Ben talks with venture capitalist Tomaz Tunguz about his path from Java engineer to Google product manager and finally to author and investor. They cover why lower data storage costs and improved database performance are driving a new wave of innovation, how LLMs learn by doing, and how companies (and investors) should respond to uncertain economic conditions.

Tomasz Tunguz: From Java engineer to investor in eight unicorns

For more than a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a developer and how the art and practice of software programming is changing our world. From Rails to React, from Java to Node.js, we host important conversations and fascinating guests that will help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed. Hosted by Ben Popper, Cassidy Williams, and Ceora Ford, the Stack Overflow Podcast is your home for all things code.

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Management

Today's episode is a chat with Benjamin Shestakofsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on the ways in which digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange.
We discuss research from his new book which dives into the venture capital business and explores the cooperative model that some software startups are taking instead.

Can software startups that need $$$ avoid venture captial?

Temporal is an open-source project focused on durable execution and workflow orchestration. Cofounder and CTO Maxim Fateev tells Ben and Ryan about the challenges of building a cloud service based on an open-source project and how Temporal is helping teams simplify their code and build more features more quickly.

An open-source development paradigm

Ben and Ryan are joined by Robin Gupta for a conversation about benchmarking and testing AI systems. They talk through the lack of trust and confidence in AI, the inherent challenges of nondeterministic systems, the role of human verification, and whether we can (or should) expect an AI to be reliable.

Would you board a plane safety-tested by GenAI?

Ben and Ryan talk with Vikram Chatterji, founder and CEO of Galileo, a company focused on building and evaluating generative AI apps. They discuss the challenges of benchmarking and evaluating GenAI models, the importance of data quality in AI systems, and  the trade-offs between using pre-trained models and fine-tuning models with custom data.

How to train your dream machine

Product manager Ash Zade joins the home team to talk about the journey to OverflowAI, a GenAI-powered add-on for Stack Overflow for Teams that’s available now. Ash describes how his team built Enhanced Search, the problems they set out to solve, how they ensured data quality and accuracy, the role of metadata and prompt engineering, and the feedback they’ve gotten from users so far.

Tomasz Tunguz: From Java engineer to investor in eight unicorns

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