It may sound trite to some, but business leaders who demonstrate a genuine spirit of caring for their customers and employees succeed in the long run better than executives that pursue predatory practices. According to the management consultant and author Alex Hiam, companies that earn their way into the Fortune 500 through a commitment to ethical business practices on the way up tend to drop off because they gradually abandon their initial ethos of service.
Companies that stop caring enough about their customers and employees are doomed to decline as more conscientious new rivals work their way up and take their place, according to Hiam. "The entrepreneurial firm that truly cares has a significant advantage that, with persistence, can allow it to triumph over larger rivals." But where exactly does a commitment to caring and ethical practices stem from, and what sustains it over time?
For one self-made technology entrepreneur, Weili Dai, who has produced a track record of stunning success in the semiconductor industry as the co-founder and former president of Marvell Technology, her commitment to fairness and caring began in her parent's Shanghai home. There in the booming industrial capital of China during the 1960s and 1970s, Dai was raised with a positive discipline and an appreciation for the power to succeed through thoughtfulness and teamwork.
"That's something I learned from my parents at a very young age," says Dai, who moved to the US as a teen and played semi professional basketball before earning a computer science degree at the University of California, Berkeley. "Be fair and care. Whatever you do, you must be fair to those around you and genuinely care, think of ways to add value," she explained, "the way I engage in business with my partners is focused on how to support and help make them more successful. Of course, it's a natural outcome that if your customer or partner is more successful, so are you!"
Dai's latest startup, MeetKai, embodies her basic principle of humaneness at the core of the company's AI technology. While many product developers face the challenge of a confused or untrusting public sentiment toward AI generally, MeetKai's mission is to create more intuitive and accessible tools that can be used by anyone, and truly improve people's lives.
As a wife and mother of two who's a brilliant role model of success for other women in the technology industry - she's listed as No. 21 on Forbes' 2022 America's Self-Made Women, with an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion -- Dai champions women's inherent strength in terms of caring for others. "Women are natural multitaskers and designers. We understand AI should be friendly and that it can support more pleasant lives. Women's valuable contributions to humanity have never been clearer and are essential to shape the future of AI."
Since stepping down as president of Marvell after 20 years, Dai and her family have also mentored and invested in a series of successful startups that are now worth billions. "We're not traditional venture capitalists," Dai says. "We're committed to working long-term to succeed and make real dreams come true." When it comes to considering business partnerships, Dai takes the measure of a person's character first, before entering any discussions about potential deals. "We're approached every week and we're very selective," she says. "We make sure they're wonderful people before we talk about tech. If innovation and the same values are there, we come together and see how we can help."
Regarding the founding of MeetKai in 2018, Dai saw the same kind of vision and passion for technology in the company's CEO James Kaplan (her friend's son) that she recognized in her own husband, Sehat Sutardja, and which prompted the founding of Marvell in 1995. "It was like I was replaying a tape!" she says. "James is a brilliant software engineer and I agreed to support him. I proposed we build AI technology to enhance people's lives, making it smarter and friendlier. That was the genesis of MeetKai."
The LA-based company is focused on the creation of cutting-edge AI solutions for mapping the real world and enhancing real-life experiences. "We're building intuitive products that empower people around the world to improve their lives and make their work more productive," she says. MeetKai's initial product rollout, a large language model, voice-search technology, supports around 50 million users on a wide variety of enterprise use cases.
MeetKai Reality, a more recent product released during CES this month, allows users to create 3D spaces based on quick videos, shot with any phone's camera in seconds. The company's metaverse solutions enable non-technical users to build their own virtual spaces and access all experiences via web-browser, for maximized accessibility. MeetKai was recently named the "Official AI Partner" of the LA Chargers and is building in-stadium and at-home experiences for NFL fans to extend the league's market penetration, especially among younger audiences.
True to their shared commitment to caring in action, Dai and her husband were key contributors in the construction of a 141,000-square-foot facility, The Sutardja Dai Hall, for the engineering department at UC Berkeley, where the couple initially met. It houses laboratories for collaborative research, offices, conference rooms, state-of-the-art classrooms, and a 149-seat auditorium. "The center combines programs in chip design, software, social science, nanotechnology, biology and chemistry - all the sciences - under the same umbrella," she explains. "We must keep an open mind and welcome disruptive technology as we carefully observe each use case to remain wise. In my opinion, having disruptive AI and next-generation technology will always be of great benefit to humanity. We just have to do it thoughtfully."
In November 2022, Dai also signed an agreement with Kura Kura Bali during the G20 world summit, to contribute e-learning technology and training to support education in Bali. The company intends to support UID Bali Campus with connection and capacity building, subject expert matter, and synergy for events taking place in Kura Kura Bali; and most importantly, to contribute to their training data scientist programme by assuring cloud platform capacity and other machine learning skills to develop and strengthen the human resources skills in data science.
