I met my two amazing co-founders, Vikas and Gabriel, at Apple, where we were building some wild, futuristic stuff that will one day ship. Fingers crossed.
What we learned the hard way is that machine learning is kind of a pain in the ass. Every single team we worked with or spoke to struggled mightily with their models. It was always a long, gruelling journey to get from prototype to production. Improving a model’s performance was akin to fumbling around in search of objects in a dark room; we knew the solutions were somewhere within reach, but finding them took much longer than necessary. If only we could just switch on a light.
That’s what Openlayer is about. Switching on a light. Making it easy and repeatable for anyone to build trustworthy, beautiful experiences using the incredible gift of artificial intelligence.
It’s been a heck of a ride already. Y Combinator was like drinking from a fire hose. Fundraising was a pure adrenaline rush. Building something has never felt more rewarding. Since we began nine months ago, I feel like time has dilated and suddenly each day is 48 hours long.
I know now that starting something special is about so much more than just writing code. My time is spent obsessing over how we can perfect our product, architecture, infrastructure, internal processes and external messaging. Along with a plethora of technical skills, I’ve learned to hire talented people, fundraise, sell, bookkeep, build financial models, review legal documents, run effective pilots and most critically, contextualize every action through an outcome-oriented lens.
Every moment so far has been exhilarating, and I can’t wait for what is yet to come. Here’s to the future and our role in shaping it.