Bye Facebook, Hello Nabla!

After 4+ years building AI products at Facebook, it’s time to go back to startup mode. I’m grateful to be joining the talented team at Nabla to lead their product and resume working with Alexandre Lebrun my 16 years partner-in-crime at VirtuOz, Wit.ai and Facebook.

At Facebook, I had a chance to build amazing products at ridiculous scale but more importantly I worked with passionate, smart and humble people along the way. When I joined Facebook in Jan 2015 through the acquisition of our company Wit.ai, I was far from imagining what would have happened in the next 4 years. Thank you David Marcus for having initiated this journey 4y ago and always being supportive.

Wit.ai is still a free, simple and scalable NLP platform backed by a vibrant community. It now enables almost 200k businesses and developers to use AI to build great experiences, including on the Messenger Platform. I’m really proud of how Wit grew inside Facebook staying true to its original vision and how the main concepts were cloned over and over by so many: Api.ai (now Google DialogFlow), Luis (Microsoft), Lex (Amazon), Recast.... I will never forget the conversations I had with many developers telling me the impact this API had on their business and life. Thanks Alexandre Lebrun, Willy Blandin, Olivier Vaussy, Martin Raison, Julien Odent, Stepan Parunashvili and Anthony Kesich for your dedication and diligence.

I've also been working on M, the personal assistant in Messenger: first back in 2015 as a concierge service powered by AI human trainers, and then as a fully automated version that helps people inside their conversation in Messenger. I’m thankful for having had the opportunity to work with Kemal El Moujahid and so many great people from designers, engineers, data scientists and AI researchers on such an awesome product. M is now used by hundreds of millions of people every month to communicate in better and richer ways in 13 countries and in 7 languages.

I can’t wait to see my former teams on both Wit.ai and M continue to bring more delight respectively to developers and Messenger users in 2019!

So what’s next? Back to entrepreneur life, taking risk and dreaming big. And Nabla is just the perfect environment to build AI-first products that can have a true impact on our world. Stay tuned!