Ian Gerard

Ian Gerard was raising hogs and vegetables on a farm before he started selling developers access to high end AI chips.

He and Brad met through mutual friends, and he came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast to get into the parts of artificial intelligence most people in the industry would rather leave alone. He said early on that those are the conversations he likes. A good stretch of it went to rescue dogs, his and Brad's, before they came back around to whether the internet is dying and what that would actually cost anybody.

The Cloud Minders builds infrastructure for developers who do not get a good deal out of Amazon and Microsoft. Ian describes the problem as the big trees blotting out the sun, and the job as giving sunlight to the undergrowth, because smaller dev teams cannot get their hands on the high end chips at all right now. Half his work is translation. Most of the people funding what he does are real estate investors with no exposure to any of this, so he uses what he calls the apartment analogy. The server is the building. The eight GPUs inside it are eight units. People rent them by the minute, the hour, the week or the year, and when they leave you hit format instead of replacing the carpet.

The hard part came at his first company. Adder started in 2017 putting paid ads on local people's cars, and the problem nobody could get around was that outdoor advertising has no analytics, so a marketing department cannot justify the budget. Fixing that meant processing trillions of location data points a day, which priced out on Amazon at 120,000 dollars a month against revenue of about ten thousand. So they built their own data center. His investors asked whether he was stupid, since everybody uses the cloud. His answer was that they could spend the 120,000 every month or spend it once and control it forever. Amazon also billed them 10,000 real dollars for three support questions about a GPU allocation, because support is priced as a percentage of spend.

He grew up building computers out of parts from the Salvation Army, whatever the family could afford, and the data center pulled him back into that after a decade away. The farm he came from was a community farm, set up so that people had some buy in and actually cared about each other, and he says the community part has never stopped being the point. He is 32, and he points out that his parents raised him not to trust strangers on the internet and now forward him things off Facebook. His trust has gone down over the years and theirs has gone up, which he does not think is the direction it should have moved. The Cloud Minders runs a Facebook page he describes as trying to be the Onion, but for AI.