Issue 12 2024

CEO MONTHLY / ISSUE 12 2024 8 tilising classical AI, not risking fallible machine learning or LLM systems, OnlyBoth relieves its customers of complicated dashboards and information overload, recognising instead that a sentence is worth 1,000 data. This is something that Raul Valdes-Perez, who serves as the CEO and co-founded the business back in 2015, has come to understand over the course of his storied career in the software space. A former computer science academic, Raul’s impressive education took him from the internationally renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, where Raul completed a PhD in computer science. After staying on as a research faculty member for a decade, Raul in 2000 cofounded Vivisimo Inc., his first spin-off from CMU, serving as executive chairman until its acquisition by IBM in mid-2012. Raul explains: “One of my academic projects led to spinning off Vivisimo Inc., which took a new approach to the presentation of voluminous search results: not as a list, but rather as thematic groups calculated and described on the fly.” Exploring his tenure at the organisation in more detail, Raul continues: “During my 9 years as CEO, I was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the North Central Region and celebrated as one of the top ten reader favourites for Entrepreneur of the Year by Inc. magazine.” Sitting alongside this venture are the memberships which Raul has held for numerous boards representing a range of corporations and non-profit organisations. From the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh through to the Pittsburgh Technology Council and even The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE), Raul has lent his invaluable expertise to a number of local initiatives, highlighting a dedication to give back to the city that has given him so much. Diving deeper into his CEO career, Raul emphasises the importance of business books in his journey, with his philosophy, sourced from a book by acclaimed author Jack Welch, being to both “say what you mean and do what you say.” Since a company’s culture usually starts at the top and works its way down the ladder, this approach is imperative when it comes to nurturing success, particularly concerning start-ups. Owing a great deal of success to these sorts of books, Raul decided to write his own, with Advice is for Winners: How to Get Advice for Better Decisions in Life and Work being published in 2012, demonstrating all he had absorbed. This book paved the way for OnlyBoth a few years later, which Unprecedented Performance Transparency Leading Pittsburghbased software development company OnlyBoth Inc. harnesses the power of AI to elevate performance transparency and benchmarking engines in such fields as employer benefit plans and healthcare. Leveraging four unique evaluation engines designed to address user needs – namely individual benchmarking, sideby-side comparisons, scoring, and discovery queries – this company, led by Raul Valdes-Perez, the Software Automation CEO of the Year 2024 - USA, uncovers factual and contextual comparisons written in natural language. was founded as start-up alongside Andre Lessa, Raul’s former colleague at Vivisimo and a person with whom Raul had carried out several projects across subsequent ventures over the years. With this expertise to boot, OnlyBoth has also created BenchMine.com, which offers a range of free and open tools to deliver robust performance transparency based on data that is publicly available. These insights can then be utilised by the likes of employer retirement plans, school districts, and the healthcare industry, to name just a few. Raul adds, “we also use simulated data to demonstrate how such engines could be applied to retailer locations, large sales teams, and B2B customer success operations.” The increasing availability of this detailed sector data – which is both collected and published by governments – as well as the company’s strategy of making its subsequent engines free and accessible to the public, has resulted in Raul deciding to post weekly answers to the questions had by stakeholders about this sector. More recently, these have taken the form of 401(k) retirement plans, with insights about this topic able to be explored via BenchMine.com. As the above shows, OnlyBoth Inc. is always on the lookout for the next datasets, ensuring it remains at the forefront of the space. With Raul at the helm, this is something that the company is sure to continue to achieve, as its award-winning CEO remains dedicated to unearthing new and innovative ways of automating creative tasks. U Contact: Raul Valdes-Perez Company: OnlyBoth Inc. Web Address: https://www.onlyboth.com/ https://www.benchmine.com/

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