Jessie 'Chuy' Chavez

💯 If your team is drowning in support tickets and customer "rough edges" you should probably sit back and evaluate if you have a viable product. At the very least, you should evaluate if your product team is correctly focused on the needs of your customers when this pattern emerges. "Jessica pointed out that if our solution was to hire someone to deal with customer issues, then next week when we grew more we’d have to hire another person, then another, and so on. Her point was that the real solution isn’t solving tickets, it’s listening to customers and building a better product so customers never need to write in the first place." "In a sense, every customer support ticket is a privilege – someone took time out of their day to write about how to improve your product. But it’s also a failure – you could’ve saved them that time by making the product better and more intuitive in the first place. You can’t out-hire a bad product, or compensate for poor taste with a big support team." Customer feedback is a gift. Don't squander it or pawn the problem off on a man-power to solve it. A pile-up here is *always* a sign that your product direction needs improvement.

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Great first three days in the Bay Area, so much energy here! My current messages to the ecosystem: - Everyone (including software engineers, small startups, academia, indie developers,...) should train, optimize and run their own models. Time for AI builders, not AI users! - LLMs are boring and progress is slowing down there. Let's focus on smaller/specialized/on-device models, datasets & other modalities like audio, video, time-series, multi-modal, robotics, biology, chemistry,...! - Open-source AI for the win! Let's go Silicon Valley! 🚀🚀🚀

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I like this idea of "technical taste". It gets into where software engineering is as much creative art as it is science. Four great takeaways (IMHO) for software devs in this era in particular: 1. Aspiring engineers should cultivate a sense of curiosity, experiment with different tools and technologies, and embrace a mindset of continuous learning. 2. AI has the potential to streamline processes and enhance productivity for engineers, but it may also lead to disruptions in traditional software development workflows. 3. Developing technical taste and judgment is essential for making informed decisions about which technologies and approaches to pursue. 4. Collaboration and open-mindedness are key to leveraging the full potential of AI and staying ahead of technological advancements. I also really liked these two quotes from Sam Schillace: 1. "The right time to do something is when you have that feeling in the pit of your stomach that's like, 'oh, this is a great idea and it's going to suck to build because nothing's ready yet.'" 2. "Technical taste is like, 'how well have you consolidated that set of experiences and heuristics into judgment that you can apply accurately when you see new things?'" 3. "It may be the case that very small teams can do very large projects, or like we were talking about before, it may be the case we're just going to get really ambitious about what we try to do with the same size of teams, which is kind of where I would put my money." Great job on continuing to put out great episodes, Brett Berson and team First Round Capital! #ai #engineering #softwaredevelopment

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Inspired by the legendary Jon Krohn, I’ve signed up to teach an O'Reilly Pearson Live Event next Friday at 1pm ET on “Choosing the right LLM - how to select, train, and apply state-of-the-art LLMs to real-world business use cases.” My timing is impeccable: yesterday’s arrival of the astonishing Claude 3.5 Sonnet, breaking benchmark records including graduate-level reasoning, has only added to the DIZZYING array of LLM options. This class will get hands-on with 10 LLMs ranging from the largest Frontier models to the smallest Open Source alternatives. We’ll use Leaderboards and Arenas to compare specialist and generalist models. We’ll look at real world applications of LLMs, like Nebula.io, and discuss strategies for selecting and applying LLMs to commercial problems. Finally, we’ll work through 3 example business problems using techniques like RAG and QLoRA fine-tuning. Along the way, we’ll experiment with Hugging Face, LangChain, gradio, Weights & Biases, llama.cpp and more. The hardest part of preparing for this class is keeping up with the daily groundbreaking progress in Gen AI!! Please can I ask everyone working at frontier labs to take the next week off to give me a chance.. By the way - if you’re not already a member of O’Reilly, you can sign up for the 10 day free trial to take my class at no cost.. https://lnkd.in/guzcDA3x

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Every day is a reminder that startups are unpredictable as hell. As alums of YCombinator's Summer 12 batch, we've long taken pride in being "the batch that broke YC" - as PG calls us. So it tickles me to no end to see this in the 2024 YC Top Companies list: "The S12 batch is the best represented, with 5 companies on the list: Benchling, Coinbase, Instacart, SmartAsset and Zapier" 🤣💪 #ycombinator #ycs12 #startups https://lnkd.in/gNDewZfn

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I sometimes see entrepreneurs effectively "single-thread" their approach to VC pitches. They find a partner they like and want to work with, and they let that partner champion them through the process. If you're a hot deal, moving fast, you might meet one other partner one time before you pitch the partnership. Maybe not even. It is absolutely the right thing to start by targeting individual partners you want to work with. They're the ones you build the business with, day in and day out. But as you move through the process, take a moment to understand the broader firm. It's the firm you're legally marrying, not the partner. Understanding the decision-making process and culture inside the firm will pay dividends if and when you hit a bump in the road. You're raising from a partner *and* a firm: https://lnkd.in/gSHuh399

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After being encouraged by multiple friends to apply to YC with our new AI Career Agent (shout out / thanks Omri Mor, Saroop, Alan, Roham + others!), Beier Cai and I put together an application last week. YC is obviously an amazing place to grow a new product category like AI Career Asssistants, but what I was NOT expecting was the application video driving so much interest. After seeing a spike in waitlist applications, citing “YouTube” as a source, I checked out the video and saw it had already generated >1k of views! If you’re curious, here is a link to the vid. Let me know your thoughts! We are passionate about building Commit: AI Career Agents for Developers into something that ALL tech workers can use to increase their growth and impact!

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Prediction: LLMs will be like directories where there will be many aggregators who allows you to connect (instead of publish in this case) to one or many from one platform. LLMs are being democratized right now. #llm #democratizationofai

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In this week's episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with notable X personality Trung Phan about the evolving social media landscape, and how to tame the mayhem and pandemonium of X. https://lnkd.in/dVHMzbui

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Earn royalties for automating troubleshooting steps? See an AI Assistant use your steps to respond to alerts and questions? If you can be in San Francisco on Sat June 22nd, sign up for SRE Day and use discount code KYLE20 so we can provision you a dev environment for our workshop. Link in the comments. I'm also taking volunteers for anyone who wants to race Eager Edgar, one of our AI Assistants, troubleshooting popular Kubernetes-based apps... #sre #devops #platformengineering #whatdoirunwhen

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“You can’t solve climate with SaaS.” 🌎 Going from science project to profitable business model is hard for most deep tech startups. It’s the valley of death. But some—like the ones that need hundreds of millions in capex to prove their tech at scale—have it harder. Here’s to the climate tech startups that are literally saving the world for us when there are much easier ways to make money. And shout out to the investors large and small who have the patience and vision to back them. Founders, you can do it! You’ll need more focus than most, and your capital stack will be different. But we’re running out of time to get this right, and we need you to succeed. Lisbeth Kaufman Stephen Blalock Shaima Sharif Jason C. Alex Anderson Khaled Al Huraimel Fares Almazrooei Laura Bowen #climatetech #deeptech

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Ross Haleliuk posted the fantastic article below. This is the world where I live day-to-day. At TechOperators, we invest mostly in early-stage cyber, but we do things a little differently, and we believe there are ways to invest successfully outside of pure Power Law math. The article argues that many security problems are too small for VC. I agree. I often try to convince bootstrapped founders not to raise venture because doing so can turn a successful, slow-growing bootstrapped company into a failed venture-backed company because, despite a large infusion of capital, it couldn't double every year. VC is not monolithic--not by stage, strategy, or style. Venture is often equated with "Tier 1 Venture". Ross argues that VC is not always great for early-stage cyber--and he is right. Bootstrapping AND VC work when incentives are aligned. Does it work for an early-stage VC with a <$200M fund to invest in several early companies at reasonable valuations, setting up the conditions for reasonable exits that pay off for both investors and founders? Yes. Does it work for $800M funds investing in seed stage at $100M+ valuations? Well, that depends! Power law says it does (for VC), but the unfortunate externality is that these rounds destroy companies and founder equity more often than not. There is a role for patient capital in this ecosystem to fuel successful companies that retain exit optionality as they scale--driving exit value for both founders and investors.

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"United Independents, the group behind the Independent National Convention set for Denver in September, has launched a new software platform for indie candidates called Electify.us, which came out of a partnership with incubator Wolfram Labs — the first tool to emerge from its program." I am so proud to share that Chief Product Officer Dana Cichon has launched the first political tech platform to come out of our accelerator program. What are you waiting for? We have the formula for breaking into the digital campaign space. Are you are the next success story? Read more in Campaigns & Elections -->> https://lnkd.in/eHhqa-Xr #techaccelerator #startups #incubator #VC #SaaS #software #political #campaigns

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There is a lot to chew on in this great article by Maggie Appleton (Maggie Appleton), called Barefoot Developers. About how large language models might enable new kinds of software, free of the demands of industrial scale, unicorn-ness, and venture capital. Software that might be made for, say, a dozen people. If you are involved in software, this is worth your time to read. https://lnkd.in/eZA_uVYf

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This is great. And for additional color on the valley of death or the gap to scale — download the Sightline FOAK Guide: https://lnkd.in/eV9Wh7s5

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🚨 Announcing the 2nd cohort of the FundraisingHackers.com “Seed+ bootcamp” we’re hosting together with Slava Solonitsyn (ex-VC and top YC founder, $180M+ raised), read below. A few weeks ago we ended the 1st cohort and it truly was a blast 🎇 14 startups across Seed, Seed+/Series A stages (and US/Europe/Asia) participated, including YC alums and exited founders. A bunch of them have already successfully raised. Some are in the process right now. Some have postponed their raise saving them a bunch of time/nerves not spent on failed fundraising. This pic is from the final workshop we’ve hosted. If you’re fundraising (or planning to in the next 3-6 months) you defo wanna check this out. This is not a course — we’ve already outsourced our “parallel fundraising playbook” (comment with “playbook” if you want the link). Instead, we provide you with a deep dive into YC-style best fundraising practices and give you a supportive environment to go and raise, period: 1. Share the “off the record” ins and outs of the parallel fundraising playbook with real-life examples/stories we’re never going to share anywhere else publicly 2. Help you understand your momentum and fundraising timeline so as not to make the wrong (too early/too late) decision 3. Provide you with an accountability group of peer founders (your first taskforce members if you don’t have any yet!) 4. Help you to refine your story/narrative and pitch materials to meet the expectations of top VCs 5. Work through your challenges/questions during office hours/group workshops 6. Give you access to our exclusive FundraisingHackers.com workspace with tons of useful content: from investor databases to guides, tools, templates, and much more Places are limited and you can get in on a first come first serve basis, so hurry up and apply, link is in the comments.

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Contrary to popular belief, not all friction is bad. In this interview, product leader Yue Z. shares how adding good friction actually led to higher conversion rates when onboarding users at Thumbtack. Here's the latest interview in my product leader series in Forbes: https://lnkd.in/ex842XsW

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As an engineer, AI co-pilots are a major tool to boost productivity. They come with the same caveats though as copy-pasting code from StackOverflow. You still need to understand what you're writing to ensure you've got the right answer. But as Catherine Huang mentions, AI is a fantastic tool to get more done quickly and go from 0 to 1 (especially when it's embedded into your editor).

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