Founder in Focus: Jeremiah Lowin of Prefect

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I've dusted off an evergreen interview I did a while back with the remarkable story of a remarkable founder for the inaugural "email" edition of Remarkable. The goal is one profile per week. I've got several in the hopper right now.  If you're an entrepreneur who would like me to write a profile on you, get in touch. Be sure to check out my profiles on Kate Bradley Chernis, Allan Thomas, and Rob Petrozzo.

And now this weeks Remarkable story:

I recently caught up with Jeremiah Lowin, founder of Prefect, an exciting AI startup with offices in Washington, DC and San Francisco. Jeremiah has a Finance/Risk Management background. The company is setting the standard in dataflow automation used to build, run, and monitor millions of data workflows and pipelines.

While his father is a value investor and entrepreneur, Jeremiah likes to dabble in side projects that catch his interest, but having started a business a decade ago, being a founder again wasn’t something he was looking for. 

Constantly experimenting, Jeremiah discovered people wanted to pay him for what he was building. He thought it might be small potatoes. Selling for a few dollars, lunch with a friend. Small scale. Another fun side project. The feedback and the appetite for what became Prefect was huge. With expertise in Machine Learning and Data Science, and having worked with diverse stakeholders in large financial organizations, Jeremiah has the ability to deliver automation tools that scale. Under the circumstances, it became clear that founding a company was the best way to take advantage of the opportunity. Moving forward, he says, the need to found was obvious.

Existing use cases at big companies were unimaginative. Query, compile, report. Jeremiah says there was no speed, no scale. He leveraged his research on recurrent neural networks to address dynamic, hard to train, get in trouble fast, projects.

His aim is to save engineering effort, mitigate the cost of being wrong, and minimize opportunity costs. He began to squeeze all the current automation tools to develop the AI tools that are now Prefect. Jeremiah says many people make mistakes when trying to interface with existing tools in AI and modern tech because they aren’t actually practitioners themselves; they can only address what they observe to be problems in other people’s workflows. The tools were big company, big problems; and too many semantics with data. Prefect’s dataflow AI automation received extraordinary reception in the Open Source community. Users can adapt the tools workflows, rather than trying to adapt their workflows to the tools.

With dataflow, 99 percent of the time it works, but when it goes wrong, catching and identifying problems in real time alleviates the unexpected “all hands on deck” hassles and expense of trying to figure out what happened.

The Risk Management side of Jeremiah likes to think of AI-enabled dataflow monitoring as insurance. At one point in our conversation, he imagined a future Prefect TV advertisement reminiscent of GEICO and Progressive commercials.

Reluctant though he may be, Jeremiah is an astute founder. He says solutions don’t build companies, problems do. Here’s his three rules for startup success:

• Understand the customer’s problem.

• How are you uniquely suited to solve the problem?

• Why does the problem persist?

When dealing with Angels and VCs, Jeremiah says getting ahead of the curve can save you months of time and headaches. Have your product/market fit down before the seed stage, so by the time you’re ready for Series A, you already have a methodical revenue growth approach. Most founder spend a lot of time on product. If you queue things up right, he says you’ll be able to spend more time on building your company.

The hardest part of a founder’s job is to make decisions. You need to understand behavior to make informed decisions. Jeremiah has some mind-blowing on decision-making for founders. He says his job is to make suboptimal decisions. Caught you off guard? It’s part of the Risk Management experience he brings to the table. He says, “Our goal isn’t to always make the best decision; it’s to never make a bad decision.” How do you do that? Jeremiah explains — say you have 100 different options. Eliminate 90% of them right off the bat. This leaves you with ten decisions that are mostly indistinguishable. Pick one. If it fails, in one iteration, you’re down to three or four options to try next out of the original 100.

His vision is to run the company for 50 years, not your typical 3 years and exit Silicon Valley pipedream. It doesn’t mean he wouldn’t entertain an exit or merger if it was in the best interest of the company, but Jeremiah is building for the long haul. His definition of success is happy customers, happy employees. You’ll notice that vision isn’t tied to a financial outcome. He believes meaningful work, quality of life, and a company built to last can make for a great career.

You can’t have a founder story without mentioning books. And Jeremiah didn’t disappoint. Here’s his top three: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Creativity, Inc. and Shoe Dog.

In a double plug for Creativity, Inc., Jeremiah says if you interview for a job and wind up with an offer, you get a copy of the book whether you accept or not. You can take a look at Prefect openings here. Saved you a click.

LISTEN

You can catch Jeremiah on the Infinite Loops podcast.