I also like to travel. I’ve had an opportunity to been to 14 countries, but I definitely would like to expand that list.