If I had to describe my professional self in 10 words or less:
Product leader with deep AI skills and business background
But since you took the time to visit, I’ll offer you a 500-word summary. Google bard tells me this will take most people about two minutes to read. So, if you read this, feel free to remind me I owe you two minutes.
Jeremy Bloom in 500 600 675 words or less…
I’m something of an oddball in silicon valley. In a market where most people are encouraged to dive deep into a single set of skills highly correlated with a clearly defined and, in theory, highly portable position, my very nature compels me to look at problems from a multidisciplinary perspective, diving deep into both technical and business concepts as required to solve a problem. Two things drive this in me:
- I am naturally inquisitive about a broad range of topics, and I love to learn. The idea that an MBA shouldn’t concern themselves with architecting a cloud application, or that an AI research scientist shouldn’t think deeply about value creation and profitability is…, for me, limiting. I get many people like to focus in very specific areas, and that’s cool, it’s just not me. Maybe it was growing up in a college town (Madison Wisconsin) and meeting so many different types of people as a kid. Maybe it was attending a liberal arts college (Macalester College) and double majoring in Computer Science and Political Science. Maybe I just like being the MBA Product Manager who builds the product test framework in python because engineering has their hands full. I don’t know what makes me a philomath with dreams/delusions of becoming a polymath, but, to the occasional annoyance of family and friends, my curious nature permeates every bit of my being.
- I’m very goal oriented and I love to build things people value and use. Typically these things save time and/or money, since those are the most immediately obvious value creation vectors. Most of the coolest things I’ve built in my life, whether solely or as part of a team, have been complex and multi month of year endeavors. Hitting roadblocks of knowledge, time, or other resources is typical even in well-planned projects. As I’m typically the (Agile) Product Owner and/or Product Manager, I’m already doing the “normal” thinkgs (researching the market, talking to customers and partners, documenting use cases, doing the pricing analysis, building the sales collateral…) but I’m also the guy who jumps in to write the documentation plan, draft the marketing and communications plan, and help test. Sometimes I do things that I know others could do better. When they have the time they can build upon what I did and show me how to do better next time.
Most of my recent experience is at major networking companies where I’ve been a software guy in a hardware company. Well meaning colleagues suggested I dive deeper into networking so I could fit in better. I did some of this, but quickly realized I was surrounded by networking experts, all of whom could help me sort networking issues, but projects were almost never blocked these areas, because we had so much talent in house. So I quickly redirected to what I saw missing, which meant going deeper into software, strategy, data, and eventually AI and ML.
Years ago I realized AI, and not networking, was my future, and I’ve shifted my educational efforts and projects to this. Of course AI is a very broad space, and there are a lot of critical adjacencies, such as security and data science. So I cast a broad net in what I learn about, and have spent hundreds thousands of hours learning: taking online classes, building my own models, getting an MBA, getting CISSP certified, and just absorbing all I can from what’s available online. I was in high school and college during the early days of the internet, and dreamt (and often wrote) of the internet as being a monumental force for the democratization of information and education. While I’m not quite as optimistic as I once was, I am awed by much information people have put online, how hard they have worked to do so, and how much they keep giving. This is as true for AI as anything, and I am enormously grateful to everyone who has helped with this. You can see some of my modest contributions on my web site.