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mijail

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mijail
·3 года назад·discuss
Discovery calls are the initial stage in a selling process. I am biased but "selling" to a customer provides a much more honest picture of the things they truly care about then a generic customer interview. Despite most folks aversion to sales, if you have a compelling story and can narrow in to a general area of pain (which you have already) most people are very willing to hop on a call and tell you exactly the things you need to know. Be sincere, open to their expertise but be willing to challenge and ask prodding questions. This helps test their conviction and set the weights of what will get them to influence internally to purchase - the true kpi of most products. You might feel goofy since they you don't have anything to truly sell yet. Rest assured, your buyers will be very willing to cooperate if you deliver and you will stand out from the crowded majority of those who don't.
mijail
·3 года назад·discuss
@williamcotton - saw this the other day in the prompt engineering post - I enjoyed it. Sent you a message on your site but something looks broken. If you use linkedin I requested to connect.
mijail
·4 года назад·discuss
The "model" is not the hard part! If a pretrained model is generalized enough and valuable enough then it can exist as simple API or a runtime, it stops being a "model." If you have the engineering chops to deploy models in production for your application then deploying a pretrained model is trivial. If its valuable enough to the business then squeezing a few more points by fine tuning the model is worth it.
mijail
·4 года назад·discuss
Kudos to her. Conservation tech is a challenging and exciting test bed for "hackers" because it's a hyper dimensional chessboard of constraints and strategies. It's easy to reduce the solution to "just do this." From one end, poaching is lucrative in areas with massive economic disparity. And from the other, climate change and the pressure we put on natural resources is unbalancing ecosystems driving human wildlife conflict.

A project I've worked on is Trailguard AI, ran by resolve.ngo, the principal is Eric Dinnerstein who is the former chief scientist at WWF. I can say they our running a start up in every sense of the word but the result is beautiful: a satelite/ gsm connected, battery powered AI enabled cryptic trail cam that can be used as a swiss army knife from animal censuses, to poacher detection, illegal logging truck detection and preventing human wildlife content (detect tiger + sound alarm).

Good article on trailguard: https://globalconservation.org/news/tech-parks-trailguard-ai...
mijail
·4 года назад·discuss
The measure of VC is growth and if you are a component to larger systems or programs you will inevitably be throttled. If you are a platform and can own the end to end then you should take VC capital and invest heavily in well connected BD's that are known by the PM's and have a nuanced ability to navigate the orgs.

Palantir (who is end to end) has opened up VC appetites for defense and you see a certain signaling pattern to the VC backed defense start ups vs the traditional small defense business upstart.

I work at a "start up" that develops a component so we took a strategic investment from a defense contractor and that has enabled us to develop core technology and grow commercially while being patient with the arduous cycles of programs.
mijail
·5 лет назад·discuss
"Over the years I have come to the conclusion that the real heroes of ideas are not the people who have them – they are the people who buy them."

Absolutely love this.