benjbrooks
Source: Enterprise customer doing $XXM annual run rate of inference spend on their platform
sales is a really interesting breeding ground for the first wave of vertical agents:
- success metrics are well-defined (did we get an email response? did we book a meeting? did we move a deal down the funnel?)
- enterprise sales is about getting a reasonably well-defined process working at scale. sales reps have to deeply understand enablement materials (what problems does my employer solve? what other companies have those problems?), qualify prospects relentlessly, and talk to lots of potential buyers.
- it's knowledge work (writing emails, preparing documents, communicating with counterparts over video call, etc.) that is mostly about aggregating information at scale. the really good sellers take rigorous notes and ask thoughtful questions.
Assuming they have the right information in context (hard work but not complex), LLMs are quite good at this work. And we think we're taking a pretty unique position in that we're not trying to replace top-of-funnel email drafting (this is somewhat trivial & also not that useful), we're making it significantly easier for sellers to find & utilize the information that enables them to do their jobs effectively.
I was surprised to see a dozen or so wag bags tossed to the side of the trail over the course of my trip. You’d think that visitors would either poop on the ground with no regard for others or pack out their waste, not take all the effort to bring the bag but leave the remnants. It really left a sour taste in my mouth (and smell in my nostrils).
Sounds like you had a great experience riding too! Did you go across the U.S.?
I think I'll pause the bike tour travel for the foreseeable future. I think I like running better :)
favorite part was jumping into extended conversations with strangers. from a scenery perspective, coming down into Lake Tahoe from Eldorado was just absolutely stunning. same when I went past Bryce Canyon.
Show HN: Street View My Cross-Country Bike Ride
After shutting down my startup in summer 2024, I was burned out and unsure what to work on next. Before jumping into another startup, I decided to bicycle across the country. I built an interactive map so everyone could follow along my journey!For those interested in learning more about the experience, I've also published a blog post on the experience:...
Show HN: Reflections on a Failed Computer Vision Startup
https://www.brooks.team/posts/on-directai/
I wrote up a retrospective on my time working as a founder at DirectAI (https://directai.io). We learned a lot and I wanted to share some things I wish I had known ~18 months ago.
Thanks for your recommendations everyone! We decided to go the route of measuring successful hits on the endpoint associated with our docs (inside our monitoring service). That's the default health check associated with our load balancer, so it gets hit periodically (built-in cron job). We just added a signoz alert that is triggered if the sum of those successful calls over the past X seconds falls below a threshold.
Ask HN: How to do simple heartbeat monitoring?
Hey there!My team is hosting an API that sends open telemetry data to Signoz & manages on-call via PagerDuty. We've configured Signoz to hit Pagerduty when there's a series of 500 errors.However, our server went down last night and NO opentel data was sent to Signoz. We weren't notified that the server went down as there weren't 500 responses to report. What's the easiest way to have a...
We’re working on text/image prompted vision models at DirectAI (https://directai.io). We help clients do detection of bespoke objects by defining them with a single phrase or prompt image. I’d be happy to talk about helping you build out a system like this without having to collect large amounts of data, annotate it, and then train a bunch of custom models.
Show HN: Computer Vision w/o Training Data (Free API)
https://github.com/DirectAI/DirectAI
Starting today, DirectAI’s Zero-Shot Image Classification & Object Detection APIs are public. Define classes and objects exclusively in natural language - no training data required. And if something goes wrong, you can resolve the edge case in natural language too!We’ve been hard at work to bring powerful and controllable computer vision to everybody. To do this, we’re building novel ways...