Watch on This Week in Startups

Watch or Listen: E18 “Angel” Rob May, angel & founder at Talla, the parent company behind BotChain: On dealbreakers, successful founder patterns, using scar tissue as an entrepreneur to be a better angel, creating Talla’s ICO & future of bots, blockchain, & crypto.

At Talla, we’ve got a lot of really interesting things going on at once. We’re building an intelligent knowledge and information platform that supports and automates a lot of the communication and collaboration workflows around documentation inside businesses. In creating it over the past couple years (we founded in 2015), we’ve learned a lot about building what’s truly a new category of software—from product and UX to architecting and selling these kinds of systems.

We’ve also got a blockchain platform, called BotChain, that acts as a layer of trust for A.I. bots and other robotic process automation software. It’s for the entire ecosystem of developers that Talla plays in. We’ve already signed on several partners because we’ve all seen the need for something like it to help the A.I. ecosystem mature and be trusted.

It’s a lot for an early stage company to take on but we’ve got a powerhouse leadership team. We’ve got Catharina Lavers Mallet, our COO, who was most recently Head of Studio at King (the developers of Candy Crush, among others) and who has been an all around boss in many other areas.

And Rob May, our CEO and Co-founder, who before Talla most recently founded Backupify (acquired by Datto in 2014). He talked with Jason Calacanis in this episdoe of his Angel podcast about a lot of the ways he — and the Talla exec team— are thinking about things. If you’re interested in the A.I. or blockchain spaces, angel investments, or entrepreneurship, watch or listen here: http://thisweekinstartups.com/angel-rob-may/