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Growing Lean
Unlocking the Mysteries of Forex and AI with Yagub Rahimov: The Journey of Polygraf.ai
Have you ever wondered about the insider secrets of the forex industry, or how Artificial Intelligence can change the game? Today, we have the opportunity to unlock these mysteries with none other than Yagub Rahimov, a seasoned entrepreneur with two successful tech exits under his belt, and the visionary behind the innovative startup, Polygraf.ai. Yagub is here to share his fascinating journey of globe-trotting, trading, and serial entrepreneurship, along with his mission to bring transparency and trust to the forex industry.
Yagub's latest venture, Polygraf.ai, is a testament to his expertise and innovation. He provides a detailed walkthrough of the platform's unique three-layered structure, which aims to distinguish human content from non-human, detect bias, and gauge reliability. He also touches on the potential of Polygraf.ai to detect deep fakes, and its far-reaching implications on diverse sectors like banking and real estate. Get ready to have your perspective on AI challenged and expanded!
But it's not all smooth sailing in the tech world. Yagub also opens up about the hurdles he's faced, the crucial pivot moments, and the importance of a supportive network for success in the AI industry. He generously shares advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and gives us a glimpse into his monthly event, Ethical AI Investors. So, if you're intrigued by the intersection of AI and ethics, looking for insights into the unpredictable world of tech entrepreneurship, or simply curious to learn from Yagub's exceptional journey, don't miss this episode. Tune in and get inspired!
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Welcome back to another episode of the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deed. I'm happy to be here with Yagub Rahimov, two times tech exit and founder of Polygraph AI. Welcome, yagub.
Speaker 2:Hey, good to see you. Thanks very much for having me here.
Speaker 1:Good to see you too. So, yagub, can you start us off by telling us a little bit about your history and how you ended up where you are today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. I'm originally promoted by Jean. Having lived throughout the world and in 2005, I was sponsored by Bush Administration to graduate my high school in the US. That's where I learned how to trade. I built my own strategy by 2008. I made my first significant income and dropped out of college, and shortly after I won a scholarship by the president of Azerbaijan at a study in Netherlands.
Speaker 2:When I went to the Netherlands, I wanted to drop out of college again, as it was kind of boring in a way, and that led me to create my. I actually created two things. I created one social enterprise which became successful, helping local businesses, and there also ended up turning my Facebook group into one of the first social trading platforms called Target Signals, which got acquired shortly after. During that period, right during the exit, we ended up becoming the first people to do digital marketing in a way for an insurance industry, and that led us to create Seven Markets, which was initially as a consulting company and it became my site head tool for a while, as I got headhunted by a brokerage in Cyprus as an early employee and we turned that broker into the world's second largest brokerage Until 2015,. I worked with them and then, because of the Swiss Frank Black Swan event. I left them and focused on my site hustle. But I had a vision that we had to eliminate the scam in the forex industry. So we kind of focused on the trust element. We would analyze brokers and so on and send findings to regulators. And that led to kind of early bits and pieces of earlier regulation that we know in Europe, like SQL ruling and MIFI2 ruling and so on. I'm not claiming that we created it, but our basically research help regulators to expose these scamsters a lot of them and kick them out of the market or penalize them. And in moving forward fast forward, 2020, february 29,.
Speaker 2:I landed in Austin this week at an event called South by Southwest, not knowing anything about pandemic or anything, and they shut down the borders. I got stuck here. The only lucky thing was that my family was with me. My wife and my back then year old son was with me as we were planning a winter vacation in Lake Tahoe. So we caught the last flight out of Austin to Lake Tahoe and spent some time there, and during that period the world broke out at Seven Markets Group CEOs and coming back to Europe, and that led us to the least expected scenario, which was the exit of the Seven Markets Group by a multiple private entity syndicate, and I kind of tried to retire afterwards.
Speaker 2:It wasn't a happy land, in a way. When you work 17 or 18 hours a day and you go down to zero, you start feeling like what's my purpose in life and you wish the universe kind of grants for you in a way right. And I had an incident with one of the review platforms. I wrote a review. They deleted it. I went on a live chat asking why they banned my account and I went on a split right to understand is it me or somewhere else?
Speaker 2:And my vision was that maybe there's a way that you can create a fully automated solution that involves some sort of an AI and some sort of data ownership, and that led us to Polygraph. And Polygraph today is the world's only content and digital integrity solution that involves a verification of the content that you are consuming as well as the governance of your data that you are utilizing. You can, as an example, use Polygraph on Amazon, walmart, best Buy to verify the products and services and sellers reviews on it and see what is real, what's not. And also we have an upcoming solution where you can utilize while you are engaging with any other AI solution, and if your data is about to be exposed, it stops you immediately before it happens. So it's insanely important for modern day that LLMs are one way journey. We can protect you all. So that's kind of like the background.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing, and it sounds like you are very into ethics and freedom of speech, with the uncovering the forex scammers and now with the Polygraph AI. Has that always been a mindset that you've had since you were younger, or did you develop that when you got a bit older?
Speaker 2:It's funny that you're asking. Yesterday I did another interview with Alexander MacCobain from Liberty Ventures. He asked exactly the same question. My answer for Alec was that perhaps it's where I come from.
Speaker 2:I was born in a post-Soviet country where initially corruption was a penny a piece. My family was in a privileged one, so we couldn't buy our way forward and upward. I was always on the look for maybe making something a little better, creating just environment. Maybe that's why it came about. But also I ended up as a young kid literally operating in one of the craziest industries, which is the forex industry, where most of the time operators are operating in a zero-sum game environment. I cannot. My inner values are built on my culture of perhaps family standards that you cannot eat the misery of others. That led me to even leave a very well-paid job. The company was pretty awesome. I still am in touch with them. They did some not-so-nice stuff, basically not because of themselves as this black swan event happened, but I wanted to be the change and if you want to be the change, you have to change yourself. It's not like you cannot just go scream like trust, trust, trust and not trust yourself. That's perhaps the reason 100%.
Speaker 1:I love that mindset and I love that explanation. That's amazing. Can you walk us through let's talk about Polygraph AI, because I think that's going to be a huge new product. Can you walk us through the strategy of Polygraph AI, how you plan to grow and expand, how you plan to get it out there and to get people using it? Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2:If anyone digs in further, they'll see that the name even was appearing publicly different in the past. It's because when you're building a truly independent AI solution, you need to train first. It doesn't happen like it's not one of those API solutions, that you get this plugin from here and plugin from there and that's it. To train our AI solutions, we initially created a review platform and the reasoning was that why not attract as many people as we can and let them help us to train the AI modules? And operating in a consumer-driven industry is the most difficult industry to train something on, to make sense out of it. We did that and via that we got to a point where we built our AI solution that can do three things.
Speaker 2:We can originate step one of any content what's the origin of it? Is it human or non-human origin, meaning machines, bots, ais and so on. But just because the content is machine-generated doesn't mean that it is not reliable or it is reliable. So we built a second layer on it, which is verification. So verification is more of a behavioral analysis around it, cross-matching it, index-matching it, and what it does is that it matches and identifies the user's behavior on other places or other look-alike content as well and saying is this content sort of biased or not? We are looking into the biased element in there. Is Dylan trying to promote Yagubi as part of this interview or is he trying to harm him or is he being neutral around it? And that's what we are trying to understand. And the third layer comes afterwards. Is the trustworthyness, kind of like an affluent AI putting all those prior metrics into one and saying this is reliable and this is not. And this is the reasoning behind it. So this is the step one that we have done. This is verification Currently operates at 98.9% accuracy for text. We have over 6% accuracy currently for voice, and video is on the development and besides it, we have the enterprise solution coming up and I won't be disclosing too much information around it, but I'm sure Our key element here is that if you have polygraph AIG AI governance solution installed on your computer, you can engage with any AI solution out there If you are about to input any confidential data.
Speaker 2:Let's say there was this incident about Samsung developers inputting a confidential code onto chatGPT and that ended up Samsung banning chatGPT as an example, right? So in that specific incident, if polygraph would have been available, they would have received a notification you are about input confidential information, and the system would have stopped them, giving them three options, one of which would be Encrypt. Encrypt would have encrypted their confidential data inside. They would have still generated the solution and once the generation would have happened, the user would have pressed again the decrypt solution and the encryption would have been decrypted and they would have got like complete, full result out of it. Chatgpt would not have received their confidential data. Neither we would have. Only the user would be controlling their data. So that's very unique to us in a way that we are working and there is a regulator that we are currently keeping a close contact with that we want this to be an industry-wide solution, so that's the product, in a way.
Speaker 1:Okay, awesome. I'm actually very excited to see what comes from this, because there's so much AI generated content these days and I'm kind of getting sick of it. Every LinkedIn post in general is just AI generated, and it'll be nice to just be able to tell what is and what isn't even though I'm starting to get the hang of it because ChatGPT has kind of got its rhythm and you can kind of tell what it is. But I think this is going to be super cool, especially for like reviews.
Speaker 2:You'd be surprised actually, like, if you know how to prompt engineer, you can make it very, very convincing. Like most people talk about text, I'm not personally worried much about text. I'm worried more about like deep fake videos, deep fake voices and so on, To a certain extent, that I have a friend here in Austin, a very well-known gentleman, and he has an 81-year-old mom. The mom lives in an around $15 million mansion, a very, very high-end location, and he goes visits his mom. Like the mom suddenly says I've done everything that you ask me, but why do I need to go to the notary? And he's like what do you mean? Why do I need to go to the notary?
Speaker 2:And the woman starts basically telling that he presumably have been calling her and saying that he created a trust company and he wants the mom to transfer the house into the trust company. And he even has a voicemail that he's looking at. It's exactly identifiable by him. Like it looks like him saying that, hey, mom, now that you are getting older and so on, we need to think of what's coming up next. So I created the trust company so that you can put the house onto it. That way we don't need to pay too much taxes, and so on. This is insane.
Speaker 1:That is terrifying.
Speaker 2:And it's not the only thing, Like there are hundreds of thousands of these things happening, even people calling banks and withdrawing money without the original person knowing it. So that's where we are actually more focused on, because text is kind of like easy. The other stuff is the main focus point for us, because when your mom calls you, you want to know that it's really your mom calling you, that God forbid if she's in distress. You don't want to run into some crime scene and be a victim yourself 100%.
Speaker 1:So Polygraph AI will be able to identify deepfakes as well.
Speaker 2:That's the end goal that we are working for for the middle of next year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's huge as well. I've seen it come now, all these scams coming out with the deepfakes, and they're so realistic it's actually crazy. So what challenges have you faced, not necessarily for Polygraph, but in general? Could you give us tips for overcoming challenges in the tech industry and, in general, what have been your tools for overcoming challenges?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so one of the similar conversations that happened yesterday, I'll kind of refer to the same similar answers, but a bit extra on it, if you're asking me about the business what challenges I saw and how I mitigated it this time compared to my previous journey. In my previous journey, the exit took around 10 years 2010. We started 7 markets, of course, in the middle of 5 years, where the sidekick kind of approached with, but it took all together 10 years. So this time I said it shouldn't take 10 years for it to get to be somewhat out there, and we took a stance that we would engage with highly reputable investors as well and handpicked the ones that we want to be associated with, and that's something that has been helping us For food industry. We've identified certain investors that we are collaborating with, such as I mean Park as an example he's a very, very helpful or John Leeds on that side, on encryption, modeling and so on. Punjiglobal Ventures Manmit Sink has been very, very helpful in our previous lead. So identifying a lead or investor that doesn't just put money but also puts the input onto your activities helps you to overcome some of the challenges that you face. But let's talk about the challenges that we have faced and how we overcame it.
Speaker 2:When we started polygraph, we knew where we are going Like. This is the thing that I'm talking to you about was the journey. But most people didn't understand. Even our investors didn't understand why we had to have a review platform to train our AI. We couldn't explain them and they didn't make sense out of it that how it would save us money to get there. So we pretended as if we are actually building a review platform for entirety of the period. And once the training model was done, then we came and said by the way, we are not stopping the review platform and we won't be doing PR and AI companies. So everyone starts telling us why you did a pivoting. So sometimes you have to, kind of like, tell your story in a different way so that the market perceives it correctly to their mind, until you are ready with the remainder of it to be unveiled. So that's what we have done and currently, rather than a challenge, the need that we have is people. It takes a village to change the world right, we are still building our village.
Speaker 2:Sure, we have 11,000 subscribers on our platform, like waitlisted for certain productions and so on, but we need people like you. We need other parties to spread our voice to show people that AI is transformative solution. No one can disagree with that. We need that solution. However, ai without control is also dangerously transformative. Your data being leaked out there can destroy your life, your everything. So we wanna share these stories, not in a promotional manner, but help you understand that, how you can mitigate it. And that's the mission that we are on and that's the challenge.
Speaker 2:Not everybody is on the same side. They think that we are just one of the like. Certain people think that we are just one of those AI identifying solutions. We are not. We are on a mission to help protect you. We are like the next generation cyber security, but without having the security element in there, just warning you and giving you your control on it, because you need to know why we are telling it. You need to be explained, just because certain websites having been masked as AI solution and this, and that you need to know why you shouldn't be using it and that will be coming as part of our journey as well, like explaining you with depth analysis of the content inside. So that's the need that we are looking at villagers with us to come and help our story be spread.
Speaker 1:Amazing and I think that's very important because a lot of people they're scared of AI. They're scared it's gonna people are gonna lose jobs and I think it's important for people to understand how it works and what the implications of it will be going forward. So we are running out of time.
Speaker 1:Thank you. We are running out of time a bit, but before we go, what advice would you give to other businesses looking to succeed in the AI industry, because I know it's quite a saturated space at the moment. So what advice would you give for people to stand out and make a successful business?
Speaker 2:So the biggest advice let's not call it advice, but recommendation that I would give to myself even is that Just start. Don't be afraid of starting. Don't be afraid of failure. In fact, actually, if you fail, celebrate it. It's not the end of the world, because you've tried it, you have learned it, and learning involves earning. Just drop the L out of it. Right, you've earned something out of it. It's an experience that you've earned. So start.
Speaker 2:But starting for the sake of failure is not something good. So you need to be prepared in a way. And that leaves me to the second point be the king of something. Be the king of something that people call you experienced person or the king of that something. Identify a niche and build something according to that niche that you are well-averse and well-knowledgeful about. And the third thing is leverage. Leverage your network. Don't be afraid of asking people like for help, because you are just one person and one stick. You can break it in very easy, but if you involve the whole people all sticks together, it's like a log no one can break it. So that would be the final point for me Don't be afraid, just start picking a niche and ask for help and let the whole world lead you towards your end destination. You'll end up pivoting here and there, but pivoting is basically the market feedback. But eliminate also the noise. Unnecessary pivoting is also not good 100%.
Speaker 1:I love that. Well, Yagub, we are out of time and thank you so much for being on the show, but quickly, before we go. What is the best way for people to get in touch with you, if you're open to that, or for them to follow your story? And Polygraph AI 100%.
Speaker 2:I'm very, very responsive in general. On LinkedIn, yagub Rahimov there is, I believe, only one, actually and on any Twitter, y Rahimov everywhere and for the company it's Polygraphai Polygraph with an F at the end that AI. We will be sharing more information around it as we go along and if people are in Austin or there are policymakers, et cetera that wants to be engaged with us. Every three months, we are hosting also an event at our office here it's called Etical AI Investors, which involves investors, policymakers and researchers together and we put them into around table information. We would also love to you all even yourself, by the way, dylan come join us and let's be part of that journey. Development overall.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you so much, Yagub. We're really excited to see what comes in the near future.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Dylan. I appreciate it. Have a good one.