People, every show

Barry McArdle

Co-founder and CEO, Hex. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.

founderexecutiveinvestor@barrald ↗LinkedIn ↗barry.ooo ↗

Prior to founding Hex in 2019, McCardel worked as a deployment strategist at Palantir Technologies and led operations at TrialSpark. At Hex, he built an AI-integrated collaborative workspace combining SQL, Python notebooks, and reporting tools.

What they said6 Shows1

Everything Barry McArdle said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.

a16z Insight

Barry McArdle: Context building and model chaining are AI's hardest work

“And I think that is really actually the hard work in many ways of Incorporating AI into your product, right? Like it feels really simple. Like you can go get an API. Anyone listening to this today could go to the open air website and get an API key. It's every…”

Barry McArdle Jun 2, 2023 ▶ 25:41 Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking

a16z Assertion Not checkable as stated

Barry McArdle: AI foundation models and API calls are already commodities

“I think the models themselves and being able to send a request to one of them is, is already a commodity.”

Barry McArdle Jun 2, 2023 ▶ 27:32 Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking

a16z Disclosure

Barry McArdle: Hex does not use customer code to train AI models

“We're not using it to train models. I should be very clear. Like that's one thing we've been very upfront with our customers about, like we're not training models where they would expect to ever have like some code they've written be a completion for someone e…”

Barry McArdle Jun 2, 2023 ▶ 27:52 Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking

a16z Prediction Held up

Barry McArdle: Hex enforces a rule to never automatically run AI code

“We have a rule as we're building these features. It's like, we don't run the code for you. Like we will generate the code. We will show it to you, but we want to keep the human in the loop.”

Barry McArdle Jun 2, 2023 ▶ 23:35 Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking

a16z Insight

Barry McArdle: Passing too much context into LLM prompts confuses the model

“I think we've been, we were tempted early on to try to shove as much context as we could in. You kind of figure like the more I can tell this model, the better. And you realize you can pretty easily confuse a model in terms of the amount of context you're pass…”

Barry McArdle Jun 2, 2023 ▶ 25:04 Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking

a16z Assertion Not checkable as stated

Barry McArdle: Strict retention policies eliminate valuable organizational knowledge

“A lot of companies intentionally delete their data. Like people will have retention policies on emails or slack, but by doing that, you're Eliminating knowledge and that knowledge could be useful”

Barry McArdle Jun 2, 2023 ▶ 38:09 Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking

One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Barry's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.

Show	Role there	Eps	Statements	Record
a16zLEDGER	Co-founder and CEO, Hex	1	6	100% 1/1	full record on the a16z Podcast →