Diamond Bishop, Augmend (acquired by Datadog)
1) Tell us about your background and how Augmend was started?
I’ve been in the AI space for a while now (decade plus!), most recently working across a bunch of AI projects at Meta and Amazon managing dev teams and writing a little code when I could. My co-founder, Tim Misiak, and I founded Augmend to build a real-world pensieve to tackle the problem of memory/expertise sharing across teams through the use of AI.
2) What are the key problems Augmend is addressing?
The challenge of team knowledge sharing (and even recording expertise for your later self) is near and dear to our hearts. As devs and technical leaders, we’ve seen firsthand how important it is to have a strong culture of knowledge sharing, and at the same time, how difficult it is to do it effectively. We start with the best intentions to create shared wikis, notebooks, and other documentation, yet we quickly get discouraged when these efforts consume our time, sometimes with less impact than we want. With Augmend, we’re taking on the current status quo and tools that record video but don’t actually understand what’s happening or being shared on screen, making it hard to access and structure this data for later. When using Augmend, we want you to feel like you are taking your laptop to the best engineer on your team and watching them think through an issue or show you how something in your team’s systems works, even when they aren’t actually around.
Our first product pairs a screen (and camera) record & share experience with AI-powered infinite memory & recall, making it possible to build a shared team memory as easily as having a conversation about a topic while you screen share. Augmend can be used to replace (or augment) meetings, docs/wikis, video recorded updates/demos, ramp-up sessions, and more, eliminating time spent answering the same questions over and over again for new hires and non-experts by recording a workflow or code walkthrough that adds to a team knowledge base that can easily be summarized and queried.
3) How are Large Language Models changing developer operations today?
LLMs have taken over the tech zeitgeist and we are getting to a point where ML/AI will permeate most things, with software operating and development ripe for improvement. What does this look like in practice? Copilot has leveraged LLMs to have the largest impact so far, leapfrogging any other ML-powered development tools that don’t use these new technologies, with developers everywhere beginning to use it to move fast in the initial software writing stage. It’s a hell of a feat, but anyone who has written production software and services knows writing the software is not usually the majority of your work. It’s just where things start.
AI is coming for the full software development life cycle. As we all look for new applications of the current tech (GPT-4, Llama 2), or whatever may come from the AI-superlab heavens next (thanks to the always awesome Meta AI for the OSS drops), we will see new systems that allow us to not just write code but accelerate where the majority of work is actually spent. This includes debugging, handling operational issues and various devops tasks, working with infrastructure, communicating across multiple teams, developer ramp-up, testing services, etc., that take up the bulk of a developer’s day, whether they like it or not. The exact breakdown of time may shift as software systems evolve and team sizes change, but the act of writing software is a small portion of this picture.
AI-in-the-loop, as a partner, in all your development workflows, will allow for teams to be more efficient and 10x their impact. Existing workflows and products will either be replaced or greatly re-architected to be AI-native, in order to provide all the context and right hooks for AI to be a core member of the team. When done properly we will be able to work better together without doing as much of the rote, the meetings, the repetitive, high-friction, drudgery.
4) What have you enjoyed or what do you look forward to about working with Tau Ventures?
The network of people that Tau has put together is incredible. I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with various founders and investors that have been brought together in this group, and look forward to chatting with even more. Reach out (especially if you’re a software dev or leader and want us to help your team get more done)!
