Chris, Shawn, and Lukas — The Weights & Biases Journey

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

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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

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:29 The stories behind Weights & Biases

7:45 The W&B tech stack

9:28 Looking back at the beginning

11:42 Hallmark moments

14:49 Favorite product features

16:49 Rewriting the W&B backend

18:21 The importance of customer feedback

21:18 How Chris and Shawn have changed

22:35 How the ML space has changed

28:24 Staying positive when things look bleak

32:19 Lukas' advice to new entrepreneurs

35:29 Hopes for the next five years

38:09 Making a paintbot & model understanding

41:30 Biggest bottlenecks in deployment

44:08 Outro

44:38 Bonus: Under- vs overrated technologies

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