Building; the only pathway to success - Jul '22 Company Update

I recently started writing public company status updates.?You can read more about why here.

Ask 1:?we are launching a "community fundraising round" where _you_ can also be an a.i. investor! If you want to give us feedback on our campaign landing page or get more info about this reach out (only open to Canadian residents - sigh, I know- regulations and stuff...)

Ask 2:?We are looking for intros to more angel investors. Please let us know if you know anyone

Ask 3:?We are looking for 2 new founding members:?Sr. NLP Developer?&?Head of Sales. Please pass on to anyone interested

Previously at Aggregate Intellect...

In?June '22?...

• We went to Collision conference and met a few hundred people!
• We extracted knowledge from technical resources and visualized it (ping me if you want to see a demo)
• We finalized our plans for the second season of Deep Random Talks (DRT) youtube show, and booked our first few recordings

See also:?April '22?| May '22

Here is what happened in July 2022:

After the very fast paced June where we met a lot of people and really spread our reach, it was time to build deeper relationships with all the new (and existing) friends, customers, colleagues, investors, ...! We met with so many people and each multiple times to explore areas of overlap, and potential for partnerships. We got more customer LOIs, and more investors familiar and interested in what we are building. Some of these resulted in relationships that might come to fruition in 6 months or a year, and some have immediate action items.

This is one of the parts of my job that I particularly love. Not every single person I meet is like this, but there is a nontrivially large group of people who want to help you, even if there is no immediate benefit to them. The number of times someone in our community / network has messaged me saying "have you seen this resource / potential competitor / investor ...?" has been remarkable. More importantly the impact of all these people looking out for things that can help us has made the journey way easier and more productive than it could have been.

There are specifically a few investment potentials on the horizon that I am particularly excited about because of the potential for great alignment of visions. Keep an eye out for the next edition of my newsletter to hear more about them as they evolve.

What were the highlights of the month for the team?

Community

A lot of our community projects have been starting and continuing until they phased out. We have been experimenting with ideas for providing more structure and continuation without introducing limitations. For the first time we are seeing signs of this working out!

... essentially community groups collect what they discovered in the past iteration of their Working Group as Recipes ... then use those to onboard a future iteration of the Working Group ... then an iteration after that & so on. We are progressively making progress on the problem while creating a large contextualized knowledge base of the problem area - Ammar

One of the first groups that are kicked off in this format is working on a Land Cover Classification project. This group is basing their work on the findings of a previous group and is aiming to improve the accuracy and robustness of the models that were previously explored.

We are aiming to create a model that has a high sensitivity and specificity in classifying the different land covers in Canada. We are excited that this project will allow us to collaborate with others and build from where we left off. In addition, we want to create a model that can be used for industry applications like real world data and settings. - Leah Lourenco & Fynn Davis

The time we spent on rethinking our YouTube show,?Deep Random Talks?(DRT), also brought up an important question about our content strategy. So we spent some time tightening our thoughts and plans there.

This was a very timely effort also because we have been in talks with a crowdfunding platform to host a "community round" of fundraising. We have been reached out by so many community members who wanted to invest in aggregate intellect but they couldn't meet the minimum requirements for the angel cheque size. Our community has always been an important extension of our internal team, and we wanted to share the ownership of the company with them since they are so crucial to everything we have done, and will do. The good news is that we have figured this out and more details are coming out in the next few weeks!!! stay tuned!

My proudest contributions have been working on the crowdfunding campaign and the content strategy. I strongly believe that more intentional content and messaging can result in better engagement and value for our community.?- Nabila

Of course, an important element of the above was to create a more understandable and educational "first encounter" for the user on our landing and marketing pages;

My proudest contribution in July is finalizing the marketing pages and getting good user feedback. It was also important to improve the consistency of design elements across the page. Now, the new design guides the users and teach them how to use the platform. - Sara

Product

We spent some time improving our engineering processes to allow us to iterate faster.

?In addition to improving how we handle roles (for example alpha testers access), I have been moving most of the work from dev team to production and revising some of the processes which will improve the time to review and push PRs to production. - Samuel

Most of the dev team has been focused on improving the project mindmap, the latest and most advanced / fun feature we have yet to release!

My proudest contribution in July was to continue enhancing the mind map data with link types, node types, filtering capabilities, semantically related links, and node importance. - Percy

And, you can't forget the integration:

My proudest contribution is working on improving project mindmap, and a new module which links the extraction pipeline and the frontend. - Muluwork

To summarize what is happening, our AI reads the text of the resources / notes you save on our platform, extracts the technical knowledge in form of a knowledge graph, and presents it to you. Then you can interact with the visualization to see resources / notes related to any concept / relationship that you are interested in at any particular moment.

My proudest contribution in July has to be introducing filtration by tag for all resources. - Eyob

Of course, this wont be a perfect extraction, and you will be able to modify the graph that is extracted to you; Imagine something that is 80-90% and then you can put the final touches on it. So, instead of you having to do all the tagging work for rediscoverability / organization, the machine does most of it, and you validate and finalize it.

My proudest contribution in July was to save user modification in the project mind map with a better user experience

So, now, sometimes you might be reading your notes and realize that you should have added a particular tag. What would you do? try to remember to scroll all the way up to the tags to add it? nah! just highlight it right there, and save it as a tag with one click!

My Proudest contribution in July was adding manual tag functionality into the platform and continuing enhancing the existing search graph?for the web application. - Fasile

Now, say you have found a bunch of resources that are very directly related, say dataset and repo of a paper. Do you not want to just drag and drop them into a group so that you can find them again much easier?

My proudest contribution is asset grouping and frontend modification to have a simple and self-explanatory UI. The feature will help users to group their resources and use the platform more easily. - Rehana

Finally, has it happened to you that you started reading a web page/ paper/... and halfway through remembered that you had seen this page, and even have taken a bunch of notes? Given the latest changes in our chrome extension, now you can see that you have seen the page and the notes you have taken directly on that page as soon as you open the extension.

Parting thoughts...

Building makes me happy; either it's a new relationship, or a it's a new product feature. The great thing about working at a startup is that you get to build a lot of things. Like, almost everything! Now, with the great joy of building, comes the great responsibility of "building the right thing". That's a tough mix of art and science right there! but the times that you crack the right mix and find yourself in conversation with an investor/ partner/ teammate who just gets you, or a user whose eyes bright up when they see a nice looking informative graph; then you are reminded why you are doing this!

Resources

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Want to talk about any of the above? startups? building products? or about your career in ML?

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