Overnight Success: Raven Protocol Q1 2019 Update
Overnight success? Just kidding, it was a daily grind and we loved every minute of it. We survived the great bear market of 2018 and it took blood, sweat, and tears from the entire team. A lot of great projects threw in the towel. It was an extremely tough year and we have mad respect for every founder that gave it their all.
The Raven Protocol team put in unparalleled amounts of work to make sure we kept moving. As a small team of 8, we stayed heads down and kept building our core technology. Here’s a blog post update just for you, CZ!
Staying True to Our Vision
Raven Protocol is focused on one simple thing — fast AI training.
While many companies shifted back into equity, we stayed true to our ethos. The only way we can pull the power of AI out of the hands of the mega-corporations is through decentralization. Many traditional VCs wanted us to build a private network that’s centralized. After showing them demos, they even wanted us to change our whole business to equity only. They were bullish on the technology.
We said no. We have a strong vision for how the future will play out and how the world will work. Nobody in the universe knows our business better than us. We will not rest until it comes to life and we will not compromise.
Building a decentralized and distributed deep learning training protocol is key to bringing fast AI training to life. Blockchain is transforming the AI industry. We are right in the middle of it. And we never doubted token networks for a second. It’s the perfect mechanism for incentivizing people to share their idle compute power.
Raven Protocol Massively Recognized
We got major recognition for grinding through the bear market. The strongest teams survived and the industry is better because of it. We’re glad to play our part in the ecosystem and excited for big things ahead.
#1 on Token Research Group’s list of exciting projects is Raven
Staying focused paid off huge. In the beginning of the year, we were named as a top 250 company to watch in 2019. We are rising in the rankings fast.
Last week, Raven Protocol took the #1 spot in Token Research Group’s list of exciting projects. Not sure how they found out about us. But cat is out of the bag. Someone tipped them off on what we’re building.
Co-founder, Kailash Ahirwar, released a book with Packt Publishing.
We are so proud of Kailash for writing THE book on Exploring GANs with Python. He is one of very few AI practitioners in the world that can roll up his sleeves and build a framework from scratch.
To celebrate we had a few drinks and watched Kailash sign copies of the book for his earliest supporters. Ever since the book was released, we’ve been getting approached by tons of companies looking to implement AI/ML solutions. They said they saw the book and decided to contact the author!
If you wanna support him, give it a read! He loves teaching and this book is his way of scaling that. There are limited edition signed copies. If you want your hands on one of those, highlight this paragraph and tweet it out. We’ll take care of you.
Sherman Lee Named Top 100 Most Influential People in Crypto
Everyone on this list stayed heads down and focused on growing the industry. #1 is CZ the founder of Binance, #3 is Vitalik the godfather of Ethereum, and #50 is Justin Sun of Tron fame.
Just squeezing in at #100 in the most influential people in crypto is our co-founder, Sherman Lee. Along with being an Author on Forbes, Huffington Post, and Hackernoon, the work at Raven Protocol is being recognized as a key pillar to the AI + Blockchain category. Sherman is one of the fast rising influencers in the space and a must follow on crypto twitter.
As you can probably guess, we wanna make it easy for dapp developers to plug AI/ML into any application they build. These discussions led to Dapp.com naming him a Top 25 Trendsetter in the Dapp world. Even Hackernoon’s Culture Roundup noticed Sherman as someone making big moves and the community created his Everipedia page!
Presentations, Interviews, and Partnerships
We have kept Raven Protocol mostly under wraps. We have a tech advantage and have been silently building. But we know it’s important to share with the world our execution.
Decentralized Summit
This is the first time we spoke publicly about what we’re building and why. The Decentralized Summit was one of the most innovative events we’ve been to. It allowed access to anyone in the world who couldn’t make it to a physical location. Speed of knowledge sharing accelerated.
Take some time to watch Raven Protocol’s talk on Why Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Needs to be Decentralized. It gives the audience a good overview of the AI + Blockchain industry.
Interview on Bull.io
Sherman made an unannounced visit to the WXY Conference. He thought he could slip by without anyone noticing. He literally stopped by just to catch-up with crypto OG Jon Chou of BeeToken and see what people were building through the bear market. Watch them hanging out on Youtube having a chat on how to stay hustling and grinding.
Inside the conference venue, the team at Bull.io seized the opportunity to catch Sherman in the building. Mad props to the media team there who worked different angles and hustled to get him all mic’d up for an unscheduled interview. They knew how to push to get that interview locked in, but at the same time being super respectful with Sherman’s time.
In this exciting interview, Sherman talks about how he played shortstop and wanted to be a professional baseball player. A lot of the same work ethic he had then transferred over to the business world. He never thought he was going to end up in the AI industry when growing up in a rough neighborhood. But against all odds, he became one of the rising stars in the AI industry and then crypto soon after that.
Partnership with the Decentralized AI Alliance
DAIA, the Decentralized AI Alliance, is an alliance of serious participants in the AI & blockchain related ecosystem, coming together to collectively solve common challenges and create an amazing future.
We joined hands with the top AI + Blockchain projects to build this ecosystem together. As a whole, we can move faster, innovate, share resources, and help each other pull the power of AI out of the hands of the mega-corps. It belongs to the AI community.
Memes Memes Everywhere
You know you made it when the community memes you. Haha, you guys are silly and we love it! Keep them coming. It’s nice to have a laugh. If you created any of these, give us a shout on our Telegram. We have a nice little gift for you that you’ll wanna hodl.
Send us the most creative meme or caption for the photo below and we’ll reward you with a special airdrop of Raven tokens. Tweet @Raven_Protocol to make sure we see it. For context, it’s a photo from the filming of the Crypto Rush movie in Hong Kong. The BEST meme gets a limited edition Raven Protocol t-shirt along with the airdrop!
Talking to Real Customers Was Key to Our Success
In the early days, we built Raven to solve our own needs in AI training. To bring this power to the masses requires working closely with our potential customers. The more we meet with AI companies, the more confident that they are starved for what we’re building.
It is clear that we have product-market fit. Companies are increasingly working with larger and larger datasets. Their compute costs are rising with cloud services and it could take them weeks to train a model.
The value proposition at Raven Protocol is to perform AI training where speed is the key. Bringing each training run down to a few hours will allow companies to iterate incredibly fast. They see this as a competitive advantage.
The most critical part about our relationship with beta customers? They are patient and want to work closely with us. They know that we’re building a framework from the ground up and it is a difficult research problem to solve. TensorFlow was in beta ~3 years and it took many more years after that to become well known. We are prepared for the long journey.
Gaining adoption in emerging markets is a must. We want to go where no one goes and be early. India really blew us away with their speed of execution and decision making. The boom in AI is happening there now and we don’t wanna miss it. Japan knows how to leverage technology to make things happen. When the big boss can’t make it to an event physically, they send staff with a Double Robotics device!
Big Things Ahead
We will be writing an upcoming blog post that dives deeper into our tech. Thank you to all of our supporters who believed in us well before the FOMO and the hype. You truly saw our vision for the future and that made all the difference in bringing Raven to life.
Now we have the world watching and eager to collaborate with us. We are excited to do big things with you all too.
Want to talk to the founders of Raven?
Drop us an email: founders@ravenprotocol.com
Join us on Telegram: t.me/ravenprotocol
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/raven_protocol
