Joining Dropout Labs!

After months of searching, lots of fun (and some less fun) interviews and hours of self-reflection, I am excited to announce I am the new Head of Product at Dropout Labs! 🎉

The interview and decision process was quite iterative and disruptive! I am somewhat to blame for this as I chose to interview with more than 35 companies 😅 The decision process itself involved many pivots, but at FooCamp, via several soul-searching conversations, I came to the conclusion that I couldn't walk away from my passion for changing machine learning for good by continuing to advocate for privacy and security in machine learning.

After coming to this conclusion, the choice was obvious. The team at Dropout Labs was deeply knowledgeable and passionate about this goal and truly believes in a future where encrypted machine learning is not only possible, it's the norm.

What is Dropout Labs even?

An amazing all-remote team built by successful entrepreneurs working on privacy-preserving machine learning at the intersection of deep learning and cryptography! Brag time: they built the open-source TF Encrypted and several other important Tensorflow Libraries helping make secure and privacy-aware deep learning a reality.

In addition to being able to stay in Berlin, the team impressed me with their knowledge and enthusiasm for privacy, machine learning and security. An all-remote culture is something I've always wanted to experience and is providing me with new learnings daily -- am I communicating the right amount? How can I ask better questions? How can I clearly share a specific insight with the team?

If you know me or my work, you also know I wouldn't join a team that didn't have a mission or vision that aligned with my deeply held beliefs. Ours is clear: create a new reality for machine learning -- one where different actors (data owners, data scientists, security and privacy folks, end users) can collaborate to define trust in their relationships and confidently build better models in a privacy-aware and secure manner.

What is this product that you are building as Head of Product?

This is what I can say so far: we're exploring the intersection of machine learning pipelines, data privacy policy and encryption. We want to meet the problem where it will have the most impact: sensitive data in production system that would benefit a machine learning or data science team if they had access.

As we are using iterative design and development, you'll get a sneak peek long before our initial launch if you follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

BTW, you should also follow Dropout Labs and check out their posts on Medium to learn more!

Can I learn even more?

Yes, of course! I'd love to chat about what we are building and get feedback! Specifically, if you are:

• a data protection officer or policy/governance lead
• a data scientist or machine learning engineer
• a data or machine learning pipeline engineer
• a security or SecOps team member
• an executive at a company handling sensitive data

I want to talk to you! As part of product development, we will be implementing a lot of fun prototypes and asking lots of questions -- which means I'd love to hear your needs and prioritize them. I can promise to listen and learn from you. If you are in Berlin (either for our call or after), I can treat you to lunch or a beverage of your choice as a Dankeschön!

Please feel free to DM me on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn or drop me a line via email. I look forward to sharing more of this journey with you and learning along the way. 🤗