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Alex Abramov
Engineering Leader | Metropolis | ex-Meta | Observability, Cloud Cost Management
Alex Abramov is the Vice President of Engineering at Metropolis Technologies, a company focused on leveraging artificial intelligence and computer vision to modernize parking solutions. He has a rich background in engineering leadership, having previously held significant roles such as Senior Engineering Org Leader at Meta (formerly Facebook) and Senior Director of Engineering at Jet. His experience also includes positions as VP of Engineering at CADRE and Bottomline Technologies, among others.12
Abramov holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Brown University, which has provided him with a solid foundation for his career in technology.1 His expertise spans areas such as AI, machine learning infrastructure, and cloud cost management, where he has been instrumental in driving innovation and leading high-performing teams.2
In his current role at Metropolis Technologies, Abramov is responsible for spearheading engineering initiatives that enhance the company's technological capabilities and operational efficiency. His leadership is characterized by a focus on team development and problem-solving on a global scale.1
Highlights
𝐆𝐏𝐔 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐞𝐧 𝐀𝐈 𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐞
Good morning LinkedIn community! It’s been about 2 months since my last post (https://lnkd.in/e5-4ibWH ) and I’d like to provide an update on what I’ve been up to. As I mentioned in my prior post, I have been looking deeper at how GPU Profiling work, inspired by this research (https://lnkd.in/e8sScCMN) I worked on with the Strobelight team at Meta, can be applied to the industry at large.
We’ve conducted market research by reaching out to ~200 companies out of which we’ve talked to approximately two dozen. The results are linked below.
𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞? Many early-stage startups choose to stay in a stealth mode during the early stage research. However, we believe this is not the right approach in this case. The AI/ML space is developing rapidly and the industry players are telling us that the value of time is high and rapid progress is a must.
We believe that the progress in the Gen AI industry is significantly slowed down by the issues companies discover with AI Infra. Our goal in sharing our market research is to raise awareness and see if there is an interest in the community for closer collaboration. Given the findings referenced below, we truly believe that leveraging novel techniques in GPU Profiling is the path to accelerating the industry forward. Please, DM me if you want to collaborate or exchange ideas!
𝐓𝐋;𝐃𝐑 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 1-We are in an AI arms race and the industry players feel the short-term value of time is extremely high. 2-Companies running large distributed ML Training workloads on clusters of GPUs lose weeks of training time per model and incur $mils in extra costs due to various issues related to GPU cluster configuration or the nature of training workload. 3-Model Builders are the ones experiencing the brunt of the infra pain, not the Infra Providers. Furthermore, the way that economic models are currently aligned means Infra providers do not have meaningful incentives to solve this problem for model builders.
See the link to the study below.
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭 I’ve teamed up with Charlie Kroll to interview key players in the Gen AI/MLOps market to get a signal on the commercial value of our ideas. The thought was if we’d find that the signal is strong, we’d try to secure a customer pilot.
As a result of our market research, we have a pipeline of potential pilots lined up. 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭, 𝐈’𝐦 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐨-𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐞𝐁𝐏𝐅 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐤𝐢𝐜𝐤-𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐭(𝐬) 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐞. If you are interested in exploring this opportunity, please DM me! I will also be reaching out to my network for referrals. If I’m able to bring a co-founder, then we’ll form a company and will quickly secure a pre-seed funding round.
After almost 5y at Meta, the time has come for me to move on. I’m writing this post to share the news broadly, reflect on the journey at Meta and thank many amazing people I’m going to miss. some history I joined in 2019 and landed to support a couple of teams in the Observability team of Core Systems group. On one of those teams, we’ve developed great tools such as Tracery, Comparison View, and Landline to empower engineers internally to get to the bottom of tricky perf/reliability/efficiency issues (https://lnkd.in/e8ph--Un). Shoutout to Douglas, Helga, Henry, and others who made this work exciting and fun.
A bit later I helped rebuild our Profilers team. We’ve started with CPU profiling by expanding our customer base from experts to non-experts and enabling $$$ of efficiency wins. And then we’ve pioneered some novel GPU Profiling methods using eBPF tech (https://lnkd.in/e8sScCMN). Shoutout to Jacie, Jonathan, Jordan, Nathan, Riham, and Vlad for being awesome!
In parallel with all of the above, we built our Capacity Tooling team SECT. We’ve mapped out Capacity Management workflows and re-engineered related business processes to make capacity management easy at Meta. As part of this journey, we’ve built Service Console, Capacity Portal, RF, VRP, and other tools that are currently used by 1000s of people internally. Shoutout to Bill, Heike, Matt, Mukund, Peter, Rachelle, and other folks on SECT.
Config Products was a great team I helped bring from IG to Core Systems. It was a lot of fun as the challenges in the area reminded me of config management challenges at Andera. Shout out to Anshul, Joshua, and others. Last, but not least, I took over the Resource Accounting and Budgeting teams early last year. 2023 was a tough year in many ways. Our teams heroically delivered 90+% fleet coverage attribution to enable resource metering and billing. Shoutout to Akanksha, Jacie, Igor, Richard, Shuyang, and others for all your hard work under pressure.
A word of thanks to the leadership: Jeromy, Yun, Avnish, and Blake. I’ve learned a lot from you.
Special thanks to my XFN partners, who made working with you a joy: Alex, Ariel, Babak, Chandra, Lenni, Valentin, James, Ayichew, Andrew, Haiying, Mark, Andrii, Parth, Patrick and many others (hitting mentions limit :) ).
As I think about my experiences at Meta, I feel gratitude for all the experiences and the people I got to work with. It's a small world, I hope many of us will cross paths again!
what’s next During the next few months, I’ll spend time reconnecting with my network, learning, and brainstorming. I'll be looking at everything from starting a new company to joining an established firm. Specific trends I'm interested in exploring are around general Observability and specific focus areas such as GPU Profiling.
As I'm planning to talk to a ton of people, don't be surprised if you hear from me. Also, please don't hesitate to reach out if you'd like to catch up or throw ideas around.
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Mesh is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Mesh centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
- Smart Search: Allows you to search using natural language like "People I know at the NYT" or "Designers I've met in London"
- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.
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