From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So did you quit Uber?

Aparna Dhinakaran: The reason I left Uber was to go to a PhD program. No one in my family had ever gone through higher education. When I had applied to Uber, I had an offer from a PhD program in Computer Vision. I had a ton of debt, so I had to first go to work for a couple of years. I’m really glad I did because nothing beats real-world experience. I left Uber to do a PhD at Cornell.

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Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about yourself as well as WEH Ventures.

Deepak Gupta: I had been part of the venture ecosystem over the last 20 years off and on. In the last six or seven years, I have been running a fund called WEH Ventures. We are now on our second fund. We do pre-seed to seed investments which are primarily focused on the Indian market. We have a few companies that are facing overseas. We are fairly sector-agnostic.

Video FAQs

From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder, CPO of Arize (Part 1)

We have a huge audience of developers, engineers, and programmers who want to transition to becoming successful entrepreneurs.

This conversation explores the journey of such a developer. Fantastic story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? What kind of circumstances?

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eva Yazhari, General Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: My observation is that the higher end of the market is extremely active. I wouldn’t say crowded, but there’s a lot of competition. There is concept arbitrage. There have been successful companies built by copying models from elsewhere and then innovating on top of that. That’s happening in the global tech space.

Then there’s the higher-end B2C space where there is this large population of internet users who are quite affluent. The market that you’re talking about, is it as crowded? Is it as active?

Colors: Bloom

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Bloom

Bloom | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor | 9  x 12, On Paper