Scale AI

“The thing that's gone the furthest for me is just really building close personal relationships with the members of my board. And that's probably been like The number one thing that I think has helped me because I think it means that with this relationship with…”

“And so I think as we look at the next five years, we want to build out all of the pieces of infrastructure, all of the tools, all of the platforms that would allow more and more organizations to be successful, effective, and productive with machine learning so…”

“It hasn't really worked in practice in most situations, particularly when it comes to visual data or even textual data. It really hasn't worked, and a lot of the reasons why it's sort of limited in terms of its overall impact is that at the end of the day, whe…”

“I think it was probably less than a week of due process.”

“And so it's really naive to think that like, oh, we can just build a better product and then we'll win. That's basically, I think it's almost never true. I think you always need to build a better product. Yes. But you also need to realize that you need to be b…”

“Now, I actually think that's negative. I think you do really want people who are okay to Taking a massive salary cut, and then really excited about getting more equity. And even though a lot of founders might view their equity as very precious, particularly ea…”

“With their recently announced a hundred million dollar series C, their valuation surpassed the one billion dollar mark, making their 22 year old founder one of the youngest to do so.”

“We at scale, we work with Very innovative companies are actually using AI and machine learning and deep learning in particular. So we work with folks like OpenAI and Waymo and Uber and Lyft and all these folks.”

“The first investment I led in Century was at a six million dollar post money, and we purchased about 20% of the business. That was five years ago. Scale, the first deal was at a fifteen million dollar post money, and we bought 25% of the business.”

“Dylan at Figma, Zach at Plaid and Alex at Scale, and I have enormous respect for all three of them got to know all three of them really early, and I just, I struggled with it.”

“I would say maybe on average, 25 to 30%, like a lot.”

“At this point in the company, still, I approve every hire, so I will look at The, I will either indirectly interview or look at the interview feedback and look at the understand every single person who we hire to ensure that we're keeping an exceptionally high…”

“I don't think everyone will, but certainly the most sophisticated companies will.”

“When you hire that quickly, it is impossible to do what we've just been talking about, which is maintaining this high bar and maintaining this sort of feeling of excellence within the team.”

“And this is actually why I think there's a very there's a very big sort of opportunity for whether it's open source models or the llama models or the mistral models or whatnot, basically these models that can go on prem and that enterprises can take. And then …”

“And so we would actually even fly engineers out to training centers all around the world to literally observe how. People are using the labeling products and, you know, different scale products, and prototype and build right there.”

“Just raised it at twenty-five billion dollars. It ends this year at two billion dollars.”

“Scale partnered with open AI very, very early on before chat GPT came out. This was like very early on RLHF when they were trying to tune models to summarize better based off of Reddit passages. And this is on GPT two.”

“Like I started the e-commerce team at scale where we were labeling e-commerce data, like from Meta, from Instacart, from DoorDash.”

“I saw scale AI and I was like, okay, you know, like good idea, but these people are so young. I think they were like 19 and 20 at the time or something. I was like, yeah, this is like, I was like, I think I could run this company better if I was doing it and I…”

“If only OpenAI is committed to maintaining that, As a partial presence, I assume the revenue will decline rapidly, right?”

“Excel made 2.5 billion dollars. Well done, Daniel Levine. Amazing seed bet early. Paige Craig led a pre-seed, a thousand extra turn.”

“Practically speaking, it's hard to imagine an independent, viable business selling to the LLMs who are the competitors to your 49% owner, where your founder and charismatic CEO is currently working.”

“Facebook slash Meta announced a fascinating transaction whereby they, that definitely is a bit of a head scratcher, whereby they invested fourteen billion into scale AI, took 49% non-voting control, allowed the other investors to literally take that money back…”

“It's an amazing business. It grew to eight, nine hundred million dollars.”

“If Alexander Wang's highest and best use is as a senior employee at Meta, then isn't it wonderful that the free market system was able to pay everyone else, fifteen billion dollars, all power to excel who probably booked a two billion dollar gain here.”

“At least Alexander from Scale gave his VCs back fifteen billion.”

“I mean, so I would say I'm pretty sure that a lot of these other companies, they are Like at the end of the day, people want high quality data and they don't want to be working with body shops. And so. I think we've seen, like, a massive wave interest because,…”

“Tiger will do better than people think, given their position, given their positions in open AI scale.”

“Largest shareholder in Figma, largest shareholder in Dream Games, largest shareholder in Wiz you know, second largest shareholder in Scale.ai, Revolut.”

“We actually, in both of those cases, that's a pure pretense to get the government off of us, right? Everyone knows both of these companies are toast because in the case of Scale AI, in theory, Meta owns 50% of it, and in theory, their business is selling to ev…”

“We were already at a nine-figure revenue run rate, and the company quadrupled since the scale acquisition.”

“But in some ways, scale lost the focus on product on scaling quality. And that was one of the largest challenges of the business.”

“Scale AI came to us and they used our platform to hire thousands of people.”

“Our average marketplace pay rate is 95 dollars an hour to put that in frame of reference, scale and search generally pay about 30 dollars an hour.”

“There's a an appropriate congratulations and acknowledgement to Dan. There is a huge, loud, full-throated thank you to Alex, and then everybody gets the fuck back to work, you know, and like, it's a humbling industry, and you are only as good as the next thing…”