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The AI Pivot: With Chris White of Prefect & Bryan Bischof of Hex
Takeaway
Pivot to AI through ruthless prioritization and a small dedicated team, treating LLMs as a new data interface inside your existing product workflow.
Summary
- Panel with Chris White (CTO Prefect, math PhD) and Bryan Bischof (head of AI at Hex) on how early-stage startups decide to invest in AI alongside core product.
- Prefect built open-source Marvin to stay in the conversation around productionizing AI and as a learning channel with users; treats LLM APIs as 'expensive, brittle, non-deterministic data APIs' that map naturally to workflow orchestration.
- Hex's AI 'Magic' aims to make data-science notebook work feel magical (e.g., SQL CTE explode feature) — success measured by frequency of user reach for Magic across every cell/project.
- Both kept teams ruthlessly slim (Hex ~5 engineers for a 20-engineer-sized roadmap; Prefect hired one dedicated AI lead plus volunteer engineers) — discipline of saying no is the advantage.
startup-strategyprefecthex
Original description
This keynote panel, featuring Bryan Bischof, Head of AI at Hex, and Chris White, CTO at Prefect, will explore what it takes to launch AI-based products in the context of running a successful, non-AI startup. Hear in-the-trenches insights and hot takes from these two product leaders as they discuss how to create an AI strategy, how to (actually) move into production, and how to measure success. Conversation will be moderated by Brittany Walker, Principal at CRV. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer Summit 2023. See the full schedule of talks at https://ai.engineer/summit/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2024! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/worlds-fair Brittany Walker Brittany Walker is a principal at CRV, an early-stage venture capital firm known for leading investments in companies such as Airtable, Vercel, Cribl, and Postman, among others. She specializes in data infrastructure and AI/ML infrastructure, and works with the founders of promising early-stage startups including Doppler, Meilisearch, Impart Security, and Lokalise. Chris White Chris White is a cofounder of Prefect, a data workflow orchestration and observability platform, for which he currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer. Chris began his journey into software while getting his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he researched optimization guarantees for non-convex data-driven problems. In addition to his work at Prefect, Chris is an active angel investor in AI and developer tooling. Outside of tech Chris is also passionate about the ocean, literature, and is an avid runner. Bryan Bischof Dr. Bryan Bischof leads AI at Hex, and is an adjunct professor in the Rutgers Masters of Business and Analytics program where he teaches Data Science. Previously, he was the Head of Data Science at Weights and Biases, and built the DS, ML, and Data Engineering teams. Before that he built ML products at Stitch Fix, Blue Bottle Coffee, and IBM. He recently co-authored the O’Reilly book Building Production Recommendation Systems. His data visualization work appeared in the popular book The Day it Finally Happens by Mike Pearl. His Ph.D. is in pure mathematics.