Consulting & Mentoring

When AI is all the hype, and new models coming online every other week, it's hard to distinguish what's hype and what's useful.

Incorporating AI capabilities into your product requires understanding the capabilities and limitations of various AI models and model approaches (such as RAG or agentic systems), researching how best to integrate it into your systems and use evals to keep it reliable and robust.

When you're thinking about creating a new product or service, there's a wrong way and a right way to do it.

The wrong way involves going blind, full steam ahead: coming up with a cool product, building it out with all the bells and whistls, telling everyone about it and hoping they'll like it. It's a gamble with abysmal success probability.

The right way is to research and determine who your ideal customers are, what need they have that you can address, how they will hear about you and perceive you, and how you can make money off of all this. This is an iterative approach, but iteration zero starts before you write a single line of code.

Startups are chaotic, unpredictable, uncertain environments in which you must figure out the market, talk to users, build the product, handle fundraising, grow the team and many other things in parallel.

Founders need to learn on the job, and fast. Having a trusted mentor who's been through that could make the difference between success or failure.

Open Source is not a business models. Organizations and individuals who want to leverage open source to build their community, create inbound demand, monetize their platform or incorporate outside contributions should be aware of idiosyncracies, and written and unwritten rules when it comes to "doing open source".