Chat8VC Community

We were thrilled to host June's Chat8VC event alongside our portfolio companies Ramp & Vercel in NY. We were honored to feature Nik Koblov (Head of Engineering) and Nico Bevacqua (Head of UI / UX Engineering) from Ramp as well as Guillermo Rauch (CEO) and Lee Robinson (VP Product) from Vercel for a discussion anchored around the future of frontend engineering.

Today, we’re pleased to share the transcript from that conversation. Karim and Nik share numerous insights on Ramp’s journey, which recently marked five years and over $1 billion in customer savings. They explain how Ramp has been guided by the same mission since their first prototype, how they’ve achieved and maintained product/market fit, how they’ve built and sustained a dynamic and collaborative talent culture, and where AI has (and hasn’t) factored into their product evolution.

For our final Chat8VC of 2023, we hosted Dr. Nik Spirin, Director of Generative AI and LLMOps at NVIDIA. He sits at a very compelling vantage point in this role. Prior to NVIDIA, he was a serial entrepreneur, classical ML PhD, and researcher by training who worked on many interesting applied AI projects at places like Gigster and played key roles in the enterprise-wide AI transformations of Canon, Dentsu, and Vodafone.

Our story is certainly full of ups and downs. Airbyte today is often associated with our open source data infrastructure project and product. It really started though in July 2019 when my co-founder and I first decided to build something together. We implemented a fairly disciplined system around idea exploration and honed in on the problem-space of data and went through YC in January ‘20, which was the famous COVID batch where we went from being in person to fully remote. 

At our September Chat8VC gathering, we hosted Mike Del Balso, founder and CEO of Tecton and a visionary behind Uber's Michelangelo, for a conversation with 8VC Partner Bhaskar Ghosh. As a reminder, Chat8VC is a monthly series hosted at our SF office where we bring together founders and early-phase operators excited about the foundation model ecosystem. We focus on having highly technical, implementation-oriented conversations and give founders and builders the opportunity to showcase what they’re working on through lightning demos and fireside chats. This can be a fun side project, related to a company they’re starting, or a high-leverage use case within a company operating at scale. 

In the spirit of sharing some lessons from our events, earlier this year we had the pleasure of hosting Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, the co-founders of Tome, at our monthly Chat8VC gatherings in April.

We were delighted to engage in a dynamic conversation with Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit during our August Chat8VC gathering. As a reminder, Chat8VC is a monthly series hosted at our SF office where we bring together founders and early-phase operators excited about the foundation model ecosystem. We focus on having highly technical, implementation-oriented conversations and give founders and builders the opportunity to showcase what they’re working on through lightning demos and fireside chats. This can be a fun side project, related to a company they’re starting, or a high-leverage use case within a company operating at scale. 

We were delighted to engage in a dynamic conversation with Andrew Lee (co-founder/CEO of Shortwave) and Dennis Xu (co-founder/CEO of Mem) during our June Chat8VC gathering. As a reminder, Chat8VC is a monthly series hosted at our SF office where we bring together founders and early-phase operators excited about the foundation model ecosystem. We focus on having highly technical, implementation-oriented conversations and give founders and builders the opportunity to showcase what they’re working on through lightning demos and fireside chats. This can be a fun side project, related to a company they’re starting, or a high-leverage use case within a company operating at scale.