April 2 SGM

4/2 SGM

Pre-Meeting Notes

• Did a lot of background research over break on the E-Commerce space: want to tackle areas like clothes, electronics, and goods like books. Also want to tackle stores with a large number of SKUs (items).
• Goal: to sign on around 3-5 design partners to work on a solution. Will also work over the next couple of weeks on building out a small demo for these partners when we meet with them.
• Continuing outreach. Have reached out to about ~30 names, personally haven't had much success. Some notable names:
  • Head of Marketplace E-Commerce Tech at Nike
  • General Partner at TCV, formerly headed up a big E-Commerce brand for selling snacks (Naturebox, made millions in revenue)
  • Senior Engineering Manager at Dover Digital, also worked at Signet Jewelers (Kay Jewelers, etc.) -- long background in E-Commerce
  • In contact with some folks from Lacoste, Etsy Search, Dover, etc., but lack of response...
• Next steps on outreach for this quarter -- more avenues
  • O'Brien -- reaching out to alumni
  • Travis -- working on immediate network (i.e., CEO of Vivino, go from there)
  • Guman and Chris -- more cold outreach
• Also on the docket this week -- improving the algorithm and reducing latency
  • Finished setting up GPU for deep learning yesterday, can run Llama 7B
  • Working on replacing our dependence on OpenAIs and use only open-source embedding models and language models
  • Will also plan to use all of the books in the dataset (20k) and run find-and-filter, want it to be faster.
• We're also looking into making a Shopify App, given that majority of E-Commerce folks don't spin their own infra
  • Travis taking lead, Chris will also be supporting there
• Meeting with Unusual Ventures liaison tomorrow, as well

Meeting Notes