Starting with the announcement of OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 in April of this year, enthusiasts and research engineers alike have generated a tidal wave of interest in the latest quantum-leap ML advances for Generative AI—particularly for forms of human expression. DALL·E 2 pioneered a new AI technique known as Diffusion Models: learning from a huge range of photography and visual expression on the open web, then “denoising” an initial input of random noise, while using the power of Transformers to structure how the resulting image evolves based on an input prompt. Over the last 6 months, DALL·E 2 has attracted enthusiastic supporters (and a few critics, as with any new disruptive technology) in artistic, engineering, and research communities. That’s because these models power new forms of expression, including techniques that work “backwards” from images to understand the concepts the model “sees”. In this panel, we’ll compare and contrast the impact that Generative AI has had across a wide range of products and tasks, from the impact on the field of software engineering, to the workflows adopted in creative fields. We’ll also talk about the impact on curation and community on the web, and how the act of discovery and inspiration might change with workflows powered by Generative AI.

Whatnot Head of Growth Engineering and former Pinterest growth leader and entrepreneur Jeff Chang will discuss how to build an effective growth team from the earliest stages, how to structure that team, and how to ensure they drive maximum impact throughout the varying stages of growth to come.

Cash App’s engineering team has historically had a very bottom-up culture where teams are chartered with constraints and goals, and are empowered to achieve those goals however they choose. And while we share a lot of technical foundations, such as service containers, frameworks, common/shared infrastructure, tooling & developer experience, teams may choose to adopt different tools, vendors, technologies, architecture or programming languages & paradigms if this allows them to achieve their goals more quickly or efficiently. However, while this approach has allowed us to build a successful business, as we’ve grown in scale to almost 1,000 engineers, it has started to show signs of failure, and manifests as overchoice, confusion, redundancy, and lack of leverage. In this presentation we will walk you through some of the history of Cash App’s engineering team, how we developed the culture that we have, our successes, and the unique challenges that this causes. We’ll talk about how we’re approaching solving them with a high level of engagement & alignment across our entire engineering team.

In this session, Loom VP Product Anique Drumright will break down the nuanced correlation between product and eng teams — and why companies often find themselves on the back foot after underinvesting in front-line engineering managers. She’ll outline why this is such a prevalent pitfall, what the most common blind spots are, and best practices for avoiding it. She’ll also talk about the importance of supercharging your engineering leaders — including instilling the skill of advocacy — so they can play an equally dominant role alongside product managers. Based on hands-on experience building hypergrowth teams, Anique will share successes and tough lessons learned when it comes to hiring execution, quality, and retention at fast-growth PLG orgs.

As you think about scaling your product platform for hyper-growth, it is important to come up with a technical strategy that includes sequenced work streams and delivering customer value iteratively, ultimately converging with overall company goals, delighting customers, and growing the business. In this talk I’ll share some real-world learnings from Carta’s efforts around, coming up with such a strategy and executing on it.

In this session, Jonathon will discuss why Alignment is the one thing you’ll find at the heart of the most successful relationships, product teams, and organizations. He will provide a straightforward, honest look at why so many digital product initiatives fail or underperform. Next, he will highlight how top-performance digital product companies build alignment to inform effective product strategy and empower product teams to deliver extraordinary outcomes.

There are so many different ways to grow in our industry, and one of the best potential shortcuts to turbocharge your growth is to join a hyper growth startup. You will be given responsibility beyond your title, you will wear many hats—you will experience a ton in a shorter, intense period of time. We’ll discuss ways to succeed at these startups: how to have a growth mindset, to keep an open-mind and optimize for learning above everything else. During your time at one of these companies, it's imperative to try and absorb the enthusiasm and knowledge that you will be able to glean from everyone around you, and to in-turn learn to foster and share your energy with others. We’ll also touch base on learnings beyond engineering: you will be in a position to influence cross functional partners—there are few other roles where you as a senior leader will have such a critical part to play in the running of the company.

We are in a shift toward people socializing with one another and sharing experiences with each other within immersive 3D environments. Companies that have been building big, reliable cloud systems to support social media and other web apps will need to adapt their tech stacks if they want to support these massive-scale 3D-social experiences. In this fireside chat, Roblox VP of Engineering Nick Tornow will talk about the evolving tech stack for the metaverse and how Roblox -- which has been building a platform for this space for over 15 years -- is leading the way as a specialized 3D Cloud provider for its community of over 54 million daily active users.