AMA with Lukas Biewald, CEO of Weights & Biases – November 4

Not a question simply a suggestion: if you’re into robots to paint walls, you should check out the recent Stuff Made Here video: A million paint spots, 3 colors and 1 mind hack - YouTube
Entirely impractical but entertaining and impressive engineering!

I really appreciate the nice note. I have gone through many periods of feeling really stuck. The first few years of my last company where we had no money or customers and my parents basically thought I was unemployed was really hard. There were also at least two periods with my last company where sales really slowed and customers were unhappy and I had to let a significant number of people go just to stay afloat and it felt really hopeless. I also remember working incredibly hard, pulling back-to-back all nighters on a couple of ML papers early in my career and having them all rejected for what felt like were totally unfair reasons. None of this felt good at all but I guess I just kept showing up and trying to keep moving forward. It might be a cliche, but when I feel stuck I try to get really small wins and celebrate them and build on them.

3 Likes

My calendar is much more full these days and my work is much more interrupt driven. It’s great having so many smart people around doing so many amazing things. The hardest part is the obligation I feel to keep everyone coordinated and moving in the same direction without wasting people’s time.

A couple of people have influenced me a lot. My grad advisor Daphne Koller really taught me the value of seeing the world clearly - she was totally obsessed with this and I really admire her for it. My first CEO Barney Pell taught me the value of really being clear about what you’re trying to accomplish and communicating it clearly to the world. My first investor taught me how to do deals and how you really have to run hard after any customer.

I would advise my high school self not to worry, that life gets better. I would advise my college self to take more physics classes :slight_smile: . I would advise my twenty something CEO self to focus more on internal mental processes and show up to work level headed every day.

1 Like

These days I spend most days in planning sessions with team, interviewing candidates, collecting feedback from customers and playing with my daughter. I’m really out of date on trendy DL architectures but I really want to carve out some time to catch up. Especially I want to play with and understand the recent work with transformers - if you have any resources you could point me to, I would appreciate it.

The first customers were not easy! In our case we used the fact that we had been in the space for a long time to contact people to try to convince them to use our software for free, and even then we were mostly rejected. There’s no magic to finding the first customers/users, it takes a lot of hustle and effort. We basically just demo-ed our software over and over and offered to do the integration ourselves. You didn’t ask this but I would add, don’t forget about your first customers! They believed in your product when no one else did.

Wow - that is awesome! I love the stuff made here channel.

Hi Justin :slight_smile:. I think the 3blue1brown video on neural nets is an amazing starting point on how neural nets work with a lot of detail but no code. Also I hear some people learn to code while doing the fast ai classes which seems really hard but free and super informative. But honestly I think I would recommend learning to code a little first - it’s pretty fun and it’s an incredibly useful skill. There are no-code udacity courses folks recommend sometimes, but I’m such a hands on learner that it’s hard for me to imagine learning another way.

1 Like

Thanks, Lukas! Tried the Kaggle course but the Python escalated in complexity way too quickly. I’ll check those out and, oh God, maybe just take a Python course.

print(terror)

1 Like

I’m saving and printing out your response! I also greatly appreciate the candid youtube interview you did today. I loved how you not only talked about the success but how hard it was to get there.

1 Like