AI/ML Start-up Trends with Anna Patterson #70

This is the first episode of our new series “Engineering Founders” featuring software pioneer Anna Patterson (Founder & Managing Partner @ Gradient Ventures) who shares with us emerging trends & opportunities in AI/ML! We cover how to spot emerging trends, typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make, how product-market fit/scaling is different vs. traditional software companies AND how to test and validate ideas in the early stages. Plus long-time listener Theo Gervet (ML Lead @ Relyance AI) joins us as a guest co-host!

ABOUT ANNA PATTERSON

Anna is the Founder & Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures, overseeing the fund’s global activities.

Anna is an accomplished leader in the field of artificial intelligence, a serial entrepreneur, with a long history at Google. Prior to starting Gradient Ventures, Anna was Google’s Vice President of Engineering in AI - integrating AI into products across Google. She also serves on the Board of Directors at Square, Inc.

Early in her career at Google, she helped launch and scale Android to over a billion phones, launched Google Play, and led the search, infrastructure, and recommendations horizontals. Anna was the principal architect and inventor of TeraGoogle, Google’s search serving system, which increased the index size over 10X at the time of launch. She also helped lead search ranking efforts through Google’s IPO to determine the top ten search results.

Anna co-founded Cuil, a clustering-based search engine, and wrote Recall.archive.org, the first keyword-based search engine and the largest index of the Internet Archive corpus. She wrote “Why writing your own search engine is hard” in the ACM Queue detailing this experience. Prior to that, Anna co-founded and co-authored a search engine Xift.

Recognized for her technical contributions as well as her commitment to championing women in tech, Anna was awarded the Technical Leadership ABIE Award in 2016. Anna received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Then she became a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence, where she worked with Carolyn Talcott and one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy. For her undergrad, she double-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington University in St Louis.

Anna resides in the Bay Area, where she wrangles her 4 kids, 2 horses and her Irish husband.

"When you set out your plan, you can't miss all of your sales targets and make all of your hiring targets." Those kinds of things have to be inline.
What people do is they just say, "Here's my plan. I'm going to march towards the plan. And it was super optimistic on the sales front and on the revenue front. And then maybe more realistic and achievable on the hiring front. And so they still kind of march ahead with the plan.
I think that you need to constantly reevaluate where you are and on what direction you're going in and whether the growth is appropriate or even the plan was appropriate..."

- Anna Patterson   

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Are you an eng leader interested in taking the leap to start your own company? Check out our brand new podcast series, Engineering Founders - Where we explore the transition from eng leader to founder!

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SHOW NOTES:

• Anna’s background scaling complex systems (4:00)
• Emerging trends and opportunities in AI/ML (9:19)
• The biggest fallacy in AI/ML right now (15:03)
• The pendulum swing between model-first and data-first (16:14)
• What’s after deep learning? (18:14)
• Machine learning and source code (20:06)
• What will be the most valuable companies with ML as the core value proposition? (25:04)
• How to spot emerging trends in the AI/ML space (27:43)
• Typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make (31:16)
• How product-market fit is different for AI/ML companies (34:30)
• Differences in scaling between trad-software and AI/ML (35:20)
• How to test and validate ideas in the early-stages of an AI/ML company (37:49)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (39:38)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Gradient Ventures (Website)
• Streamlit.io (Website) - collaborative Python-based app-sharing platform
• Building Your AI A-Team (Link) - Anna and Adrien Treuille’s talk from the ELC 2020 Summit discussing how managing an AI team is different from traditional engineering teams & how to think about the collaboration between AI and engineering when scaling