“Founders at Work [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work]” is a unique book by Jessica Livingston, one of the founders of YCombinator. It contains un-narrated, almost unedited interviews with founders of successful startups like Paypal, Hotmail, Apple, and 27 others. I’m only through about 10% of the book, and it’s clearly one of
Lately, Twitter has been full of the 2020 US election, which has displaced everything interesting. That means it’s a good time to blog. I’ve recently been reading James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which manages to combine forestry, agriculture, and land/city planning into a history of top-down planning. One thing that stuck with me
A few years ago at Starship, I contributed to the Data is the Specification [http://dataisspec.github.io/] manifesto. The core idea is that it's better to solve problems directly against a collection of examples, as opposed to trying to generalise the problem first and then solving the general problem. Typically you would run an employee engagement survey,
Which business models benefit from AI? This is an audience question I recently got at a webinar aimed at early-stage startup founders. The answer is almost like enumerating all business models because AI is like Javascript. Which businesses could benefit from Javascript? It can create value at almost every company. I’ll make the question more specific: what are
What do people mean by “artificial intelligence”? When I say “AI” I mean one of two things. First it could be the experience of a product feeling intelligent. Or I could refer to what it looks like technically: that the system uses machine learning, deep neural networks, code where you optimise parameters against a dataset. The not explicitly agreed but
A startup’s AI work often starts from a developer hacking algorithms on the side. When a generalist engineer with no data science background works on prediction problems, they often don’t use a dataset at all, or at best a small one. For example, in the early days of Veriff, a front-end developer tried to build a feature
As the coronavirus pandemic escalated, I was travelling around the world. The timing was unfortunate, but the endless hours of flying also presented an opportunity for reflecting on the virus. Most people correctly focus on the immediate effects of the virus: survival is required for anything interesting in the future. However, many people will change their habits permanently and that
devclub.lv meetup 07.11.2019ML at Veriff: What is possible in a year?Google Docs
