481 karma · joined February 18, 2013
Founders Ben [0] and Rob [1] have been friends since meeting at Venmo in 2013. Ben worked at Stripe for 8 years. Rob worked at Fin (human-in-the-loop AI executive assistant, before LLMs) and was founding engineer at Substack. We started our first product, Substrate in 2023, a platform for building agentic workflows, and raised an $8M seed round led by Lightspeed [2]. We were pushing the envelope on both infra (serving multi-model workloads efficiently) and developer experience (ahead of our time in several ways) [3]. Though we found solid traction with startups, we realized inference was a red ocean especially upmarket, and decided to spin down the product/team at the end of 2024. We've spent the last 6 months prototyping and discarding ideas, and we’re now gearing up to launch our latest vision, a consumer AI application.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgdotjpg [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertkcheung [2] https://lsvp.com/stories/substrate-building-compound-ai-syst... [3] https://docs.substrate.run/
Email me (ben [at] substrate) with your resume.
Founders Ben [0] and Rob [1] have been friends since meeting at Venmo in 2013. Ben worked at Stripe for 8 years. Rob worked at Fin (human-in-the-loop AI executive assistant, before LLMs) and was founding engineer at Substack. We started our first product, Substrate in 2023, a platform for building agentic workflows, and raised an $8M seed round led by Lightspeed [2]. We were pushing the envelope on both infra (serving multi-model workloads efficiently) and developer experience (ahead of our time in several ways) [3]. Though we found solid traction with startups, we realized inference was a red ocean especially upmarket, and decided to spin down the product/team at the end of 2024. We've spent the last 6 months prototyping and discarding ideas, and we’re now gearing up to launch our latest vision, a consumer AI application.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgdotjpg [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertkcheung [2] https://lsvp.com/stories/substrate-building-compound-ai-syst... [3] https://docs.substrate.run/
Email me (ben [at] substrate) with your resume. Competitive comp with meaningful equity.
Check out Substrate - it's an orchestration framework that also runs the inference. https://substrate.run
I thought it'd be interesting to try implementing the idea with just an LLM call.
I've turned the target object into a JSON schema, but you could probably generate that JSON schema pretty reliably using a codegen LLM.
1. describe an svg drawing in great detail
1.5. ask the llm to label its drawing because it's fun to watch
2. generate the svg
3. img-to-img with sdxl
it's a silly demo but kinda fun, source: https://www.val.town/v/substrate/scribble
you can coax Llama3 into generating better SVGs using multiple steps, actually – in a previous version the SVG had gradients, stacked layers, dot grid textures... even animations
but i had to do a roundabout thing to rasterize the SVG in the val sandbox so i removed all that
We're building a never-before-seen way to declare, run, and scale an ensemble of ML models. You'll get to build a deep understanding of this fast-evolving space, design greenfield developer interfaces and infrastructure, and co-create the culture of what could become a generational company.
Because we're building an ambitious developer product, we're extremely selective with early hires. We're looking for engineers who are extraordinarily meticulous about the foundations, really sweat the details when designing interfaces, abstractions, and infrastructure, and are willing to wear the many hats we'll need to scale this business.
Our founders are friends that have known each other for the last decade since meeting at Venmo in 2013. Rob (CEO) was the founding engineer at Substack, Smalltalk, and Fin.com. He’s been hacking on GPU pipelines for years, and built AI features for startups before realizing he should be building reusable infra instead. Ben (Cofounder) spent the last 8+ years at Stripe, where he led mobile and was the founding engineer on Stripe Terminal. Our early team comes from Grailed, Stripe, Pulumi and the Samsung AI center.
We've raised a large seed round from notable VCs, the founders of Vercel, Venmo, Substack, and others.
Apply: Email ben@substrate.run with your resume
More info: https://publish.obsidian.md/-/Join+Substrate
We're building a never-before-seen way to declare, run, and scale an ensemble of ML models. You'll get to build a deep understanding of this fast-evolving space, design greenfield developer interfaces and infrastructure, and co-create the culture of what could become a generational company.
Because we're building an ambitious developer product, we're extremely selective with early hires. We're looking for engineers who are extraordinarily meticulous about the foundations, really sweat the details when designing interfaces, abstractions, and infrastructure, and are willing to wear the many hats we'll need to scale this business.
Our founding team is a group of friends that have known each other for the last decade since meeting at Venmo in 2013. Rob (CEO) was the founding engineer at Substack, Smalltalk, and Fin.com. He’s been hacking on GPU pipelines for years, and built AI features for startups before realizing he should be building reusable infra instead. Ben (Cofounder) spent the last 8+ years at Stripe, where he led mobile and was the founding engineer on Stripe Terminal. Liam (founding engineer) spent the last 8 years at Grailed, recently acquired by GOAT.
We've raised a large seed round from notable VCs, the founders of Vercel, Venmo, Substack, and others.
Apply: Email ben@substrate.run with your resume
More info: https://publish.obsidian.md/-/Join+Substrate
I built this over 2 days, Friday night and Saturday. Thanks to the new search endpoint in the v2 Twitter API, I was able to go from concept to launch really quickly. I definitely wouldn't have been able to build so quickly on pre-v2 APIs (and the user experience would've been wayy more janky).
Lots of positive feedback so far on Twitter, thanks to the #RoamCult: https://twitter.com/benzguo/status/1294832715049517058
I’m thinking about monetizing with a “top up credits” / pay-as-you-go pricing model. Would love advice from the HN crowd :)