Meeting of AI leaders: Sam Liang (Otter.ai) and Gary Fowler, (GSDVS.com)

Origins & Shared Foundations

• Otter.ai was founded in 2016 by Sam Liang (CEO) and Yun Fu (CTO), driven by Liang’s experience at Google and a passion to solve the “memory problem” of recorded speech.

• Around the same time and place, Fowler’s Findo, Inc. was operating in the Bay Area — a serendipitous alignment of entrepreneurial ambition in the same micro‑ecosystem

Otter.ai’s Evolution

Since 2016, Otter.ai has grown from a transcription tool into a leader in voice‑AI meeting intelligence:

• It has transcribed over 1 billion meetings, serving nearly 20 million users, including enterprise teams, educators, and solo professionals

• Otter supports real‑time transcription, live captions, image capture integration (e.g., slides, whiteboards), searchable transcripts, action item extraction, and meeting summaries — via its AI assistant OtterPilot™, launched in early 2023.

• The company operates on a freemium-to-enterprise model, bolstered by integrations across Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, and other platforms — and has attained HIPAA compliance, enhancing its security credentials for enterprise and healthcare use cases

• Otter.ai only raised new external funding in 2021 (Series B, ~$50M), choosing organic user growth and capital discipline thereafter

GSD Venture Studios under Gary Fowler

• Gary Fowler is a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur with 30+ years of global strategic innovation experience. He has founded or co-founded 17 startups — including Findo and Yva.ai — contributing to significant exits, including an IPO (CKSW) and acquisitions, such as Yva.ai being acquired by Visier

• GSD Venture Studios is something of an operational family office, hyper‑accelerator, and global venture studio focused on scaling high‑impact firms in AI, Quantum Computing, Biotech, and other deep tech domains

• Under Fowler’s leadership, GSD combines hands-on mentorship, operational support, global networks, and strategic capital to help startups scale rapidly. Fowler himself was recently recognized by The CIO Today as one of the “Top 5 AI Leaders Redefining Success” in early

Highlights of the Meeting

During their discussion, Fowler and Liang explored complementary themes:

Data‑driven growth & AI intelligence

• Liang shared Otter.ai’s AI flywheel: processing massive volumes of meetings through its own transcription ML stack, enabling higher-quality speech models, meeting agents, and actionable insights

• Fowler spoke about GSD’s approach to leveraging deep tech and global scaling strategies for startups — particularly those blending AI, quantum, and biotech intelligence — and the importance of owning proprietary models and data.

Shared ecosystem beginnings & entrepreneurship

• Both reflected on launching in Mountain View’s vibrant ecosystem in 2016: Fowler with Findo, Liang with AISense. A shared sense of ambition and early‑stage AI innovation framed their roots.

Scaling philosophy & future collaboration

• Fowler emphasized his “Get Stuff Done” mentoring philosophy: an operational model that embeds with companies to help scale from ideation to international markets

• Liang highlighted Otter’s platform‑agnostic positioning — nimble, user‑focused, mobile‑strong, integrating deeply with enterprises without being tied to a single conferencing provider

What’s Next: Opportunities Ahead

• GSD Venture Studios continues to invest in and operate companies revolutionizing AI, biotech, quantum computing — and potentially voice‑AI enhancements that could benefit from Otter’s robust meeting‑data infrastructure.

• Otter.ai is on track for further growth: it has surpassed $100M in ARR as of March 2025, continues to add multilingual support, and deepens its AI assistant capabilities across industries like healthcare, education, and the enterprise market.

• In collaboration, there’s potential to co‑build tools blending Otter’s voice‑AI infrastructure with GSD‑backed startups — unlocking new productivity dimensions in cutting‑edge fields.

Conclusion

This meeting between two Silicon Valley pioneers — Gary Fowler and Sam Liang — was more than just a reunion of entrepreneurs from the same 2016 tech ecosystem: it was a powerful convergence of strategic scaling expertise and voice‑AI innovation. As GSD Venture Studios pushes forward in the world of deep tech, and Otter.ai continues to lead in intelligent meeting productivity, their synergy promises to deliver new breakthroughs where data, AI, and global operational scale intersect.