# Chris, Shawn, and Lukas — The Weights & Biases Journey

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/gradient-dissent/chris-shawn-and-lukas-the-weights-biases-journey
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/gradient-dissent/chris-shawn-and-lukas-the-weights-biases-journey.md
Podcast: [Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI](https://stenobird.com/podcast/gradient-dissent)
Published: 2021-11-05T11:45:00+00:00
Episode link: https://wandb.ai/site/resources/podcast
Audio file: https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/c3cba7d5-65d4-4084-8921-fff6e0ff341b/gd-founders-revert-v2.mp3
Processing state: failed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/gradient-dissent/episodes/chris-shawn-and-lukas-the-weights-biases-journey
Duration seconds: 2953

## Resource

You might know him as the host of Gradient Dissent, but Lukas is also the CEO of Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML tools platform! In this special episode, the three W&B co-founders — Chris (CVP), Shawn (CTO), and Lukas (CEO) — sit down to tell the company's origin stories, reflect on the highs and lows, and give advice to engineers looking to start their own business. Chris reveals the W&B server architecture (tl;dr - React + GraphQL), Shawn shares his favorite product feature (it's a hidden frontend layer), and Lukas explains why it's so important to work with customers that inspire you. The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-wandb-cofounders --- Connect with us: 📍 Chris' Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanpelt 📍 Shawn's Twitter: https://twitter.com/shawnup 📍 Lukas' Twitter: https://twitter.com/l2k 📍 W&B's Twitter: https://twitter.com/weights_biases --- Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:29 The stories behind Weights & Biases 7:45 The W&B tech stack 9:28 Looking back at the beginning 11:42 Hallmark moments 14:49 Favorite product features 16:49 Rewriting the W&B backend 18:21 The importance of customer feedback 21:18 How Chris and Shawn have changed 22:35 How the ML space has changed 28:24 Staying positive when things look bleak 32:19 Lukas' advice to new entrepreneurs 35:29 Hopes for the next five years 38:09 Making a paintbot & model understanding 41:30 Biggest bottlenecks in deployment 44:08 Outro 44:38 Bonus: Under- vs overrated technologies --- Subscribe and listen to our podcast today! 👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​ 👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​ 👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​

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## Transcript

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