Our guest today is Max Mergenthaler, Co-Founder and CEO of Nixtla: one of the most popular libraries for time series forecasting.

In this conversation, Max first explains how he got into AI and the lessons he learned from building a couple of tech startups. We then dive into Nixtla and forecasting. Max explains how he founded Nixtla and the different libraries available to build stats, ml and deep learning forecasting algorithms.

We also tallk about TimeGPT, Nixtla's closed-source foundation model for time series. We finally discuss the future of the field along with mistakes and best practices when working on forecasting projects.

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To learn more about Nixtla: https://www.nixtla.io/

Open source librairies (StatsForecast, MLForecast, NeuralForecast): https://www.nixtla.io/open-source

TimeGPT: https://github.com/Nixtla/nixtla

Follow Max on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mergenthaler/

Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/  

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(00:00) - Intro

(02:00) - How Max got into Data & AI

(03:44) - Combining Philosophy with Analytics

(09:49) - Lessons from building Startups

(14:00) - Founding Nixtla

(16:23) - Time Series Forecasting

(19:25) - StatsForecast, MLForecast, and NeuralForecast

(26:16) - TimeGPT & LLMs for Forecasting

(34:30) - Why people love Nixtla

(42:34) - Future of Forecasting

(45:51) - Mistakes & Best Practices in Forecasting

(52:12) - Max’s role as CEO 

(56:09) - Career Advice