DataFest Tbilisi 2018 from the perspective of Yerevan machine learning



Ադամ || ადამ, grubyy nemec v Erevane







At the afterparty at a chic bar in old Tbilisi, the Georgian machine learning mafia's final message for me to take to Yerevan was: "Send speakers!"

But actually the thing I had heard from them again and again over the days of the event was: "If a neighbouring ecosystem is doing great, it is great for us!" I love the win-win mindset.

It should be obvious, but, as we know, zero-sum mindset - "They win => We lose" - has ruled this region for too long. On the ride back I had 6 long hours to look out the window at the misery and destruction caused by years and years of statist central planning, corruption and lose-lose conflicts.

We can talk about the causes, but today let's talk about the fixes.





Are neighbouring startup ecosystems competing?

From outside a lot of people see "Silicon Valley" as one place, and want to be the next one. But our recent guest Georges Afiki talked about the spectrum all insiders know: SF <==> SJ : social/mobile <==> hardware.

Actually in the Bay Area we only say "the City", "the Peninsula", "the South Bay" and "the East Bay". And they are very very different, and most people living and working in one almost never go to the others. I literally visit Tbilisi more often than I visit Berkeley, and I have only visited Tbilisi 3 times in my life.

The SF <==> SJ spectrum is a great model for how two cities can be linked for a huge huge win-win. Is there competition? Yes. Healthy competition. Mostly between companies, even within companies. And it is very fluid, people change teams all the time. And nobody organising a major event ever said "Oh, we won't invite them, because they're in the City but we're on the Peninsula" or even "because she's a Facebook engineer but this is Google I/O" and definitely not "because his great-grandfather worked at IBM and mine worked at MIT".





What Yerevan tech can learn from Tbilisi tech

The other thing I heard most from our Georgian colleagues was that Georgians and Armenians are very similar. It's very true in many ways, if we remember they only meet Armenians from Georgia or Eastern Armenia.

But the majority of Armenians on earth are diaspora, and it has a huge effect on life in Yerevan today, in tech of course too.

The difference in skills, experience and so on between formerly Soviet Armenians and diaspora Armenians is much greater than the difference in skills and experience between formerly Soviet Armenians and Georgians. Think about it.

Outsiders tend to overestimate how internally diverse and disorganised a distributed nation is. The open secret is that there is no HQ, there is no CEO, there are literally 3 patriarchates and 2 holy sees, for historic reasons.

It's a strength, it's anti-fragile, but it has some overhead cost, and just because your last name ends in -yan doesn't mean you have a direct line to or even common language with Alexis Ohanian. It's more like 5 degrees.

But many of the challenges for Tbilisi and Yerevan are very similar, because Tbilisi and Yerevan are so similar, and because all ecosystems, even the Bay Area, share similar challenges - not enough local talent, the seed funding gap, transport, universities losing students and professors to industry.

What would tech in Armenia do if there were no Armenian diaspora in the US and around the world? Where would it go for speakers, customers, markets and investors? That is the question for our colleagues in Georgia, every day.

From what I see, of course it is difficult, but not getting charity from a diaspora forces them to develop some healthy habits. They develop good connections with solid tech hubs around Europe. When a guest visits, they make sure the experience is first-class, because the guest only gets one impression, the guest does not visit for family reasons or patriotism or charity.

They make the event not about them. In three days, I never once heard "The problem in Georgia is..." or "The government needs to..." When there are guests, it is not the time and place, because it does not interest the guests, who flew in from everywhere from the US to Ireland to Kyrgyzstan to Egypt - just like in Berlin or San Francisco.

And note that it is called "DataFest Tbilisi", not "DataFest Georgia". It's about a city, not a nation, just like all the startups ecosystems - the Bay Area, Berlin... Sound much more inclusive and cosmopolitan than "America" or "Germany". Or to take an extreme example, "Istanbul" sounds much more intelligent and suitable for a tech event than "Turkey". That makes people from all over the world feel more welcome.

There is also the regional level. Our colleagues in Tbilisi remembered to tell us in Yerevan that the event was happening. That's why there was a bus of data scientists and data analysts from PicsArt that went to DataFest. Whereas in Armenia we make sure our contacts in California know, but we consistently forget to inform Tbilisi or even New York. Sending one email or making one post in their group is not that hard.

The result of all of this is that DataFest Tbilisi is executed better than any event of similar size held in Yerevan that is technical, than any event that is not initiated and run by diaspora in California. Besides the organisation and polish, they have more quality guests from more quality companies from more tech ecosystems - that balance is great, it's why we go to events, to get a slice of different perspectives and offerings, to see the Facebook engineer from London compete with the Google engineer from Munich who or the Zalando engineer from Dublin - all real examples from DataFest Tbilisi - who gave the previous talk.

The downside to not having a diaspora in big markets is of course is that it is very hard for tech in Tbilisi to shift from service companies to product companies. But the technical talent is there. Every machine learning engineer I met in Tbilisi was very strong.

So what happens? There are service companies in Tbilisi like MaxinAI that end up having dozens and dozens of machine learning engineers! It's a huge opportunity, if the right people find out. And Tbilisi actually has a regular official machine learning meetup, open and findable on Meetup, once a month. (Yerevan brings Evan Shelhamer, Anna Harutyunyan, Richard Socher... people from Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, USC, Stanford, DeepMind... but does not have one actual regular machine learning event open to industry, not even a yearly one. The closest is the YSU ML Summer School, which is more like a course.) Which is in fact right, there should be a constant, stable, reliable community, it's more concretely useful than random visits from angels and prophets.

As an aside, although our Georgian colleagues complained about their politics, I see big progress towards a European future. The state university is noticeably part condition, in fact it's beautiful outside and inside, it reminded me of the more humble sections of the Imperial Palace (Hofburg) in Vienna. In three days in Tbilisi I did not see one traffic jam! Nor did I see one big black innomarka rabizmobil. There are no gas pipes and no electric cables above.

And these things like clean air are not just luxuries. Every single investor and Bay Area tech company active in Armenia is privately telling me about the need for more talent, that there needs to be a wave of talented people from other countries. From the West, from the East.

The talent will come for engaging career opportunities - the chance to work in a Bay Area company, and intellectual stimulation - and quality of life - affordability, safety, family-friendliness, cuisine, culture and arts. Yerevan and Armenia have great things to offer on those fronts, but that makes it even more of a shame to ruin it unnecessarily.

Building an event, or building an ecosystem, is like building any other product: put yourself in the shoes of the user.





What Yerevan and Tbilisi both need to learn: efficiency, efficiency, efficiency...

When I came back to Yerevan, I found out that a colleague of mine who is from Tbilisi and whom I see every day in Yerevan was, by chance, actually in Tbilisi at the time of DataFest, but did not know about the event! Apsos! But not surprising. As an ecosystem we are very disorganised, which causes inefficiency.

The basic problems of efficiency are common to Yerevan and Tbilisi. Inefficiency is common to all ecosystems. Hrant came back from EMNLP - the top research conference worldwide in machine learning for language - and also had stories of disorganisation in Brussels.

Well, those societies with the top events are already wealthy and secure and at a huge scale, we are not. We don't get to make those mistakes. We must be better. Schedule, acoustics, projector, wifi, climate control, transport. These things just need to work.

Use standard platforms

We should always use Unix (Linux or MacOS) not Windows. Most projector issues are caused by this, because all the good speakers show up with a Mac or Linux machine, and then there is no cable. It's just one symptom though, many other issues are caused by this.

We should probably just use GitHub Pages for static sites. Fancy CMS are slow and complex and hard to search and require a server and an engineer to update, even for a small typo. (I watched this painful dynamic at every single machine learning event with which I am involved, in Armenia, in Georgia and also in Switzerland and Belgium.) GitHub Pages is the standard in machine learning. It's fast and bombproof, people can send pull requests, markdown is easy to edit, and, yes, it can be served on any domain, on https.

We are too addicted to Facebook. Facebook is designed to make you believe your own illusions. This causes our people to miss valuable updates on our tech ecosystem and also valuable updates from the top people from more mature ecosystems who generally interact on other platforms, and for them to miss updates from us.

You don't need Facebook. I never opened an account when I was in the Bay Area. I don't have any tech friends from there who really use it. Even the friends who are engineers at Facebook do not use it. I have never found a co-founder, investor or enterprise customer via Facebook. I have, with ads, found users who install apps and scroll scroll scroll and click click click on more ads. Consumers not producers. Facebook is Odnoklassniki 2.0. Even SMS would be better. Building a tech ecosystem on it is collective suicide.

Write things down, write things up

We should write and document more and operate more openly. It should not take a series of coffees and beers and emails from ծանոթ to ծանոթ to get to the right person in the average case. That does not scale, and even if it works for us, it makes it impossible for outsiders - who could be investors or companies that want to open an office, and who do not know our ways - to know what exists here.

Share the work

We have too much dependency on too few amazing people, and maybe a small team around them. That's stressful on them, and dangerous for us all. Tbilisi is dependent on Nino, and Yerevan on Nina. A good way to test for it is to ask "Would HiveSummit happen without Nina's efforts?", "Would DataFest happen without Nino's efforts?", "Would DataFest have great guests without Giorgi's efforts?", or "Would machine learning in Yerevan exist if Hrant were working in California?"

If the answer is only "Maybe" or "Yes, but it would be significantly lower quality", that's scary, because people get busy all the time for good reasons - busy with family, with jobs, with research, with their own startups. The amazing part is not just that these people achieve so much for their ecosystems, but that they achieve it outside of their main work!

Great productivity from a single amazing person is fine, if it benefits that person's main work or that company's main business. But it should not be charity, it should not be on top of the person's main work, because that's not sustainable - it will be the first thing to be cut when that person is under stress or has more important side work. In the long run, it is better for all of us if that person is more successful in his or her main work. One thing the Bay Area has figured out is how to replicate roles that create value - for example, any single Google engineer is basically replaceable.

So other people and businesses need to step up. It can't be that a few people are working 150%, and many other people are working 70% on low-value stuff with .NET. In a meeting once Larry Page said to us ten thousand engineers: "If you're not working on a problem that's a $1m / year problem for the company, skip your manager, come talk to me directly, because we have > $1m / year problems with nobody working on them." Can we define a number like that for people in our ecosystems? Maybe $100K / year? And what to do in that case?

Be global

If we are going to all this work to organise, we may as well go big. "DataFest Tbilisi" is better than "DataFest Georgia" or "DataFest Armenia", or, to take a real example, "JavaScript Conference Armenia" and "ArmTech". But why not just "DataFest"? They don't call it "TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco" or "WebSummit Lisbon" or "Applied Machine Learning Days Lausanne" or "Burning Man Black Rock City". It's just "TechCrunch Disrupt". And they all have a .com or .org address. It makes it more attractive for the potential speakers, and is better for the local companies too when they can say they had a winning pitch at DataFest.





For 2019, for 2029

So what does it mean concretely?

Exchanging speakers is one idea. And we have started that. But just like we should want more constant low-level buzz of activity instead of yearly spikes between Yerevan and the Armenian diaspora, we should want more constant low-level buzz between Yerevan and Tbilisi.

That will happen when there are people going back and forth for selfish sustainable for-profit reasons - because companies open offices to get the good engineers, because startups need investment, because the best PhD programme for some niche is in one city or the other.

And it is more practical for people in Yerevan to initiate much that, as there are more tech companies in Yerevan, and also the Tbilisi Armenians are instrumental in the connection we do have. We cannot expect Georgians and diaspora Armenians to connect to each other, we must be the bridge.

I hope all of us visit Tbilisi more often, so I hope it doesn't take another 2800 years to fix the damn road. Դե բզբզե՜նք:



