Community-Led 💬 What's on the Minds of Early Adopters #17
AI primers from AI experts, modern data stack takeaways and finding network unknowns.
Welcome to Community-Led. Each week we connect founders to dozens of early adopters and technology executives in fast growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. This newsletter surfaces the most interesting insights and conversations across the >1,300 members of the Decibel community every month. Let’s dive in!
Let’s kick off 2023 with the Generative AI trend as I am sure, like many of you, my holiday conversations were peppered with discussion, debate and questions about Dalle, ChatGPT and the future, and challenges, of AI.
As early adopter operators, we have all played with these tools however more depth of understanding is necessary to unleash the potential value to and impact on your business. Below are some recommendations and references from Decibel’s AI/ML experts to help you come up to speed quickly.
Bindu Reddy, co-founder of Abacus.AI, has a twitter feed full of helpful/insightful info on all things Generative AI, LLMs, AI/ML, a primer on neural networks and…
Susannah Shattuck, head of product at Credo AI, gifted us with her (viral!) list of the best things she read this year about AI - here's a preview:
🗞️ The best article The New York Times has ever published about AI (by Kevin Roose)
📐 An OpenAI blog post that helps to answer the question, "How can ChatGPT actually do that??"🌸 An explainer article from Alberto Romero about the most important model of the decade that you've probably never heard of
📊 The definitive guide to using AI for business, a must-read from Allie K. Miller that will change the way you work
⚖️ An intro to generative AI governance by my colleague and Credo AI Head of Data Science Ian EisenbergMy partner, Alessio Fanelli, also contributed his list of Generative AI primers including How GPT3 Works (including illustrations!), A Brief Timeline of NLP, and AI’s Hardware Problem.
The Watercooler: What we’re hearing in the Community
The inaugural meeting of Decibel’s new Data Engineering Council took place last month with 15 data engineering and analytics executives joining a thought provoking discussion that ranged from the technical adoption of modern tools to how to use AI responsibly in this new world. Extremely spirited in conversation with an intent to share best practices amongst the group, it became clear that we are just at the beginning of this new paradigm of data usage amongst elite organizations. Below are a few nuggets from the discussion around the modern data stack.
Contact me for an invite to the next Data Engineering Council at stacey@decibel.vc
Decibel Community Events
You love customers, and so do we! One of the most exciting moments in creating product-market fit is when great founders meet early adopters. Our Early Adopter Summit in New York brought together nearly 100 Decibel company founders and Fortune 500 execs to discuss how founders of B2B software companies can partner with early customers to build and sell better products. A special thanks to our keynote speaker Derek Jeter for inspiring us all to build modern championship teams that focus on excellence, diversity, and inclusion.
In Las Vegas, we hosted over 150 early adopters, founders, and friends of the Decibel family at our “VPC” (Vibes + Cocktails) event, our annual gathering @AWS re:Invent for those that love cloud computing!
Join us IRL…email me at stacey@decibel.vc for an invite to our 2023 events!
An Inside Look at Innovation - runZero
runZero is the easiest way to find the unknowns on your network with no agents or credentials and has the best asset fingerprinting in the market. Customers can uncover policy violations, visualize IP allocations, identify compliance issues, highlight misconfigurations, and discover security exposure.
"Asset Inventory isn't just a list of devices that you have on your network. It's also what is on those devices, what services are on those devices, what ports are those devices listening to, and who owns those devices," Huxley Barbee, Director of Product Marketing, runZero on the Cybersecurity Readiness Podcast
Co-Founded by HD Moore, former Chief Research Officer of Rapid7 and creator of the Metasploit Project, runZero is popular with customers as well as SIs and MSPs who need to scope out and manage their customers' networks.
Start a free trial of runZero today!
Decibel Friends and Family Update
🎉 Congratulations…
David Tsao moves to CISO of Instacart
Niels Provos joins Lacework as the company’s first Head of Security Efficacy
Meagan Eisenberg joins Lacework as CMO
Mike Agnich promoted to VP of Product Management at Confluent
Matthew Shump now with Vimeo as VP of Data (Engineering, Analytics, Science)
Jon Francis to Chief Data and Analytics Officer at General Motors
Colin Bodell signs on with Bazaarvoice as CTO
🚀 Jeff Williams named The Cyber Influencer Top 10
See you next time.
Thanks for reading. This is a community that you’re always welcome to add to. If you have any feedback or know a story that’s perfect for this newsletter, please reach out. Email me at Stacey@Decibel.vc.
Stacey