How Hugging Face raised $235M

In this episode, Nathan and Erik sit down to analyze Hugging Face in light of its recent $235M Series D round. They analyze Hugging Face’s community and defensibility through the lens of other community businesses like ProductHunt and Yelp, assess its ability to fulfill its $4.5 billion valuation, and assess competitors and other notable companies in the space like Replit, Character, and Runway. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

TIMESTAMPS: (00:00:57) Episode Preview (00:01:52) Nathan’s Introduction (00:04:57) Overview of Hugging Face and recent fundraising announcement (00:08:13) Hugging Face’s product line (00:16:47) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky (00:18:36) Community driven businesses and HuggingFace’s moat (00:23:23) Discovery and inference (00:28:04) Hugging Face’s ideological nature (00:31:31) Curation is key (00:33:46) Keeping content fresh when AI moves so fast (00:35:44) If Hugging Face is a $50 billion company one day, what would it look like? (00:48:08) Hugging Face vs Replit (00:57:19) Contrasting Hugging Face with other companies like Character and Runway

LINKS MENTIONED: Hugging Face's LLM leaderboard

X/TWITTER: @labenz (Nathan) @eriktorenberg @CogRev_Podcast

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Music Credit: GoogleLM