Jeremiah Lowin - How to navigate your startup through the COVID-19 pandemic

04/09/20 • 50 min

In this episode I talk with Jeremiah Lowin, founder and CEO of Prefect, the company behind the open-source dataflow automation tool of the same name.
We first dive into his background in risk management and his frustrations behind trying to automate certain tasks using the currently available tools. This inspired him to write Prefect, an open-source dataflow automation tool for Python which focuses on the data scientist's needs.
We go on to discuss his decisions and experiences in founding a company with a significant portion of the software being open-source.
Finally, Jeremiah explains how COVID-19 has caused him to question everything he thought he knew about his business and decide to open-source even more of his company's software stack. He shares his insights and experiences of how other startups can turn this challenge into an advantage and how to overcome the challenges of all employees switching to remote-only.
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Special thanks to my patrons:

Ayan Doss
Daniel Gerlanc
Richard Craib
Jonathan Ng

If you would like to support the podcast, you can do so here: https://www.patreon.com/twiecki

Support the show

Special thanks to my patrons:

Ayan Doss
Daniel Gerlanc
Richard Craib
Jonathan Ng

If you would like to support the podcast, you can do so here: https://www.patreon.com/twiecki

Support the show

Previous Episode

Matt Rocklin - Parallel Computing & Founding OSS Companies

In this episode I talk with Matt Rocklin. Matt is best known for his work on Dask, a parallel computing package built into the PyData stack. After working on open source software at Anaconda and NVIDIA he now founded his own company centered around Dask called Coiled Computing. In this episode we talk about the insights into open source he gained through his career, what Dask is and how it is funded, and then of course his new company.

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Thanks to my Patrons for their support, especially:

Daniel Gerlanc
Richard Craib
Jonathan Ng

Support me here to get early access: https://www.patreon.com/twiecki
PyData is a registered trademark of NumFOCUS, Inc.

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Next Episode

Kevin Systrom - After Instagram: Bayesian modeling of COVID-19 with PyMC3

Kevin Systrom is the co-founder and former CEO of Instagram. In this episode we talk about his time after leaving the company, whether becoming a billionaire made him happier, how to decide what to work on, the Japanese concept of Ikigai, or a reason for being, and meditation.
We then dive into his current project -- rt.live -- a website which tracks the spread characteristics of COVID-19. The statistical model underlying the website is Bayesian and built using PyMC3. Kevin shares why he chose that approach and how he got started on PyMC3.
Show notes