Disqus - Latest Comments for Fraser

Re: AIVC

Fraser — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 22:54:34 -0000

OpenAI did something similar to this for music with GPT2.

You can have the model generate a, say, country song, but use the first few notes from lady gaga’s poker face as the prefix.

https://openai.com/blog/mus...

Re: AIVC

Fraser — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 14:06:34 -0000

This is directionally right! The past year has seen incredible advances in AI for natural language processing. There are now pre-trained language models that can be fine tuned on specific data sets.

GPT2 is a transformer-based language model that OpenAI created and released. I scraped a decade of posts from AVC and used those to train GPT2 for 10 hours using an advanced GPU. The resulting model generates text.

I'm not an engineer but modern tooling has made it possible to do this with some technical sophistication and a few hours of effort. I'm not an engineer and this was (somewhat) accessible.

Re: Selling

Fraser — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 16:04:39 -0000

Thank you

Re: Selling

Fraser — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 10:45:26 -0000

I have some assumptions, but I'd value hearing your thoughts on why this is the case:

"when we have the opportunity to sell an investment that is not one of our big winners, I have found that it is generally the right idea to do that."

Re: The Valuation Obsession

Fraser — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 07:32:01 -0000

Valuation. Total raised. Head count. Numbers that cause real harm when mismanaged. It’s unfortunate that these have become measures of success at startups.

Re: Valuation Inflation

Fraser — Sun, 03 Jun 2018 14:00:30 -0000

Wild. I believe that raising less, at a realistic valuation, is in the entrepreneurs best interest. Celebrating total capital raised and high valuations is a disappointing trend of the past 10 years. It’s harming more founders and startups than is generally recognized.

Re: Voice Assistants Six+ Years In

Fraser — Sun, 08 Apr 2018 14:41:57 -0000

We have a few Alexa’s and use them often. But not for a lot of tasks. Timers in the kitchen. Music. Weather. And lights.

If your house works for controlling lights via voice (eg simple lighting set up without the need to specify things such as ‘living room lamp that’s behind the couch’) it’s delightful.

We also use Amazon fresh for groceries. Adding things to a grocery list via voice, that’s actually our shopping cart, is delightful.

We don’t use it at all beyond these 3-4 things. But for these things it’s been embraced by myself, my skeptical wife, and our 3 y/o.

Re: Streaming The Olympics

Fraser — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 13:45:53 -0000

Unable to access online credentials for US cable we ended up getting a VPN so we could stream the freely available Canadian broadcasts online (no credentials needed). Frustrating at times during this transition.

Re: The Early Stage Slump

Fraser — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 10:47:00 -0000

Hallelujah. Discipline returned to seed stage valuations will help entrepreneurs too.

Re: Airpods

Fraser — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 09:59:40 -0000

Please keep us updated. I was considering switching to Android and AirPods are the thing I'm unwilling to give up. Best device I've purchased in years.

Re: Getting Help

Fraser — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 09:16:19 -0000

Wonderful lesson to learn, thanks for sharing.

I believe that one of the best skills to cultivate is the ability and willingness to say "I don't know" in any situation. It's freeing. It's disarming. It makes it easy(ier) to ask for help.

Re: Buyer Beware

Fraser — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 19:28:19 -0000

Buyer beware. But also: buy and be aware. Best way to learn is to use.

Re: I Paid $22.38 For This

Fraser — Wed, 24 May 2017 09:04:54 -0000

This is one of the more interesting experiments in a while. If you've ever collected anything, you can probably understand why.

"Yeah, but in a digital word we can copy this card an infinite number of times" Uh huh. And the more the digital copy proliferates, the more valuable the scarce/verified version becomes.

Re: The Hard Raise

Fraser — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 15:04:50 -0000

I thought I heard Brad mention once that you two shared hotel rooms while on the road, pitching. If I heard correctly, what a lesson about keeping costs down.

Re: The Revolving Door

Fraser — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 07:45:22 -0000

Nearly a decade ago you mentioned to me that this was the plan. You wanted it to feel like McKinsey, both in terms of the strength of the alumni network as well as the respect the brand garnered. It's cool to see this play out.

Re: Voice Input

Fraser — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 08:53:13 -0000

My use has grown from basically zero to a few times per week in recent months. When we talk to teens about how they use their phone/apps, voice is huge.

Re: Checking In On Chat Bots

Fraser — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 10:37:22 -0000

That's a thoughtful article from Ted, I agree with the gist of his argument. A bot is a chatbot like a smartphone is a phone. Chat need not be part of the experience at all.

We've brought our iOS app to messengers while retaining basically the same experience, with little-to-no chat involved. We've experienced all of the benefits that Ted talks about.

That said, there's strong user demand for interacting with a computer via a conversation. Lots of anecdotal stories suggest this. The problem is that the technology today is far from being able to handle this in anything but a highly constrained way.

Re: Streaming, Ads, and Subscriptions

Fraser — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 18:34:45 -0000

Yep

Re: Streaming, Ads, and Subscriptions

Fraser — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 08:18:29 -0000

My wife and I are big cycling fans. We've never had cable. Each year we pay $20 for NBC Sports Gold to watch the Tour de France. No ads. Watch whenever we want, etc. It's fantastic. If the same existed for the Olympics we'd be a customer.

Re: Feature Friday: Photo Search

Fraser — Sat, 07 May 2016 11:20:02 -0000

A few months ago I did a search for an esoteric term (banana) in Google Photos and it returned three photos out of my 10,000+ that had a banana in it. It was perhaps the most magical moment I've experienced from technology since the first time I tried the iPhone. It opened my eyes to the fact that machine learning is going to change the world, far faster than we think, and in ways far beyond what we think.

Re: Koko

Fraser — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 09:38:10 -0000

Not yet. Tiny team of 3 people with limited resources, we had to focus on iOS. As we grow and the experience stabilizes we'll come to Android quickly. Signup and help us with the beta when we get there: itskoko.com

Re: Koko

Fraser — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 16:02:51 -0000

Yes indeed. One of our goals is to make the process of helping others on the app be both easy and quick to do while being rewarding. This is one way we hope to have people continue to stay involved.

Bonus of this? Those who provide the help appear to benefit the most from using the service.

fraser at itskoko.com

Re: Koko

Fraser — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:36:56 -0000

though desktop use cases have new challenges we'll have to overcome - we are completely anonymous in the app and don't collect any PII (personally identifiable information). we'll need to find a way to enable that same level of anonymity on other platforms.

Re: Koko

Fraser — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:33:52 -0000

we hope to expand to other platforms soon but with a small team of 3 people needed to make a hard decision to focus on a single platform to start. as we get the experience into a place that people value, and as we grow the team, we'll expand to other platforms.

Re: Koko

Fraser — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 14:35:07 -0000

That's the one. Although we recently moved the entire office (1 Uber ride) to the Lower East Side.