Clara de Soto

Clara de Soto has built chatbots for KIA, Starbucks, Coca Cola as the co-founder of Reply.ai, a top chatbot building platform. A serial entrepreneur, Clara founded the viral KillSwitch app on Facebook, built and sold ClearHart Tech, and is also editor of ChatbotsWeekly.com. We talk artificial intelligence and authenticity, resilience, when to sell your company, and how to triumph over adversity.

Show Notes

What do you do when you launch a startup, it soars like a rocket ship, and then just 10 days later it crashes back to earth?

Serial entrepreneur Clara de Soto wrote the email of her life and the right person opened it – in just 15 minutes. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was that right person, and Facebook had killed KillSwitch, Clara’s first startup, an app that helped Facebook users erase the identities of their ex’s from their timelines.

Now Clara is onto startup three, an artificial intelligence platform called Reply.ai. With a bevy of blue chip clients and a promising future, Reply.ai is growing fast.

We talk about the life of a serial entrepreneur, resilience and determination, and why improv is a great lab for a budding startup founder.

Here are some of Clara’s tips for women in business:

• Resilience: Clara’s first big lesson as an entrepreneur: Stuff happens beyond your control. “ You have two choices, you can either lie down and take it, or you can do something about it. We chose to do something about it.”
• How To Get a Response, Fast: Clara got Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to reply in 15 minutes: “Banned by Facebook, Praised By Media, KillSwitch Appeal”. Clara learned she had to use guerrilla tactics, drive earned media, and not take “no” for an answer.
• Humans in Tech: Clara is passionate about bringing a human element to her work in AI – and her cross-disciplinary background is an asset. (She is an English major). The challenge with Chatbots is to make them authentic.

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Read the full transcript here:

Clara de Soto: Chatbots and Guerrilla Growth – Melinda Wittstock

Clara de Soto has built chatbots for KIA, Starbucks, Coca Cola as the co-founder of Reply.ai, a top chatbot building platform. A serial entrepreneur, Clara founded the viral KillSwitch app on Facebook, built and sold ClearHart Tech, and is also editor of ChatbotsWeekly.com. We talk artificial intelligence and authenticity, resilience, when to sell your company, …

More about Reply.ai here: https://reply.ai

Clara is also editor of the Chatbot industry newsletter

http://www.chatbotsweekly.com/

How to Find Clara on Social Media:

Follow Clara on Twitter @Claradactyl

• https://www.facebook.com/clara.desoto
• https://www.facebook.com/Replyai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/claradesoto/
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/10652705/
• https://www.instagram.com/theclaradactyl