1 Year @ Aggregate Intellect (ai.science)

This week marks my one year anniversary at Aggregate Intellect (https://ai.science/), and what an amazing adventure it has been so far!

The year truly flew by, and while we've had our fair share of ups & downs (like any other upstart), I feel like we're closer than ever to delivering the product that will generate mass value to the AI community at scale - and I am more excited than ever! Much more on that soon, but if you've ever spent too many hours on Google and scouring Arxiv, YouTube, Medium, GitHub and more for relevant information on the AI project you're building, stay tuned.?

The two questions I’m most asked are: (1) How did I meet my co-founder, Amir, and (2) How did I get involved in Aggregate Intellect. So, let’s dive in:

How I Met my Co-Founder

In 2016, I started an AI community out of NYC (NYAI) focused on events & education geared towards ML developers, data scientists, and researchers. In 2019, we had grown to over 8K members, and I had decided to try out a mini-conference series model. In my quest to find other AI organizers that might be interested in helping to promote the event, one intro email changed the course of my life.

We have to give a huge thank you to Matt Turck of FirstMark Capital for initially introducing us. (You can also check out Data Driven NYC, a fantastic event series gathering monthly to learn from Founders, CEOs, and CTOs of the most iconic data-driven businesses in the world.)

Amir & I had an intro call in March 2019, and kept in touch over the next year. We shared best practices with each other, cross-promoted each others' events, and started talking about how we could potentially collaborate to bring our two communities together in the future.

How I Started at Aggregate Intellect

At the end of 2019 & the end of my mini-conference series experiment (which was objectively successful, but demanded too many resources for me to properly scale), I decided to pivot NYAI's business model. Essentially, instead of running a conference series myself, I partnered with much larger conferences to help them with programming & business development. I'd sell sponsorships on their behalf for a commission, find speakers for certain stages, and chair and speak at stages myself. We'd also help on the promotional side by distributing discount codes to our community + partners.

It was with this in mind that we (my husband & I) left NYC in the beginning of 2020 for what was supposed to be a 3-month road trip with the intention of building out our partnership network with other AI organizers around the US. Welp, you can probably guess what happened. Things were going great until they weren’t. Enter global pandemic & alas, our 3-month road trip turned into a 6-month road trip focused on getting home safely (I’ll write more about this crazy trip one day).

You probably remember that around this time, offices closed, in-person events screeched to a halt, and our operational funding (which was contingent on marketing budgets tied to in-person events at Capital One Labs & Moody’s Analytics) disappeared almost overnight. (Quick aside to thank Saad Khatri & Katherine Curtin for being truly awesome people to work with while it lasted).?

Like most other event organizers, I turned to online events. I decided to partner with another AI organization that had more experience + resources devoted to running these event types. I followed up with Amir as they had been running these for a few months at that point, and we began planning what became one of our largest virtual events ever focused on data privacy.

6 months later, Amir was finalizing his go-to-market strategy and asked for feedback. That began a series of conversations around fundraising, their vision, and how someone like me might fit into that. Several months of conversations resulted in me deciding to come on full-time, initially as Director of Revenue Operations. We had spoken about structuring this as an initial 6-month contract to see how we all worked together, with the goal of possibly bringing me on as COO eventually. Our goal at the time was to scale our Startup Competition Series, and I had commission incentives built into my contract. A few months in, we realized that growth and retention should be the metrics we optimize for, and decided to move away from active business development while we reallocated resources to ensure a great user experience on our platform. Around that time, Amir offered me the role of COO & Co-Founder, and I graciously accepted!

Select Company Highlights of 2021

• STRATEGIC FOCUS: This year, we’ve strategically reevaluated all our activities (community, business, and operations) to understand how effective they were at contributing to our business objectives. We analyzed our activities using the AARRR model (Pirate Metrics Framework by Dave McClure) to ensure we’re spending time on the metric that means the most to us - which we’ve now identified as Retention. Early on in the exercise, we realized we had 10x more Acquisition activities than Retention activities! We had to make some hard choices, but decided to dramatically scale down our acquisition activities until that one day in the inevitable future when that becomes our new North Star metric.
• COMMUNITY: In 2021, we made the decision to onboard a Community Manager full time. Ammar has been a wonderful addition to the team, and truly loves engaging with all our members. It was with Ammar’s dedicated help that we were able to not only increase the number of both discussion groups & participants, increase retention across all discussion groups, and spin up global open source projects with major players in the field (IBM + Big Science).?
• INTERNAL CULTURE: We had been doing external All Hands meetings with all the ultra-engaged experts and community leads for a while, but in 2021, we decided as our internal team grew, we also needed a quarterly company-wide meeting. Our team is globally distributed, so it was extra important for us to connect centrally and ensure everyone was not only on the same page, but excited to be there.

If you’re interested in reading more of our highlights from 2021, you can check out Amir’s monthly posts on our company successes.?

There is still a lot to do, and a ways to go, but I count my blessings everyday that I’m able to continue working in such an interesting problem space with a highly-capable and enthusiastic team. Make sure you follow us at Aggregate Intellect to stay in the loop of what we do next!

If you have any questions, or want more information on anything written above, comment directly on this article, or ping me on our slack workspace.?