Who you are
Startup building an AI native foundation
You're an early startup and you know that you need to be "AI native" — to build your business from the ground up to benefit from AI. You want Codex on your team.
You want a fast track to good decisions on infra, data engineering, stack choices, codebase design, hiring, and tools.
Dev team catching up on AI
You're a strong engineering team. You're laser-focused on your product and shipping value. But you're not experts in AI.
You're not planning to become an AI company, and you want to minimize distraction while making sure you're investing where it matters.
ML team that needs research support
Your team is working hard, and there's just not enough folks to test ideas and promising opportunities.
It's challenging to grow the team right now, but you need someone to look for signs of life in one of your priority research areas.
Fred has over and over again shown he can start in a very ambiguous place with little direction and come back with a plan.
What I can help with
High-level pathfinding
AI development is risky. There's a chance your project won't work at all, or that it'll be too costly to complete.
The hardest part is working out what's worth doing. Where are today's techniques going to solve a business problem?
You're the expert on your problem space. Let me help you navigate the solution space.
Accelerated shipping
Top performing engineering and ML teams are using AI in their work.
But using AI to build effectively requires investment in new tools and practices.
Start compounding with tailored and pragmatic advice about where to invest to accelerate your delivery.
Research, models and hillclimbing
Stringing together LLMs is a great starting point for AI.
But there's a whole new world available to companies that use the best technologies available for the job.
I can help you build an evaluation pipeline, research approaches, and train models or hybrid systems.
Fred is very good at diving into a problem and coming up with insights that provide a different take on the problem and help pivot to solutions which might not have otherwise been considered.
What you'll get
Strong business thinking
I'm not interested in solving technical problems for their own sake.
Our relationship will be grounded in the opportunities you need to capture to succeed at what's important right now.
Technology is a means to an end, and I'll help you tie in your investment to your ambitions.
Deep technical expertise
I've been building world-class product experiences at scale for more than a decade, at companies like QuizUp and Monzo.
I'll make sure you're using the techniques that are the best fit for the problem.
I work hard to have up-to-date knowledge across infrastructure, data engineering, machine learning and systems development.
An opinionated approach
I want you to have clarity quickly. I'll bring that through analysis, research, experimentation, and quick validation efforts.
I want you to get results quickly. To do that, I will need to work closely with your team until I understand your context.
I will do plenty of independent analysis with rich context, but I won't give decontextualized "advice from above".
I think the best thing about working with Fred was that he looked beyond the initial ask.