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Sierra Raises $950M at $15B Valuation
- tombert 5mo agoDamn, for just a moment I thought the Sierra Online company was coming back. I want a new official Quest for Glory game.
- pixelpoet 5mo agoLikewise, I was hoping for more Space Quest :(
- ErneX 5mo agoUse plunger.
- mysterydip 5mo agoNot exactly the same, but SpaceVenture finally released at the end of last year: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1374960/SpaceVenture/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1374960/SpaceVenture/
- pixelpoet 5mo agoThis looks great but wow, what a hilariously shameless knock-off! :D
- pmdr 5mo agoEvery single word domain seems to have become some new AI company.
- tombert 5mo agoI still get briefly confused when I see a post on here about X, only to realize they're talking about Twitter, and not the display server. There are 26 letters and millions of words; people should choose other ones.
- breppp 5mo agoand not only one https://www.cyera.com/press-releases/cyera-raises-400m-to-meet-rapidly-growing-demand-for-ai-security-among-enterprises https://www.cyera.com/press-releases/cyera-raises-400m-to-me...
- Bjorkbat 5mo agoI was about to post a snarky comment along the lines of "Sierra? The publishers of Homeworld and Homeworld 2?"
- reconnecting 5mo agoAssume Sierra owners are too young to know what Sierra games means. I was absolutely obsessed with their logo (1) at school time. 1. https://preview.redd.it/remember-sierra-games-1979-2008-they-had-a-cool-logo-v0-9450p2apn3d11.jpg?auto=webp&s=78853c962543cfffca557d994d4a15b034f2a204 https://preview.redd.it/remember-sierra-games-1979-2008-they... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMQi7olp-tw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMQi7olp-tw
- tombert 5mo agoWhat was wrong with their logo? Or did you mean to type "obsessed"?
- reconnecting 5mo agoObsessed, correct. One of the most beautiful game logos, going back to the early nineties.
- foobarian 5mo agoWow seeing that hit me surprisingly hard. Such good times
- rashkov 5mo agoIt occurs to me just now that the logo is in fact a mountain and not a breaching Orca whale like I'd always thought
- jcgrillo 5mo agoA new Lode Runner when EDIT: holy shit I stand corrected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Runner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Runner
- throw0101c 5mo agoAt least I'm not the only one: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment
- thatmf 5mo agoSame. A new Gabriel Knight would be fun!
- tombert 5mo agoOh yeah! For some reason I was convinced that Gabriel Knight was LucasArts but nope, just misremembered. Gabriel Knight was awesome, I'd love a new one.
- Apocryphon 5mo agoWell, if MicroProse could do it...
- bastardoperator 5mo agoSo you want to be a hero?
- cousin_it 5mo agoThat series is over, and the magical feeling of being in an open-ended fantasy world is really hard to replicate when we're not kids anymore. Loom is another game that gave me that feeling. But there was one idea in QfG that I wish more games would use. Namely, designing three different solutions for every problem the player is facing. This idea works so well to create a sense of possibility in a game, I don't know why it got forgotten.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5mo agoMe too, now I am suddenly wanting Space Quest 2026!
- ransom1538 5mo agoSpace Quest IV: Roger?
- maxglute 5mo agoOne can dream.
- pmdr 5mo agoSo we're supposed to believe that removing humans from customer support will lead to better outcomes? > Ensure you only pay for the value Sierra delivers with outcome-based pricing. Yeah... that won't last.
- htx80nerd 5mo agoAI customer support is trash and everyone hates it , but it makes the Wall St numbers go up, so it's a good thing.
- tombert 5mo agoI broadly agree though I have noticed that it seems to be getting a bit better. I hate how patronizing pretty much every LLM tends to be, but at least I've noticed now that the AI support is better at figuring out what it is I actually want. That said, my life hack for these things to get escalated to a human is to just keep saying or typing curse words. Usually that triggers a "connect to human" flow. I can't promise it will always work, but I can say it has worked every time I have tried it.
- zamadatix 5mo agoAI support generally sucks but I actually wouldn't mind if everyone used it for the initial call routing portion. Beats an IVR tree or waiting for someone to just redirect your call to the real queue.
- el_benhameen 5mo agoI respectfully disagree with the initial routing point. I very strongly prefer a traditional tree to “I’m your voice assistant! In a few words, tell me how I can help!”. The tree is structured and gives me an immediate sense of how to map my task to the support offering. If I’m calling, I probably have an issue that I can’t self-serve resolve via the customer portal or whatever, so walking the tree lets me get an idea of who can help. The “voice assistant” gives me no sense of what the system is capable of or how to take advantage of those capabilities. So I’m left guessing at phrases or functions based off of the assumption that there’s still some kind of tree-like structure that’s been abstracted away. Same outcome, more cognitive overhead, plus I usually have to shout in my best William … Shatner … impression to get it to understand me.
- wxw 5mo agoVoice agents in customer support is an extremely crowded market. Seems like Sierra is taking a considerable lead. I don't know much about their product offerings, but I was doing some speech-to-text work and came across https://research.sierra.ai/mubench/ https://research.sierra.ai/mubench/ for comparing current models. It felt fairly thoughtful, particularly in regards to coming up with better benchmarking metrics than word error rate.
- captn3m0 5mo agoIf you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder. > Bret is Co-Founder of Sierra. Most recently, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Bret founded Quip and was CTO of Facebook. He started his career at Google, where he co-created Google Maps. Bret serves on the board of OpenAI.
- bsimpson 5mo agoThe coauthor (and presumably cofounder) is Clay Bavor. He's a Google exec who was the face of their VR efforts when he was there.
- tencentshill 5mo agoWhat VR efforts? Cardboard?
- throwaway320948 5mo ago[dead]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nikcub 5mo agocan't believe Bret's bio doesn't mention friendfeed!
- derwiki 5mo agoTornado is all but lost to the sands of time
- chrishare 5mo ago[dead]
- fastball 5mo agoHe is the Chairman of the OpenAI board.
- linkregister 5mo agoI think this is generally a good product because businesses that previously had zero phone support can now afford to have something. However, the hard work of actually building out the various workflows and decision trees is not automatic. Previously, a call center employee would receive abuse from a caller for being unempowered to make a decision. Instead, an LLM will perform the same role. Ideally, businesses will escalate to an empowered human for all undefined parts of the flowchart. In practice, I truly hope it will be better than the current pre-recorded phone tree system that leads to a human following a script. I personally only call support because a fix is not available through an organization's website.
- MagicMoonlight 5mo agoAWS can do this out of the box
- throw03172019 5mo agoStrong disagree here. AWS can give you the tools to build yourself but not an out of the box all in one solution for this problem.
- dllrr 5mo agoHilarious
- altmanaltman 5mo agothey can but why would they, its literally not their business
- pavlov 5mo agoI don't think businesses that previously had zero phone support can afford Sierra. They seem to be a "for pricing, let's go play C-level golf" type of company.
- HDThoreaun 5mo agoAll of big tech other than apple has zero phone support unless you pay for enterprise support subscriptions.
- TrackerFF 5mo agoWonder how much compute is essentially spent on conversations that end up with the human asking "Let me speak with a human"
- hoofedear 5mo agoIt’s interesting that the example interaction they use on their homepage is a no-friction example that can be handled without an AI chatbot. Why not something more complex that properly demonstrates the value?
- dllrr 5mo agoAnd why do the numbers sound impressive but the words are verrrry specific (authenticating a new ... what?! What does that even f'ing mean?!)
- eaenki 5mo agoI remember waiting for uber next to him in SF one night 10+ years ago. This dude must be the son of some mafia boss or some shit and have some crazy blackmail to raise billions for companies that are copies of products where he’s the 12th company doing the same thing.. never turning a profit or anything and yet raising ever more money. doesn’t make sense otherwise
- ej88 5mo agohes board chair of openai and is ex co-ceo of salesforce, ex cto of facebook, can get a meeting with any exec in F500... their moat is distribution
- svnt 5mo agoIs that really a moat though or something like a firehose of gasoline?
- ej88 5mo agoits a moat vs. other startups and it carried them to multi-B valuation obviously the product needs to deliver and nrr needs to be good in the long run
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Is that really a moat though or something like a firehose of gasoline? It's a moat from a defensive perspective. It's a firehose from an offensive one. Outside state capture, most moats are both.
- colesantiago 5mo ago> their moat is distribution It is trust. Everyone in the valley knows Bret Taylor and will back any project he does, even if the product has no distribution. The same way everyone in the valley knows Naval Ravikant for example, angels and VCs will back any project he does even if his product has no distribution.
- paganel 5mo ago
- ej88 5mo agoIt's always interesting seeing how HN reacts to AI CX (as someone who works in this space). Yes, the tech savvy crowd loves to say how they always ask for a human and love old school phone trees in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language The vast majority of callers call in to resolve their issue, and most don't care if they are speaking to a bot because they just want their issue fixed. Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months There's also the 2nd order effs of making CX cheap. before, there is the perverse incentive of companies trying to keep you off support because each call costs them way more than the value they get. if your cost per call drops 100x you can invest in turning a cost centre into a revenue driver (+ a better experience)
- tardedmeme 5mo ago[flagged]
- insane_dreamer 5mo agoI have yet to encounter an AI agent that was able to handle my support questions adequately. I always end up having to get a human (which is becoming increasingly difficult or virtually impossible). I'm sure AI Support Agents will be implemented better, but so far in my experience, the humans I connect to far outperform the AI agents.
- ej88 5mo agothat's fair, most implementations in the industry are in the early stages and implementing a full powered agent with access to all the tools it needs is hard (very political as you can imagine). i hope over the next year you notice them getting better!
- nubg 5mo agothanks for your insights, however, citation needed that they will get better
- bix6 5mo agoIs their tech unique or do they just have the F500 relationships?
- caycep 5mo agoat first I thought Sierra games was making a comeback...
- brcmthrowaway 5mo agoThis is sad. These jobs should go to someone in a poor town in the Midwest.
- jjtheblunt 5mo agomaybe in an ironic unforeseen twist they are....to people running datacenters there?
- nemomarx 5mo agohow many jobs does a data center provide compared to a call center? It's gotta be like 10-50 per DC I would think, for locals anyway
- jvwww 5mo agoWhy should they?
- khazhoux 5mo agoWell, we still live in a society in which one must labor in exchange for food, shelter, and medicine. The opportunities for labor keep shrinking, meanwhile money is funneled into an ever-smaller pool of people.
- woeirua 5mo agoI don't get this for several reasons: 1. There are already apps/websites as an alternative for CSAs. Most of the time I have to call someone its because I couldn't do what I wanted through those portals, so adding an AI agent to the chain is unlikely to prevent an immediate escalation to a human. 2. How much money are you really going to save this way? CSAs aren't high salary employees. Sure you might need a bunch of them, but we've already seen that brand loyalty erodes quickly when you remove the human touch. United/Spirit airlines offer opposing views on the cut your way to profitability perspective. 3. "Pay only for good outcomes" isn't going to last. 4. Are agents good enough to even do this? Yes, the cherrypicked examples sound good, but... I just know how well coding agents really work and my only experiences with voice agents in the wild have been very poor so far.
- the__alchemist 5mo agoThis doesn't matter. Another comment cuts to the quick of it: "If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder.". This is funding for established tech businessmen; what the business claims to do doesn't matter beyond having "AI" in it.
- dmix 5mo agoThey seem to have no shortage of big name customers.
- ergocoder 5mo ago> How much money are you really going to save this way? A lot of money. Managing a large group of people needs structure. It comes with tons of headaches and cost. In terms of the investment: It's Bret Taylor who has one of the most impressive background in tech. He can raise any amount he wants. VC bets on the person, not the business. If Bret Taylor allowed me to invest, I would have invested too.
- petra 5mo agoIf 40% of the F50 are already using this, and others too, why aren't we already seeing a huge drops in the employment numbers ?
- loupol 5mo agoYet another AI company where the logo follows the butthole convergence rule [0] ? As an aside, my favorite Sierra Entertainment logo version is probably the 1983-1993 version [1]. I think the design still holds up even today. [0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt... [1] https://logos-world.net/sierra-entertainment-logo/ https://logos-world.net/sierra-entertainment-logo/
- oleggromov 5mo agoThis made me laugh, than you!
- Infinitesimus 5mo agoI can't speak to the business itself but they recently published a refreshing take on improving the product engineering interview experience in the age of AI https://sierra.ai/blog/the-ai-native-interview https://sierra.ai/blog/the-ai-native-interview Well worth a read even if you are generally anti-AI.
- gorgoiler 5mo agoI’ve heard much about Sierra but haven’t ever tried their product. What do I need to pretend to buy and then complain about to get on a call with their agents?
- SilverElfin 5mo agoI don’t get it. Isn’t this relatively simple for companies to build themselves.
- madrox 5mo agoI supervised a Sierra rollout a while back. Their performance was impressive and the price was great. I suspect both will not be true in time. Their implementation is rather cumbersome, requiring implementation fees and AI configuration that is rather bespoke to Sierra. Anyone rolling off of Sierra will find there is nothing they can take with them. In general, I think CX ought to disappear as a vertical in an AI world. If I'm talking to a product AI and need support, why should I switch to another AI to do that? Even if that second AI is invoked by the first as a tool, how much am I gaining? Interestingly, the first and best implementers of AI support so far have been at companies that roll their own. There is nothing unique to CX about AI, as far as I can tell. Sierra is still just the same AI infra people are putting in products. Granted, you can make good money positioning yourself this way, but I expect on some time horizon they will need to reposition.
- asdev 5mo agoDo they actually have something or is it just a wrapper with tool calling?
- madrox 5mo agoThis is difficult to determine given how they implement. I would liken them to a professional services organization, where most of the magic is in their implementation for you, and you have to presume their implementation includes a lot of intenral building blocks. It isn't turnkey.
- mortoc 5mo ago"AI has evolved more rapidly in the past two years than anyone predicted." We clearly do not live in the same universe.
- glimshe 5mo agoFor a second I thought I was going to get another King's Quest.
- vunderba 5mo agoAs Graham would say, "Woah wait a minute!". Unfortunately Sierra hasn't been around for 18 years at this point and is now currently owned by Microsoft Activision. I'd also love to see another point-and-click KQ game in the style of KQ 5/6 - as they are two of my favorite games of all time.
- mromanuk 5mo agoI loved the Hero's Quest saga (later renamed Quest for Glory), specially the first HQ. I played it on an Hercules display, later a monochrome VGA monitor. I remember going to Erana's peace to have a good sleep for the night.
- jppope 5mo agoMaybe its just me, but $950M seems a lot of money to invest in a "company". Had to check my assumptions though so I looked up what the lower end of GDP for a country is and sure enough they have American Samoa, Dominica, and Tonga beat. Now that money is probably meant to last 16 months so its not quite apples to apples but kind of wild regardless. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
- altmanaltman 5mo agoIn economics, comparing a corporate investment round to a country's GDP is considered flawed. As you noted with your "16 months", the company is sitting on a $950M bank account that it will slowly burn through over the years. Comparing a multi-year pile of cash to a single year of national production distorts the scale. You are basically comparing a nation's actual hard work and output to a speculative pile of cash. Even comparing corporate revenue to GDP is frowned upon by economists. A company's revenue includes the cost of all the inputs it bought from other companies (such as servers, electricity, and software licenses). GDP, by definition, strips out intermediate costs to avoid double-counting and measures only final value added. You're also picking nations that do not produce much or have a very low population (Tonga only has 100k people), which pulls down the GDP due to how it's calculated.
- jlokier 5mo agoPeople are rightly concerned that AI chatbots could result in worse customer experience, so I'd like to share my anecdote. I recently had the best customer support experience I've ever had, and it was an AI chatbot, helping my in ways I would not expect from a first-line support human. Recently I opened the chatbot window on the site of a supplier of electric vehicle chargers, and asked some obscure things about how I could access and modify the charger in a non-standard way. I explained I was doing some R&D testing of a novel way of using the chargers, and I would need to temporarily reconfigure the public unit we had already installed in an unusual, non-standard way, rewiring its network to intercept traffic via transparent proxy, make it behave a little differently than it normally does, and that I didn't have the credentials. I was expecting the first-line person or bot on the chat to be unable to handle my non-standard request. What I was hoping for was this would start the process of getting me to someone who could help. I expected to take a few days or weeks to reach someone appropriate in the company, perhaps a sympathetic technician who could understand what I was trying to do. To my amazement, in the first response it one-shotted a nearly complete answer to every part of my question, including the detailed and implied parts I'd left out for a later interaction. It figured out what I was doing and what that needed, told me exactly what to do and why, and showed me that it understood every aspect of my request. There were things in this I doubt anyone ever asked about before. Because the answer so complete I didn't really need more. I asked it some things, e.g. about electrical safety, just to confirm my understanding of the one-shotted answer. In every reply, the chatbot was insightful, informative, helpful and correct, and I didn't need to explain things twice, or wait on hold, or be transferred to anyone else. I don't know what service they were using, but whoever implemented it, hats off to them for using good technology and providing it with high quality data about the products they are supporting. Honestly, if AI customer support calls or chats can be made that good consistently, that sounds great. (That was a stark contrast to my awful expereinces with support at banks, where many humans made mistake after mistake, contradicted each other, and seemed to struggle to understand simple things. Particularly the one where a bank required me to fill out a form with basic company info, then it took 14 hours of phone calls and hold time until I got to the one person who understood straight away that the entries on the form were correct, had to be that way, and they could tick the "it's done" box. My execellent AI bot experience suggests a good one will always understand things like that on the first iteration, as if they are the best-trained and best-informed humans available. But other, worse AI bot experiences suggests the 14 hour calls would become infinitely long, never able to resolve the problem, leading to things like unnecessary account closures and locked funds needing a court to resolve.)