Chris, Shawn, and Lukas — The Weights & Biases Journey
Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI - A podcast by Lukas Biewald
You might know him as the host of Gradient Dissent, but Lukas is also the CEO of Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML tools platform!In this special episode, the three W&B co-founders — Chris (CVP), Shawn (CTO), and Lukas (CEO) — sit down to tell the company's origin stories, reflect on the highs and lows, and give advice to engineers looking to start their own business.Chris reveals the W&B server architecture (tl;dr - React + GraphQL), Shawn shares his favorite product feature (it's a hidden frontend layer), and Lukas explains why it's so important to work with customers that inspire you.The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-wandb-cofounders---Connect with us:📍 Chris' Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanpelt📍 Shawn's Twitter: https://twitter.com/shawnup📍 Lukas' Twitter: https://twitter.com/l2k📍 W&B's Twitter: https://twitter.com/weights_biases---Timestamps: 0:00 Intro1:29 The stories behind Weights & Biases7:45 The W&B tech stack9:28 Looking back at the beginning11:42 Hallmark moments14:49 Favorite product features16:49 Rewriting the W&B backend18:21 The importance of customer feedback21:18 How Chris and Shawn have changed22:35 How the ML space has changed28:24 Staying positive when things look bleak32:19 Lukas' advice to new entrepreneurs35:29 Hopes for the next five years38:09 Making a paintbot & model understanding41:30 Biggest bottlenecks in deployment44:08 Outro44:38 Bonus: Under- vs overrated technologies---Subscribe and listen to our podcast today!👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify