On October 17th, we hosted an AI Deep Dive Session in collaboration with the Owen Graduate School of Management’s Center for Entrepreneurship with Baxter Webb, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Vanderbilt. The Center for Entrepreneurship (C4E) supports Vanderbilt founders at every stage through structured programs, funding, and mentorship. Webb, a seasoned entrepreneur who founded MEDarchon (acquired by XSOLIS) and holds multiple patents in healthcare technology, led a discussion on using AI to help B2B startups identify their first customers.
Highlights:
- Purpose: Address the critical challenge of identifying “beachhead” customers—the early adopters essential for new ventures to survive and cross the chasm to broader market adoption.
- Focus Areas: Building an end-to-end system that operationalizes go-to-market discovery, with particular attention to edtech and healthcare sectors where buyers are consolidated.
- AI Applications: Integrating EDGAR Form D signals for pre-seed/seed companies, automated web scraping to track customer logos over time, and firmographic data enrichment to train machine learning models that forecast look-alike prospects.
Session Insights:
- The session explored best practices for ethically and reliably collecting web and third-party data, including considerations around scraping frequency and data quality maintenance.
- Collaboration between data science and entrepreneurship faculty can turn noisy market signals into rigorous, founder-friendly insight that Vanderbilt B2B founders and campus programs can use to prioritize outreach.
- Discussion addressed evaluation frameworks that tie predictions to real outcomes, helping founders validate whether AI-generated prospect lists translate into actual customer acquisition.
Conclusion:
The AI Deep Dive with Baxter Webb and the Center for Entrepreneurship showcased how AI can transform the guesswork of early-adopter identification into a repeatable, data-driven process. This session provided a unique opportunity for those interested in data science, entrepreneurship, and venture development to engage in meaningful discussion and collaboration.
Are you interested in hosting a future AI Deep Dive? Contact us at datascience@vanderbilt.edu.