Where I express personal thoughts in words
Chris Riccomini is an engineer, author, investor, and advisor. He has worked on infrastructure as an engineer and manager for about 15 years at PayPal, LinkedIn, and WePay. He was involved in open source as the original author of Apache Samza and an early contributor to Apache Airflow. He has also written a book with Dmitriy Ryaboy called The Missing README, a guide for software engineers. Lately, he has been investing in startups in the data space.
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.
Dânia Meira has been a senior expert and mathematician in the data field since 2012, with a Data Science career in Berlin startups where her work focused on ML for predictive analytics. She is also an experienced teacher and mentor. Dânia is the Director of #datalift and a Founding Member of the AI Guild.
The holiday season is my favorite time of the year. It's a natural time to step back and reflect on what happened this year and define how we want to focus our energy and time in the year ahead. So much can happen over the course of a year: lessons learned, victories, hardships, special moments, personal growth, new relationships, etc. With our inboxes quiet and our schedules free of meetings, we can afford to take a moment and think about what we achieved and what’s next.
Dating back to 2014, I have taken time at the end of the year to conduct a comprehensive annual life review (2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014). This exercise has helped me identify what is important, remove what is not, and evolve in different ways. Continuing the tradition, in this annual review, I'll attempt to gain a holistic perspective of my life in 2022 and where I want to go in 2023.
Ran Romano is the co-founder and VP of Engineering at Qwak, where he is focused on building the next-generation ML infrastructure for ML teams of various sizes. Before Qwak, Ran led the Data and ML engineering groups at Wix.com - where he built Wix's internal ML Platform. Previous to that, he was a Technical Product Manager at the Israeli Intelligence corps.
Dr. Eric Daimler is an authority in Artificial Intelligence with over 20 years of experience in the field as an entrepreneur, executive, investor, technologist, and policy advisor. Eric has co-founded six technology companies that have done pioneering work in areas ranging from software systems to statistical arbitrage.
As a Presidential Innovation Fellow during the Obama Administration, Eric helped drive the agenda for U.S. leadership in research, commercialization, and public adoption of AI. He has also served as the Assistant Dean and an Assistant Professor of Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. He specializes in public policy and economics, helped launch Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley Campus, and founded its Entrepreneurial Management program. His academic research focuses on the intersection of Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, and Network Science.
As a frequent keynote speaker, Eric has presented at venues including the engineering schools of MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. He studied at Stanford University, the University of Washington-Seattle, and Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned his Ph.D. in its School of Computer Science.
