Victor V.

Introducing Dot Product: https://dotproduct.xyz/ We’re building AI coworkers for operations teams. We call them Operators. Working at companies like Stripe and Coinbase we noticed that while engineering teams can scale their output with code, operations teams are often bottlenecked by headcount. At every high-growth company these teams are constantly understaffed. For the first time ever it’s possible to move operations labor from the world of atoms to the world of bits, allowing for software-like scaling properties. We believe that Operators will lower the barriers for starting and growing new businesses. Just like self-driving cars, Operators will also benefit from millions of hours of learnings across businesses to improve at a compounding rate. Today is the worst they’ll ever be. Our first Operator is a voice agent that augments your customer support team. It works 24/7, follows your playbooks perfectly, and scales instantly. No more understaffing, overstaffing, or demand planning headaches. Request early access here: https://lnkd.in/gzhDZAYz We are grateful to have a great group of early supporters. We’ve raised $6m from Index Ventures and Lachy Groom, with participation from some great angels like Fred Ehrsam, Gaurav Ahuja, Marc Benioff, Conviction, Balaji Srinivasan, Emilie Choi, Ryan Delk, Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo, Dan Romero, Sahill Poddar, and many others. Building Operators that can reliably do work equivalent to millions of human hours requires solving very hard engineering, ML, and design problems; it has never been done before. We are hiring for Founding Engineer, ML Engineer, and Designer roles: https://lnkd.in/gDB43gFK

61

1 Comment

Source: GeekWire From the article: "LinkedIn released its annual list of Top 50 startups, and three Seattle-area companies made it: Chainguard, Truveta, and Statsig." Additional articles are included in the first few comments of this post.  #Seattle #Technology #News #Chainguard #Truveta #Statsig

San Francisco tech job layoffs Tech layoffs continued to take a toll on the San Francisco economy in August as the unemployment rate rose. The San Francisco metro area, which includes San Mateo County, lost a net 7,000 jobs in August, according to state data released Friday. The unemployment rate rose in San Francisco from 4% in July to 4.1% in August. Professional and business services lost a net 2,800 jobs entirely from professional, scientific and technical service, which include tech jobs. The tech-focused information sector also lost 1,400 jobs. Companies including Cisco, Udemy, Intel and Lyft all confirmed Bay Area layoffs in the past month, signs of continued weakness in the labor market. — San Francisco Chronicle #sanfrancisco #bayarea #tech #jobs #jobcuts #layoffs #economy

1

🎈Attention!! 🎈 Calling all SWE Technical Leaders with “at least 3-4 years” leading/mentoring teams and handling end to end large scale projects, located in the Bay Area, CA or NY Metropolitan locations, supporting Product/Backend Systems or Machine Learning/Data Science domains, and have “NOT” interviewed with Meta in the last 12 months! If you meet these qualifications, please send me a message to connect and chat about the exciting opportunities at Meta! Last week, we released the new version of Meta AI, our assistant that you can ask any question across our apps and glasses. Meta AI has been upgraded with a new state-of-the-art Llama 3 AI model. We believe Meta AI is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use, and marks a significant milestone in our AI investments. By open-sourcing this technology, we aim to encourage collaboration and knowledge-sharing among developers worldwide, ultimately leading to even more advanced tools and applications. In addition to this, we have made progress towards our vision for the Metaverse, opening Meta Horizon OS - our operating system powering Quest - so others can design more headsets in our ecosystem. This will allow new headsets to be created in the coming years, focused on productivity, entertainment, exercise, gaming, and more. We also announced new product features and styles for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, including AI integration. These are just a few examples of the groundbreaking work that we are doing at Meta, and we believe that there is no better time than now to join! Learn more about our Meta AI assistant built with Llama 3 here:

3

Several companies are competing for a share of the US robotaxi market. But Waymo One, Alphabet's autonomous taxi service, announced in August that it was providing more than 100,000 paid rides weekly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. Waymo One also plans to expand to Atlanta and Austin early next year and is set to be facilitated through the Uber app. While the robotaxi industry could be slowed by regulatory hurdles and safety concerns, ride-hailing experts previously told BI that growing adoption would probably hurt Uber and Lyft drivers' earnings in the years to come. Some drivers told BI this was already happening. — Business Insider #waymo #alphabet #google #robotaxis #autonomousvehicles #uber #lyft #apps #gigeconomy

1

The most robust, reliable, and productive uses of AI are when many models are used in coordination with each other, with "regular" programming mixed in. This leads to more capable, more reliable, and more interpretable AI systems. Most people building with AI already know this. But (unless you work for Google) the main barrier to realizing multi-step AI workloads is an infrastructure one. For the rest of us, we’re left creating an unwieldy mess of chained API calls to multiple providers, with many roundtrips in between. This state of affairs is stifling progress. Nobody wants to deal with more tooling and infrastructure… but everyone would benefit from simple, intuitive interfaces that abstract away a powerful system underneath. Substrate is the first inference API optimized for multi-step AI workloads. With Substrate, you can write less code, run more inference, and build high performance AI applications with zero infrastructure to manage. No tooling, no infrastructure – just elegant abstractions. Excited to support Ben Guo, Rob Cheung and the amazing Substrate team on their mission to democratize how AI applications are built.

41

4 Comments

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of things in Silicon Valley. One thing that hasn’t changed much? People making the same mistakes about equity compensation, taxes, and risk. That’s probably because the Bay Area has so many talented software engineers, who tend to have a “do-it-yourself” mentality. However, when dealing with complex matters where human behavior and specialized knowledge play crucial roles, a collaborative 'buddy system' almost always leads to better outcomes. 👥 If you'd like to work on any of the 5 items below and want to try out the 'buddy system', send me a DM. 🤝 #rsus #taxes #microsoft #meta #apple #google #Nvidia #amazon #tesla #magnificent7 

4

5 Comments

Want a preview of what I'm going to be talking about in my keynote for RubyConf? You can catch a glimpse of it here!

10

Welcome to another edition of Growth Talks! 😊 Today, we spotlight Marin Smiljanic Co-Founder and CEO of Omnisearch. With a background as a software engineer at Amazon, Facebook, and SingleStore, Marin brings years of experience from both fast-growing startups and Big Tech. Key takeaways: 🔹 Partnering with established companies can help a startup gain credibility and early customers. 🔹Knowing what customers want, especially about data control, is important for product development. 🔹Moving from a technical role to running a business means learning new skills, especially in sales and marketing. 🔹Focusing on efficiency and performance can set a product apart in the market. 🔹Making quick changes and ensuring the business model works are crucial for growth. 🔗 Link to the interview: https://lnkd.in/d3BMDAUp

9

1 Comment

Ever heard of the California Gold Rush? It's one of the most significant events in American history, beginning in 1848 and lasting until 1855. It all started when James W. Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill in Coloma. News of the discovery spread quickly, and soon thousands of people, known as "forty-niners," rushed to California from the U.S. and abroad. The rapid influx of gold revitalized the American economy, and the swift population growth enabled California to achieve statehood quickly as part of the Compromise of 1850. But here’s the real question: Did all the gold seekers strike it rich? Not exactly. While a few found success, many did not. If we break down this historic event, three key elements were involved: Product, Process/Platform, and People. ⛏ Product is the gold. ⛏ Process/Platform refers to the services and infrastructure that supported the search for gold—shops selling mining tools, restaurants, and hotels catering to the "forty-niners." ⛏ People are everyone who understood the value of gold. Among these, people were the most crucial for any business to thrive. Without them, there would be no demand for gold. Interestingly, while many gold seekers didn't strike it rich, those who provided tools and services—the middlemen (Process/Platform)—were the ones who profited most, without ever digging for gold themselves. Now, fast forward to today, and we’re witnessing a similar phenomenon, but this time it’s the AI Rush. 🤖 The product is AI. 🤖 The platforms are the companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and others that offer the tools and technology to harness AI’s power. 🤖 And, once again, the people—those who understand AI’s value—are the driving force behind this new wave of innovation. Just like the Gold Rush, the success stories won’t just come from those who are "mining" the AI itself but from those who provide the tools and platforms to make it happen. #AI #Innovation #TechRevolution #BusinessTransformation #AIRevolution

24

How did Amazon make it to the top? From Jeff Bezos' garage in Bellevue, to a titan of the industry. The journey wasn't easy for them. But throughout their journey, one tactic remained dominant - #Personalization. Through personalization, you can significantly upgrade your existing #MarketingStrategy. Here's how personalization can improve your ROI:- - Enhance Relevance - Improve User Experience - Increase Interaction - Boost Conversion Rates - Add Precision To Targeting - Create Adaptive Campaigns It can help you achieve all of this and then some... If you like to know how to quickly personalize your messaging, Check out our latest blog: https://loom.ly/ms_BmG4 #b2bmarketing #marketingtechnology #marketingcampaign

2

One of the best things about being in San Francisco 🌉 is the ability to drop in on great talks. Last week I had a chance to see NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang (JH) being interviewed by Stripe's CEO Patrick Collison. Jensen is among the longest-serving founder-CEOs in Silicon Valley at the moment (30+ years). With that comes a special clarity of mind and some hot takes. 🌶👇 🗣 Jensen doesn't believe in 'praise in public and criticism in private'. Instead, he reasons that most information in the organization should not be privy to certain people. By giving feedback in public, you allow everyone to learn. 'What is better than learning from your own mistakes? It's learning from someone else's mistakes!!' 🔥 JH also doesn't like to fire people. He would rather "torture them into greatness". He invests in people and he doesn't like to write off his investments. 👨‍💻 Asked whether he likes his job every day, he answers "no". The perfect job doesn't give you happiness 100% of the time. "No great things were done, that were easy all the way." ... "Even if I come home from a day where I did things I didn't enjoy, it could still be have been a great day." 👩‍👧‍👦 Jensen famously has 60 direct reports. "This allowed us to cut out probably 7 levels of management". His subordinates don't necessarily have such large teams. "It doesn't scale down, less senior people need more guidance". Looking at the numbers, this approach allowed NVidia to reach ~2T market cap with ~28.000 people vs. Microsoft's 3T with ~220.000 people and Apple's 2.6T with 160.000 people. ❔ Jensen answers almost every question in the same way: "Let's break it down, let's reason about it". This is a great response on so many levels. First, it allows him to not be put on the spot. Second, it allows him to teach his workforce how he reasons through a problem so that they can emulate it and create alignment. Third, it gives people a chance to point out flaws in his reasoning. He admits he is not right all the time. ON AI 👨‍🔧 "You will not lose your job to AI, your company will go out of business because another company used AI." "If you're not using AI you're doing it wrong." ⏱ The extent to which AI will enter many processes is largely underestimated. Right now we are focused on language - sounds in a time sequence. "Any time sequence can be tokenized." This will include robotic movement. 🥛 JH also expects that we won't be satisfied with foundation models "You're going to want to tune it into perfection because you care so deeply. Say if it's already at 99% you'll want to get it to say 99.3%" This last piece is also why we created Query Vary (YC W22). AI will never feel truly intelligent until it completely understands your data and context. It needs to be taught, regardless of how powerful the foundation model is. Finally, besides insights, it was remarkable how funny Jensen was, cracking a joke at roughly a 1 per 3 min rate. It was a very entertaining talk. #ai #sf

61

8 Comments

In 1997, NVIDIA was a small, scrappy company in the tech world, fighting to survive against giants like Intel Corporation after launching its RIVA 128 graphics card. At an all-hands meeting, CEO Jensen Huang said to team with a bold declaration: “Make no mistake. Intel is out to get us and put us out of business… We need to go kill Intel.” This intense moment, shared in The Nvidia Way by Tae Kim, captured the urgency and drive of NVIDIA’s early days. At the time, Intel’s i740 graphics card, with better specs, posed a serious threat to NVIDIA’s survival. The story also shows how demanding NVIDIA’s culture was back then, with Huang pushing his team hard through long, relentless workdays. Now in 2024, NVIDIA has risen to the top, with a $3.5 trillion market valuation that rivals Apple and Microsoft, while Intel struggles to stay afloat. That quote from Huang reflects just how far NVIDIA has come—from fighting to survive to becoming a global leader. Source ~ Web #Leadership #AI #Technology

34

4 Comments