Squirro’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Dorian Selz, didn’t get to the top the easy way. A serial social entrepreneur, he has taken his lumps and learned his lessons, some harder than others: “You can’t survive as a restaurant,” he said, “if your patrons eat the food and don’t pay for it.”
At Squirro, 13 years into his tenure, Selz has narrowed his focus: not simply to give you the data you need, but to give it to you when you need it. “That’s the vision that makes me get up in the morning,” he said in a 2024 interview. “If you take the information coming to you when you need it, this implies a few things. You don’t want everything to come at you at once; that would be too much. The aim is for the appropriate things to come to you when needed. What you want is the appropriate information at the appropriate moment in the appropriate quantity.”
This depth of consideration is central to Selz’s business, which, he said, is tasked with looking past the limitations of the present to embrace the norms of the future. “I remember 25 years ago we did the first test with eCommerce and everyone told us: ‘No one is going to spend that much; no one is going to order stereo equipment online; there is a maximum to what people will be willing to spend over the internet,’” he recalled. “The same with fresh food: ‘No one will buy vegetables online because of the logistics involved. It won’t work.’ These predictions have been proven to be wrong.”
So he believes it to be with artificial intelligence, and with large language models specifically; while we understand their power now, we don’t know what aim we will eventually choose to apply it to. “It’s the focus of a lot of time and energy right now,” he said, “but it’s not where LLMs will end up in 5 years or 20 years.”
Wherever LLMs end up, Selz is sure to be there, alongside his professional backers hacking away at whatever problem piques their interest. Anywhere they go, he goes, he says, paraphrasing the author Jim Collins: “You need to get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus,” he said, “and then decide which direction to take.”
