Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: When you mix human knowledge with the machine learning with the LLM, you got back far better results than either technology worked on it on its own. Like if, for example, you just used an LLM, it could be a perfect result. But it may be that it's totally, you know, hallucinating but when you put in the contextual information, it greatly increase.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Welcome to localization. Today we are going to be having a conversation with Peter Reynolds, the CEO of memoq, about their most recent acquisition of Global Lease.
Welcome.
Hi Peter, how are you doing today?
[00:00:49] Speaker A: I'm very well. Thank you very much Eddie for having us on your show. Thank you.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Oh fantastic. It's always great to have you back to hear your perspectives. And today we're going to be talking about Global east and your acquisition. Why don't we get right into it? Tell us more about it. How did it come about? How did the conversation start? And then we'll get into it.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Well, this is kind of like, kind of like dating that, you know, when there's a sort of, you've seen situations with your friends where everybody says that's a match that should happen and should have happened a long time ago and you'll find all your friends were setting you up with this person or whatever. Well, that's a bit like with Mama Q. And globally. Sam.
The founders of Memo Q, Ishvan Lingo, Gabaru Gray and Blaze Kish used to work for a company called Morphologic which established a rule based machine translation system.
It was also provided a lot of the dictionaries for Microsoft Word and was very cutting edge technology company at the time. And they were all working there and they then left us in the early 2000s to create Memoq. Around 2004, the founders of Global Ease did the same thing. They were working at the same company, some of them at the same time. So it was a case that all these people knew each other, they had gone their separate ways. We formed Mamoq, we built up our customers, built up our technology, they did the same thing, built up a great company, got a lot of very, very high technology company where they were doing some incredible things. And then over the last year we started talking to them and you know, we asked them what would they be interested in being acquired by Mama Q. It turned out they were thinking the same thing, that for them to grow that the way they should grow is in partnership with a translation management system such as Mama Q. So the whole thing was like, you know, I'm surprised there isn't enough. Well, there probably is an app that puts companies together in the same way that people do on Tinder and whatever. But it was a bit like that.
It was an acquisition merger that should have happened probably earlier, but we're slow learners. But now we've, we've got together the company's great. About two weeks we acquired Global east the beginning of September. About two weeks later we had our company meeting by the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary. And the Global Ease people were being bombarded with really complicated questions about their technology and how it would work and how it would fit in. How do you present this to customers and whatever. And the interesting things about it is that the answers were usually spot on. And it was just great to see people that you started getting together very quickly. And you can see from our announcement, if you go to the Global east now, you get to redirect it to Mama Q instantly. They already did things that we did not expect them to do at this stage, like the Global E software has been rebranded in the memoq luck and feel. So we think it's going really well. We think they've got very powerful technology and we think it's great potential.
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Thank you so much for that context and let's dig a little bit deeper into this technological match that you're talking about. Can you tell a bit more?
How does it make sense right now? How does it amplify memoqs and Global Leases outreach and of course approach to technology right now?
[00:05:06] Speaker A: What memoq, what we've been telling people over the last year or so that what we're about, what we want to, how we see the future is matching human knowledge plus machine learning. And we started doing this with a technology called AGT Adaptogene Generative Translation. And what that does is it takes translation resources from within memoq, the human knowledge where a human has created a TM or created terminology or Live Doc's corpus and it uses that as the context for the segment that's sent to to an LLM. In this case, it's the Microsoft OpenAI solution. And what we found is that it came back with when you mixed human knowledge with the machine learning with the LLM, you got back far better results than either technology worked on it on its own. Like if, for example, you just used an LLM, it could be a perfect result, but it may be that it's totally hallucinating, but when you put in the contextual information, it greatly increases that. And we started work on that in the summer of last year and we had it developed and released around November 2023. Then we found a couple of weeks after we had released it that there's actually a name for this. It's called Retrieval Augmented generation. We'd never heard this before, but it turns out what we're doing is most companies know what they're doing in this area or using the contextual information to when they work with LLMs.
Some of the people that helped us a small bit with the agt reason we asked their advice were the Global east people, you know, and they were doing something similar at the time. Where what they were doing is they had a neural machine translation engine and they were using that to provide contextual information which they were finding that they were getting even better results from what would be considered a format.
You know, as a NMT's suggestion, it was becoming far better when they were using it together with the LLM and they were starting to work on hybrid solutions and we found their technology really, really exciting. They were doing a couple of things that only they and maybe one or two other vendors did. One of them was on premise, an on premise solution. And this is something that's very important. Like some of our customers in the area of banking and regulated industries, some life sciences and whatever, they're not allowed to have USB storage facilities on their computers. You know, sometimes when they're releasing a new product that they ask translators to move in a premise so that they, you know, and use their equipment completely within the premise. And those people want to use machine translation but they don't want to use it outside of their premise. So being able to bring the engine to them and helping them with that is a great advantage.
They've also had an NMT solution that's worked really well for some quite impressive brands like that. They're a company that have attracted the more technical brands that have started like in Global Ease, which showed, you know, where they've been really good has been in producing a technology where we hope that together with Mama Q there'll be a great big improvement is around marketing and sales. So, you know, we're very happy with the technology part of it. So we think there's a lot of potential there. Mama Q is dedicated to making this happen.
Our intention is that we provide real competition to the other companies that are out there. But this whole area is still relatively new. It's not the case that there is a dominant player in the whole area of artificial, you know, of automated translation. So there's plenty of opportunity for us and for other competitors to as long as we bring innovation and we make things better for the customers. There's a good story to be told here.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: It is. It is a great story to be told, Peter. And as you are inferring, this is the beginning of that conversation. So I presume independent from what Global east has already built and what memoq has already built, there is an element of the talent that is now merging with the memoq talent. Could you tell us a little bit more about the talent that's coming to now work with memoq? That transition and the leadership that's there and a little bit of the culture that's now emerging?
[00:10:43] Speaker A: One of the things with this area around machine translation is that some of the, you know, particularly in Europe, the conferences around that some of them are quite academic. And we have always had people that have been, you know, we quite a lot of PhDs, but they haven't been people that then gone on to teach. One of the interesting things that we found, you know, a couple of days after we had acquired Global Ease, is that one of the leading engineers within Global Ease is the person who is mentoring one of our colleagues in, who's doing research as part of his.
I'm not sure whether it's master's or a PhD, but they brought with them a huge amount of technology experience.
They really up the skill set in terms of their approach to research. Research was something that Mama Q did, but we did it in our spare time and we did it in a sort of research was done by people who were developers first and interested in research second. And we hadn't got a lot of the methodologies and a lot of the skills to do in research around innovation. This has greatly improved with the Global east people that they brought in a lot of research capabilities in terms of the culture. That's possibly the interesting part of it because we tried to build a culture within Mama Q where it's essentially built on respect for people and continuous improvement. The Global east people had no problem whatsoever fitting in with that sort of culture. So we were delighted with that part of it. The culture just was a fish.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: And in terms of the timing and you've mentioned, you know, this is something that should have happened before.
I presume, of course, that there was some pre conversations that made this a lot easier. Is there anything any more intimate stories that you can tell us about how this came about and, and where you realize, and the team realized that this was going to be that level of matchup, not just technically, but culturally and in terms of leadership some years ago.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: People have worked in the same Company and they've kept in touch. I mean, you know, they've always. For example, nobody's always attended Mama QFest.
They've always been, you know, very active in the field, out. We talked to them in March or March of February, I think, of this year, and it was sort of an aspirational talk. But this year at Mama Q Fest, we just sat down in a room and we'd like to buy you. And they said, well, they'd like us to buy them. So we just figured out the logistics. It was very, very pleasant.
We had about a month where we checked various things. Each time we checked something, we found that they were actually better than they had told us.
And, you know, we were very pleased with it. You know, there's not a lot of secrets there. We planned, you know, we bought the company at the beginning of September, and we announced it in the beginning of October. And by the time we announced this, we had everything in place. Like, the Global Ease were already part of our production team.
We had everything done on the MemoQ website that, you know, could give you details of Global Ease. They had even changed the user interface for Global Ease so it looked like a MemoQ product.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Well, congratulations to Global Ease and MemoQ. And I don't want to get too intimate on this, but looking into the future, and you don't have to tell me names or technologies, but is Memoq looking into more acquisitions, more mergers, including more things coming up?
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Memoq is a completely bootstrapped company, and we've developed this.
When we do an acquisition, it's something like. It's not something that we're doing for know, to make the revenues bigger so that the private equity company can have a more important player within the industry.
Well, our focus has been that this is something. The acquisition is something that's important to our customers. We're not planning any acquisitions.
I don't quite understand why people find them so entertaining, but they do. You know, the funny thing that one person who's said to me that, you know already, mergers, acquisitions coming up with Mama Q. And I said, what if there is? You'll be the first to know about it. And he was. We told a couple of people ahead of the announcement, and it worked out very well because they were able to help us with the announcement. Not planning anything at the moment. And if we did do another acquisition, it would be, you know, it's quite a deep reason for one other thing. Just to mention that memoq has done in the last two years is we've had a spin off company we were looking at how we manage shor FPS requests for proposals that you get from various companies. We're doing business. We also always had problems and issues with them.
And we looked at this very deeply, discovered that we could use our own software and then looked at that even more. That's an interesting industry. And we had a colleague working in Seattle called Mark Schreiner, a salesperson lesion. We said to them, you know, why don't we make a company and Mama Q will be the seed investor and we'll see what we can do. So there's a company called Breeze Stocks which makes an RFP management tool. It's completely, you know, separate to localization and translation part of it. But the company is doing very well now. They're just at the stage where they've got a product. They've been in business a year and in that year they developed an AI product where it does something similar to how things work In a translation management system. When you're answering a request for a proposal or information or whatever, it checks if you've answered that question similar question before. If you have, it shows your answer. If you haven't, it goes to an LLM with contextual information about your offering and gets an answer that you can then edit. And it makes managing the whole RFP process from it turns it from it being a painful process that everybody hates into something that manageable. And I'm not saying it's easy, but it's much easier than it would. You know, it produces time by many multiples and it gets.
We're using it in house as well as well. So we find it very effective. And you know some of our. I've heard of other people that I know that and I know they're not the sort of people that will just take a solution because somebody says it's a good idea. They will kick the tires very thoroughly before doing anything. And they're also you using Breeze docks and it's working very effectively.
So we've done that as well as acquired Global Ease.
[00:19:12] Speaker B: So perhaps no more acquisitions. Definitely the growth of your spin off. Maybe other spin offs, maybe those that are attending memoq fest this year.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: We're not planning any more. We're planning to grow memoq and you know, we see great opportunities ahead for us.
The Restocks company is doing fairly well and we see great opportunities for them. And thankfully it's, you know, it's gone from being our baby to being a grown up who doesn't return our calls and is busy too busy working to, you know, to talk to its mother much. So it's great. It's very positive.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: The boat companies, both companies, incredible and really reassuring. We probably should bring Mark and Alessio here to talk more in depth about that. And we are excited to see memoq growth. Hopefully we'll be at memoq Fest next year. That's the plan for the Multilingual team.
That will be the first time for me.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: It's not even a secret anymore but it's easy. The best conference in this industry.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: Oh great. Then I look forward to being there.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you and take care. Good luck with the magazine and good luck with these podcasts. Thank you.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: And this was our conversation with Peter Reynolds, CEO at memoq. We talked about their acquisition with Globalist, their technological and cultural feat and how this makes sense for our industry. My name is Eddie Arrieta, CEO at Multilingual Magazine. Thanks for listening. Until next time.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: Goodbye.
