Grace Wardhana

Instacart is a market leader when it comes to leveraging AI tools to boost productivity at work. I had an amazing conversation with JJ Zhuang, Instacart’s Chief Architect, who has shepherded over 50 AI-driven initiatives to market across the org. We explored what catapulted Instacart to the forefront of AI integration, supporting radically diverse use cases across various functional areas. One striking insight (echoed by Ethan Mollick and others elsewhere) is that you often don't need specialized tools for specialized work. Frontier models like GPT-4 can seamlessly adapt to a wide range of functions and use cases. They're not just for engineers; they're incredibly versatile tools used by marketing, comms, and legal teams. From generating code to proofreading and ideation, GPT-4 empowers every department to leverage AI for enhanced productivity and innovation. By integrating LLM’s like GPT-4 into their workflows, teams can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock bandwidth for new creative possibilities. How can you harness the power of AI in your own work to boost productivity? Share your thoughts below 👇 Want to hear more insights from JJ? Check out the full podcast episode by clicking the link in the comments.

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Hosted a curated group of NYC AI builders for dinner tonight, including product / research / eng / design / GTM leaders from Runway, LangChain, Hume AI, Norm Ai, Galileo 🔭, Spring Health, NVIDIA, Scale AI, and Haize Labs (a Visible Ventures portco!) as well as early-stage AI founders Building in AI by day, two musically gifted guests have performed at the Grammys & Obama's inauguration - as marginal cost of software creation trends towards zero, I'm a big believer in NYC's future in the AI ecosystem for the multidimensionality of talents it attracts and empowers - VCs bearish on NYC are simply blinded by their own lack of imagination 🌆 🎶 I noted some of my favorite POVs from the night - some I strongly agree with, some not so much - but welcome any reaction: - OpenAI may be the Waymo in AI where its edge comes from its head start, not from any 'secret sauce.' OpenAI can keep scaling and improving its model quality, but will eventually flatten out due to fundamental limitations of the transformer architecture - that said, similar to Microsoft's bundling strategy, OpenAI has done an amazing job packaging a variety of features and products to create commercial value 📦 - AI research has been boring last year as no new technique has been introduced 💤 - Anthropic will one day face the pressure of pivoting away from its safety / research core and following OpenAI's commercial footsteps, except it will be years later ... ⛑ - Advanced AGI cannot be accomplished as human intelligence is passed down and enriched generationally - there's no way for AI models to 'learn' how to recreate humanity's collective abstract intelligence 👵 - VCs have mistakenly funded many seemingly technical founders who actually ... are not 🥷🏻 - Humans are lazy by default, and no one likes typing - AI products should prioritize reducing the work it takes for end users to interact with and benefit from AI 🐨 - Open source is over-hyped due to lack of means to sustainably access GPU clusters. While Meta can fund its own AGI play, the entire open source community relies on Zuck. Meta also isn’t truly open source as they’ve built a custom license where Azure / AWS would have to pay royalties past certain usage thresholds, which will help fund Meta's model development 🔓 - Crafting a scalable implementation strategy is key to selling to enterprises as adoption is almost always delayed by legal roadblock and organizational grunt work 🚧 - Healthcare AI today lacks creativity - workflow automation for providers / payers may be the first wave, and the next wave should be focused on truly improving care outcomes with AI models 💉 Thank you for John Bryson (Banc of California)'s partnership, and if you are building impactful AI products our doors are always open at Visible Ventures !

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Geography is destiny

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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🏁 Bay Area vs. Los Angeles rivalry Exactly 3 years ago we moved to the Bay Area from LA, where I spent most of my life. Since then many have asked me what I feel the differences are. My general breakdown: 👩🏽‍💻 Technology Bay Area > LA - There is no place like the Bay for the sheer quantity and quality of big tech companies, startups, VCs, academic institutions, and talent. LA has Silicon Beach, which focuses mostly on media, entertainment, and consumer tech, while the Bay ecosystem is more diverse and dense. Some claim Silicon Valley has lost its appeal, I’d say the deep-rooted technology ecosystem, going back nearly a century with Bell Labs, HP, Shockley, etc., is not easily replicable. 🌴 Lifestyle Bay Area > LA - As my neighbor accurately put it: “In LA, success is measured by name-brand bags, luxury cars, and big houses. In the Bay, it's by how many exits you've had and the number of boards you're on." Both are ego driven, but I’d take the latter. LA > Bay Area - The cost of living in the Bay is infamously insane. (Cost of living in San Francisco is 23% higher than the state average and 71% higher than the national average. Housing is 187% more expensive than the U.S. average, while utilities are about 42% pricier.) LA > Bay Area - LA takes the crown for its diverse food scene, great restaurants, and affordability. Especially with Asian cuisine, it's hard to compete with the options in the San Gabriel Valley. LA > Bay Area - Style and cultural diversity are stronger in LA. Even though I ❤️ close to 30% of population in the Bay are AAPIs LA > Bay Area - grew up in Purple & Gold Bay Area > LA - Traffic, obvious Bay Area = LA - Weather, which is why we pay the infamous California "weather tax" 👥 People Bay Area > LA - Bay Areafolks are generally much nicer and more courteous than Angelenos. Bay Area > LA - The Bay has the most passionate people I've met when it comes to community involvement, activism, and social/political issues. Ingrained in the DNA and its cultural history. Which city is better? 🤼 “Let me serenade the streets of L.A. From Oakland to Sac-town, the Bay Area and back down Cali is where they put they mack down, give me love!” - Tupac

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I'm very excited to see this, if this report is accurate. If we leave aside the hotness or otherwise of Gen AI (I think lots of upside eventually, but also lots of risk), I think ambient computing, and the convergence of a variety of tech: IoT, edge, cheap small compute, etc is going to be profoundly transformative - hopefully over a shortening horizon. Apple stepping into spatial computing with Vision Pro was a huge milestone. Apple has the product discipline and strategic determination to drive maturity in this space. Moving forward with a cheaper, less capable, but more accessible product is a great way to both broaden awareness of, and receptiveness to, spatial computing, hopefully without crossing over the infamous "creepy line". I'm hopeful this approach will also increase the breadth of feedback that users will provide, and also shorten the feedback loop - hopefully leading to faster improvements, and overall better product. Really exciting to see how this develops, and impacts how we work.

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Taking it all in at #SeattleAIWeek hosted by Technology Alliance. Thoughtful insights from the panel on the Early-Stage VC Investors in AI, in particular: Heather Redman from Flying Fish Partners shared perspectives on Gen AI - particularly the reality check that #generativeAI is going to take it’s time to work through the hype cycle, and startups need to time things right. Startups need to focus on delineating their data advantage vs technology advantage. Her call to founders is be more involved with your Seattle institutions and representing globally - eg Microsoft, University of Washington. Ken Horenstein made a good point that RLHF (real-time learning from human feedback) is something that most startups are missing the boat on (and a key focus area for AgAID Institute). The other point is to pull data & insights, and then critically - improve the workflow. Kirby Winfield called out that Seattle needs to be louder & prouder. Seattle institutions stand neck-and-neck with top SV institutions. Opportunity is for the region & tech alliance to promote the successes, and remember to think purposefully about incenting entrepreneurship. (Great call-out that Vancouver BC / Canadian-based companies are reimbursed for 50% of tech salaries.) Leslie Feinzaig calls out that true AI companies need to earn the right to play, by bringing together the right people, right data, and addressing really substantive problems. And the reality that Seattle imports more VC $ from outside the region is actually a strength; Seattle founders need to think about pitching to align with vision in #SiliconValley, but then differentiating on execution. I love the call-out to more founders investing in each other (late stage founders paying it forward to early stage founders). Francisco Gomez Olmedo - awesome job moderating a panel with diverse & complex perspectives. WTIA

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The future of tech is here, and it's wearing glasses 🕶️ Here is an intriguing article about how Snap's CEO, Evan Spiegel, believes his company is leading the charge in AR smart glasses, with Meta and Apple set to follow. As someone who’s been following the AR space closely, I find it exciting to see companies like Snap pushing the boundaries of what smart glasses can do. Spiegel’s vision of using hands and voice to interact with augmented reality is a game-changer. Snap’s Spectacles, now in their 5th generation, are already making waves among developers. The goal is clear: to bring computing back into the real world, away from screens and closer to our daily lives. While Meta’s Ray-Ban Stories and Apple’s Vision Pro are also making significant strides, Snap’s approach to natural interaction and developer-friendly pricing could be the key to mainstream adoption. It’s an exciting time for AR, and I’m eager to see how these innovations shape our future. #AR #SmartGlasses #TechInnovation #FutureOfTech

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Founder Dadagiri: The challenge with Founders who "just can't let go". I keep sharing Microsoft's incredible story. I saw Steve Ballmer and met Satya Nadella, and they were as different as Neebu ka achaar and Boondi ka Ladoos. (Ballmer was Achaar). But they (Ballmer and Gates) let Nadella do his thing; boy, what he did was magical! Enter Howard Schultz, the founder and genius of Starbucks. Via WSJ “Howard Schultz, the legendary entrepreneur who turned a local coffee chain into a global icon, was meeting Laxman Narasimhan, the man who would succeed him as Starbucks CEO in a month. Shultz had recently watched a New York Giants practice and was inspired by how football teams manage their time and structure their work by unit—offence, defence, and special teams. He told Laxman that the same principle could be applied to Starbucks’s systems, which Schultz had spent nearly a year analysing in search of ways to improve service. Narasimhan wasn’t buying it. “That’s a football team. We are a company,” he said. “If you don’t like it, that's fine; it’s your company,” Schultz said, laughing, as Narasimhan chuckled.” It seems that the spirit is not working. "It all exploded into public view Sunday night when Schultz wrote a LinkedIn post that read like an open letter to shareholders criticizing how Narasimhan and his senior leaders were running the business" See link - https://lnkd.in/dx3ebFgP I read the post, and these statements sounded terrible. See #Dhandhekibaat (DKB) comments inserted in the flow "There is a natural tendency to try to do too much too soon. " "Don’t try to do everything at once." "Leaders must model both humility and confidence as they work to restore trust and increase performance across the organization." DKB - It sounds like he is preaching to some B'School kids. The Humility and Confidence point sounds horrible "Over the past five days, I have been asked by people inside and outside the company for my thoughts on what should be done. The stores require a maniacal focus on the customer experience through the eyes of a merchant. The answer does not lie in data but in the stores." DKB - therein lies the bullying. WHY answer these questions and give side views? Instead, say, "I am sure Laxman and the team are on top of it" (And send your gyaan privately to Lax). Learning: As a founder, it's impossible to let go. Only the rarest manage to achieve Microsoft's magic. As they say, "Love means never having to say sorry". #Dhandhekibaat "Letting go means never having to say ANYTHING" :) Do you agree? Article Link in comments

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Really interesting podcast that brings up one of the characters that seems to not go away in #bayarea #tech culture, i.e #ayn #rand . Conceptually if you fled authoritarian regimes, some of her ideas are good, but in practice the idea that being purely selfish is good, is what is deeply wrong with tech. The real world is complex and simple philosophies like “selfish good” are appealing to simple people or exploitive people looking to exploit.

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"Editors note: Welcome to issue #2 of Transcriptions. Today, we’d like to present a conversation between Qasar Younis of Applied Intuition, and Bilal Zuberi of Lux Capital. We discovered Qasar recently, and find his focus and clarity of thinking to be admirable. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their talk, first held at the Paklaunch forum." Link to transcipt: https://lnkd.in/gH4uBmPE

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I’m excited to share this one! Redactive has raised a $11.5M seed round -- their mission is to become the trusted GenAI engineer for enterprise teams. Blackbird co-led this round alongside Felicis with participation from Atlassian Ventures and Zapier. Andrew, Alexander and Lucas are working to solve an urgent problem hidden in plain sight – empowering GenAI applications to meet their promise of "magic" in an enterprise setting. GenAI applications are only as useful as the data that they have access to, and for most enterprises, the most valuable data is sensitive and permissioned. We all want a chatbot (“ChatGPT for…”) at work that can search the data that we share in private Slack conversations or store in private folders on Sharepoint but first, we need to trust that our data will be kept safe – from prying eyes and accidental disclosure to others in the organisation who should not see it. Redactive keeps your sensitive data safe, giving developers the trust to connect it to GenAI applications and build products that you will love. Here's to the next decade. https://lnkd.in/gPuEAFvW

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🌉 San Francisco's Surprising Comeback: From 'Doom Loop' to Renaissance? Recent data suggests that San Francisco, once trapped in a pandemic-induced 'doom loop', is showing strong signs of recovery. Here's what's changing: 📈 Positive Trends: - Population Growth: Net gains over the past two years, with domestic in-migration positive for the first time since 2012. - Housing Market: Median home sale prices up 1.2% YoY to $1,427,500 in June. - Job Growth: The Bay Area added 7,400 jobs between January and June. Downtown Revival: Foot traffic beyond typical work hours has recovered to over 90% of pre-pandemic levels. - Crime Reduction: Property crime down 32% and violent crime down 14% in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023. - AI Boom: The city is positioning itself as a hub for the AI revolution. 🚧 Ongoing Challenges: - High office vacancy rates - Homelessness and drug crisis - Lagging tourism and business travel 🔑 Key Initiatives: - "Vacant to Vibrant" program offering free rent to businesses in empty storefronts - Increased police patrols and encampment sweeping - Crackdown on open-air drug dealing 💡 Expert Insight: "The rising AI empire is giving the city a new edge. Funding, talents, and culture related to the AI revolution will help the city turn the corner." - Lu Chen, Senior Economist at Moody's Analytics 🤔 What's Your Take? Are these positive trends sustainable, or is it too early to declare a comeback? How can other cities learn from San Francisco's recovery strategies? What role will AI play in reshaping urban economies, particularly in tech hubs? https://lnkd.in/gCnPCBRU

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20 hours in and Hoyo's formidable craftsmanship is on full display with ZZZ. ⭐1.0 release pool of 16 characters. Hoyo games have always prioritized quality over quantity, leaning instead on deep systems to enable diverse team comps / fun theorycrafting. Interestingly, Wuthering Waves also launched with the same # of characters in its 1.0 pool. I'm personally a big fan of this approach, and hope to see more games adopt it going forward. ⭐Female to male character ratio of 3:1. HSR currently stands at ~2:1 and Genshin at ~1.7:1. Every faction shown so far has only 1 male char. Surprising given Hoyo's recent titles have focused more on the "mainstream anime" audience instead of catering only to the core otaku audience. Very happy to see Hoyo honoring its roots here. They cooked and core fans are going to be very pleased with all of the fanservice (e.g. cinema artwork, main menu char selection, etc.). ⭐C6 / Cinema artwork is... IYKYK. They clearly tested it with HSR and are fully leaning into it with ZZZ. Congrats to all you Grace C6 havers. They knew exactly what they were doing. ⭐First Hoyo game with dedicated furries / anthropomorphic races. Ellen, Ben, and Von Lycaon are all very compelling characters. Wakayama Shion does such a fantastic job as Ellen's VA. Hoyo absolutely nailed the launch banner here. ⭐Just like other Hoyo games, ZZZ is more "casual" than it is "core." It doesn't demand much of your time as a single player live service title. For me it's the perfect side game that I can see myself spending 1-2 hours per week on. I don't expect everyone to like it (might be too "easy" for core gamers), but it's a winning formula that Hoyo has perfected for its target audience. ⭐One of Hoyo's underrated special talents is making "core" genres widely accessible from a gameplay standpoint across all platforms. ZZZ plays flawlessly on mobile, PC, and console without diluting the experience at all. Everything from the simplified switching system to the flat level design was intentional to make it incredibly accessible even for someone who has never played action games before. This is something really only Hoyo is capable of pulling off with such finesse. ⭐Really digging the comic / manga style storytelling. Glad to see Hoyo continue to innovate on how it delivers its stories and really looking forward to seeing more of this. ⭐Hoyo's investments into its music / animation departments are really paying off. The release trailer for ZZZ is Hoyo's best yet and their character drip marketing is perfected to the point where I'm basically forced to pull on every banner. In many ways, Hoyo is slowly becoming the Apple of the gaming industry, and their IPs are rapidly expanding the audience for gacha and anime on a global scale. I'm honestly humbled. Shut up and take my money... #zenlesszonezero

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🚰 VODA.ai is building software to make one of our scarcest, most important resources safer and more cost effective to manage🚰 It's W13 / Q2 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got VODA.ai, an AI startup helping analyze our nation’s water infrastructure at a local level to deliver better service for utilities and local populations across the country. Co-Founder & CEO George Demosthenous was working in product management at a utility technology vendor that builds metering & network infrastructure for utilities. George consistently heard that while the technology Mueller was selling was effective, the external pipe detection equipment and sensors they were purchasing didn’t necessarily stop leaks. There are 2.2M miles of drinking water pipes across the U.S. In Jackson, MS more than 65% of their processed water does not make it to end customers. In Detroit’s Highland Park neighborhood an estimated 70% of water is lost from 120 year old pipes. Imagine if Apple shipped 100M iPhones stateside and 50M were littered across the Pacific Ocean floor on their way over from Asia. Crazy, right? VODA.ai is building a software company that uses existing data to assess the condition of pipes that cannot be seen and determine which ones will have the highest likelihood of an event, like a leak or a break. VODA.ai created an AI engine dubbed “daVinciTM” here in Boston that uses pattern recognition in the way that LLMs probabilistically identify the next word in a sentence. daVinciTM has been tested head-to-head with other alternative models and has always outperformed! No pressure.. Since COVID they have grown both revenue & customer count by 200%+ y/y, continuing to leverage AI with both their product & team. AI’s emergence has helped VODA.ai’s sales cycle fall from a full year to three months as utilities broadly want to leverage best in class AI software. This Seed-stage startup has already analyzed over 1M miles of pipe (almost 50% of America!) and over 2M miles of service lines with customers from Boston to San Jose, CA. They are planning to more than 2x revenue in 2024, becoming the go to decision support platform for water utilities across the country in the next five years. VODA.ai is backed by local Boston investors Innospark Ventures and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. MassCEC has named VODA.ai a top carbon reduction emission leader, the team has twice been voted (by water utilities!) the Best Smart Water Solution at the Smart Water Summit, and VODA.ai plans to continue to grow their team in Boston in the quarters ahead. Operators to Know: -Kyra Dubinsky, Chief of Staff -Cory Sides, SVP Sales -Dan Hack, EVP of Operations and International Sales -Lowell Rust, MBA PMP, VP of Customer Success If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments! And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you next week, will you?? #bostontech #startups #AI

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400%? Wow 🤯! I’m so incredibly proud of this team: Sami Ghoche, Rachel Link Robinson, Mitchell Hanson, Lindsay Fifield , Dalton Haughey, Al Martin and so many other incredible Forethinkers who make this happen. Building a company at the forefront of Generative AI for CX requires a lot of hard work and dedication from all of us. Many long nights shipping innovative products on time, like our agentic reasoning engine, Autoflows. Hours in the trenches with our customers, ensuring they have the best possible experience. And working to build an efficient business while we’re at it. The past few quarters were most difficult for me in learning how to trust in everyone’s superpowers while navigating rapid changes. I always say that the role of the CEO is to put the best people in the world into their zones of genius, and then getting out of the way. But that also means truly trusting my team to execute without micromanaging, and trusting myself enough to lead and to lean into the most critical areas in the business that maximally impact our outcomes (in my case it has been: spending as much time as humanly possible deeply getting to know our prospects, customers, and partners.) Knowing the right level of “abstraction” to operate at as a leader has been an important growth lesson for me. Since our inception, Forethought has been on a mission to deliver best-in-class customer support experiences. Our users, and their understanding of the need for human-centered, AI-powered customer support, have propelled our evolution as a company. We fundamentally believe that customer experience will be the most consequential use case for generative AI. In the coming months we’ll be developing even more ways our customers can use AI to transform their businesses and how they interact with customers. I’m so grateful to get to work with this amazing group of Forethinkers on behalf of our customers — industry leaders like Upwork, Thumbtack, Asana, Fetch, Airtable, Acorns, Gusto and more — and their customers. Wild to think that this vision of generative AI for customer support that we started in 2018, is starting to come to life. “The journey is only 1% finished.” Let’s go team! 💪🚀 #generativeai #genai #ai #customersupport #cx #leadership #entrepreneurship #tech #news

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