B2BaCEO (with Ashu Garg)
Dec 16, 2019
How to Be a VC Jr. (Adi Garg & Ashu Garg)
playlist_add
This one is for you really, really early-stage founders. Fifth-grader Adi Garg interviews his dad about startups and venture capital and chocolate.
More episodes from B2BaCEO (with Ashu Garg)
Nov 17, 2023
How to Power the AI Boom (Robert Nishihara, Co-Founder & CEO of Anyscale)
In this episode of B2BaCEO, I speak with Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale. Anyscale’s aspiration is to build the fastest, most cost-efficient infrastructure for running LLMs and AI workloads. When it is successful, Anyscale will be to the AI era what Microsoft was for the PC era: the underlying operating system on which all AI applications are developed and run.
Anyscale is built on Ray, an open-source compute framework that Robert and his co-founders developed as PhD students at UC Berkeley. Under the guidance of Professor Ion Stoica, who also co-founded Conviva and Databricks, the team sought to make distributed computing broadly accessible. Anyscale was then launched as a fully managed platform for Ray, making even the toughest problems in distributed computing easy for developers to tackle. Today, Anyscale is a billion-dollar business powering mission-critical AI use cases at companies like Amazon, Cohere, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Visa.
If you’ve been a PhD student at UC Berkeley, created a popular open-source framework, and built a billion-dollar business on top of it, you’ve likely learned a thing or two along the way. Robert’s story offers valuable lessons for fellow founders and builders at all stages of the startup journey.
playlist_add
Sep 15, 2023
How to Build, Scale, and Sell a Startup (Tracy Young, Co-Founder of TigerEye & PlanGrid)
My guest this month is Tracy Young, the co-founder and former CEO of PlanGrid, a productivity tool for construction companies. From going through YC and losing a co-founder to cancer, to being acquired by Autodesk for $875 million, Tracy has picked up many valuable lessons that other founders and CEOs can learn from.
Our conversation unpacks these lessons, including finding (and keeping!) product-market fit, navigating startup growing pains, showing up effectively to board meetings, and managing the emotional toll of fundraising. We also speak about Tracy’s new venture, TigerEye, and what she’s doing differently the second time around.
After having countless conversations with founders over the years, I thought I’d heard it all. Tracy proved me wrong. Her story serves as an inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs in any industry.
playlist_add
Jun 2, 2023
How to Deploy AI in Your Company (Matei Zaharia, CTO & Co-Founder of Databricks)
If you’re not hardcore about AI, then stop the podcast now — because this episode for real technology nerds. Ashu’s guest is Matei Zaharia, CTO and cofounder of Databricks, and a professor of computer science at Stanford University.
Ashu and Matei cover a lot of ground — most of it technical, all of it very relevant for anyone who’s serious about building with artificial intelligence. They start with a discussion of Databricks’ early days: how the startup established a foothold in a market dominated by entrenched incumbents and some of the challenges Matei and his cofounders faced.
The rest of the conversation is all about AI. Matei breaks down the most common challenges that enterprises run into when attempting to adopt AI. He shares tips for how startups can best deploy foundation models. And he speculates on what the game-changing new use cases for AI will be over the next two years.
Matei also pulls back the kimono on some of the cutting-edge machine-learning research he and his team at Stanford are working on. Finally, listen to the end for a fascinating exchange about artificial intelligence beyond large language models.
playlist_add