Tobias "Tobi" Konitzer

Why?

Because I tackle product problems the way I used to tackle research problems.

So I'm very familiar with that thinking.

But here's the crux.

There is nothing that replaces two or three years of industry experience.

You don't have that.

I think it's a very risky hire.

I've done these hires before when I was really cash constrained.

There's just a much higher risk factor to it, right?

Here, I didn't.

So the people that we brought have industry experience because I had the flexibility to do.

But that gives you a little bit of an idea.

If you build something as specialized, that, in my opinion, is, I don't want to be presumptuous, but you know what?

Probably the only way to build a team and make sure that the folks you bring in are successful.

One thing that I've found is very rarely do you tackle problems that are really not scalable from a technology perspective.

I'll give you a concrete example of that, by the way.

My first company, the backend code was written in a coding language called R, and it used an MCMC, a Monte Carlo code.

processor that was called Stan.

It was a C++ wrapper.

So that thing fantastically didn't scale.