Lessons co-founding and operating an AI/ML company during massive market shifts w/ Jared Roesch

As the CTO & Co-Founder @ OctoML, Jared Roesch shares his experience building a ML company in a rapidly changing product market space. Jared also covers shifting from an open-source organization to a more product- and enterprise-focused business. We also discuss product & market strategies for ML businesses, optimizing your product for both high- and low-sophistication users, navigating a fast-paced industry, ML market participation predictions, and strategies for recruiting co-founders from academia.

Jared Roesch (@roeschinc) is Co-Founder and CTO of OctoML. He completed his PhD at the University of Washington as part of the PLSE and SAMPL groups. A computer scientist at heart, Jared loves taking insights from the research community and applying them to build intelligent, performant, and powerful systems. Jared's background includes experience in web development, JIT compilers, software engineering, computer architecture, functional programming, compilers, verification, databases, systems, and machine learning.

"I think there are a whole set of problems here that are just unexplored. I don't think there are that many people solving them because they're tricky, they're very user-focused. They're not as much fun as building up the hub or the platform or the ML ops tool and so I think that this is where there's gonna be a lot of room for people to innovate and not just us, but I think in the market, and I think you see some people doing things like this right now, but it's still really early days.”

- Jared Roesch   

OctoML is on a mission to make AI more accessible and sustainable so it can be used thoughtfully to improve lives. They make AI more sustainable through efficient model execution and automation to scale services and reduce engineering burden. They make AI more accessible by enabling models to run on a broad set of devices and easier to deploy without specialized skills. The OctoML platform brings DevOps-level agility and automation to Machine Learning deployment on any hardware.

Backed by leading venture capital firms, the company is headquartered in Seattle, with an office in San Francisco, CA. OctoML is founded and led by the creators Apache TVM, an open-source ML stack for performance and portability.

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

• Jared’s transition from academia to industry (2:53)
• The origin of OctoML (5:31)
• How Jared’s time in academia informed his knowledge of ML / AI trends (8:45)
• Piecing together Jared’s interest in music composition w/ programming (11:07)
• Lessons learned from Jared’s first start-up failure in undergrad (12:05)
• Strategies for recruiting a co-founder from academia (15:03)
• Communicate from a place of intentional curiosity & intellectual honesty (18:28)
• Reviewing the trends within the ever-changing AI / ML landscape (19:52)
• How to remain nimble while navigating fast-paced changes (24:08)
• OctoML’s approach to being dynamic & navigating strategy adjustments (25:46)
• Addressing new iterations of user-encountered problems (28:59)
• Insights around serving both higher- and lower-sophistication users (32:28)
• Jared’s experience transitioning OctoML from a technology to product-focused company (36:58)
• Shifting from open-source to an enterprise- and user-focused model (43:07)
• Challenges when optimizing for various roles / user experiences (46:31)
• Product market strategy lessons learned within an ML business (50:13)
• Jared’s predictions on ML market participation & evolution (55:18)
• Rapid fire questions (58:12)

• The Complete History & Strategy of Sega - A podcast from Acquired detailing how, in a single console generation, Sega went from ~zero to 50% US market share and dethroned Nintendo’s seemingly invincible global monopoly, then, two console generations later, Sega was out of the hardware game entirely, and the company was sold off for pieces to a pachinko manufacturer.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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