Jackson Wang

Revelio Labs launched a new labor market metric today -- a Workforce Confidence Pulse. In a newsletter announcing it, they write that the only alternative measure of employee confidence is Glassdoor's Employee Confidence Index and pointed to some of its limitations. It's worth looking closely at the inputs to the Revelio Labs metric -- measures like CEO and senior leadership approval, employee beliefs about internal advancement opportunities, and whether the employee would recommend the company to a friend. Anyone steeped in labor market and people analytics data will recognize these inputs as the core company ratings categories that Glassdoor has collected over the course of nearly two decades. It is abundantly clear to me that Revelio's new confidence metric is -- perhaps entirely -- derived from data collected by Glassdoor, with no acknowledgement of the source. While it is perfectly legal to scrape such public data, this kind of data rebranding without source attribution raises thorny questions about public goods in the data economy. (I'm obviously not a lawyer, but this is my understanding having worked in the data sharing space for the past decade and a half.) Perhaps imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and public exchange about improving technical methods is core to scientific advancement. Open data with attribution benefits society at large by scaling opportunities for insight. But when there is every incentive to repackage data collected by others with no obligation to attribute its source, we devalue the essential work of data creation. Many become data re-branders, and few become data creators -- a world of DJs with vanishingly few musicians. (In full disclosure, during my time at Glassdoor I worked with my team to develop the original version of Glassdoor's workforce confidence metric.) https://lnkd.in/ghn-7BeN

45

10 Comments

We’re cooking some cool stuff and building next-gen agentic UX interfaces that blend human & AI collaboration and handovers. Check out Ted’s post for more details on what we’re looking for! We’re also working with some great customers in industries such as payroll & hr, healthcare marketplaces, delivery services, and logistics, helping them automate some of their most complex manual processes!

47

1 Comment

🚀 At Instacart, we just launched PIXEL — our in-house generative AI platform for product imagery. From DreamBooth fine-tuning to automated quality review with VLMs, PIXEL helps teams generate high-quality food images 10x faster — boosting conversions and reducing manual effort. Proud of the cross-functional AI work here! #GenerativeAI #ComputerVision #Instacart #ML

28

Why does the SF Bay dominate the tech landscape? There's a network effect, like a gravity well that creates compounding benefits from those that are within the region. Here's one of my slides from my TEDAI San Francisco speech on why community and culture play a key role in the AI ecosystem development in our region.

60

7 Comments

Now that big tech companies are laying off tens of thousands of employees, which is sadly nothing to celebrate, the silver lining is that more talented young people will once again look to start or join earlier-stage startups. California and the world will benefit far more from fresh entrepreneurial energy and less “ex-Google, ex-Apple” employee energy that had taken over the past decade or so. We need more entrepreneurial mindset and less big-tech employee mindset. Gone are the “a day in the life at big company XYZ” Tik Tok videos and people will need to learn to build something again. Building is much harder than being an overly paid big-tech employee with a cushy non-impactful role, but it’s much more rewarding and a much better learning ground. If you are young, and really want to learn and grow, join a great startup or scaleup. Best advice I ever got when I was in my twenties.

55

3 Comments

Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

71

3 Comments