Four short links: 18 March 2015

Moonshots, Decacorns, Leadership, and Deep Learning

  1. How to Make Moonshots (Astro Teller) — Expecting a person to be a reliable backup for the [self-driving car] system was a fallacy. Once people trust the system, they trust it. Our success was itself a failure. We came quickly to the conclusion that we needed to make it clear to ourselves that the human was not a reliable backup — the car had to always be able to handle the situation. And the best way to make that clear was to design a car with no steering wheel — a car that could drive itself all of the time, from point A to point B, at the push of a button.
  2. Billion-Dollar Math (Bloomberg) — There’s a new buzzword, “decacorn,” for those over $10 billion, which includes Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Uber. It’s a made-up word based on a creature that doesn’t exist. “If you wake up in a room full of unicorns, you are dreaming,” Todd Dagres, a founding partner at Spark Capital, recently told Bloomberg News. Not just cute seeing our industry explained to the unwashed, but it’s the first time I’d seen decacorn. (The weather’s just dandy in my cave, thanks for asking).
  3. What Impactful Engineering Leadership Looks Like — aside from the ugliness of “impactful,” notable for good advice. “When engineering management is done right, you’re focusing on three big things,” she says. “You’re directly supporting the people on your team; you’re managing execution and coordination across teams; and you’re stepping back to observe and evolve the broader organization and its processes as it grows.”
  4. cxxnet“a fast, concise, distributed deep learning framework” that scales beyond a single GPU.
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