I'm at the end of my 2nd full year at Nuclearn, and I've been reflecting on 2023 and felt like I'd share some of my thoughts. This was a year of big change and a lot of growth. We doubled our customer count, doubled the number of products we offer, made significant advancements applying fine-tuned large language models to Nuclear-specific domains, and so many more things that I don't have the space to enumerate here. We started the year with 1 employee besides Bradley Fox and I, and now our headcount is over 10 and growing. And through all of that... I've learned a few things. In no particular order:
- Making decisions quickly and having a bias for action is really really important. In previous roles working for a utility, most decisions were hard to back out of and often took a long time to make (often for good reasons, e.g. longer planning cycles, emphasis on capital projects, etc). That isn't really true of an AI software startup, and delaying decisions is the death of agility. Most things we do are "two-way doors", and doing something >> doing nothing. The resulting snowball effect on momentum you get from more quickly iterating through your decide - act - observe loop is far more powerful than I ever would've thought.
- Hire the right people, give them the explicit goals, and explain the reasoning behind those goals. When you give the right people challenging (but realistic) goals, they put in the extra effort to achieve those goals. When they understand the "why", they are able to prioritize and adjust on their own instead of needing explicit direction. And then when they meet those goals, they get much more fulfillment. I've seen this work so well in the last year, but still don't take this approach as often as I should. This is something I'm really going to focus on this year.
- Unsurprisingly, startup life can be... chaotic. Lot's of hours, last minute trips, unplanned fires that need to be put out. It's hard to express how thankful I am of my family and especially my wife for all of the support. Managing a startup while raising 2 young children wouldn't be possible without you all.
- 2 years in and I still love it. The challenges are always different, and the excitement rarely wanes. Maybe having great customers (you know who you are!) and an awesome team help a little with that.
2024 is going to be great. We have made some recent AI advancements that I think are going to "wow" a lot of people, and make a huge positive impact for our customers. And we have a strong core team that will be able to execute on the opportunities. 2024 here we come!
