Published inAnant Jain·Jul 5, 2022Leverage vs. DecouplingThinking through tradeoffs is what makes software engineering so fun. Here’s an interesting one. — Leverage Your managerial leverage is your team’s output divided by your team’s size. To increase your managerial leverage, your team can do more with the same people or do the same with fewer people. You can do this by either: increasing the productivity of the individuals or increasing the leverage of…Engineering Mangement2 min readEngineering Mangement2 min read
Published inBrex Tech Blog·May 26, 2021Building Brex Instant PayoutsWe recently launched Instant Payouts — a new feature that shortens the time it takes for our customers to access their revenue. …Brex10 min readBrex10 min read
Published inAnant Jain·Sep 12, 2019Thing is no such thing as computer-generated “art”Around a year ago, Christie’s, a British auction house, sold its first piece of computer-generated art, titled “Portrait of Edmond Belamy,” for a cool $432,500. I have always been intrigued by the notion of computer-generated art. However, every time I try to think of the term, “computer-generated art” something seems…Art3 min readArt3 min read
Published inML Review·Mar 31, 2019The Intuition behind Adversarial Attacks on Neural NetworksAre the machine learning models we use intrinsically flawed? — What are adversarial attacks? In 2014, a group of researchers at Google and NYU found that it was far too easy to fool ConvNets with an imperceivable, but carefully constructed nudge in the input. Up to this point, machine learning algorithms simply didn’t work well enough for anyone to be surprised when it failed…Machine Learning7 min readMachine Learning7 min read
Published inAnant Jain·Mar 10, 2019Books read and listened to in 201920 books and 22 audiobooks — Books (20): The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building. Matt Mochary. This Is Water. David Foster Wallace. The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts. Shane Parrish. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Yuval Noah Harari. The Dip. Seth Godin. On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will…Lists3 min readLists3 min read
Published inTowards Data Science·Feb 9, 2019Breaking neural networks with adversarial attacksAre the machine learning models we use intrinsically flawed? — As many of you may know, Deep Neural Networks are highly expressive machine learning networks that have been around for many decades. In 2012, with gains in computing power and improved tooling, a family of these machine learning models called ConvNets started achieving state of the art performance on visual…Machine Learning7 min readMachine Learning7 min read
Published inAnant Jain·Dec 23, 2018Skin in The GameNassim Nicholas Taleb — In Antifragile, I mentioned that the book is part of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Incerto series. In 2018, Taleb added Skin in the Game to this series. I hopped onto the audiobook over the past week and was happy to find that while sticking to his fuck-you writing style, Taleb did…Books4 min readBooks4 min read
Published inAnant Jain·Dec 16, 2018Never Split the DifferenceChris Voss and Tahl Raz — Never Split the Difference is the first book I’ve read about the art of negotiation — the other book closest to this one was Influence by Robert Cialdini (review). In this book, Chris Voss, a former international hostage negotiator for the FBI, lays out his approach to high-stakes negotiations and…Books7 min readBooks7 min read
Published inAnant Jain·Dec 9, 2018Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five DaysJake Knapp and John Zeratsky — The Sprint process was developed at Google Ventures by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. It’s a highly effective process for solving problems by building prototypes and user-testing them over a span of five days. Sprint is almost a required reading for everyone in the tech industry — from the executives…Design3 min readDesign3 min read
Published inAnant Jain·Dec 2, 2018Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to SuccessAdam Grant — I read Adam Grant’s first book, Give and Take, in August 2017. It introduced me to his excellent framework for building your professional (and personal) network. It’s probably the most valuable book on “networking” ever written. The core idea introduced in the book is that in any network, there are…Books2 min readBooks2 min read
