Where I express personal thoughts in words
Jason Risch is an investor on the enterprise team at Greylock - investing in security, AI/ML, data, infrastructure, and developer tools. Before joining Greylock, he incubated ML companies at AI Fund and was a management consultant at McKinsey. Jason is a Bay Area native, graduated from Stanford, and when not working, can be found reading, hiking, playing Age of Empires, and cheering on Stanford Football.
Sakib Dadi is a vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners in their San Francisco office, where he primarily focuses on early-stage investments in developer platforms, data products, and software infrastructure. He has been involved with Bessemer’s investments, including Prefect, Coiled, Arcion, Periscope Data, Okera, Guild Education, and Sila Nanotechnologies. Before joining Bessemer, Sakib worked in product at Viagogo, an international marketplace for buying and selling tickets for live events.
Casber Wang is Partner at Sapphire Ventures. He focuses primarily on security, enterprise infrastructure, and data analytics.
He is on the boards of Huntress, JumpCloud, StarTree, Tetrate, Upytcs, and Zesty. For his work, Insider listed Casber as an Enterprise VC Rising Star Investor and as an emerging investor charting the industry’s future on the 2022 EVC List.
Prior to Sapphire, he was part of the technology investment banking group at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he worked on a number of high-profile IPO and M&A transactions. He also spent time at Wish, a leading mobile commerce platform in North America and Europe.
Nnamdi Iregbulem, a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, is a self-taught programmer and lifelong technology nerd. His mission is to increase total software output by supporting entrepreneurs building technical tools for technical people. He focuses on investments in technical enterprise software such as developer tools, application infrastructure, and machine learning.
Tom Rikert is the co-founder and CEO of Masterful AI, the training platform for computer vision that helps developers build models faster and with much less labeling. He is a former VC and invested in enterprise software and AI/ML at Andreessen Horowitz. Before VC, he held product management roles at Wildfire (acquired by Google), YouTube, and Autodesk. He began his AI/ML journey at MIT and started his career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics. Tom lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter and loves going fast, whether on a mountain bike or flying racing drones.
Grace Isford is a Partner based in Lux Capital's New York City office. She invests in companies innovating at the nexus of the computational sciences – data, AI and ML infrastructure, network and compute infrastructure, and cutting-edge technological applications, especially in healthcare and financial services. She focuses on data and machine-learning startups that are hyper-personalizing user experiences and transforming legacy industries, as well as fintech and blockchain infrastructure companies building the next-gen developer stack and payment rails.
Astasia Myers is a Partner on Quiet Capital's enterprise team leading investments in ML, data infrastructure, open-source, developer tools, and security. She focuses on pre-seed, seed, and Series A.
Prior to joining Quiet, Astasia was an investor in Redpoint's early-stage enterprise team, where she partnered with Dremio, LaunchDarkly, Solo.io, Preset, Hex, Cyral, among others. Before that, she worked at Cisco Investments, where she focused on cloud-infrastructure M&A and investments, including Cohesity, Datos IO, Elastifile, Guardicore, Springpath, and the funding of internal stealth projects.
Cody Coleman is the Founder and CEO of Coactive AI. He is also a co-creator of DAWNBench and MLPerf and a founding member of MLCommons. His work spans from performance benchmarking of hardware and software systems to computationally efficient methods for active learning and core-set selection. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where Professors Matei Zaharia and Peter Bailis advised him, and an MEng and BS from MIT.
Back in May, I attended apply(), Tecton’s second annual virtual event for data and ML teams to discuss the practical data engineering challenges faced when building ML for the real world. There were talks on best practice development patterns, tools of choice, and emerging architectures to successfully build and manage production ML applications.
This long-form article dissects content from 14 sessions and lightning talks that I found most useful from attending apply(). These talks cover 3 major areas: industry trends, production use cases, and open-source libraries. Let’s dive in!
Alessya Visnjic is the CEO and co-founder of WhyLabs, the AI Observability company on a mission to build the interface between AI and human operators. Prior to WhyLabs, Alessya was a CTO-in-residence at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), where she evaluated the commercial potential for the latest advancements in AI research.
Earlier in her career, Alessya spent nine years at Amazon, leading Machine Learning adoption and tooling efforts. She was a founding member of Amazon’s first ML research center in Berlin, Germany. Alessya is also the founder of Rsqrd AI, a global community of 1,000+ AI practitioners who are committed to making AI technology Robust & Responsible.
