As an entrepreneur, investor and judge, I’ll share with you the tips that can help you take the first steps into your entrepreneurship journey.
Learn. The very first advice I would give would be to learn about this field.
There's kind of a common misconception whenever you have a new technology, which is that you have to become the guy who makes it.
Now, obviously, if you can become a person who makes machine learning, that's pretty great, but it's just as important to know how to use it.
One of the most successful founders of the SaaS era is Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport, and he's not a software engineer, but he knows how to work with software engineers really well. And he developed good taste for where the world was going and how to use it for the problem he understood really well.
Steve Jobs is another example. He knew electrical engineering more than software engineering. He couldn't write a line of code, he played around a little bit with circuit boards, but it's not like he was Steve Wozniak, who was the actual technical genius.
Learn the technology
Learn who the good people are, who have predicted where the field is going really well. That's how I would advise you to start.
Andrej Karpathy, Jan Koum, Andrew Yan-Tak Ng Fei-Fei Li… These are people who have been consistently right about where the field is going and they've all produced entry level materials. Learn from them, not necessarily how to make it, that's up to your interests and technical talent. But go and see what you can do there!
There's a lot of math in AI that makes it really difficult or different from programming. Programming you can get by with hardly any math. It's mostly logic and engineering skills. You have to be good at math if you're going to be making AI.
Invest in math
That's another thing: invest in math. Once you've identified these people who are really good, you'll learn what skills you don't have that you need to understand what they're putting out. And you'll see who do they admire, who did they learn from and what are the areas that they're interested in? And then learn from that.
From there, remember whether you're one of the people who is learning to apply it or one of the people who is learning how to make it, you'll be able to do a lot.
I think that not everything is going to be an AI company.
Not every problem is going to use AI, but you are going to be interfacing with it as part of your life going forward. That's just going to be part of the universe. If you are flatfooted on that, you are going to be missing something really, really important. That's the key.
Engage in the real world
No one gets into the business’ business. This is the thing that I tell MBAs who ask me for advice.
I say, well if you were to talk to an executive at a chemical company, they're in the chemistry business. If you were to talk to someone who's at a tech startup, they probably tell you, “Well I'm in the software business” or “I'm in the rocket business” if they're in space or “I'm in the biotech business” if they're working on medicine.
Everyone does something. This is true even with a new technology like AI, even for the people who do pure technology development. They're thinking a lot of the use cases, of what's exciting, because that also helps them find collaborators.
Even if you’re someone who's like Jeff Hinton who purely just develops AI systems. Don't you think Jeff Hinton is so much more effective because he realized that he should work with people who are doing search and image recognition, which is what brought him to Google? I think so.
Thinking about the real world, engaging with the real world will help you a lot. Attending Leangap could be a great starting point. Even entry-level jobs at places like McDonald's or JCPenney can teach you unexpected lessons about AI.
You may not believe it, but it actually will. Not because you'll learn about AI itself (that's something that you still have to do watching Andrej Karpathy videos), but because you are going to learn about the world, you're going to see how they're using AI today, but also how they aren't.
And you are going to have an edge because your manager isn't going to be as focused on these new technologies. Not because your manager can't, your manager's probably a smart conscientious person, but just because most people don't take the time to look around at the outside, at the broader world and especially at new technology.
New technology is oftentimes difficult to understand, and most people are not willing to do something that's difficult to understand, even if they're smart, even if they're nice, even if they're hardworking. So, going out there, developing your work ethic, seeing the real problems of the world, while taking the time to learn, is going to put you in a really strong position.
