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Paul Vidal

Co-founder & CTO @Collective - Building the first freelancer professional network - Find the best freelancers for 0% - ex-Datadog

Paul Vidal is a French software engineer turned entrepreneur and CTO, currently spearheading the development of innovative solutions for independent workers at Collective.

With a prestigious recognition as a Forbes 30 under 30 Europe honoree, Paul takes pride in his passion for CrossFit and sports while embodying an eternal optimist outlook.

At Collective, known as the 'LinkedIn for freelancers,' Paul and his team are empowering freelancers to collaborate, connect, secure work opportunities, manage invoicing, and streamline communication with recruiters through unique tools crafted for seamless interaction.

Boasting significant achievements as of May 2024, Paul led Collective to secure an impressive $8 million mammoth seed funding round, attracting over 20,000 freelancers to the platform who actively engage in the ecosystem.

Among its pioneering features, Collective offers a commission-free platform for recruiter searches, setting a new standard in the freelancing industry.

In terms of technology, the Collective stack comprises cutting-edge tools including Typescript, React, GraphQL, NestJS, PostgreSQL, Helm, Kubernetes, and AWS, alongside utilities like Github, Forest Admin, Datadog, and Github Actions for CI.

Paul's academic background is marked by an Engineer's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science with First Class Honours from Imperial College London, complemented by his exceptional performance in obtaining the French Baccalaureate with the highest mention, Très Bien, from Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle de Londres.

His professional journey includes diverse roles such as Angel Investor at various startups including Unify, The Mobile-First Company, Hexa, Roundtable, Bitstack, and Dotfile, underscoring his keen interest in fostering innovation.

Moreover, Paul's experience spans leadership positions such as CTO & Co-founder at Collective.work, Entrepreneur in Residence at Hexa within eFounders, Software Engineer II - R&D at Datadog, DevOps Lead at Réseau Entourage, and Site Reliability Engineer II at Datadog.

Paul has also engaged in research and development activities involving machine learning at Imperial College London and held software engineering positions at reputable companies like Skyscanner and BlaBlaCar, showcasing his versatility and expertise across multiple domains.

Highlights

Sep 7 · linkedin

😭 We running OUT of good data for AI !

Everyday, cooler and cooler AI models are coming out...

But who's working on creating better data for those ?

For example, we know llama 3 was pretty much trained brute force on most of the internet and all the datasets you can find out there 😮

Where do we continue from there?

🤯 We're clearly hitting a data wall problem

Yes, we can inprove the quality of all this data which is for most garbage or redundant

But at sone point, we need to generate tons of new great data to move forward !

This is the reason OpenAI is partnering with news provider and more, it desperately needs more quality data to move forward

But this will be far from enough given the massively rapid expansion of AI

▶️ IMO, synthetic data generation will reach golden years !

And if I could start something new, i would definitely check out this field

Creating unique datasets (even better for humanity if you open source some part) is heavily needed

Now!

Sep 5 · linkedin

🔄 AI Companies are Flipping the Cost Paradigm

Traditional Companies: ➡️ 90% Employees' salaries ➡️ 10% Other expenses

AI-Driven Companies: ➡️ 90% GPU costs ➡️ 10% Employee salaries

No wonder why those companies pay well

Salaries are ridiculous compared to the amount of money that is burnt into GPUs 😜

Paul Vidal
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Location

Greater Paris Metropolitan Region