MosaicML’s Naveen Rao on building an edge in AI infrastructure

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Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast

Unusual Ventures

53 episodes

1 week ago

Every overnight success in the world of software happens after years of hard work finding product-market fit. The Unusual Ventures Startup Field Guide is a podcast for early-stage software leaders and aspiring founders looking for help going from 0 to 1. Featuring great conversations with successful startup founders, you will learn about hiring, product research, go-to-market, fundraising, and more.

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MosaicML’s Naveen Rao on building an edge in AI infrastructure

Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast

43 minutes 41 seconds

1 year ago

MosaicML’s Naveen Rao on building an edge in AI infrastructure

MosaicML is the developer of open source infrastructure for training LLMs. The company was acquired by Databricks for $1.3 billion in July 2023. and has gone from 0 to over $30M in revenue this year in just 6 months.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde and Wei Lien Dang chat with Naveen Rao, co-founder of MosaicML and now the head of Generative AI at Databricks

Join us as we discuss:

00:00 Preview: Future of foundation model companies

2:16 How Naveen’s previous experiences led to MosaicML

7:29 The core insight behind the founding of MosaicML

9:52 MosaicML’s approach to building an end-to-end platform

12:09 Why MosaicML focused on open models and LLMs

14:25 Why most foundation model companies will fail

15:52 How MosaicML found early adopters

18:14 Early use cases for MosaicML’s product

21:27 Impact of early feedback on MosaicML’s product roadmap

25:21 Why Naveen decided to move ahead with the Databricks acquisition

31:44 How Naveen sees the AI ecosystem evolving

34:08 Regulation of AI and the importance of open source

41:15 Advice for founding building AI infrastructure

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor.

Wei Lien Dang is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures and leads investments in infrastructure software, security, and developer tool. Wei was a co-founder of StackRox, a cloud-native security company prior to its acquisition by Red Hat.

Naveen Rao is the co-founder of MosaicML (now a Databricks company) and currently the head of Generative AI at Databricks

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from Unusual Ventures:

Starting an open source company

Open source customer development