Venture Stories

On this episode of Venture Stories Erik is joined by Sean Byrnes (@sbyrnes) and Shastri Mahadeo (@ShastriMahadeo). Sean is CEO of Outlier, a company using AI to create better business intelligence, and previously founded Flurry Analytics. Shastri is co-founder and CEO of Union Crate, a demand-planning tool for consumer packaged goods companies.Sean shares an anecdote about how when he was in grad school for machine learning 20 years ago his classmates joked that what they were learning would never be relevant. He says that two things changed to make machine learning one of the hottest technologies of today: 1. the amount of data that companies have access to has exploded, and 2. the cost of computing has gone down dramatically. He also mentions that there have been no new machine learning techniques developed in the last 20 years and that the algorithms from his printed textbook from 20 years ago still encompass the breadth of techniques that are in use today. Shastri previously ran a consumer packaged goods