No Priors Ep. 44 | With Former Square CEO Alyssa Henry

AI tools are helping small business owners manage their businesses, so they can stay focused on the aspects of their business they love to do. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Alyssa Henry, an executive at some of the most impactful companies from Microsoft to Amazon. Most recently she was the CEO of Square. She led Square’s team as they were very early adopters of a consumer-facing product that used GPT-2 and have continued to incorporate AI into their offerings. On today’s episode, they talk about the whitespace within e-commerce for AI and lessons from the prior generation of infrastructure. Alyssa recently retired from being longtime CEO of Square, within Block. Before that she was a vice president of AWS running, amongst other things, the storage products, or the digital storage bucket for the world. And before AWS, she ran order management software at Amazon Retail and started her tech career at Microsoft. She remains on the boards of Intel, Confluent and was previously on the board of Unity. 0:00 Alyssa’s experience and career trajectory 2:30 Transition from engineer to manager 4:09 AI implementation at Square 7:46 Small business AI applications 12:14 Latent demand for content generation 15:04 The origin story of Square’s GPT-2 products 16:54 Consolidating ecommerce workflows 18:46 How will AI change cloud services 23:07 hyperscaler foundation models and the AI land grab 25:16 Enterprise demand for open source models 28:08 Startups in the AI semiconductor space 31:02 Scale up architectures vs scaling out 34:32 What’s next for Alyssa 36:08 What Elad and Sarah are excited about in 2024

Sarah GuohostAlyssa HenryguestElad Gilhost

Dec 14, 202339mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: December 14, 2023
Duration: 39m
Channel: No Priors
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

AI tools are helping small business owners manage their businesses, so they can stay focused on the aspects of their business they love to do. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad are joined by Alyssa Henry, an executive at some of the most impactful companies from Microsoft to Amazon. Most recently she was the CEO of Square. She led Square’s team as they were very early adopters of a consumer-facing product that used GPT-2 and have continued to incorporate AI into their offerings. On today’s episode, they talk about the whitespace within e-commerce for AI and lessons from the prior generation of infrastructure. Alyssa recently retired from being longtime CEO of Square, within Block. Before that she was a vice president of AWS running, amongst other things, the storage products, or the digital storage bucket for the world. And before AWS, she ran order management software at Amazon Retail and started her tech career at Microsoft. She remains on the boards of Intel, Confluent and was previously on the board of Unity. 0:00 Alyssa’s experience and career trajectory 2:30 Transition from engineer to manager 4:09 AI implementation at Square 7:46 Small business AI applications 12:14 Latent demand for content generation 15:04 The origin story of Square’s GPT-2 products 16:54 Consolidating ecommerce workflows 18:46 How will AI change cloud services 23:07 hyperscaler foundation models and the AI land grab 25:16 Enterprise demand for open source models 28:08 Startups in the AI semiconductor space 31:02 Scale up architectures vs scaling out 34:32 What’s next for Alyssa 36:08 What Elad and Sarah are excited about in 2024

SPEAKERS

Sarah Guo
host
Alyssa Henry
guest
Elad Gil
host

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of No Priors, featuring Sarah Guo and Alyssa Henry, No Priors Ep. 44 | With Former Square CEO Alyssa Henry explores former Square CEO Alyssa Henry on AI, Cloud, and Commerce’s Future Alyssa Henry reflects on nearly a decade leading Square, describing its evolution from a simple card reader for farmers’ markets into a mission-driven, full-stack platform serving businesses of all sizes. She explains how AI and machine learning have long underpinned risk, fraud, and growth at Square, and how generative AI is now unlocking massive latent demand for marketing, content creation, and back-office automation for small businesses.

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