While most discussion of aviation breakthroughs focuses on areas like VTOL, advanced fuels, electrification, or autonomy, weight is a universal concern. In commercial aircraft, lowering costs through methods including weight reduction has helped expand access to air travel from an estimated 383 million global air passengers in 1970 to almost 4.5 billion in 2019. In defense, weight reduction means greater range - increasingly critical with conflict looming in the Indo-Pacific. In recent decades, weight reduction has largely involved replacing metals with composites - most notably in Airbus’ A350 and Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, with total reduction estimated at 20%.
Today, two neural architectures scale to the limits of available data and compute:
Crafting world-changing companies from the ground up.
Today, we’re pleased to share the transcript from that conversation. Karim and Nik share numerous insights on Ramp’s journey, which recently marked five years and over $1 billion in customer savings. They explain how Ramp has been guided by the same mission since their first prototype, how they’ve achieved and maintained product/market fit, how they’ve built and sustained a dynamic and collaborative talent culture, and where AI has (and hasn’t) factored into their product evolution.
While models command the spotlight, the AI age ultimately depends on real-time, reliable data access - and this is true of countless traditional business processes. Today, Postgres is the de facto database for enterprises, SMBs, and developers, yet Change Data Capture (CDC) and data movement tools for Postgres represent a massive bottleneck. Picture the Ever Given wedged in the Suez Canal, with data as cargo.
Today, OpenGov announced its acquisition by Cox Enterprises for $1.8 billion USD.
For our final Chat8VC of 2023, we hosted Dr. Nik Spirin, Director of Generative AI and LLMOps at NVIDIA. He sits at a very compelling vantage point in this role. Prior to NVIDIA, he was a serial entrepreneur, classical ML PhD, and researcher by training who worked on many interesting applied AI projects at places like Gigster and played key roles in the enterprise-wide AI transformations of Canon, Dentsu, and Vodafone.