Nick Heiner

Thank you.

Happy to be here.

You mentioned that it's one of the best funded but also least understood areas right now.

So there's a tweet that, you know, I love to poke fun at my VC friends with.

I said a lot of VCs have become reinforcement learning experts in the last three months.

And they're like, yeah, yeah, we know.

Like we're just we're piling in here and there's still a lot to learn about the space.

So, I mean, the moment that I sort of left Netflix and went into AI startups in general was basically the moment, the first moment I used ChatGPT.

And it was just, I'm sure everyone remembers where they were when they first used ChatGPT.

I remember the moment.

Right.

It's just immediately obvious that this is something totally different.

And, you know, I love Netflix, but it just didn't feel like a time to be at a 25-year-old company in a well-established space.

It's like this is a whole new field.

So I came over to Surge, and at the time, everything was scaling up really fast.

Like, you know, Llama 2, GPT-3, sort of those initial models had come out, and everyone's looking at the scaling laws and saying, okay, now we just need to bump it up in order of magnitude.

which means the entire supply chain needs to get bumped up in order of magnitude, of which we at Surge were a part.

So when I first joined, I focused a lot on building out our expert network.

And that has a bunch of pieces to it.

There's the actual recruiting, but then there's things like, how do you vet people?