Cutting edge AI in one of the oldest cities in North America
Lessons learned from our first Extend AI team meetup
We recently held our first Extend AI team meetup and it was absolute greatness! It was the first time we were all together under the same roof. We are a distributed team, with team members in Brazil, England, USA and Canada.
We gathered in Old-Quebec city in this amazing flat (full disclosure, this flat is in the family, but its seriously a fantastic nest to brainstorm and create). We packed the fridge with great and healthy food and well crafted IPA, ready to push our research & prototypes to the next level. Our goal, set a crystal clear scope for our next big milestone.
The meetup was absolutely enlightening. We set ourselves some ambitious targets, we know the next months will be intellectually really demanding and we are stoked by those challenges. Our excitement comes from our clear scope of work, we took the time during the meetup to identify the weak spots and we structured and tooled ourselves to strive. We can’t wait to show you what we’re baking!
Lessons learned
Distributed team must meet in real life from time to time. Communicating through pixels is really effective in our day to day progress, but seeing each other creates a space where ideas have time to be synced-in and challenged in a much more deeper way. The little hesitation bubble that arise from time to time when a new idea is put on the table is sometime not big enough to get the webcam up, but when we are all together in the same room, a simple “what if …”, “did we considered that…”, “I’m not sure about this..”, ensure the new idea gets challenges a lot more! Plus, taking a beer and chatting about life through the screen is not as fun!
25/50/25 — white board/hacking/white board. It worked really well for us. We first thought about only doing white board work during our meetup. But at ~25% of it, we felt the need to test some ideas with a small hackathon and it was absolutely great. It ended up taking almost 50% of our meetup but it was totally worth it! It also felt really good to take the last 25% of our time to review our initial concepts, making sure they still hold and are still realistic based on our targets, reassess the scope and ensure to all go back home with the same common understanding of our next milestone.
Throwing a daily dose of shit in the fan. Confirmation bias is something we really take seriously at Extend AI. We therefore tried to break the conceptualization of our next milestone as much as possible. Being together in the same room almost 24/7 is a great opportunity to be real with each other and our ideas. We left the meetup with a stronger than ever conviction that we are on the right track. It’s easy and actually quite natural for us human being to get all excited about new ideas and to daily seek-out new ways to confirm them. I’m quite proud of ourselves to have being disciplined in searching ways to invalidate them. Some of our great ideas didn’t made it, but for the ones who did, we know they are rock solid. At the end, this process stripped out some complexity, leading to a much simpler and beautiful design.
Inhale-exhale. It’s when we exhale that our muscles relax. It’s when they are relaxed that they can deliver the most power. We didn’t have a chef cooking for us and we only went out for lunch or diner a few times. So at least three times a day, we had to take food breaks and change the focus on our minds! It was great to let the mind exhale, gathering in the kitchen and cooking some, let’s be honest here, sometime totally overcooked and suspicious meals. So until the team can manage to all fit in a kitchen, we’ll keep this minimalist meetup services philosophy to force us to exhale from time to time. Most of the great ideas of the meetup happened during those moments!
Special thank you to our investors
We had a great evening with our investors! We were excited to share with them the scope of our second milestone and it was an honor to be together.
