What Devs Need To Teach CEOs About AI w/ Lexion’s Emad Elwany

**Emad Elwany** (0:00)
Right now, AI is really glorified pattern matching, but it's really, really good at pattern matching. And computers have been good at pattern matching for a long time. This is not new, we've been doing it since the 60s or even before.
But what's happening is AI is doing pattern matching on things that it hasn't seen before.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
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**Dan Lines** (0:46)
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines. And today I'm joined by Emad Elwany, CTO and co-founder at Lexion.
Emad, thanks for joining us today.

**Emad Elwany** (0:59)
Of course, thanks for having me.

**Dan Lines** (1:01)
Yeah, awesome to have you on. Also, congratulations. So you did an $11 million Series A funding round last year, right?

**Emad Elwany** (1:10)
That's right.

**Dan Lines** (1:11)
That's really, really cool. So we'll get into that a bit. Also, we were talking pre pod. You let me know that you are from or were growing up in Egypt.

**Emad Elwany** (1:22)
That's correct. Alexandria, Egypt. On the north coast, a very beautiful city.

**Dan Lines** (1:25)
What was that like?

**Emad Elwany** (1:27)
It was great. I loved growing up there. It's a very cosmopolitan city.
It's very old. It's been around for a couple of thousand years. So you can see a lot of interesting stuff even on your way to college or work.
Have a lot of family and friends still there. Go there at least once a year. It's a nice part of the world.

**Dan Lines** (1:43)
Yeah, yeah. When did you move over to the US?

**Emad Elwany** (1:47)
I came into the US a few times in around 2008 and 2009 I moved here permanently in 2010 and have been here ever since.

**Dan Lines** (1:56)
Yeah, I want to ask you a little bit about your background and, you know, professional career, software engineering. You're doing interesting things with AI. You're a co-founder. So walk us through kind of your professional journey.

**Emad Elwany** (2:12)
Absolutely, yeah. So I started initially in academia. So I went to undergrad for computer engineering, which I enjoyed very much.
And then I started to join industry for a while after graduation. I had to choose between continuing in academia or going into industry. But I wanted to try industry out for a while. So I joined Microsoft.
And while working at Microsoft, where I ended up staying for a long time, around eight or nine years, I went back to grad school part-time and ended up getting my masters in computer science at Stanford.
And then after these eight years, I decided that I want to try startups. So the Paul Allen Institute is a very famous AI institute here in Seattle. They had a great incubator program that helped people like me coming with big tech experience and some academia experience to start companies in the AI space.
That's where I joined. I joined them in 2018 and I met my co-founders there. We tinkered a bit. We had some ideas and we ended up building what's now Lexion. It's been a very exciting journey. At Microsoft, my experience spanned many teams, so I worked for a bit in search and paid search. I worked in social computing. I worked in NLP and natural language processing and AI, conversational AI. I've really worked on a lot of great teams and met some of the greatest people of my career there. And I've taken all this knowledge into Lexion and enjoying now working on using AI to solve business problems.

**Dan Lines** (3:36)
That's actually a really interesting background. You got your masters at Stanford, right?

**Emad Elwany** (3:43)
Correct, yes.

**Dan Lines** (3:44)
Do you think it was worth it to get your masters? You did it in computer science?

**Emad Elwany** (3:49)
I did. It absolutely was. Just because in our field, it's important to be on top of things. And the latest research in Stanford is really good at that. Also, the community there is amazing, from the teaching staff to the student body. And just everybody there, there's just this vibrant energy.
And everybody's trying to do great things, and they inspire you, and you learn a lot of great tools. And it just helps shape you as a software engineer and AI practitioner. So definitely was worth it for me.