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Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

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Re: Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

#11

Post by tempsy »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

I really dislike this sort of journalism. Theranos was founded by a 19 year old too. That one didn't work out so well. Was it because the founder was so young? The board so oblivious? (a bit of both if you read the book) What does it really matter how "old" the founder is, does the business have a workable business plan? Can it be profitable? Do people pay enough money for its goods and services to return a net incom…

I think we have to just come to terms with the reality that ad-dependent journalism is inherently click-baity. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional or lying.

Re: Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

#12

Post by ayw »

pkaye wrote: post #9

> It’s built a set of software tools that take a first pass at marking up pictures before handing them off to a network of some 30,000 contract workers, who then perform the finishing touches. Machine learning indeed.

To be clear, there is real machine learning that makes the labeling more efficient.

You can see some videos of what this looks like in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/BW/status/1158407524216909826

Re: Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

#13

Post by atemerev »

ayw wrote: post #3

Hey everyone! I'm Alex, CEO/founder of Scale! I just wanted to chime in that we're a YC company as well (S16), and I'm thankful to the HN community for having been supportive through our whole journey.

I wish you a great success — curated datasets and training/markup APIs for AI applications is a great idea indeed.

Re: Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

#14

Post by invalidOrTaken »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

I really dislike this sort of journalism. Theranos was founded by a 19 year old too. That one didn't work out so well. Was it because the founder was so young? The board so oblivious? (a bit of both if you read the book) What does it really matter how "old" the founder is, does the business have a workable business plan? Can it be profitable? Do people pay enough money for its goods and services to return a net incom…

I've come up with much dumber business plans at 30 than many originated by 22-yr-olds.

Harshness is in order---regarding the business plan. But the age is a total red herring.

Re: Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

#15

Post by ArtWomb »

ayw wrote: post #3

Hey everyone! I'm Alex, CEO/founder of Scale! I just wanted to chime in that we're a YC company as well (S16), and I'm thankful to the HN community for having been supportive through our whole journey.

Congrats! Two quick questions...

Is it weird sharing the same name as a fashion icon ;)

And I'm curious about your ML "stack". Particularly the chicken and egg problem. Are you using something like Tensorflow with pre-trained binaries, perhaps from a vendor? Or is it 100% proprietary. Thanks!

Re: Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

#17

Post by opportune »

ayw wrote: post #3

Hey everyone! I'm Alex, CEO/founder of Scale! I just wanted to chime in that we're a YC company as well (S16), and I'm thankful to the HN community for having been supportive through our whole journey.

How do you plan to make money once the self-driving hype dies down or becomes a solved problem?

Re: Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

#18

Post by ayw »

ArtWomb wrote: post #15
ayw wrote: post #3

Hey everyone! I'm Alex, CEO/founder of Scale! I just wanted to chime in that we're a YC company as well (S16), and I'm thankful to the HN community for having been supportive through our whole journey.

Congrats! Two quick questions... Is it weird sharing the same name as a fashion icon ;) And I'm curious about your ML "stack". Particularly the chicken and egg problem. Are you using something like Tensorflow with pre-trained binaries, perhaps from a vendor? Or is it 100% proprietary. Thanks!

Re 1—It has been a bit of annoyance growing up (for example, Google autocorrects "Alexandr Wang" to "Alexander Wang"), but we run different circles ;)

Re 2—As with most companies working on ML these days, our stack is not fully proprietary. We don't take too strong an opinion on ML framework and use both Tensorflow and Pytorch currently. We generally use neural network architectures from the literature and then iterate on top of them to suit our unique problem requirements.

Re: Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

#19

Post by gjhfnfi »

ayw wrote: post #10
choppaface wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is notable that one of Scale's customers has a real yellow Corvette with "#NotHotdog" as a bumper sticker.

I genuinely am not sure who you're talking about, but good to know!

DKan's yellow corvette circa 2017

Re: Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation

#20

Post by minimaxir »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

I really dislike this sort of journalism. Theranos was founded by a 19 year old too. That one didn't work out so well. Was it because the founder was so young? The board so oblivious? (a bit of both if you read the book) What does it really matter how "old" the founder is, does the business have a workable business plan? Can it be profitable? Do people pay enough money for its goods and services to return a net incom…

Incidentally this frame is what got the most upvotes, compared to more neutral framing of the new valuation.

[3 points] Scale AI (YC S16) raises $100M at $1B+ valuation to go beyond AI data labeling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20615657

[11 points] Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614672

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