Some relationships in life start with a deal. Others start with a random hackathon and an unexpected iPad bill.
I met Lukas Biewald almost 15 years ago when he and Yan-David (Yanda) Erlich showed up to Euclid’s first hackathon (Euclid being the company I founded). At the event, they built an app called Euzak using the Euclid API. Whenever you walked into a store, it would automatically change the music to something you liked.
The judges (Michael Dearing, DJ Patil, and Andrew Fine) made an unexpected call: instead of choosing just one winner, they crowned most of the participants winners. That meant I had to buy them all iPads. At the time, I was annoyed at Michael for the unexpected expense, but looking back, it was the pre-pre-pre seed round of Weights & Biases. More importantly, it was the start of one of my most cherished relationships.
Lukas and I started hanging out regularly, alternating between congratulating and consoling each other as founders of our respective companies.
One moment, in particular, stands out. Euclid was struggling. More importantly, I was struggling. It was hitting me not just as a founder, but personally. I felt stuck, frustrated, exhausted, and unsure what to do next. Lukas could have jumped into business strategy, but instead, he did something much more valuable: he saw me first as a person, not just a founder. Before talking about the company, he helped me process what I was going through. It’s a moment I think about often, even though I’m sure he hasn’t given it a second thought. That’s just who he is. The way he naturally shows up for people is how I aspire to engage with friends and partners.
The Garage Days & the Birth of W&B
When we had both stepped out of our CEO roles, I loved swinging by Lukas’s small and packed garage in the Mission. It felt like walking into a lab where the laws of physics were just slightly different. He was always playing with something: magnets, lights, music, machine learning experiments. One day, it was playing with neodymium (NdFeB) magnets. Another day, it was a drone that could fly around and do face detection…in 2015.
When he wasn’t in the garage, he was teaching machine learning classes, and several of my teammates took them, raving about how good they were. Eventually, it became clear that Lukas was shifting from mad scientist mode into building something more defined. Around that time, I had just written my first seed check and was eager to back whatever he was working on.
When he told me he was building tools for ML practitioners, it was an obvious yes. This was a pain point so real that I just had to turn to the person sitting at the desk next to me to see it in action. Lukas was kind enough to let me invest in the first round, and I followed on in the subsequent A and B rounds.
The Best Companies Don’t Need You
There’s a truism in venture capital: “The best companies don’t need you.” That couldn’t be truer for Weights & Biases.
But the best investors don’t just show up for the companies. They show up for the people behind them. That’s what Lukas did for me. And it’s what I strive to do for the founders I back at Octave.