Satyajeet Salgar

It’s exciting to witness how the hyperscalers are enabling a hyper-collaborative marketplace ecosystem that allows the multiplication of revenue opportunities. I see this happening in two ways 1️⃣ ISVs are being encouraged by hyperscalers to build with interoperability in mind 🔧 All three #hyperscalers have, over the course of the last few years, incrementally deepened their partnerships with on-page "competitors" like Salesforce and Snowflake to break data silos and leverage #GenAI on more comprehensive data sets. AWS, GCP and Azure are not just strengthening their own associations, but they are also actively encouraging collaboration between these ISVs to drive interoperability, aimed at the creation of joint solutions that significantly expand the universe of customers who can benefit. Snowflake’s most recent Polaris Catalog launch also reaffirms its commitment to interoperability with a wider library of industry players (beyond the three clouds) including hyperscaler partners like Salesforce and Confluent. That brings me to point 2…. 2️⃣ Hyperscalers are actively inviting the participation of channel partners to piece complementary solutions together 🤝 As ISVs focus on creating compatible offerings with each other, and with hyperscaler services, buyers have the opportunity to find end-to-end solutions for specific use cases right from the marketplace catalog. To do so, they’re relying on partners to identify, connect and manage these increasingly complex technologies. This presents a tremendous opportunity for channel partners to add value to these marketplace-led deals by helping piece solutions together into a comprehensive whole. Hyperscalers are also cognizant that the “channel is the glue between them and the lower enterprise, midmarket and SMB,” as I’ve hear my friend and founder of Ultimate Partner Vince Menzione put it, and are actively developing strategies to incorporate channels into marketplace deal workflows. There’s a clear signal to shift the perception of marketplaces from being potential threats to traditional partnership associations, to what they really are – growth opportunities. Channel partners who recognize this sooner rather than later, have biggest opportunity to capture net new business.

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Want a front-row seat to the frontier of tech? We’ve got the role (or two) for you! We’re expanding our frontier-tech team at Blackbird by hiring a Frontier Tech Investments Associate and Foundry Fellows! Got questions? We've got answers... 1️⃣ What are the roles? 🧪 Associate = a full-time VC investment gig in our Blackbird Investments team, working directly with me. We’re looking for someone with a science and/or engineering background and more curiosity than they can handle. You’ll grow your own investment brand and practice, support our portfolio founders, and will help build Foundry, our early-stage frontier-tech accelerator. ✨ Foundry Fellow = a casual/contract gig in our Blackbird Investments team, ~15h per week for 3 months. The Fellowship is ideal for PhD students and ECRs who want to learn more about startups and VC. You’ll go deep on emerging areas relevant to your expertise (or curiosity!), get a front-row seat to groundbreaking companies in those areas, build out your non-academic network, and develop a solid writing practice. 2️⃣ Why are you hiring? We love frontier tech, and we’re ready to grow our team. 3️⃣ Wow, it’s so great that you’re starting to look at deep tech! Look, we get it: we don’t make a lot of noise about our frontier tech investing. Buuuut we’ve been deep-tech investors since we backed Tim Kentley-Klay to found Zoox back in 2014—we’ve been on incredible journeys with PsiQuantum (building the world's first utility-scale quantum computer right here in Australia!), Inventia Life Science (transforming drug discovery with high-fidelity cell models), Remedy Robotics (surgical robots for remote endovascular procedures), Opto Biosystems (minimally-invasive neural implants to treat cancer), and more. We believe that frontier technologies, and great frontier-tech investing, will be part of the solutions to the greatest problems humanity faces today. 4️⃣ When do applications close? May 31st at 11:59pm AEST. 5️⃣ I have more questions! I’m sure you do! Clare Birch and I are hosting an AMA to answer any and all questions about these roles. Want to know what a week in the life of our team looks like? What’s keeping us up at night? What our ideal candidate looks like? Come along and find out - registration link in the comments 👇 Apply for these roles: Associate - https://lnkd.in/gCfj4EUJ Foundry Fellowships - https://lnkd.in/gj6ATZVZ If you know anyone that we should meet, send me their details! Cameron Elise Ben Andrew Robin Joseph Adelaide James Olivia Lucinda Raghav Jesse Christie Mohamed Tom Amee Pablo Haya Loong Hon Joshua Benjamin Megan Harry Denzil Matthew Diana Daniel Tom Deanna Justin Amar Lilly Stone Thomas

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AI news roundup: 1. Pope Francis raises some alarms about AI. https://lnkd.in/g5gxxCM6 I'd argue that we're already well down the rabbit hole of decisions being made absent a human touch or ethical concerns and that's long before the rise of "AI" as we're using the term today. But he has a good point. 2. Interesting take on Apple and what they're doing to address AI or "Apple Intelligence" https://lnkd.in/gHEUppwz I like that Apple just named it "Apple Intelligence" and then packaged up a bunch of commodity items inherent in any of the last few generations of foundational AI models like summarization, text generation, revamping Siri, and being able to call up ChatGPT to ask questions. 3. Although this is the actual plot of a Black Mirror episode, this is a great, humanistic use case for AI -- making a digital clone of yourself for your loved ones to talk to after you're gone. https://lnkd.in/g2-KyYdP 4. AI-powered candidate for local election: https://lnkd.in/g_TXPkUz Not sure how you'd actually vet that it's AI/ML recommending things or making suggestions. This reminds me of the Net Party in Argentina (letting voters make decisions directly via an app): https://lnkd.in/gujR_-WZ

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AI can be an incredibly powerful technology for creating valuable products. However the golden rule – “Do not delegate thinking” –becomes most critical than ever. AI can seriously hallucinate, lack the right context, and become a source of quality and originality regression. Great article by Itamar Gilad

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Instacart is a market leader when it comes to leveraging AI tools to boost productivity at work. I had an amazing conversation with JJ Zhuang, Instacart’s Chief Architect, who has shepherded over 50 AI-driven initiatives to market across the org. We explored what catapulted Instacart to the forefront of AI integration, supporting radically diverse use cases across various functional areas. One striking insight (echoed by Ethan Mollick and others elsewhere) is that you often don't need specialized tools for specialized work. Frontier models like GPT-4 can seamlessly adapt to a wide range of functions and use cases. They're not just for engineers; they're incredibly versatile tools used by marketing, comms, and legal teams. From generating code to proofreading and ideation, GPT-4 empowers every department to leverage AI for enhanced productivity and innovation. By integrating LLM’s like GPT-4 into their workflows, teams can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock bandwidth for new creative possibilities. How can you harness the power of AI in your own work to boost productivity? Share your thoughts below 👇 Want to hear more insights from JJ? Check out the full podcast episode by clicking the link in the comments.

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Tinkering fuels innovation and curiosity. It allows us to truly understand the tools and systems we work with at a granular level. Recently, I've been tinkering with Rust, a language gaining popularity for building reliable, safe, and sustainable systems at scale. The best way to learn is by doing. So, I turned our simple summarization proof of concept, Distill, into a CLI leveraging Rust's performance and memory safety advantages. As builders, it's our responsibility to continuously look for optimizations in everything we do. To ask questions and challenge the status quo. To learn and be curious. I encourage you to give Distill CLI a try, tinker with it, and share your feedback. And as always – now, go build! #AWS #tinkering https://lnkd.in/e7HUQwEt

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"Since 2018, we have increasingly leveraged Rust for critical workloads across various [AWS] services like S3, EC2, DynamoDB, Lambda, Fargate, and Nitro, especially in scenarios where hardware costs are expected to dominate over time." We've seen a lot of success with Rust at AWS, including our work on Firecracker, on Lambda's container dataplane, and on many other systems we've built. I love the fact that we can get memory safety without compromising performance or efficiency. I also enjoy seeing how much less time my teams spend tuning runtimes or debugging memory issues. I also really appreciate this sentiment from Werner's post: "... this is not a call to rewrite everything in Rust. ... It’s about using the right tool for the right job. This means questioning the status quo, and continuously looking for ways to incrementally optimize your systems – to tinker with things and measure what happens." Make decisions about programming languages the same way you make all critical engineering decisions: with data!

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🚀 Exciting news for all startup founders! 🌟 Before he took over the mic at TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Haje Kamps joined us to share invaluable insights on crafting a pitch that stands out—especially in today's challenging fundraising climate. 🎙️ In this killer video excerpt, Haje, with his deep expertise as a pitch deck expert, breaks down the essentials of a compelling pitch. He emphasizes clarity in your value proposition, the critical nature of founder-market fit, and the importance of a sizable market opportunity. 📈 We dig deep into these topics, extracting gems that are vital for every founder looking to make an impact with potential investors. 🤝 👉 Watch the short clip here, and if it grabs your attention, the full conversation covers even more ground on navigating the VC ecosystem successfully! 👇 Check the first comment for links to the full podcast on YouTube and Apple Podcasts!

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Ever wondered where the perfect balance between tranquility and innovation lies? For me, it’s Seattle. Unlike the Bay, Seattle has a more serene environment that’s perfect for focusing on building products and businesses. The city’s vibe encourages deep work and creative thinking, free from the overwhelming hustle. But let’s be honest, Seattle’s founder and investor communities aren’t as vibrant as those in SF. Yet, this city holds a special place in my heart – a blend of my love for startups and the charm of Seattle. I believe in Seattle’s potential and I’m on a mission to help ignite its startup community. From connecting with fellow founders to engaging investors, let’s come together to build something extraordinary here. Seattle has all the ingredients to be a startup hub – talent, innovation, and a supportive ecosystem. What it needs is a spark. Let’s be that spark.

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I'm back with the New York edition of our Doxxing and Drinks event! If you couldn't make it to one at RSA, come join us for this one at New York Tech Week. We'll show you firsthand how easily your phone number can be compromised and how Cloaked can protect you. With Cloaked, you can generate unique, unlimited phone numbers and email addresses, shielding you from spam, scams, and fraud. Why is this important? The more you share, the higher your risk. We’re here not just to react to threats but to prevent them, ensuring that every interaction—online shopping, traveling, or socializing—remains secure. 🔐 Event Details: Where: Midtown Manhattan When: June 5th, evening Highlights: Interactive QR code scans, food, drinks, and invaluable privacy insights If you value your privacy and are ready for a safer digital life, join us to turn the tide against digital threats. Share this with someone who values their privacy and help us strengthen our defenses together. 🍹🛡️ RSVP now: https://buff.ly/3ystJLW #NYTechWeek #TechWeek #Tech #Privacy

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𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐨 This past Monday, I had the incredible opportunity to demo and pitch Jammy to over 100 investors at NY #TechWeek AI Demo Day. Two weeks ago, thanks to Cindy Berman, I found out about the event and hesitated to sign up, doubting our product’s readiness. However, I saw it as a chance to push our limits. After a screening with Shriya Nevatia we were one of eight companies chosen, and I had to figure out how to demo our work-in-progress app and deliver an eight-minute pitch. I prepared thoroughly and felt confident. On the day, Dorothy Chang informed me I’d be the first presenter, which made me both nervous and excited. The pitch went well until the live demo. When showcasing Jammy’s ability to recommend post-session music, the integration failed despite my preparation. I still finished the presentation, landing the vision for Jammy and with congratulations and consolation from my peers: “live demos always break,” they said. It helped. Though I didn’t win the $50K prize, I secured a check from an angel investor, generated interest from several others, and met amazing founders in AI. The winning pitch went to the highly deserving CAPSULE, who is set to revolutionize contextual visual shopping search (like Shazam for shopping). Very cool. This experience highlighted the value of taking risks and the importance of failing forward. It also reminded me of the supportive NY Tech and entrepreneurial community. The journey can be lonely, and many dismiss community events and networking as distractions from the "real work." While that might sometimes be true, Monday night was a reminder that we’re not alone in this journey. We all want to see each other succeed in building the - extremely AI-infused - future we envision. On to the next challenge! And definitely check out these amazing companies & founders: Glist, Gülin Yilmaz (Posokhow), Path, Soar.com, Abood Hannoon, DeepLeads.ai, pre.dev, and In The Loop

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If anyone is in North County San Diego, on Thursday May 2nd, we will be hosting a tech entrepreneur and investor meet up at 5:30pm. We’ll have a couple speakers, one of which is a fin-tech start-up raising a round, followed up by a presentation on the state of the stock & crypto market. We host these events quarterly and usually get a lot of founders and investors to attend. If anyone is interested, please message me and I can send you the details. LaunchPad San Diego #startups #startupincubator #entrepreneur #investing #crypto #meetup

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👉 Implementing AI isn't optional anymore; it's a necessity for survival. As the Founder of The Product Experience Club and CX2 Labs, where I’ve led the development of generative AI platforms for Fortune 500 companies, I've mastered the art of AI and product development. I'm getting a lot of DMs from talented individuals seeking guidance on scaling their business operations with AI. So, I've opened up 5 exclusive 1:1 mentorship slots on Intro ! What can we cover together? ✔️ How to scale AI startups ✔️ Guidance on AI platform development ✔️ Tips on AI-focused product management ✔️ Best practices for automation solutions ✔️ Advice on strategic partnerships ✔️ Insights on fundraising strategies ✔️ How to develop generative AI applications for the real-world ✔️Enterprise sales strategy for selling AI/ML/GenAI Honored to be on Intro alongside world-class experts like Christian Keil (Chief of Staff @Astranis, valued $1.6B), Namrata Sarmah (Nam) (founder & CEO of Women in Product UK & CPO Track), Anand Verma (Dr.) , so many more incredible people in the industry! You can either comment “interested” or secure your spot now over at: intro.co/nikhilvimal Can’t wait to be a resource 🙌

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Over the past couple of years, there's been a noticeable decrease in the openness to share cutting-edge LLM research. I've been fortunate to have lead a group working on advanced Generative AI challenges and to have the opportunity to share our work publicly, potentially impacting a broader audience. Exciting news! Our research, centered on enhancing batch size scalability for LLMs, has been accepted at ICML 2024. We addressed the vital challenge of single-context batch sampling, crucial for generating multiple completions from one context, a common scenario in applications like code-editing IDE tools or ranking among multiple generations. Incremental decoding in such scenarios presents a memory IO-intensive challenge, particularly for large batches and context lengths. Our efforts improve efficiency, resulting in reduced latency, making it suitable for real-time applications such as massively-parallel answer generation without a significant increase in latency. Additionally, it enhances performance when paired with postprocessing techniques like reranking, contributing to overcoming the challenge of scaling model size for improved performance with reranking. Our solution introduces context-aware bifurcated attention, dividing attention in the generalized multi-query family into context and decoding components during incremental decoding. This bifurcation maintains the same computational complexity and delivers identical results as the original attention mechanism, while notably reducing memory IO costs and associated latencies in scenarios with large batch sizes and context lengths. This approach enables generating multiple real-time completions without incurring significant additional latency costs or allows for much larger batch sizes, thereby enhancing ranking performance. For example, using a 16B multi-head model with a 2k context length, we increased the batch size to 128 with bifurcated attention, compared to a batch size of only 5 without it, resulting in pass@k increasing from 59.0% to 84.6% Paper: https://lnkd.in/gXbhc4jT Kudos to the great team I had opportunity to work with Ben Athiwaratkun Sanjay Krishna Gouda Haifeng Qian qing sun Hantian Ding Ramesh Nallapati Sujan Gonugondla Jun Wang Sudipta Sengupta Bing Xiang

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We’re experiencing a massive platform shift to LLMs. Lightspeed's Michael Mignano and I discussed what this shift means for Grammarly, what the industry needs to do to ensure #genAI adoption and value creation, and where I predict true efficiency gains through AI will come from. Hint: it’s not about creating more content. Thanks for having me on, Michael! https://lnkd.in/gpruc99i

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"Finding community is so much harder than founding a company 🚀" That's what a friend said the other day, who just moved to SF. I wished I could have pointed him to something like a magic list of all the SF-based communities directed at new founders. Before moving to SF myself to build my current startup, I wanted such list as well. In fact, I spent a good amount of days googling and googling "top hackerhouses in SF" and "founders community SF", only to find few results, things I already knew and outdated blogposts. Thankfully, On Deck's SEO was solid, so I applied and got accepted and that was my lucky baptism in SF's founder communities. Some folks like Garry Tan, say that SF's uniqueness is not its taxes, but its people. It's the builders, the hustlers, the AI startuppers, even -maybe- the VCs. That's definitely true, as long as you're able to find them! If you can't find them in the first place, there's no point in paying the SF rent, nor a reason to move there. You may as well live in Treasure Island! (fun fact, I do) So, for those like my friend, like myself, and for you, here's *our* imperfect list. Shoutout to the tons of friends who invited me to, hosted me at and co-infiltrated different communities and events over these past few months. Did I miss any other communities/accelerators/hackerhouses? Definitely comment below or DM me and I'll edit ASAP. On Deck Julian Weisser Noémie Federico South Park CommonsZ Fellows Inception Studio Entrepreneur First Founders, Inc. A16Z GAMES SPEEDRUN Y Combinator Techstars Unshackled Ventures Sequoia Capital Pear VC Alchemist Accelerator 500 Global Race Capital HF0 AGI House Rocky Yu SHACK15 Ventures SHACK15 Studio 45 Nate Padgett The Battery The Commons The Long Now Foundation Commonwealth Club World Affairs

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The Care Summit was an incredible conference, made up of world class speakers, mission driven founders and top tier VC’s. To top it off- it was hosted in San Francisco (don’t bet against SF!). I feel really fortunate I was invited to attend. Most people don’t realize the care economy is now a 6 trillion dollar industry, and only growing. Every opportunistic industry gets a lot of attention when capitalist are at work, but oddly Care- something that will impact every human- gets a fraction of the attention it deserves. Why is this? Why at a conference that’s focused on caregiving, longevity, child care and human health was there only a handful of men? On one discussion, one of the moderators asked the panelist in 5 words what they want to see happen between now and next year. If I was given the opportunity to answer, I would have said, “more male participation”. I think it’s critical more women lead, enter venture, build companies and hold executive roles- we need more voices not few- but I am baffled by the absence of men, and the lack of effort on the huge problems at home, at work and in our policies. We must participate and create positive impact, and not sit silent because you feel you are not impacted (news flash: you are). I am leaving San Francisco inspired by conversations I had. I am eager to dig in deeper at Maple as a founder in this space, and at home as a husband, brother, son and father. A big thank you to FamTech.org , Magnify Ventures , Pivotal Ventures , The Holding Co. And every person involved. I look forward to attending next year, and hope more men join in.

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Stability AI, a startup that rode the boom in generative artificial intelligence to a $1 billion valuation before experiencing financial trouble and employee defections, has a new CEO. Prem Akkaraju, former CEO of visual effects company Weta Digital, will step into the role. The 51-year-old Akkaraju is part of a group of investors including former Facebook President Sean Parker that has stepped in to save Stability with a cash infusion that could result in a lower valuation for the firm, which develops products that use Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI image generator. The new funding will likely shrink the stakes of some existing investors, who have collectively contributed more than $100 million. https://lnkd.in/egevkxv3 #artificialintelligence #ai #stabilityai #venturecapital #fundraising #startups #stablediffusion

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"We're just going to steamroll you". So so many startups building new AI products (with hopes of becoming businesses) are just solving near-term obvious problems or filling gaps that they see in current generation AI platforms. The (vast?) majority of these are really just features that will be absorbed by the platforms as they mature. Or as Sam Altman comments in this video - it's not because we don't like you, it's because we have a mission and we're "just going to steamroll you". The insane pace of advancement in platforms at this market stage makes a time-to-market advantage a foolish thing to bet on. Go deeper with critical thinking on moats, customer-centered product experience, and always build ahead of today's models... https://lnkd.in/gXe5nTHf

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