Jeremy Burton

Absolutely simple yet powerful way to look at leadership. Its an "ability to reason thru" to contribute positively when people come to you or show you piece of work/situation etc. One can easily use this to find out true leaders at workplace. Designations dont make leaders but ability does (even without any formal designation ) #Leadership

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We're launching the inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks, a deep dive into the metrics and trends observed across the early-stage enterprise cloud market. This is the first look at some of the business data around GenAI in SaaS. Some initial observations: 1) 60% of SaaS companies have already integrated GenAI into their offerings (60% of these as part of their current product and 40% as a new product), and an additional 20% are planning to do so this year. Almost half aren't monetizing these features. Those that are are primarily experimenting with both usage-based and flat fee pricing models. 2) Most companies are utilizing OpenAI as their primary LLM, but many are experimenting with multiple models - and we are noticing an early trend towards intelligently routing GenAI inference requests to different models based on cost, performance, and security. 3) Though we are in the initial innings of GenAI, we are seeing some positive signals - companies that implemented GenAI had 7% higher NDR than those that did not. Still early days, but we'll be doing this benchmarking report regularly to track and share how things progress in this new era. Link to report in comments.

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We just concluded Embiggen X’s strategy for 2025. For almost two years, we’ve experienced conversations and priorities shift for large companies - more focus on innovating the core the business and less on non-core innovation initiatives. We’ve seen large global companies in the west close down their innovation labs, corporate venturing units, and let go of non-core innovation teams — or at the very least, decreased spending in venturing activities. This is also true for large corporates in Southeast Asia. Simultaneously, we’ve been getting into conversations with CEO’s asking more questions on AI & Digital Business Transformation. No, I’m not talking about building apps. We’re getting questions around: - How do we rewire the “guts” of our operations for us to be able to “scale profitably”? - How do we fix our “spaghetti & siloed” operations? - How do we make sure that we don’t just “buy more” off-the-shelf tech platforms that don’t talk to each other and complicating our already inefficient ops? - How do we increase our NPS score by transforming our customer experience? - Can you help us build a holistic digital business transformation strategy and help us execute too? - How and where can we use AI to become grow better? This is why Q4 of last year in the midst of business challenges, we decided to shift focus from Corporate Venture Building and spin off an AI & Digital Business Transformation company, Embiggen X (https://lnkd.in/geVM4BCF), from the Embiggen Group. Within less than a year, we’ve expanded our operations in Southeast Asia to Europe and 2024 as our highest revenue & profit generating year. We’ve served companies from Insurance, Supply Chain, Telco, Conglomerates, Construction, and Consumer Services to date. We help from Strategy to Execution. I’m beyond grateful to the operating team that made this new chapter of our journey possible. Embiggen X Managing Partner & COO, Xavier (X) Marzan; Partner & Head of Europe, Nicolas Souvlakis (calling in from Switzerland); Junior Partner & CAO Bien Herrera; Partner & CTO Robert Newgen; Chief Growth Advisor Gary de Ocampo, GICD; Advisory Board Member and Incoming Board Director Cliff Eala; Head of Artificial Intelligence Miguel Testa (calling in from Canada); as well as more partners, clients, and supporters. Big goals & challenges up ahead. Excited for whats to come. Onwards & upwards. 🚀

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Learn a development pattern to systematically improve the accuracy and reliability of LLM applications in our new short course, Improving Accuracy of LLM Applications, built in partnership with Lamini and Meta, and taught by Lamini’s CEO, Sharon Zhou, PhD, and Meta’s Senior Director of Partner Engineering, Amit Sangani. (Disclosure: I am an investor in Lamini.) The path to tuning an LLM application can be complex. In this course, you'll learn a systematic sequence of steps for improving accuracy by reducing hallucinations:  - Create an evaluation dataset to measure model accuracy - Add prompt engineering and self-reflection - Fine-tune your model including "memory-tuning" which is a new method of embedding facts in an LLM Using the Llama 3-8B parameter model, you will: - Build a text-to-SQL agent with a custom schema and simulate situations where it hallucinates - Understand the difference between instruction fine-tuning, which gives pre-trained LLMs instructions to follow, and memory fine-tuning - See how Performance-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) reduce training time by 100x and Mixture of Memory Experts (MoME) reduces it even further I appreciate Meta releasing the Llama's family of open models -- this course gives an example of the unique type of work that developers can do with such models. Please sign up here: https://lnkd.in/gyxHwPkp

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I like this idea of "technical taste". It gets into where software engineering is as much creative art as it is science. Four great takeaways (IMHO) for software devs in this era in particular: 1. Aspiring engineers should cultivate a sense of curiosity, experiment with different tools and technologies, and embrace a mindset of continuous learning. 2. AI has the potential to streamline processes and enhance productivity for engineers, but it may also lead to disruptions in traditional software development workflows. 3. Developing technical taste and judgment is essential for making informed decisions about which technologies and approaches to pursue. 4. Collaboration and open-mindedness are key to leveraging the full potential of AI and staying ahead of technological advancements. I also really liked these two quotes from Sam Schillace: 1. "The right time to do something is when you have that feeling in the pit of your stomach that's like, 'oh, this is a great idea and it's going to suck to build because nothing's ready yet.'" 2. "Technical taste is like, 'how well have you consolidated that set of experiences and heuristics into judgment that you can apply accurately when you see new things?'" 3. "It may be the case that very small teams can do very large projects, or like we were talking about before, it may be the case we're just going to get really ambitious about what we try to do with the same size of teams, which is kind of where I would put my money." Great job on continuing to put out great episodes, Brett Berson and team First Round Capital! #ai #engineering #softwaredevelopment

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Reflections on my first-ever self-driving Uber (Waymo) experience... When I told my family and friends about my first Waymo, autonomous vehicle experience, I was surprised by the reactions. "You are so brave." "Weren't you scared?" "I have driven in SF, that is insane." "I never even knew that was a thing." "That sounds so risky." "Only in California." I reacted by saying that these cars were all over the city, and they seemed very safe, reliable, and even cool. Most importantly, they really seemed to work. In fact, I recall watching people exit the vehicles, and they all looked happy, excited, and really glad they took the risk. I began to reflect on how this experience equates to pharmaceutical companies first choosing to use Mobile Locker over the safer, more comfortable, and more visible choice(s). After all, the small, lesser-known experience is a bit riskier, right? But in the end, it turns out we, too, are "all over the city," with nearly 60 satisfied pharma/med device clients. And yes, I think most would say we are safe, reliable, and...(well, okay, maybe not necessarily cool.) Finally, most every one of our clients is happy, excited, and really glad that they took the risk. Why...because Mobile Locker really works. So if you are seeking to provide more impact and value to your field and to the HCPs you are targeting with your digital messaging... Consider riding with us here at Mobile Locker. #pharmaindustry #meddevices #hcpengagement

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AI memory is fundamental for conversational AI and AI agents. It is critical for building personalized experiences and improving reasoning. Check out Letta’s course to understand how to use AI memory to enhance the customization and quality of your AI app.

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Task-specific models and routing architectures are the future. Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale, is seeing hybrid strategies emerge, where businesses are evaluating different types of models for different use cases. With the rapid advancement of AI tech, it won't be long before open-source models are "good enough" for the majority of business tasks. The natural progression from here is to develop smaller, task-focused models using proprietary company data. As Robert puts it: "You're going to need small, fast models. And task-specific models have a huge advantage when it comes to cost and speed because you can achieve the same quality with a smaller model if it's specialized." Another interesting development: the growing use of routing architectures. Imagine a classifier as a kind of traffic controller for your AI queries. It assesses the complexity of each query and directs it to the most suitable model: simpler requests are handled by smaller models, while complex ones are passed on to larger, more sophisticated models. “If you do it right,” Robert says, “you can achieve something like the cost of the smaller model with the quality of the more advanced model.” Dive deeper into AI architecture trends in my full discussion with Robert on the B2BaCEO podcast here: https://lnkd.in/ghigvERn

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Databricks is thrilled to share that our FedRAMP High agency ATO is now accessible on the Data Intelligence Platform. This milestone marks our continued commitment to providing secure and compliant Data & AI solutions to Government agencies. #DataIntelligence #PublicSector #FedRAMPHigh #AnalyticsSolutions #CloudComputing

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Join us on August 29 at 9am PT | 12pm ET for an exclusive webinar with NVIDIA. We’ll dive into fine-tuning LLMs and deploying them at scale—securely and cost-effectively—across any infrastructure. You’ll Gain insight on: 💡 Efficiency boosts with NVIDIA NIM 🔧 Optimized resource use and performance 🧠 Advanced model training with NVIDIA NeMo 📈 Scalable deployment strategies 👉 Don’t miss out—reserve your spot now! <https://gag.gl/rJT3Xq> #AI #MachineLearning #Webinar #NVIDIA

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I’m proud to announce that Oxa are now live in California! This milestone marks the 2nd US State and 3rd US city this year to deploy shared, electric, autonomous transport “driven by Oxa” software and operated by our dear partners Beep, Inc. It’s an exciting time to be at Oxa as we knock each major milestone out of the park. Our product is developing so so fast. We are commercially deployed across public transportation and industrial and commercial industries. Our team has doubled in size in the past 24 months, whilst still remaining super-lean and capital-efficient. But most importantly, we are innovating in ways that are breaking down the barriers to scale. This is where the music is today. Nobody said this industry would be built in a day. But it gets better day-by-day. Just like every other giant leap. One day, everyone on the planet will benefit from self driving vehicles of all kinds doing all manner of commercial service. This is our steadfast mission… one state, one city, one nation, one energy-plant, one port, one airport, one factory, one logistics yard… one day at a time. My deepest respect and thanks to everyone that works so hard to change how the Earth moves, not least our Oxbots, our customers and our world-class partners and investors. Beep, Inc. Ford Pro Google bp Tencent Hostplus Ocado Group Trimble Inc. eVersum mobility solutions Kiko Ventures Parkwalk Advisors Bradshaw Electric Vehicles NVIDIA ZF Group

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With the progress of Waymo and the Tesla event yesterday, something I wrote about in 2021 could become true as soon as 2027. In some industries (like ride sharing), marketplaces are just an intermediary step to aggregate independent suppliers. Ultimately, companies will figure out how to provide the service themselves at scale, and we'll have a few very large "super-suppliers". But in other industries (like e-commerce) where the consumer values creativity, consolidated suppliers won't be able to provide all of the new and interesting things that customers want, and we'll still need independent suppliers. Those industries will stay in marketplace mode much longer.

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WAYMO: THE BIGGEST SUPPLY CHAIN TECH INVESTMENT OF THE YEAR The supply chain technology markets are heating up. In the biggest transportation tech investment of the year, Waymo just announced a $5.6 billion financing. The investment, led by Alphabet Inc. (which owns the majority already), also included Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Investments, Perry Creek Capital, Silver Lake, Tiger Global Management and T. Rowe Price. Waymo will use the capital to pursue leadership in the autonomous vehicle arena, with a focus on its Waymo One robotaxi offering. Would you get in a self-driving taxi? Most people don't realize this, but there are already 100,000 weekly trips in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta and Austin. I predict robotaxis will be in most major markets within 3 years. What other winners are you seeing in the autonomous transportation arena? #supplychain #transportation #tech #autonomous https://lnkd.in/e8HAhReY

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At the beginning of this month, the infra team at Orb gathered for our Q2 infra offsite at HanaHaus in Palo Alto. Orb's customer growth in Q1 far exceeded even our optimistic projections — and is often the case in any org, this put a tremendous amount of load on Orb's infrastructure stack. Here's what is top of mind for our team as we look to the next few months: 1. We take uptime & reliability extremely seriously and have a strong track record of this — we proactively invest in our stack to avoid scrambling when issues happen. Over the last six months, we've invested in read/write workload isolation, more robust rate limiting, and making it much easier to spin up tenant-specific clusters of our core services and datastores. This has been a huge win already for our largest customers and in Q2, we're driving towards complete tenant workload isolation all the way from the API layer down. 2. Infrastructure often gets saddled with a really tough oncall rotation. At Orb, we share this workload across engineering with a larger rotation, but infrastructure owns the horizontal platform to make product engineers successful. In Q1, the infra team invested energy in aggressively making oncall better, and in the last month the number of overnight pages has dramatically decreased. Example investments include automated alerting and triage for long transactions and expensive queries. 3. When we first started building out Orb, we were careful to be pragmatic in where we spent energy with respect to scaling efforts. One of the choices we made was to use RDS Postgres as a job queue — although this has worked very well up to thousands of asynchronous jobs each minute, we've hit the EOL signs you'd expect (https://lnkd.in/gyQVEhKQ). We're spending time on moving to a different job queueing solution this quarter. 4. In Q1, we rearchitected parts of our ingestion and compute services to more aggressively pre-compute data, to avoid variable load through the API. We're finding that this is also going to help us ship much faster alerting features in Q2, enabling Orb customers to more efficiently power flows like spend management on Orb (without needing to pay for dedicated provisioning). If you're interested in joining this small but mighty infra crew, we'd love for you to apply (DM me, or look for link in the comments)

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Great to see not only one but two of our portfolio companies in a podcast! If you want to learn how you can squeeze double (or more) the performance out of your database, have a look.

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DevRev’s “Effortless 2024” conference will focus on #AI and #Design coming together to strip away complexity, streamline enterprise workflows, and give you back time for what truly matters. In this conference, DevRev will reveal what’s needed to modernize the fractured enterprise and explain why AI begins with those on the front lines—end users and customer support SecureKloud Infosolutions is proud to be part of Effortless 2024 and eager to understand how AI and Design are reshaping #SaaS to be simpler, smarter, and more powerful than ever. We wish to drive this futuristic vision with our customers. If you’re around, let’s catch up at Effortless 2024 👋 #Effortless2024 #AIandDesign #BayArea #Events #AIinHeart #SecureKloudInfosolutions

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A provocative piece in the Harvard Business Review from my friend Bobby Yerramilli-Rao (Microsoft CSO) charts how AI will reshape enterprise expertise and strategy. What resonates deeply with me is their insight into AI's "triple product" return. I’ve seen firsthand how AI drives operational efficiency, elevates workforce performance, and enables sharper strategic focus by automating non-core activities. Another fascinating insight: the conventional wisdom that AI mainly benefits top performers is wrong. Studies show AI assistants boost lower-skilled workers' performance by 43% versus 17% for high performers. AI is raising the floor for everyone. This has major implications for how enterprises should think about talent and org structure. Bobby and his co-authors John Corwin, Yang Li and Karim Lakhani deliver a clear-eyed view of what it means to compete when AI puts expertise at everyone's fingertips. Well worth the read: https://lnkd.in/gy9TsVVU

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Many tech leaders pretend they have everything figured out. They use fake bravado and cultivated social media posts to hide their struggles. But, what would happen if you were REAL instead? Your peers and your team members all struggle with something! Being AUTHENTIC and REAL as a leader and letting people know that we ALL have battles we’re fighting builds a more powerful and meaningful connection with people. In a world of El🤡ns, you can choose to lead with humanity, authenticity, and realness. Take inspiration from Luke Zhang, winner of the TechPoint Mira Resilience Award:

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