Chris Nelson

🎉 Big congratulations to our incredible team (Haoyu Chen, Nick Greenquist,Yuxing Wang, Sridevi Maharaj, Ruiyang Wu and many more) for delivering several quarters-long impactful features on the Play Store! 🚀 We’re thrilled to have launched key updates like Search Home, Sports Moment, and WearOS recommendations, all designed to enhance personalization and help billions of users worldwide search and discover content they love. 🌍✨ Check out the Play Store Q3 updates: https://lnkd.in/dn5wx8Mi #GooglePlay #Personalization #Recommendation

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Come join us tomorrow in SF to learn more about the latest updates to run AI workloads on Google Cloud!

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Want a preview of what I'm going to be talking about in my keynote for RubyConf? You can catch a glimpse of it here!

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Last year, I lived in SF and flew to LA weekly to attend MBA classes at UCLA. I flew back and forth at least 20 times. I am not a morning person by any means, but this required me to have a routine of waking up at 5:00AM on Sunday, Ubering to SFO to catch the earliest flight that would get me to LA before my classes started at 8:00. I would attend class all day Sunday, work remotely Mondays, attend more classes Monday night and then fly back Tuesday morning just in time to get to the office before standup. I am proud to say that I did not miss a single flight or a single class during this period. Last month, I officially graduated from UCLA Anderson. I wore my graduation cap and gown and lived through an event I had been dreaming about for the past 3 years. Now the big question: was it worth all the flights, tuition costs, and time spent studying? Yes, it was absolutely worth it. And here’s a story that encapsulates why. On one my MBA trips, we had a few executives from the Executive MBA program join us on the trip. One of the executives had immigrated to the US over 20 years ago and was nearly a billionaire. He snuck a few of us Chinese speaking MBA students out for a dinner and afterwards we all grabbed beers by the beach. Towards the end of the dinner he told us that we were no different than him. He pointed at each one of us and told us that we could all become successful too as long we just went for it. I’ve heard similar words from guest speakers, but the informal setting of having a mentor tell us this to our faces while enjoying beers near the beach in a foreign country really made me believe that I could do it. To sum up my MBA experience, being able to learn valuable life lessons from classmates, professors, and guest speakers made me confident that I could pursue whatever I put my mind towards. This is the true value of the MBA in my opinion. So what’s next? Before entering UCLA, my goal was to start my own startup and be a "real" founder. I can proudly say that my dream is starting to become a reality. I will be posting more news about this in the future, but my cofounders and I just raised an angel round and are now working full time on a new startup with a mission that we all care deeply about. #mba #uclaanderson #startup #graduation

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My cofounder Saumil goes on the Stack Overflow Podcast to deep dive on AI Agents! He goes into detail how we leverage AI agents to power automated workflows to accomplish the most complex tasks. Including agents firing off tasks to other agents to tackle the details. Need an agent to verify your work? No problem. Give it a listen and let us know what you think!

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🍜Anybody up for some ramen? I am excited to share that I am back in the garage, building again (it’s actually a house in the Berkeley Hills). We are taking the wraps off of Supercog AI, a new startup focused on solving Application Integration using LLM powered agents. My co-founder in this new venture is a great friend of mine (and a former co-founder partner), Alex Osborne. Alex and I have worked around the application integration space for a long time, and we are unrealistically excited about applying the GenAI stack to this problem. Not many people relish the task to get some bits to move from system A to system B. But it’s a critical job to be done, and that’s led to a lot of brittle scripts, a myriad of inflexible “no code” tools, and a lot of hand crafted SQL. But the power of the Large Language Model, trained on a huge corpus of information, offers a remarkable tool to solve this problem. The LLM you use today already knows the APIs of hundreds of popular systems. It knows the SQL dialects of every major database. It understands the semantics and data schemas of many popular SaaS systems. It understands much of the specific domain in which your business operates. I like to call the AI revolution “the last platform shift”. That may turn out to be hyperbole, but I definitely believe we are in the very early stages of seeing what this new stack can enable. I know we are hardly the first folks to claim that “amazing stuff is coming!”. But this is why Alex and I have decided to focus on a real and hard problem. If we can prove that LLMs can power a new way to solve this problem, it will be the first successful *new* approach in 15 years.. We will have much more to share about this new platform soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in getting a peek - or even better if you have application or data integration tasks that you would like some help with - please reach out because we want to help. #genai #startups #backinthegarage

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I enjoyed learning about the Reflection technique from Andrew Ng, where you ask AI to do a task ("Summarize the Acme deal"), then ask it to reflect on its answer ("Check your answer carefully and highlight any potential hidden challenges"). This extra "Reflection" step can dramatically improve the AI answers -- even allowing older models to outperform newer models. I'd be very interested to see someone apply this technique to a  #BuiltWithEinstein example with an Einstein Copilot Action and an extra Reflection Action that improves the original answer. Full talk from Andrew Ng can be watched here ->

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For me, we’re in the “fun part” of AI right now — hunting for use cases. LLMs have unlocked a wave of capability, but we’re still figuring out where they fit best. VC Tom Tunguz made a great analogy earlier this year: if today’s AI were a direct report, you’d micromanage it. It’s got sky-high motivation (always ready to answer) but relatively low skill. I like this lens for exploring AI applications. Yes, there is a ton of (deserved) excitement around capital-A, capital-I tech companies, but I’m more excited about the AI-enabled businesses that we can create today. Where do you see opportunities for an army of high-motivation, low-skill “workers” to unlock new business potential? #AI #Innovation #ProductDevelopment #FutureOfWork

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Since the YC deadline to hear back for W25 is coming up next week, here’s the story of how we went from 2 students coding in an MIT dorm room to being full-time YC founders building Delve in SF. For all you founders anxiously waiting to hear back, just keep building — you’ll be successful regardless of the decision. -- In Fall 2023, my co-founder Karun Kaushik and I were studying AI at MIT and spending all of our free time building an AI medical scribe to help doctors. We had vaguely heard about YC from a friend who had just gotten accepted but had no plans of applying whatsoever. However when the YC deadline rolled around, we spontaneously decided to put in an application on the very last day. We spent that whole day in Karun’s dorm room typing up the application and filming all the required videos. We finally hit submit the minute of the deadline! By the next day we had already moved on. We went back to the usual rhythm of coding in the dorm room, calling with doctors, attending conferences, etc. If anything, we were even more motivated now to get more traction and be successful regardless. Later that week, while we were eating in the dorm kitchen, I noticed I got an email saying we had a YC interview scheduled. My heart rate spiked. I jumped up out of my seat and immediately told Karun. I never seriously considered YC, but for the first time it hit me that it might actually be a possibility. When the day of the interview rolled around, we did mock interviews with former YC founders and focused mostly on calming our nerves. More important than the actual content of the interview, we wanted to show our excitement for building and hacking together as co-founders. Unfortunately the interview caught us by surprise. The group partners didn't seem to care as much about our actual AI medical scribe. Instead, they seemed more curious about a side idea we had listed in our application that we wrote up in a day. The idea was about streamlining HIPAA compliance (since we had to go through HIPAA for our AI medical scribe). By this point, we were already seriously considering pivoting into this and had made a lot of progress on the idea. The YC interview was our tipping point Not too long after, we got an ominous email titled “YC.” We were freaked out. I could not sleep the entire night. Then, in the middle of class the next day, I got a phone call from Karun with Surbhi on the other end of the line. My heart rate spiked. I ran outside of the classroom. That turned out to be our acceptance call:) -- For everyone out there still waiting to hear back, just keep grinding. Build as if you’ve been rejected and you might just be pleasantly surprised. I’m also always here to help with mock interviews/give advice! We’ve helped a handful of friends through the YC app process and are always here to support other founders!

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Every leader should watch this video. Thanks for sharing Nolan Church! In his book Loonshots, Safi Bahcall breaks down an innovation equation. One of the reasons I love this so much is that it recognises one of my favourite quotes from the late Charlie Munger about the power of incentives: “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” The innovation equation explains what creates innovation and it revolves basically around one idea. If employees gain the most value personally by delivering outputs which benefit the organisation, you’ll have high innovation. If they gain more value by doing anything else, you’ll have lower innovation as they will prioritise those things instead. Equation: Innovation rate = M = (E + S^2 + F) / G Equity Fraction (E) – how much equity does the team have in the success of an idea. This can be tangible (i.e. stock) or intangible (i.e peer recognition). More equity = more innovation. Fitness Ratio (F) – how well employees skills are paired with the work they do. Strong pairing means people are aligned to delivering value through their work (high innovation) rather than by lobbying for favour and playing politics (low innovation). Management Span (S) – The number of direct reports managers have (higher = more innovation, lower = less innovation). Salary Growth (G) – how your salary grows as your rank increases (higher = less innovation). If you look at this equation through the case study of Nvidia (undeniably one of the more innovative companies of our time) you see this playbook being run. - Low level of hierarchy, the Ceo has 60+ direct reports - Generous equity compensation with life changing outcomes for employees - Heavy focus on fitting skills to jobs Running these through the equation, you’d expect a highly innovative business! I love finding one element in a system which can drive an outsize gain in outputs. Especially if it’s easy to do. In this case, implementing a low hierarchy organisational structure is that one element. Taking out hierarchy and expanding the number of direct reports managers have, will dramatically increase the focus on outputs while reducing politics! This in turn generates significant value for the organisation because it focuses everyone on doing what is actually important. That this is literally the opposite of what most companies currently do, makes me like it even more. 🙂 Summary article on the innovation equation from the Harvard Business Review here: https://lnkd.in/eiNKH7fQ

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Getting started with AI can seem daunting, especially when contemplating its safety against data privacy. But past that fear lies a fix for itself: AI tools can be harnessed to overcome cybersecurity hurdles. Join us for an insightful discussion at the intersection of security, building resilience, and emerging technologies like AI, IoT, and others such as operational technology, and products intersecting with information technology and engineering. Get inspired, learn something new, and connect with peers, partners, and Googlers!

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The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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Watching Professor Girotra talk about recent developments in Chinese companies using GenAI and putting that in perspective with what we learn from Western companies, it’s exciting to see the technology’s potential being explored from different angles. Take a look at Kling, the GenAI tool that Kuaishou (a company comparable to TikTok) built to allow its users to generate videos up to two minutes long with a resolution of 1080p / 30 fps. This video is from a prompt: ‘A giant panda is playing guitar by the lake.’ Girotra's video - https://lnkd.in/gfanV4Xk. He's also the author of the Generative AI for Productivity certificate program published by eCornell. #IWork4Dell #GenAI

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You want to do Machine Learning on large scale Marketing solutions ? Check below 🚀

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Want to tease something my team has been working on over at Buffer! The attached image isn't a mockup, but a screenshot of a live prototype of RSS feeds directly in Buffer! It's only available internally and still pretty rough at this point, but we'll have it available for user testing soon. With this enhancement, we hope to help Buffer users easily find new and engaging content to share with their audiences. What do you think? Will RSS feeds in Buffer help you create more content?

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Calling all IT leaders, developers, and practitioners! Ready to explore the future of data in the age of GenAI? Join Google Cloud for Database Day: Sunnyvale on August 27th! **🔥 Here's what you can expect: ** Two tracks packed with insights: one for IT Leaders & Executives, and another for Developers & Database Practitioners. Expert-led sessions on topics like building GenAI apps with Google Cloud databases, maximizing PostgreSQL ROI, and mastering Cloud SQL. Hands-on labs and demos to level up your skills and connect with peers. Don't miss this chance to build your GenAI future. Register now - spots are filling up fast! #GoogleCloud #DatabaseDays #GenAI #DataInnovation

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