TechCrunch+ Roundup: Building a Core AI Team, HVAC Climate in Brazil, Remote Work Rituals

About one in three restaurants will close in their first year. For construction companies, this figure rises to 53%.

But AI projects are the real heartbreakers: a study by Gartner found that 85% are doomed to failure “due to biases in the data, the algorithms, or the teams managing them.”

Unfortunately, the deep-seated fear of missing out means that many organizations jump into AI projects with both feet, even if they don’t fully appreciate the scale of the work involved.

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“The best way to make sure you’re on the right AI development path is to start your AI project without thinking about models,” recommends Eran Shlomo, co-founder and CEO of Dataloop.

“Most of the data the AI ​​needs to perform at its best is not available to the development team,” he writes. “This creates a ‘chicken or egg’ problem: companies need production data to provide a working model, but the model must exist to go into production.”

In a post aimed at non-technical managers and senior developers, he shares a framework for building a core team of data scientists, domain experts, and data engineers who can build a system capable of learn from mistakes iteratively.

Through collaboration, “AI provides automation, speed, and low cost” while the team directs “AI to the correct outcome in an ever-changing environment.”

According to Shlomo, working along these lines generates a flywheel of machine learning data, “essentially planning a learning system rather than an AI model that works correctly at any given time.”

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Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

Despite the slowdown, CVC is gaining traction in the Brazilian startup ecosystem

The Brazilian venture capital scene is still in its infancy, but in recent years companies from sectors such as mining, telecommunications and retail have gotten into the game.

“These CVCs should be structurally advantageous for the Brazilian startup ecosystem, as they introduce a stable medium-term dry powder pool that could reduce volatility,” says hedge fund investment analyst Matheus Tavares Dos Santos.

Gatik’s Gautam Narang on the Importance of Knowing Your Customer

Picture credits: Bryce Durbin

As illustrated by the derailment of a toxic train in eastern Palestine, OH, our fragile legacy supply chains have long awaited an overhaul.

Autonomous vehicle startup Gatik operates around 40 driverless heavy-duty tractor-trailer trucks on routes up to 300 miles long, connecting distribution centers to smaller hubs.

Rebecca Bellan interviewed Gatik CEO and co-founder Gautam Narang to learn more about the company’s operations, investor expectations and the impact of a shortage of human drivers on growth.

“We’ve never done free shipping,” he says. “We’ve been doing commercial deliveries since 2019, which means every trip we’ve taken, we’ve been paid for.”

If you have more than one business model, you don’t have a business model

Picture credits: chief sergeant (Opens in a new window) /Getty Pictures

If your startup doesn’t have a well-defined business model — and a backup in case the first one fails — it’s unlikely to get funded.

Haje Jan Kamps defines it as “the full stack of how your business operates: how you deploy your resources (money and people) to create products and attract paying customers, and how you retain those customers.”

There is no need to stumble in the dark: seed-stage founders can rely heavily on LTV and CAC to shape their strategy, as identifying a “replicable business model” is the first task.

“The important thing is to clarify the direction of your business model and how you will focus your attention during the sales cycle of your product,” he writes.

Create Remote Work Rituals That Stick

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Remote teams have a lot of flexibility in when and how they work, but adding some structure can improve productivity and transparency without sacrificing freedom.

“At the end of the day, asynchronous work only serves you when you compartmentalize the phases of work with your team,” explains Stefanie Palomino, product manager and general manager of ROOM3D.

This article offers several tips that can help managers deploy active listening techniques that promote engagement, improve communication, and ideally reduce the number of meetings that take place.

“The routines people create are negotiated over time, but it’s something we take for granted.”