I’m so excited to announce that I’ve joined the incredible team at Unusual Ventures as a vice president focusing on infrastructure software for data and machine learning.

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Nothing is more core to engineering than ruthless optimization. Every great engineer I’ve worked with has a bone to pick with every second of time that is wasted while building great software. The beautiful thing about infrastructure software is that engineers get to build great software that helps them build great software. It’s incredible how much you can multiply your impact as an engineer if you can enable the 31 million developers in the world to be more efficient.

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The data and machine learning industries have lagged behind the software industry when it comes to the tooling that enables an explosion of productivity. Almost every data professional at some point still runs into a rough edge that requires them to go too deep into infrastructure, distributed systems, or low-level APIs. The modern data stack is just the start of the tools that will bring data professionals to the same playing field as the modern software engineer.

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I can’t wait to work with the founders who are going to bring about the data revolution. Founders starting companies in the next five years will enable data scientists, machine learning engineers, and analysts to be multiple times more efficient, bringing the promises of advances in machine learning to reality in the products we use every day. This technology will build the foundation for us to revolutionize how software is built.

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Unusual is the perfect firm to make those founders’ vision a reality. I’me so impressed by Unusual’s laser focus on helping technical founders to succeed when they start a company. Our Founder Services team is comprised of world-class leaders in marketing, sales, recruiting, and community building. Finding product-market fit is incredibly challenging and not always intuitive — Unusual’s team is built to ensure founders have every resource they will need along the way.

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I want to thank John and Wei for the incredible opportunity to join this team — this is going to be fun!

If you’re starting a new data infrastructure, MLOps, or core ML company, I’m excited to chat and share notes. This industry is changing every day and hopefully we can help you. Get in touch at dhershey@unusual.vc or on LinkedIn.