In 2017 The Economist declared data to be the world's most valuable resource. And yet “data insight” is one of those phrases that, while important, is now so ubiquitous it’s been numbed of meaning. So how do you actually get the most meaningful insights from your data, and what does that look like as you also think about crafting the best customer experience? When and what is the best way to use this information... without getting to the dystopian future depicted in, for instance, Minority Report? This episode of the a16z Podcast (based on a discussion that took place at a16z's annual summit event in November 2017) features Suhail Doshi, co-founder and CEO of Mixpanel; Gil Elbaz, founder and CEO of Factual; and Jeff Glueck, CEO of Foursquare; moderated by Lauren Berson. It covers everything from using data to understand context and one's customer base to what personalization really means and how data can impact the physical world.
Suhail Doshi, a YC alumni who previously founded Mixpanel and Mighty, has created a state-of-the-art (SOTA) AI image diffusion model with Playground. The app allows you to talk to it like a graphic designer and helps you create imagery and text for a wide variety of use cases. In this episode of Lightcone, Suhail sits down with the hosts to talk about his experience building Playground with his team, and what it takes to make a SOTA model. Try Playground: https://playground.com/design Read Playground V3 Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.10695 Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 0:00 Intro 1:07 What is Playground? 1:47 What Garry was able to make using Playground 7:04 The focus on text accuracy 10:44 Building a marketplace for Playground 16:00 Prompts are like HTML for graphics 22:25 Creating new design professions 26:13 Using tailwinds of what is happening in language 30:06 Problems with aesthetics evals 32:42 The commercial applications 33:54 When the users you get are not the users you want 40:30 Reflections on going through YC twice 48:30 Running a research lab/startup hybrid vs a pure startup 53:35 What it takes to make a state-of-the-art model 55:09 Outro
Suhail Doshi, founder of YC alumnus Mixpanel and a world-class expert on measurement, details how startups should think about discovering the important facts about how their product is used. You can find the lecture transcript and slides here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/39 Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/