Christian Berczely

Large-Scale Operations: The Inescapable Role of Technology By Julio Barcelo, CEO, Bespoke Cypher In the realm of high-value business operations, exceeding the $100 million threshold signifies a fundamental truth: success is contingent upon meticulously orchestrated systems. This intricate network, requires every component to function flawlessly. A critical error in judgement: the belief that sound business practices alone are sufficient for large-scale ventures. While proficient sales strategies and exceptional product quality are necessary foundations, neglecting technological infrastructure is an invitation to disaster. The Mandate of Technological Integration  Large-scale operations demand a level of complexity that necessitates automation. Manual management of these intricate processes is not only inefficient but invites human error. Integration of the appropriate technology streamlines workflows, automates repetitive tasks, and minimizes the risk of costly mistakes. Data: The Indispensable Resource  In the contemporary data-driven landscape, the ability to harness insights reigns supreme. The power to gather, scrupulously analyze, and strategically leverage data empowers informed decision-making. Without the appropriate technological foundation, vital information remains scattered and inaccessible. This hinders strategic planning and fosters missed opportunities or potentially disastrous oversights. Uncompromising Security  Financial data, intellectual property, and customer information – all classified as invaluable assets. Large-scale operations are particularly vulnerable to breaches or disruptions, which can inflict devastating financial and reputational damage. Robust security solutions serve as the guardians of sensitive information, ensuring business continuity. The Inevitable Price of Technological Neglect   To be clear: millions of dollars can be hemorrhaged from a large-scale operation even when everything appears carefully executed. Consider a missed shipment due to outdated logistics software or a fraudulent transaction slipping through an inadequate security system. The potential cost of such errors or gains can easily eclipse any savings achieved by neglecting technological investment. Investing in the Orchestration of Success  By strategically investing in the right technology and ensuring meticulous configuration, large-scale operations achieve an unparalleled level of efficiency, mitigate inherent risks, and gain a significant competitive edge. At Bespoke Cypher, we are dedicated to empowering businesses like yours to achieve this optimal state. Conclusion: A Symphony of Success  A flawlessly conducted symphony exemplifies the ideal state of a large-scale operation – every element plays a vital role. Do not permit outdated technology to disrupt the harmonious rhythm of your success. Contact Bespoke Cypher today and allow us to orchestrate an efficient and secure path to achieving your financial objectives. 

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🌱 SBIR grants have played a pivotal role in our journey at Vigilant Aerospace, but turning research into a market-ready product isn’t easy. In my interview with the Boston Computation Club, hosted by @maxvonhippel, on tech entrepreneurship, I discuss how we’ve navigated this challenge. Watch the full interview for more insights on government funding and product commercialization. Follow the link below to my blog to watch the full interview. #SBIR #GovernmentFunding #Innovation #Startups https://zurl.co/AkVj

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Over the past two years, Integral Labs had the privilege of contributing to the creation of the Polkadot Community Foundation. Polkadot has already pioneered one of the most active and robust DAO governance systems to date, including tokenholder management of a nine-figure treasury. As the DAO continues to mature, the need to represent and serve tokenholders’ interests off-chain has become increasingly apparent. That’s where the Polkadot Community Foundation comes in. Designing the corporate structure, governance, and operating model, Integral Labs joined a working group led by our friends at Actum Node with a mission to extend the reach of Polkadot's onchain governance into the offchain world. This project was a first in the industry, with a novel design that stands apart from traditional DAO "wrapper" structures. Unlike foundations that subsume treasury assets and delegate limited powers back to the DAO, the Polkadot Community Foundation works as an optional, unopinionated side-car entity that any DAO member may utilize in their proposals. This ensures the DAO retains full autonomy and control of its treasury while enabling offchain activities such as holding real world assets, entering commercial agreements, making fiat payments, owning IP, and more—all for the benefit of, and under the explicit direction of, the tokenholders. The governing documents and bylaws are open source and available for future use by Polkadot or other DAOs. We hope is that this modular design becomes a blueprint for a future constellation of real-world businesses to permissionlessly cooperate and compete to serve DAOs by extending their existing onchain governance systems. The Polakdot community voted with over 98% support to establish the Polkadot Community Foundation. Now incorporated, community members have begun to publish treasury proposals that utilize the foundation, including the creation of what will be the first mobile app owned by an open community, and increasing accountability for vendors and service providers in the ecosystem. You can read more here: https://lnkd.in/ebCJKsjD Integral Labs is proud to have contributed to this project alongside Michael D'Alto of Actum Node, James Hutchings, ACA, CFA, Theo Louw, Michael Preston, and Kevin Foster-Archibald CA(SA) of Autonomous, Edward Noyons of Marfire, Matthew Shaw and Gregory Peacock of Webslinger Advisors, Glenn Kennedy of Leeward Management Limited, Jonathan Bain of Bridgestream, Ignatius N., Jonathan Hernandez, and David Manadom (formerly) of Fenwick & West, Melissa Lim and Justin Wretham of Walkers, Björn Wagner, Raul Ignacio Romanutti, Dieter Fishbein, and the Polkadot community.

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The New York ecosystem for dual-use technology is small but strong and growing rapidly. Thanks to companies like Decisive Point and @a16z who continue to support the community with networking events for founders, investors, and community members. More and more founders are recognizing the value in partnering with the DOD as a strong way to support the country's national security interests while hopefully decreasing the tax burden on citizens regarding government spend as commercially available technology becomes more available and affordable for government organizations. Not only this, but the DOD serves as a great test bed and sandbox for emerging technologies and talent. #dualuse #emergingtech #defensetech #Kilsar

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The recent CCA program award to Anduril highlights a vital case study for VCs on navigating defense acquisitions and gauging startup maturity from a government perspective. Typically, startups begin with SBIR awards, but the award’s utility varies across agencies, offering weak signal for investors. Anduril’s initial SBIR in 2019 was for $50K; at Machina Labs we secured our first SBIR in 2020 for over double that amount. However, many firms disappear at this stage, so Phase 1 SBIRs are not strong indicators for VC investment; they mainly serve to de-risk tough scientific and technical challenges. Progressing to Phase 2 SBIR, which focuses on commercial viability, both Anduril and Machina have advanced, using this stage to further de-risk engineering for commercial use. Importantly, funding for Phases 1 and 2 often does not indicate product-market fit as it does not typically come directly from the customer’s budget but is more accessible than other government funds. The narrative changes with Phase 3, which is geared toward actual technology acquisition and is a robust indicator of market fit. Both Anduril and Machina, as well as Blue Force Tech (BFT is the company Anduril acquired last year and developed their CCA), have secured Phase 3 awards, suggesting strong government interest in these technologies. To bridge the gap to program of records (like CCA program), which the government budgets for two years in advance, transition funding mechanisms such as STRATFI or APFIT are used. Anduril and BFT have had those. We are working with our customers to secure that. Anduril made a very smart move and strategically acquired BFT, which was likely ahead in that two years to program of records to expedite this transition, killing two birds with one stone, gaining hardware expertise and an accelerated path to funding. In summary, we at Machina Labs are perhaps a couple of years behind Anduril but are aggressively pursuing technology development and scale to meet and exceed our customers’ needs. That being said, nothing is guaranteed with government funding, but we are working very hard with our customers to earn their business. So far, they seem to be happy with us. Keep in mind we have had fraction of the private funding Anduril has gotten to date but going toe to toe in meeting government need! Disclaimer: I am not a government funding expert and my comments only stems from my specific understanding of government acquisition process from tech startups shaped by my experience at Machina. Applogzie if there are any unintentional mistakes

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The Drake equation [1] presents a probabilistic framework to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations within the Milky Way galaxy. It factors in variables such as the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planetary systems, the number of planets capable of supporting life, and the probability of life emerging on those planets. Ultimately, it illustrates how a sequence of seemingly improbable events can converge to create extraordinary outcomes. In many ways, building a successful startup mirrors this equation. The path from inception to becoming an industry leader is filled with daunting challenges, and yet, with the right combination of vision, execution, and talent, a startup can emerge as one of the few "habitable" entities in a competitive ecosystem. Among those, only a select few will truly evolve into sustainable, thriving organizations — those that will "hold life." Now, we're looking for engineers who are excited about helping grow our "planet" into a thriving, life-sustaining force in the tech universe. Join us as we expand and conquer new frontiers. https://lnkd.in/gPuQ3mFQ [1] https://lnkd.in/gpw9aaY8

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This is such an instructive interview. Servicetitan and lessons for vertical SaaS cos. https://lnkd.in/ghBXGrk7

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Huge takeaway re #AI Regulation today at Perkins Coie. If you are using AI #Agents, make sure you know what they are doing and saying. Good #monitoring and #visibility are required to ensure your company will be on the right side of litigation and regulation. #SFTechweek

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I’m excited to share this one! Redactive has raised a $11.5M seed round -- their mission is to become the trusted GenAI engineer for enterprise teams. Blackbird co-led this round alongside Felicis with participation from Atlassian Ventures and Zapier. Andrew, Alexander and Lucas are working to solve an urgent problem hidden in plain sight – empowering GenAI applications to meet their promise of "magic" in an enterprise setting. GenAI applications are only as useful as the data that they have access to, and for most enterprises, the most valuable data is sensitive and permissioned. We all want a chatbot (“ChatGPT for…”) at work that can search the data that we share in private Slack conversations or store in private folders on Sharepoint but first, we need to trust that our data will be kept safe – from prying eyes and accidental disclosure to others in the organisation who should not see it. Redactive keeps your sensitive data safe, giving developers the trust to connect it to GenAI applications and build products that you will love. Here's to the next decade. https://lnkd.in/gPuEAFvW

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2024 Midyear Proptech Outlook 👀 “AI dominates the discourse, but the conversation is evolving,”  Ryan Masiello  "Owners and operators are working through developing data strategies to unlock AI’s value." " ‘Winning’ companies are focusing their energy on providing real-time data that fuels smarter large-cap decision-making at a time when capital is tight, and improving the customer’s experience in the spaces they inhabit " Nick Romito "Although venture capital investment is down, it’s not out" Aaron Ru “Despite the headwinds, we think the sector remains ripe for a continual digital transformation overall,” Frank Spadafora, As always with new and ongoing challenges, there is still considerable opportunity.... What is your take? Full article https://lnkd.in/eq32QbXk #proptech #CRE #commercialrealestate

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Join us! Many thanks to Aptible (and as always to Primary Venture Partners and Engineer Access) for sponsoring our monthly Startup CTOs event series. Tomorrow night we have over 50 series A+ venture backed CTOs and VPEs connecting with and learning from their peers. ​​This month we have a fireside chat with Ariel Pérez, VP Engineering, Measurement and Learning at Split. We'll be discussing how he runs a single large team of 25 with a total of three managers where the team dynamically self organizes around the work to be done and the managers are not necessarily working with their reports on any given project. ​In addition we have a special lightening video interview with Heidi Helfand, author of Dynamic Reteaming who shares a little bit about her experiences and the patterns that can be used to make engineering orgs more resilient to change. We only have a couple of slots left, but if you'd like to attend tomorrow night, apply ASAP - link in the first comment! Or ping me (or comment below) if you'd like to be notified of future events!

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Today is the last day for SXSW panel voting! Would greatly appreciate your vote for this panel I’m on with Caitlin Krause, Gabriella Chihan Stanley, and Rolando Masís-Obando that focuses on humans in the loop of technology such as AR, VR, digital twins, robotics, automation, AI, and virtual worlds. Our panel will dive into how these technologies can enhance human connection, collaboration, and creativity while ensuring wellbeing, but reminding ourselves that the humans in the loop is essential. #sxsw #digitaltransformation https://lnkd.in/gF99QHc6

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Amazing turnout & insightful discussion for our AI x Blockchain event!! More to come

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Arcee.ai is building domain specific models for enterprises & startups who don’t need to present their data in the prose of an 18th century poet. It's W9 / Q2 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Arcee, a Seed stage startup building Small Language Models (SLMs) so companies can deploy their own proprietary models quickly & cheaply without hallucinations or purchasing GPUs. Just to state the obvious, AI is booming! You know this, I know this, we all know this. But Enterprise AI spending is still a minority of overall enterprise software spend so we are really *just* getting started. Arcee was started by Mark McQuade & Brian Benedict who worked together as early employees at Hugging Face and were soon joined by Jacob Solawetz. Brian & Mark talked to a LOT of enterprise & mid market companies working to figure out how to build and use AI internally. Unsurprisingly, there were gaps. Brian, Mark & Jacob set out to give companies a better way to use their data to build proprietary models. Arcee can deploy customer models into production on a client side VPC (virtual private cloud) within a couple weeks. As Arcee rolls out their SaaS offering in the coming months serving startups to F500 companies, all customers will need to do is upload their data, pre-train a model, and merge it - all with button clicking. For Thomson Reuters, they launched an entire model around their Checkpoint product which was deployed 96% cheaper with 23% higher performance than their original model trained with GPT 4 and a “retrieval augmented generation” RAG system. Arcee has only been out in the market since October 2023 and has already surpassed a seven figure ARR run rate for 2024. They’re currently growing 40% q/q! Hiring will increase this summer and their team of 15 will hopefully double into the end of 2024 across most functions - including GTM, Engineering, and Research. Naturally they’ll be looking for people interested in building their career in AI and would love for many of these jobs to be in Boston where Brian Benedict calls home.. They work with small startups and enterprises and will be expanding both the customers and verticals they serve as their SaaS offering is unveiled. AWS and MongoDB are two big partners they work closely with and they most recently won MongoDB’s 2024 AI Partner of the Year award. Operators to Know (Locally): -Malikeh Ehghaghi, Applied NLP Research Engineer -Charles Goddard, Senior Research Engineer -Vladimir Karpukhin, AI Researcher -Tyler Odenthal, Solutions Engineering Lead -Mary MacCarthy, Head of Growth & Marketing -Luke Meyers, Applied NLP & Research Engineer -Michael Nason, Founding Software Engineer -Shamane Siri, PhD, Head of Applied NLP Research -Gomathy V., Senior Applied NLP & Research Engineer If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments! And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you next week, will you?? #bostontech #startups #AI

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Catch up on the latest news in one place by visiting Teckedin.com ___________________ We hand-curate from well-respected sites like SiliconANGLE & theCUBE "Glean’s generative artificial intelligence platform differs from consumer-oriented services like OpenAI LLC’s ChatGPT by including features that are unique to business scenarios. That includes the ability to accept multi-step prompts that automate complex workflows and to access popular enterprise applications via more than 100 connectors." Glean #AI #workflow #automation #chatgpt #genai #teckedin

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