Vinodh Jayaram

A super clear, straight forward example of how to do cost effective RAG using LangChain for your document pipeline and Groq for compute resources. The code demonstrates how to speed up RAG and reduce costs using quantized embeddings (reducing 32 bit values to 8) Nice job Sahibpreet Singh! https://lnkd.in/gf5QMCKK

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Ever wonder why some companies can ship software at lightning speeds while others seem stuck in the mud? 🚀⏳ . . . . . . . . . Daksh Gupta of Greptile collected real-world insights from engineers at many of the world's largest tech companies, unpacking the intricacies that either propel or impede the speed of shipping code. The big reveal? Older and larger companies tend to move more slowly because the costs of missteps become greater. In some cases, those costs are fairly non-negotiable (e.g. ensuring software for customers in production remains secure) while in other cases, the costs are more optional and cultural (e.g. wanting a lot of accurate estimates, forcing a manager's vs. maker's schedule, etc). #SoftwareEngineering #Tech #DevelopmentVelocity #Innovation #Productivity

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A successful systems design and delivery strategy begins by assuming that change is likely the only constant. Be adaptable, or fail.

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I have known Avni for almost ten years and I am super glad (and not surprised) that her customer-focused approach remains unchanged. We were fortunate to have Avni Savant speak to our teams at G2 India. The session was inspirational, and we learned a lot from her. Avni has a wealth of experience, and we are grateful for the valuable insights she shared with us. During the session brilliantly moderated by Aravind Raj, we discussed several topics and gained a few key takeaways: ⚡ Creating an environment that supports a "fail fast" mindset fosters innovation, and consistent leadership support is essential. Interestingly, this is something that Roger Valade aligns with strongly, and we are just in the middle of an innovation sprint. :) 🧠 We explored areas where AI can be implemented to solve product use cases. Avni stressed that we don't need to reinvent the wheel; instead, we should learn from companies that have successfully adopted AI. The most doable areas for AI implementation are to improve developer productivity and summarize insights and discoveries. 📊 We discussed how squad-specific goals (OKRs) can be integrated with the company's larger goals. For example, we can analyze if improving our product's onboarding experience impacts the adoption rate, and understand if the release was successful. Avni emphasized the importance of using data to make feature iterations and prioritization decisions. 💬 We discussed the significance of product development teams being close to the customers and leveraging customer interviews, and feedback from pre-sales, sales, and support teams. 💗 Lastly, Avni highlighted the importance of self-drivenness and having a clear point of view in one's career. She noted that this proactive approach is valued and appreciated. We are truly grateful to Avni for her time and lessons!

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The afternoon Keynote @ Stripe Sessions was Fireside Chat between Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) and Jensen Huang (CEO of NVIDIA). Patrick was an excellent moderator — asked Jensen really probing, nuanced questions that Jensen answered with his usual sharp wit and unique (and impressively well rationalized) perspective. A couple of quotes among many that stuck with me: - “Current CPU installed market is $1 trillion of hardware, all of which will be upgraded to GPUs over the next 5 years. And I would estimate about another $1 trillion will be spent on top of that during the same time period as companies try to do more with AI. Add those together — and I think at least $2 trillion will be spent on GPUs in the next 5 years.” - “I like to go after Zero-Billion Dollar Markets — nonexistent markets that I envision & can rationalize well, but will be very hard, expensive & time-consuming to achieve.”

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🍜Anybody up for some ramen? I am excited to share that I am back in the garage, building again (it’s actually a house in the Berkeley Hills). We are taking the wraps off of Supercog AI, a new startup focused on solving Application Integration using LLM powered agents. My co-founder in this new venture is a great friend of mine (and a former co-founder partner), Alex Osborne. Alex and I have worked around the application integration space for a long time, and we are unrealistically excited about applying the GenAI stack to this problem. Not many people relish the task to get some bits to move from system A to system B. But it’s a critical job to be done, and that’s led to a lot of brittle scripts, a myriad of inflexible “no code” tools, and a lot of hand crafted SQL. But the power of the Large Language Model, trained on a huge corpus of information, offers a remarkable tool to solve this problem. The LLM you use today already knows the APIs of hundreds of popular systems. It knows the SQL dialects of every major database. It understands the semantics and data schemas of many popular SaaS systems. It understands much of the specific domain in which your business operates. I like to call the AI revolution “the last platform shift”. That may turn out to be hyperbole, but I definitely believe we are in the very early stages of seeing what this new stack can enable. I know we are hardly the first folks to claim that “amazing stuff is coming!”. But this is why Alex and I have decided to focus on a real and hard problem. If we can prove that LLMs can power a new way to solve this problem, it will be the first successful *new* approach in 15 years.. We will have much more to share about this new platform soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in getting a peek - or even better if you have application or data integration tasks that you would like some help with - please reach out because we want to help. #genai #startups #backinthegarage

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Tennessee, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Washington, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New York. What do these 9 states have in common? . . . . . . . . . In order of magnitude, they all grew their infotech sectors by a higher percentage than California since 2019. This has led to California's share of all US tech jobs dropping from a high of 19% to a more modest 16%. This trend continues today. We can no longer make believe this is a temporary COVID-related anomaly. Which emerging tech hubs are you most excited about? Why? #California #SiliconValley #Tech #TechIndustry #Jobs

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From Astrologer's Whispers to Real Connections: Reclaiming Belonging in a Lonely Age Have you ever consulted an astrologer, their predictions swirling in your head, only to feel empty when your day takes a different turn? The emptiness might not be about the details themselves, but about seeking outside approval for your happiness. This same feeling can creep in even when you achieve success. Remember climbing the career ladder, landing that dream apartment, only to find yourself lost in a quiet emptiness? In India's bustling cities, it's a familiar, painful emotion. We're surrounded by people, yet there's a little loneliness at the edges of our lives. Thinking back to Mrs. Deshmukh, your friendly neighbour with the legendary Til Gur Barfi's, who brought the whole neighbourhood together with tea and friendly chats. Those evenings of shared stories and laughter, a web woven by simple human connection, feel like a distant memory in our super-connected yet broken world. We chase success with thumbs glued to screens, building online bridges that leave us feeling more alone than ever. The pressure to create a perfect online self-drowns out the whispers of our own desires. But here's the real deal, that shiny designation and fancy car can't fill the hole left by genuine connection. There's hope, though! We can rewrite this story. Let's ditch the small talk and chase deeper connections. Share your fears and worries, break free from feeling isolated in this sea of ambition. Remember the warmth of family gatherings, the joy of shared childhood games? Revive those small traditions. Pick up the phone for a real heart-to-heart conversation rather than What's Apping. Every act of connection, no matter how ordinary, how small, builds a more satisfying life. Imagine hearing back from an old friend, reliving an old laugh, and being surrounded by people who truly see us, where we belong. Isn't that what life is all about? Together, one conversation, one meal, and one act of kindness at a time, we can tear down the walls of loneliness. We can rewrite the narrative of modern society, where connection becomes the foundation of a life well lived. It's not too late, or is it? #HumanConnections #BelongingMatters #OvercomeLoneliness #RealConversations #MeaningfulRelationships #CommunityOverConnectivity #AuthenticLiving #SocialWellbeing #RedefiningSuccess #TraditionsRewoven #FightIsolation #VulnerableAndReal #KindnessRevolution #SmallActsBigImpact #ReconnectingHumanity #IndianSociety #UrbanLoneliness #DigitalDetox #QualityOverQuantity #ConnectionCures Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

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The products team's fixation on milestones tends to divert their attention from the broader perspective. They hop from one feature to another, enamored by each glowing aspect. Individuals work in isolated bubbles, fixated on ticking off one milestone after another, sometimes without significant displacement. Read More - https://lnkd.in/dxEvS6Yg #products #productmanagement #milestones

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Thanks, Amnic team, for hosting me on your podcast. I enjoyed the conversation with Sathya narayanan Nagarajan. We have many things in common from our learnings from working on CD-based products where perfection was the expectation in the first iteration to today, when Amnic and Mindtickle are taking big bets on GenAI and Cloud to delight our customers. In this podcast, I shared my experiences of more than twenty years of building and deploying large-scale systems at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Mindtickle. The podcast also covers my learnings from moving from large enterprises to a relatively smaller company where being agile and nimble is paramount. #Microsoft, #Meta, #Google #Mindtickle.

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Your ability to adapt to changing conditions will be your super power. Being overly adapted to existing conditions makes survival questionable.

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Humans have an inherent friction to change, be it city, house, job, role, team—almost anything. Interestingly, in my whole career, I have hardly found anyone who recently joined a team and wholeheartedly appreciates the things the team has done in the past or is currently doing. Most Engineers and PMs have their existing biases towards how things should be done, best practices, etc. They have their anecdotes to prove their points. I do appreciate people from diverse backgrounds, as that helps figure out solutions to tough problems sometimes. However, things become less productive when it results in ego clashes. Especially when interacting with some of the young engineers, they are very enthusiastic about new technologies, programming languages, cool frameworks, tools, and whatnot. They feel disconnected when they find none of these things are that relevant to most organizations doing real business. I know that's not cool, but that's how most businesses are built. Things at well-established businesses can't be changed at the pace at which technologies are evolving. Of course, corrective actions need to be taken at certain intervals. How to solve it: Develop empathy. Context is king, trust that the decisions that a team or company has taken in the past must have had a legit context then. A decision that seems stupid now might have been the best possible decision back then, depending on factors like cost, tech capabilities, resources, time to market, and probably many more. #empathy #context #business

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Envy is a dangerous emotion. In many ways, worse than greed or malice. Rebecca Konynoyk Deyoung, in her book - ‘Glittering Vices’, puts it best when she describes it as, “Feeling bitter when others have it better.” Not to be confused with its twin, Jealousy, who feels ill will when it has to compete for what it already possesses fearing its loss. Jealousy vies to be the sole possessor of what it owns. Envy on the other hand is not rooted in what it possesses but rather what it doesn't. It desires what belongs to another. One grave danger of Envy, is that it fears not to suffer loss as long as its object doesn't gain. Willing to endure harm if it means the other suffers also. A poem by Victor Hugo (’Envy and Avarice’) illustrates this, such that when Envy and Avarice were given the opportunity to receive whatever they wished on the condition that the other receive double. Envy responded, “I wish to be blind in one eye” (paraphrase). When we forget to run our own race in our own lane, we make it our steady companion. Seeking satisfaction in another losing what they possess even if it means we also don't possess it. One remedy I've found is to turn that gaze towards the one we envy from ill to curiosity. Curiosity on what we can learn from this person. Curiosity on what we can do differently to also improve. Indeed it might be chance or skill that benefits them. Ultimately, we need to walk away from the comparison game. It is one you and I will never win. When we cease to compare, we do away with Envy’s vice grip. One good thing that dwelling on our Envy does is that it shines a light on what defines our identity. You want what the one you envy has because somehow it is important to your sense of self. To really rid ourselves of Envy, then, we must then examine what defines us and make sure the foundation is sure.

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Thought I would share a personal milestone today. I reached 25 blogs on medium https://lnkd.in/dJc3YsKE This is a short blurb on my journey and process. I had started blogging in 2020 and actively from 2021 partly inspired by people I met along the way and also as a way to express my thoughts better. I changed my focus and approach multiple times, from org design, promotion processes and tech frameworks to in depth content on specific areas like cryptography. Sometimes all it took for me to go past a writers block was to just pen down my thoughts even if it doesn't form a cohesive whole and refine it as I continued writing. I decided I would always put in links to the articles or blogs of the articles I had been inspired by. Most of them have better content than mine. I realised that if I had to explain something complex I had to build concepts around it brick by brick so when I started writing about OPAQUE PAKE, I made sure I had covered cryptography in ample depth even if it meant repeating commonly known concepts. I also wanted to focus on the why rather than the what so that my detailed blog doesn't end up like an abstract white paper with references. I wanted the blog to focus on my own interests instead of clickbait. So I kept it free of prophetic albeit popular articles like AI doomerism. So what's your excuse for not blogging?

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Work tidbits - Living on the edge! Over a year back, I received my patent in the Knowledge Annotation space after 5 years of wait - it triggered me to join this new team.  The space was/still is AI Accelerators, within Cloud Compute. My team specifically was the ‘last mile’, productionize and land the AI accelerators for the top cloud customers.  The work would have been fine in the last 2+ decades of my career - but these times were different. Everyone and everything was in the AI/ML race. Before we(or others) could plan a new stack - something better was out there - sometimes open sourced! Before anyone could make the perf/$ cheaper - There was an update on new numbers available. There were negotiations on software lifecycles, in favor of velocity.   Customers were eager more than any other time. They were feeling the same stress - best LLM, best Stable diffusion, best MLPerf, best ML stack, best chips, best networking, best price! We did very well overall and that part will continue - despite living on the edge. Recently things shifted and I have gotten time to breathe(joined a sister team), also write my thoughts/tidbits - 1.) A friend, a mentor once said - Go far, not fast! Life is not a race and you have a long way to go! I do.  2.) Build resilience. You will see a lot of ups and downs. You don’t always have time to feel sorry for the down, or cheer for the ups! Keep your emotions in the middle spectrum.  3.) Find the true allies, and keep them close. They will tell you when you are wrong, or not - but most importantly they will stick with you, for long. I just ran into my peer from 9 years ago, 2 companies back in the hallway today!  4.) Recognize that some folks are indeed for the fast, maybe also far.. but mostly fast. Let them be! Take 2 steps back. Build resilience.  5.) Invest in your team - My reports, people are/were the team's biggest strength, and the primary reason to keep us going. We certainly don’t end here. The jobs will always be demanding, and that is by design. But the 'how' is on you..   My Amazon manager (now a VP@Microsoft) wrote me a handwritten note that said - Shivani, slow down and take the time to smell the flowers - I have been practicing something like this lately..  I am taking my learnings and my tribe along - and certainly aiming to go far.  Please take care of yourself, no matter what stage! ##resilience #livingontheedge #farnotfast #machinelearning #google #cloud

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Interesting article from Bloomberg about life at Google's X in a time of layoffs and cost reduction at https://lnkd.in/gmw3GG7C. X is a component of Alphabet (Google's parent company) that incubates new ideas. They have been responsible for some great successes - getting Waymo and a lot of Google's AI work started - but they've also had projects that didn't survive - like Google's attempt to provide Internet access via weather balloons. When you work at a company that has hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues, it's hard to get a lot of interest in an entirely new business idea that brings in hundreds of millions. If you have a project that improves ads revenue by that amount, or decreases capital expenditures, you can do it, but if you want to, say, build wearable tech, it becomes hard to attract the attention of marketing or product. So, new ideas often die on the vine. For the most part, this is good and proper. Companies may have the financial wherewithal to branch out, but more often than not, they consider it a distraction. And they are probably right - it's hard to argue that Meta was right to divert such a huge chunk of their resources to chase after the metaverse. They've (rightfully) pulled back, and are more focused on their core business again. On the flip side, if you are in the tech sector, and you don't innovate, you are likely to get left behind at some point. So, you need to make and manage these investments somehow. When I joined Google, the CEO had a 70-20-10 rule - 70% of effort went to core businesses, 20% to broader efforts to improve Google, and 10% to stuff that's completely blue-sky. This is probably not completely right, but it is also probably not completely wrong. X is the division of Alphabet that is *specifically* designed to bring blue-sky products to life. Unsurprisingly, they've had to pivot and rethink their strategy many, many times. The article interviews a number of people who have worked at X over the years; it's well worth a perusal, for folks who are interested in the story.

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🌟 The Superpower of Connecting the Dots: Thoughts on High Impact Communication 🌟 In my career at companies like Meta and Google, I learned that effective leaders possess a unique superpower: organizational awareness. This isn't just about having information; it's about connecting the dots across a complex organization to drive impactful efforts. 🚀 Consider this: On any given day, tech leaders spend 70 to 90 percent of their time communicating. Yet, effective communication is much more than mere information exchange—it’s about informing, influencing, and inspiring. 🗣️✨ Consider this common scenario in large organizations: multiple teams working in silos, unknowingly duplicating efforts on similar efforts. This is not merely about redundancy but represents a significant missed opportunity for collaboration. When leaders facilitate connections between these teams, allowing them to share insights and understand each other’s projects, the result is often a merging or improvement of projects. This not only enhances the outcomes but also improves organizational efficiency. Such strategic collaboration underscores the power of effective leadership in fostering organizational coherence and productivity. 🛠️🤝 This experience underscored a critical lesson: Great leaders don’t just operate within their teams; they have the vision to see beyond, identifying overlaps and opportunities across the organization. Here are some actionable insights for leaders aspiring to master this superpower: 1) Step back to see the big picture: Engage with different teams, join cross-departmental meetings, and keep abreast of broader organizational goals. 2) Communicate with context: Always provide the 'why' behind your messages. This not only informs but also empowers and aligns your team with the organization's vision. 3) Be a conduit, not a bottleneck: Share knowledge freely unless specifically instructed otherwise. Your team's trust in you grows when they see you as a source of valuable information. 4) Foster connections: Encourage your team to network within and beyond their immediate circles. This builds a more interconnected team and enhances problem-solving capabilities. Remember, information is plentiful, but the ability to connect the dots to form a clear, actionable picture is what sets true leaders apart. #TechLeadership #Communication #Teamwork #OrganizationalAwareness #Influence #Inspire

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This new piece out of VS firm NFX predicts: "Labor plus software will eventually become one market." In other words . . . Get used to AI colleagues. A lot of them. And software businesses - get used to having to compete with both labor markets and automated software on your product roadmap, professional service offerings, and more. How is your business readying itself for this new era? #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ML #MachineLearning #SaaS #Innovation #DigitalTransformation #FutureOfWork

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Amazon-to-Google-to-Amazon #a2g2a thought of the day: interesting to see how RTO (Return-to-Office) outcomes are entirely different for the two companies. In my post today, I don't really want to go down the path of debating whether RTO is "good" or "bad". There's very emotional and valid opinions on both sides, and it affects people's personal lives in real ways. Please be respectful. Whether you agree with the policy or not, for it to actually work it does need *critical mass*. Both companies have essentially the same RTO policy (3 days/week expectation), but there's significant differences is in how the message was delivered and enforced - and the outcome. Google’s 3-days-per-week was mostly a “pretty-please, would-you, if-you-don't-mind” with no actual enforcement (but some vague threats). So most people ignored it. They still do. Leadership got frustrated and the message got less polite over time, but nothing really changed. Even as of 3 weeks ago, when I was still a Google employee, the buildings were fairly empty. That made being physically in the office significantly less useful, other than enjoying the perks of free food and massages by myself (and occasionally with 1 or 2 coworkers). Amazon’s 3-days-per-week came with actual enforcement. Amazon used badge reader data to track when people were actually coming to the office, with consequences. It does feel a bit draconian, but you can’t argue with the effectiveness of saying “we have a policy that we believe is business-critical and we’ll enforce it or else.” I appreciate that when I come to the office, I can find my coworkers there and we can have f2f meetings. There’s critical mass for RTO to actually be effective. Amazon has picked a lane. Personally, I have not figured out how to truly be productive and happy working remotely in the last 4 years. I respect and appreciate the fact that some people have, but I haven’t. I do like the option to stay home a day or two, skipping my long commute, working from a lounge chair in my backyard on a sunny day. But there’s nothing like the energy in the room of a good group meeting, or the chemistry of a face-to-face 1:1, or the enthusiasm of two engineers standing in front of a physical whiteboard drawing boxes and arrows with markers brainstorming about the future. Or the bonding of sharing a meal or a walk between buildings with a coworker. I feel energized when I’m physically in the office. It literally charges my batteries. I’ve been coming to the office 4x/week and loving it. 

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