Emerging Technologies

Navigating Partnerships with Unicorns and Large Enterprises: Protecting AI Startups' Interests

This article explores the challenges faced by AI startups when partnering with unicorns and large enterprises, and provides strategies to protect their interests. It suggests engaging legal expertise to negotiate favorable terms and review contractual agreements, implementing NDAs and non-compete agreements, and considering jurisdiction and governing law. On the technical side, it recommends encryption, access controls, authorization, watermarking, model protection, federated learning, secure collaboration frameworks, and regular auditing and monitoring. By combining legal and technical safeguards, AI startups can mitigate the risks of theft or unauthorized usage of their AI models.

Finding the Career Path for You

This article discusses the importance of pivoting through different roles in order to achieve personal and professional satisfaction in a product management career path. The author shares their experience of transitioning from a product development and engineering career path to a product management leadership role, only to find that the added responsibilities were not what they had expected. They eventually downsized to an individual contributor role, where they could focus on technology innovation. The article emphasizes the importance of taking risks and measuring success/failures in order to achieve transformative success.

Using A Demo To Solve A Dispute

Two engineers faced resistance when exploring a technology to use in development, so they created a demo to prove its usefulness and gain buy-in from their manager and team. The demo was successful, and the technology was implemented across the team. This experience taught them that data and demos can be effective tools for resolving conflicts about technology decisions.

Team Development Framework for new managers

When transitioning from an Individual Contributor to a Manager, it can feel overwhelming. This post focuses on the mindset shift needed to better utilize the advice available for new Managers. The key difference between the two roles is the core action (Developing code vs. Developing team) and how it is done (high quality vs. high engagement). Managers must have a core set of skills such as building trust, active listening, decision-making, and emotional intelligence. Despite having the development framework and required skills, being a Manager is still hard due to the high cost of being wrong, solutions not always being logical, and non-determinism.

Discovering Non-Traditional Pathways to Success

This is the story of a software engineering intern who, without a college degree, worked his way up to become the CTO/co-founder of a startup. He began tinkering with technology in middle school and continued to develop his skills in high school and college. He joined a startup through an online tech group and worked with the CEO to develop a product that would give users cashback rewards for paying with their bank. Through many iterations, he grew into the team lead position and eventually the VP of engineering, helping to manage the product and find the right product-market fit.

Taking a Product from Inception to Market

This is a story of a successful product launch from idea to market in three months. The product was an advertising technology company, a demand-side platform, that allowed customers to buy ad space in real-time bidding exchanges. The team needed to prove to advertisers that the investment was worth it from an ROI perspective, so they studied foot traffic measurements and built a proof-of-concept of their own foot traffic measurement product. After validating the findings, they created training and pitch materials to present to potential clients. They imposed budget constraints to get the ideal volume of use and traffic for their study. Ultimately, they were able to get the product to market before they ran out of resources.