Construct I/O

2024-10-18

prep work

elevator pitch

Write down some elevator pitches about self that captures who I am, what I do & why I’m at the conference.

  • I’m Zach Churchill, a tech lead at AEP focused on integrating GenAI into the enterprise. However, I’m actually here on my own accord to reconnect with the folks from the Columbus tech scene & learn more about how folks are thinking about AI outside of the enterprise setting.
  • Hey, Zach Churchill. Yeah I’m here to expand from my technical skills to learn about the journey builders face when building a product, specifically one that looks to incorporate AI/GenAI. It’d also be nice to reconnect with some folks I worked with at Root Insurance.

goals

Define goals of attending the conference.

  • Learn about the challenges builders/founders face at the beginning of their journey: product owner mindset, finances, & acquiring customers.
  • Pick up some ideas around how folks are utilizing AI/GenAI in different settings.
  • Reconnect/catch-up with at least one person I worked with at Root Insurance.
  • Network with at least one person, focusing on learning more about them & why they are there.

etc

Call-outs:

  • I’m more focused on listening to the presentations & panel discussions instead of the workshops.
  • I am not looking for new/more work, I am looking to build relationships for the future.

“Dream not just grind” (from “How Do I Get the Most Out of a Developer Conference or Event?” YouTube video by IAmTimCorey)

  • I like this way of describing the giddiness I feel as I look forward to attending Construct I/O.
  • Although building my own projects, like the Churchill Library, is invigorating, I look forward to immersing myself into a scene/group of folks excited by the same topics. I feel like this is how I stay excited about being a builder.

Past experiences with conferences/events:

  • attending Utility Analytics Institute conference in 2017
  • a random Google Cloud machine learning event in 2018 or 2019

plan

Initially, what sessions do I plan on attending?

  • Opening session: 9a - 12:15p @ Performance Hall (1st floor)
    • Welcome & Kickoff from Shereen Agrawal
    • “The Future of Coding” from David Staley
    • “CPO of Etsy on Building Products & the Business” from Nicholas Daniel
    • “The Entrepreneurial Journey with Dan Manges: Insights for Founders, Innovators and Future CTOs” from Dan Manges
    • “Building AI Agents to Augment Humans” from Huan Sun
    • “Anthropic: GenAI and The Great Flattening” from Ash Alhashim
  • “Behind the Scenes: AI Use Cases Inside the Company”: 1:30p @ US Bank Conference Theater (1st floor)
    • from Dalton Flanagan, Derek DeHart, Cory Tressler, Mahir Yavuz
  • “Business Considerations for Funding Decisions: From VC to Debt to Boostrapping”: 2:45p @ Archie M. Griffin West Ballroom (2nd Floor)
    • from Ashraf Hebela, Jeff Schumann, Jean Bredeche, Mo Gupta, Zeenia Kaul
  • “The Customer Acquisition Game”: 4p @ Archie M. Griffin West Ballroom (2nd Floor)
    • from Jeffrey Dotson, Dave Reed, Patrick Kaiser, Kumi Walker, Shereen Agrawal
  • Networking event @ 5p

Conference notes

Plan & Goals

Mostly followed above except I attended “Idea to Business Plan” at 2:45p & left afterwards.

Met my goals where Derek DeHart was the person from Root & Akshat Saladi was the other person (kind of a cheat but I’ll take it!)

  • One caveat is that my first goal was mostly fulfilled from the “Idea to Business Plan” talk

Morning Session

  • Talked with Akshat beforehand, checked out his site, interested in mobile & frontend, currently working with some folks on a start-up around a social calendar app.
  • “COMP-U-SERVE” - Shareen mentioned this was “built in our (OSU) backyard”, what is this?
  • OSU has a “land grant mission” which roughly means that they are required to benefit the surrounding community.
  • Look at the book “I am a strange loop” by Doug Hofstadter
  • Look more into the “Center of Software Innovation”
  • Etsy maintains marketing & centeredness towards humans by applying AI/GenAI into the workflow/experience rather than highlighting it e.g., utilizing metadata and tags on seller images automatically, intergrating Ai/GenAI to alleviate “sameness” of general search queries.
  • TechStars fall cohort demo day is Dec 4th
  • Strong technologist + deep domain expert is a successful pairing for founders of a start-up (Dan Manges)
  • “How to cpature the most value with the limited engineering resources?” in addition to talent density are strong contributors to Dan M.’s success
  • “How can we use AI to understand the most valuable & productive ways to build and design software?” - check out what RWX is doing around this with query languages and static analysis.
  • Chase seems to have a surprising presence at OSU - briefly spoke with a couple folks from Chase.
  • “Automatic Scientific Reasoning”; “ReAct; new research by Huan Sun.
    • How could this be useful for the DS team? What kind of Agents could be created for battery optimization?
    • checkout Mind2Web & SeeAct by OSUNLP
  • AI Tinkerers monthly meet-ups coming to Columbus, first meet-up on Wed. Nov 6th
  • “AI removes barriers between data silos and distribution channels” - Ash
  • “AI can be instrumental at identifying and building your ideal customer profile (ICP) during ideation/business development” - Ash
  • check out using Claude with “artifacts”

AI Use cases

  • Etsy: Uses LLM to help guide specificity of the search query; LLM end-to-end vs finetuned; also title rewriting using prompting to create similarities between other items.
  • Meta: Works on Llama open-source team; started with fine tuning but failed miserably; then used RAG for Q&A agent for cutomer support; Llama stack for agentic & action-based workflows.
  • OSU: OSU Libraries enormous amount of artifacts need to meet rules & regulations around accessibility; clean-up metadata & garbage to ensure materials/docs actually accessible for screen readers. Check out GitHub for architecture design.
  • Alignable: 9.5M small businesses on network; identify & maintain connections to help grow businesses (70 employees). Utilizing LLM to help with taxonomy of business types to help improve search and identification of actual categorization/relationship building.
  • “Can you talk with a book - load the content, context about author, etc?” - Derek & Cory
  • Multi-modal + HITL for verification of search results - Etsy
    • Only being used in non-mission critical aspects like related items rather than completely new user-facing products.
  • “Unsolvable problems not necessarily solvable but previously difficult problems have become tractable & less costly” - Derek
  • Etsy - keeps ROI aligned with north star metrics, not looking to create a new framework to measure value.

Idea to Business Plan

  • Need to validate the idea - is the problem big enough/worth it? Do this before building the solution. Who’s the target audience/ICP?
  • Be way of biasing potential customers by sharing ideas and thoughts - work with them to validate the problem not the solution/idea.
  • Find the product market fit
    • how does this tie into how the DS team generally works? Probably still good even if project-based.
  • Use surveys to affirm what’s picked up from qualitative conversations.
  • User stores > Journey maps > Feature paths > Wireframes
    • don’t go to the coloring book first.
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel; Find your differentiator; Avoid analysis paralysis => “Buy the basics; Build your IP”