Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Dibattista
Hi Jeremy, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I moved to Atlanta in 2010 after spending my childhood years in Pittsburgh. Growing up, I was always fascinated with technology and entrepreneurship; I always knew that was what I wanted to do as a career. Thankfully, I had Georgia Tech nearby that could fulfill my fascination. I decided to stay in Atlanta to spend the next five-and-a-half years at the university for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees. Throughout my time at Tech, I grew to love being in the mecca of the southeast’s tech startup hub, loved learning business and entrepreneurship through my minor program, the Denning Technology and Management program, loved becoming a technologist, specializing in the growing field of AI, machine learning, and of course, loved rooting on the Jackets (even through some rough years).
While so many of my smart and accomplished colleagues moved away, working for some of the most elite tech companies like Apple, Tesla, and Google, I had always felt like I was destined for a different path. I love being on the ground floor, starting with nothing and building up a product. I spent the next almost half-decade working as employee 3 for a PubTech (publisher technology) and AdTech (advertising technology) startup, Spiny.ai. With such a small team, the product was mine and my team’s to learn how to perfect, shape, and build. Over the next few years, we went through the cycle of build, fail, build, fail, until we finally built a product that broke through and now services hundreds of websites and hundreds of millions of visitors daily.
During that time, I also pursued my love for teaching and writing. I began writing as a tech blogger for publications like Toward Data Science, experimenting with new technologies and bringing my discoveries to light. I volunteered my time at the computer science departments of Drew Charter School and Atlanta College and Careers Academy, two high schools in Atlanta, to help inspire upcoming technologists. Finally, I partnered with Educative to write my first professional machine learning course on writing algorithms to perform spell check and grammar check, similar to a tool like Grammarly.
Seeking a new challenge and getting back to the innovation ground floor, earlier this year I left Spiny.ai and joined Bronson, an AI Legal Technology firm, to clean up our environment and help build a future we all can enjoy, free from pollution. We are still in the early stages, but we have a lofty goal of completely modernizing how legal firms can handle environmental and consumer protection, making sure we can detect future disasters, like what happened to the water in Flint Michigan, before they hurt Americans.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
When I was in college, I told myself I had to have a job in the tech field to learn practical experience alongside my schoolwork. I never had trouble finding a job, but working 30 hours a week on top of being a full-time college student and grad student was at times overwhelming. I recall every Wednesday being especially stressful, leaving my house at 6:30AM, working a full day, taking classes until 7:30PM, and then group studying until around midnight, pulling 16+ hour days multiple times per week for years, while still trying to balance a social life on the weekends. Looking back, getting industry experience while in college was helpful, but I could have been easier on myself and a lot of the pressure I put on myself was self-inflicted. I graduated grad-school with 7 different jobs in the tech industry, and while I am grateful for those opportunities, the experience taught me that more is not necessarily better. A few highly focused efforts can prove magnitudes better than spreading yourself paper-thin.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I like to tell people I bring startups to life. That is the elevator pitch, but to break it down further, I specialize in machine learning, large language models, and data engineering for early-stage startups. That means being scrappy and building whatever I have to from scratch to deliver a product. It means talking to customers to understand their needs. It means fast learning and fast failures until a viable product comes to fruition. I typically join these organizations very early on, being one of the first employees, and enjoy setting a tech strategy, building modern AI technologies, and hiring the best people at their jobs to work alongside me.
Nothing makes me more proud than taking what was just an idea months earlier to something that impacts and improves my customers’ lives. In my last startup, Spiny.AI, I led the tech strategy that took us from 2 early customers to gaining the trust of some of the world’s largest publishers like Time and Sports Illustrated. Nothing is more fun (and more scary) than seeing your product 1000x in size over a matter of months!
What sets me apart from others is my willingness to learn whatever it takes to get the job done. When you’re in an organization of only a handful of engineers, there are a lot of knowledge gaps and unknowns. Engineers in a big organization know their domain. At a startup, however, that is rarely a luxury you get. I pride myself on being the one who can figure out what I do not know, learn it, and use my passion for teaching to help share that knowledge. Over the past few years, beyond everything technical, I have taught myself topics like SEO, content marketing, litigation financing, call-center logistics, environmental law, advertising servers, and pharmaceuticals just to name a few.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
I love living on the eastside of Atlanta. I take my bike everywhere – to the store, to the gym, and to go out to dinner. The Beltline development project has made the area such a nice place to live, with a vibrant community and fun festivals like Chomp and Stomp and Inman Park Fest.
While my neighborhood is very walkable, what I like least about Atlanta is that other parts of the city have a car-centric design. there are so many other cool parts of the city, but they rely so heavily on car-centric design, that they can be a burden to get to. The best example for me is The Battery. I would love easier ways to get up to watch The Braves, but it’s practically inaccessible during the 9-5 traffic!
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