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Spence Green is Lilt’s Co-Founder and CEO, working on machine-assistance language translation. Before founding Lilt in 2015, Spence served as a fellow at XSeed Capital, a software and research intern at Google. He worked on Google Translate and developed a shallow syntactic language model to improve English to Arabic translation. He was also a research intern at Johns Hopkins University and a technical lead, project manager, and software engineer at Northrop Grumman, where he worked on various large projects, including a national air defense system and avionics packages for naval aircraft.
Spence graduated with the highest distinction from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. He also earned both a master’s degree with a distinction in research and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. His research area is the intersection of natural language processing and human-computer interaction.
He has published papers on statistical machine translation, statistical language parsing, and mixed-initiative systems and given translator productivity talks.
In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, Spence says:
- “Just keep pushing.” The greatest organizations keep pushing, and, in some sense, that’s how you achieve success. You try to get better every day – and there are many times where things didn’t seem like they could work, but you need to keep pushing through
- “Find a way.” A coach of mine from high school always used to say that phrase. In parts of life, you can easily get backed into a corner. But if you keep searching for a way, right up until the last second, you always have a chance. Both of those have always served me well in life, and I think about them all of the time
My favorite life lesson quote is, “The world belongs to the discontented.” The quote sounds negative on the surface, but there’s a positive and entrepreneurial spin to it: things can always be better. So many builders and entrepreneurs want to make the world better in some way. The quote itself was a favorite of Robert Woodruff, former President of The Coca-Cola Company. I’m from Atlanta, so that quote has been in my life since I was pretty young, and it’s one I always go back to.
Read on to know more about Spence Green and his journey.
Spence Green: Before founding Lilt in 2015, I was a grad student at Stanford, where I worked on natural language processing. I also spent a summer at Google working on Google Translate during grad school, where I met my now co-founder John DeNero.
My co-founder John and I have spent our careers developing artificial intelligence technology related to human languages. The last decade has transformed the field. Computers still can’t use and understand language like people do, but automatic translation technology is undeniably useful in assisting people in writing more quickly and accurately. We founded Lilt to maximize the impact of this technology on information access.
Spence Green: Lilt is an AI-powered enterprise language translation company. Our mission is to make the world’s information available to everyone irrespective of where they were born or which language they speak. Our focus is to enable the companies, governments, and academic institutions that create and publish most of the world’s information with a solution for equal access. We deliver high-quality translation, quickly and affordably, to customers in all regions of the world.
Our solution consists of an end-to-end translation system and a community of professional freelance translators. We source, qualify and manage a network of the world’s best translators on behalf of the organizations we serve. We equip those translators with powerful productivity tools and AI-powered neural machine translation technology, enabling them to translate more accurately and efficiently than they could alone.
This process is, at its core Human-in-the-loop AI. Ultimately, a human has complete autonomy to make all decisions about translating a word or sentence, but our machine translation technology makes suggestions of the most likely translations. That way, we can preserve high quality while making human translators more efficient than ever.
On top of that, we’ve built a set of best-in-class workflow tools that enable businesses to manage the entire localization lifecycle on one central platform. And we’ve built a robust ecosystem of integrations and connectors that connect Lilt to customers’ existing IT systems – things like content management systems, code repositories, knowledge bases, and more.
Spence Green: We have raised a total of $37.5M in funding.
We most recently raised $25M in Series B funding, which we announced in May 2020.
Spence Green: Lilt offers customers a higher ROI on localization spend, enabling them to localize into more languages, faster and for the same budget. The way we deliver that message is through a combination of inbound marketing and outbound prospecting.
Spence Green: We use a combination of Hubspot for most digital marketing channels – email, social, blog, and other content. We use Drift for engaging prospects in conversation when they’re on our website.
These tools help us better communicate with prospects and customers, but ultimately it’s more what we say and how we say it rather than the specific tool we use to send out that message that has made the difference.
Spence Green: As a company that enables other organizations to expand globally through localization, we’ve more or less always had a global customer base.
We have also had teams located on multiple continents ever since we were founded, so expanding globally has always been something we’ve done and will continue to do.
Spence Green: The most common mistake we see is not localizing your content and assuming that a local market is willing to interact with you or buy your products and services without having access to those products and services in their native language. People feel more comfortable in their native language, and often, if they can’t find access to your content in their language, they will go to a competitor who does have it.
Spence Green: Because our translators have always worked remotely and our employees can work from home, we feel very fortunate that the transition to remote work due to COVID-19 has been about as smooth as it could have been. Furthermore, our business can be performed entirely virtually, so we don’t believe COVID-19 will have a material impact on our company’s future growth.
Spence Green: There are two pieces of advice I’ve received that I believe would be beneficial to others as well:
Spence Green: The writings of Peter Drucker and Andy Grove have helped me a lot as the company has grown – I have two of their books on my chair right now because I referred to them just this morning. When you transition to becoming a manager, you have to switch from evaluating your performance and your worth based on your output to evaluating your performance and your worth based on the organization’s output. And so you have to learn to fight this tendency to do things yourself and instead equip the organization to do those things. That can be challenging to overcome, especially early on.
Grove was a scientist, and he helped me understand that there are management systems that can be learned and put in place – systems to set objectives, get feedback, encourage communication, build architecture, and so on. I’ve been building software systems since I was a young kid, and while a human system has different characteristics, you can still think about it as a system. And that systems-based approach was something that I could latch onto and helped me understand that I could use the skills and training that I had from the other parts of my life to learn how to manage people.
I personally think that everybody should read everything that both of those two people wrote.
Spence Green: My favorite life lesson quote is, “The world belongs to the discontented.” The quote sounds negative on the surface, but there’s a positive and entrepreneurial spin to it: things can always be better. So many builders and entrepreneurs want to make the world better in some way. The quote itself was a favorite of Robert Woodruff, former President of The Coca-Cola Company. I’m from Atlanta, so that quote has been in my life since I was pretty young, and it’s one I always go back to.
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