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So what is your competitive advantage? I.e. what cannot be replicated? From a technical perspective, can someone just post labelling task to mechanical Turk? what is the difference here?
Tomorrow (Maybe): Huge corpus of previously solved cases by humans, that can be used to train a custom model to replace the humans
I don't understand startup valuations well, so would appreciate someone more knowledgeable throwing some light on how these valuations are made. Would I be in the ballpark in assuming that they have a Sales ARR of $125M. At a sales multiple of 8x (for SaaS cos) makes them worth $1B. The $125M is around 12 large customers with contracts of $10M each, which buys them services of 2500 labeling contractors for 2000 hrs/y…
Another risk is that the well-funded self-driving customers go belly-up. However, one important facet is that dead players don’t release much data. MobilEye has a vast dataset (including images from not just Tesla but other automakers) but that data isn’t going anywhere. Neither is Nvidia’s 180PB of HD recordings. (Release or transfer in part requires dealing with PII of the people in the recordings. Now if only the offshore labelers weren’t handed PII for free...).
The valuation is likely a forward-looking bet on AI as whole versus the current suite of contracts. Anybody using an off-the-shelf model will want some labels after their first proof of concept. I wouldn’t argue that the math makes sense but rather that demand does look underserved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi Alex! Congrats on your success so far! What principles/rules did you stick to when growing your company that you thought helped improve the culture/profits? Thanks again for acknowledging the Hacker Network community!
We have a rule when hiring people—we look for people with an internal locus of control. Roughly speaking, this means people who believe they have control over outcomes in their life, as opposed to external forces beyond their control. It’s a small thing, but it’s surprising easy to spot once you look for it. And it really matters—startups are the business of building something from nothing. You need people who believ…
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.
The problem I see with wading into other subfields (like my own) that need high quality training datasets, is that the datasets may be proprietary, and may not really overlap that much between companies in the same industry. For example, assembly line datasets for companies making almost the same product may be vastly different. I'm really struggling to see how you can possibly achieve the same scale in other industries.