You might know him as the host of Gradient Dissent, but Lukas is also the CEO of Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML tools platform!
In this special episode, the three W&B co-founders — Chris (CVP), Shawn (CTO), and Lukas (CEO) — sit down to tell the company's origin stories, reflect on the highs and lows, and give advice to engineers looking to start their own business.
Chris reveals the W&B server architecture (tl;dr - React + GraphQL), Shawn shares his favorite product feature (it's a hidden frontend layer), and Lukas explains why it's so important to work with customers that inspire you.
The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-wandb-cofounders
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Connect with us:
📍 Chris' Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanpelt
📍 Shawn's Twitter: https://twitter.com/shawnup
📍 Lukas' Twitter: https://twitter.com/l2k
📍 W&B's Twitter: https://twitter.com/weights_biases
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:29 The stories behind Weights & Biases
7:45 The W&B tech stack
9:28 Looking back at the beginning
11:42 Hallmark moments
14:49 Favorite product features
16:49 Rewriting the W&B backend
18:21 The importance of customer feedback
21:18 How Chris and Shawn have changed
22:35 How the ML space has changed
28:24 Staying positive when things look bleak
32:19 Lukas' advice to new entrepreneurs
35:29 Hopes for the next five years
38:09 Making a paintbot & model understanding
41:30 Biggest bottlenecks in deployment
44:08 Outro
44:38 Bonus: Under- vs overrated technologies
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Subscribe and listen to our podcast today!
👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts
👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts
👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify
