Sujoy

Product management - analytics, bigdata, cloud social metrics, mobile... proud Yahoo! alum

[Michelle Fang 🌁 @michelleefang]

Happy SF Tech Week! Here's where to find Stripe & me across the week - would love to see you so bookmark these 16 events 🗓️

A list of what's happening this week (Oct 5 - 11) ⬇️

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

Daily #1643
0️⃣5️⃣⬛1️⃣0️⃣
1️⃣1️⃣⬛1️⃣2️⃣
1️⃣3️⃣⬛0️⃣4️⃣
0️⃣6️⃣⬛0️⃣7️⃣
0️⃣8️⃣⬛1️⃣4️⃣
1️⃣6️⃣⬛1️⃣5️⃣
1️⃣7️⃣⬛2️⃣0️⃣
1️⃣8️⃣⬛1️⃣9️⃣
https://t.co/5SVeqPFNud
#sedecordle

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

The popular NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook.

Today I learnt about the what & why about the suffix LM to its name.

Here’s the backstory about how it came about.

[Steven Johnson @stevenbjohnson]

I have some news. But first a little backstory.

Almost exactly four years ago, I drove down to Mountain View for my first day as a Google employee. I was fifty-four years old, and somehow had managed to avoid ever having a proper job over that entire period, other than a few startups that I had founded in my twenties and thirties. At that point Google Labs, which had just been formed a few months earlier, was headquartered in a fairly anonymous looking suburban office park off 101, closer to Office Space than Silicon Valley on the Mike Judge spectrum. And as it happened, my first day at Google was a Monday in the summer of 2022, which meant COVID-era work from home policies were still the default, and the office was absolutely deserted. But I’d been set up with a badge and a computer and I had to schedule a phone call with tech support to get my account in order, and so I grabbed one of the empty cubicles and sat down to work through the problems I was having getting into the system. I remember feeling a definite sense of dread in that moment, sitting there in the silence, thinking: have I made a terrible mistake?

And then—and I swear to god this actually happened—the silence was interrupted by a lonely robot rolling its way across the carpet past my borrowed desk.

Before the end of the summer, though, an inspiring cast of characters began to populate the office, and by October a small group of us had built a prototype of an AI-first tool for thought that my colleague Adam codenamed Tailwind. About six months later, after @joshwoodward previewed Tailwind at I/O for the first time, we set about to give our little experiment a proper name. We had some branding consultants spend an afternoon with the team; we ideated and free associated and placed our post-it notes on the whiteboard, but all the names that they came back with were too impressionistic, too evocative — they didn’t sound like iconic Google names: Maps, Docs, Meet. Because I’d written so much about the history of journals and commonplace books, I had always been partial to simply calling it Notebook. There was something about that framing that just made sense: a notebook is the place where we capture information that we want to remember, where we gather our thoughts. It gives us a dedicated space for thinking, where new connections happen, where we can trace the evolution of our own ideas. And it had a simplicity that fit the Google house style.

But we were far too experimental and unproven to take on a name like Google Notebook—remember we had exactly zero actual users at this point—and so we found ourselves a bit stuck: too early-stage for a proper grownup name, but ill-inclined to adopt a name that didn’t sound like the classic Google brands. But at the time there happened to be another Labs experiment that had just launched called MusicLM, and so at some point in late May of 2023 it occurred to me that we could borrow that convention for our embryonic product, and call it NotebookLM. It wasn’t the most elegant name you could imagine, but it had a certain logic to it: we were building a notebook reinvented for the age of language models, after all. I wrote an email to a few folks proposing the idea and included the caveat that if the product ever took off, and Google wanted to elevate us into the canon, we could drop the LM and just be Notebook.

And so that’s the news. Three years and somewhere near a billion notebooks later, we are finally ditching the LM.

@Gemini_Notebook

[Indus Khaitan @1ndus]

I first met @om outside at Kresge auditorium. I think it was a vlab event.

He enjoyed 555 special filters and offered me one as I approached him. It was socially acceptable to smoke back then. I think he quit many years later.

When I was raising Fund 1 for an accelerator, he spent a few hrs advising me on skype, and he was the reason our fund raise got coverage in WSJ.

It feels like many of us grew up reading his writing and started blogging because of him.

Thanks for everything.

RIP Om. 🕉️

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

@NonsensicalNemo Lekha pora cchare je onahaare more se

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

@NagpurKaRajini Siva!
Apart from the performance by Amala & Nagarjuna as lead characters, the villain’s role was superbly played by Raghuvaran. Illaiyaraja’s music was very catchy

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

@SandipGhose @vivek_singh1226 @airindia @KolkataAirport @moleskine Phew! Lot of invisible ink soaked in this khaata…

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

@Iam_Rohit_G

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

@saranormous @hnshah Yes

[Christopher Michel @chrismichel]

I first met @adwane when we were both students at @HarvardHBS. Even then she stood out. Not in the loud, performative way that business schools often reward, but in a quieter and far rarer way. Anne had the ability to look at a complex system, understand what truly mattered, and then build something practical around it.

That instinct led us to cofound https://t.co/8T9Z3Gjm2F together. At the time the internet was still young and the idea that a digital platform could meaningfully serve the military community was far from obvious to most investors. Anne saw both the mission and the opportunity clearly. We built https://t.co/8T9Z3Gjm2F to help service members and their families find information, connection, and support during a time when the web was still figuring itself out.

Over time Anne shifted from building companies to helping founders build their own. As a cofounder of @villageglobal, she has become one of the most respected venture investors in Silicon Valley. The firm is backed by some of the world’s most accomplished entrepreneurs, and Anne has helped shape its culture around thoughtful partnership with founders. She is known for asking the right questions, seeing patterns early, and supporting people for the long run.

What stands out most about Anne, though, is not just her track record. It is her character. In a world that often rewards speed, ego, and noise, Anne operates with unusual thoughtfulness and generosity. Founders seek her out not only because she is smart, but because she listens. She gives people her full attention. And she has an instinct for encouraging ambition while keeping the human side of building companies intact.

Many people in Silicon Valley consider Anne one of the smartest and kindest entrepreneurs and investors they know. I feel lucky to know her for another reason as well. She is one of my dearest friends.

You can read more about Anne here:
https://t.co/P3Itc1x0fZ

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

Great to see you on @tbpn. Your views on data centers in space are so refreshingly ‘down to earth’

[Sara Hooker @sarahookr]

Was so much fun on @tbpn.

Inspired the @adaptionlabs team to explore baby gong options.

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

If everyone is slacking, how do they get any work done?

J/k

[saket साकेत ಸಾಕೇತ್ 🇮🇳 @saket71]

The encouragement of regressive Muslim practices by the Congress in search of Muslim vote is pushing India back and creates an identity vote bank which is a fertile land for the party of Razakars created for the sole purpose of unity of Muslims as an isolated unit, an island of Islamism within Secular Hindu majority India. AIMIM is reaping what Congress is sowing. Won’t be long before IUML ventures out of the southern India. ISLAM party too has made mark in the pocket which is Muslim majority. Only @VHPDigital can’t fight election because it would be in the name of religion. #Democracy #ShamOfSecularism #BMCResults

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

@sanjeevsanyal @hem_foxtrot Congrats!

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.

$30 per seat per month.

$1.4 million annually.

I called it "digital transformation."

The board loved that phrase.

They approved it in eleven minutes.

No one asked what it would actually do.

Including me.

I told everyone it would "10x productivity."

That's not a real number.

But it sounds like one.

HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.

I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."

They stopped asking.

Three months later I checked the usage reports.

47 people had opened it.

12 had used it more than once.

One of them was me.

I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.

It took 45 seconds.

Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.

But I called it a "pilot success."

Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.

The CFO asked about ROI.

I showed him a graph.

The graph went up and to the right.

It measured "AI enablement."

I made that metric up.

He nodded approvingly.

We're "AI-enabled" now.

I don't know what that means.

But it's in our investor deck.

A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.

I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."

He asked what that meant.

I said "compliance."

He asked which compliance.

I said "all of them."

He looked skeptical.

I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."

He stopped asking questions.

Microsoft sent a case study team.

They wanted to feature us as a success story.

I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."

I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.

They didn't verify it.

They never do.

Now we're on Microsoft's website.

"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."

The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.

He got 3,000 likes.

He's never used Copilot.

None of the executives have.

We have an exemption.

"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."

I wrote that policy.

The licenses renew next month.

I'm requesting an expansion.

5,000 more seats.

We haven't used the first 4,000.

But this time we'll "drive adoption."

Adoption means mandatory training.

Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.

But completion will be tracked.

Completion is a metric.

Metrics go in dashboards.

Dashboards go in board presentations.

Board presentations get me promoted.

I'll be SVP by Q3.

I still don't know what Copilot does.

But I know what it's for.

It's for showing we're "investing in AI."

Investment means spending.

Spending means commitment.

Commitment means we're serious about the future.

The future is whatever I say it is.

As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

@atShruti Vaani

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

@felixprehn Protocol

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

Enjoyed Google #AgentsForImpact Hackathon .. great to be #LearningWithGoogleCloud #TechForGood

[Sujoy @B_Sujoy]

@felixprehn Hi Felix. I checked my DM. Don’t see anything there from you. Could you please re-send? Thanks in advance