We’re rebuilding streaming discovery from scratch, wanna join?
Sometimes the stars just naturally align and everything seems to fall into place. In 2021 I had been looking for a new adventure for a while, as one day I happened to bump into the phenomenon and force of nature Maria Westergaard.
Maria has a deep passion for a pretty niche area, which fits my (slightly nerdy) skill set really well. Her dream is to make streaming discovery joyful again. We ran into each other at an incubator in Stockholm and I got impressed by her visionary and organisational guts. My OCD gravitates toward people like Maria. Also from day one I could tell she was helpful and nice not only to me but for others as well. I like good people. We didn’t end up working together until later that same year but decided to launch Hint Technology since we were sure to have identified a problem the two of us could solve together.
Past
The thing with me is that I’ve always been an early adopter. I started my computer science career by designing and programming websites commercially when I was around fourteen years of age. Looking back, I’ve learned a bunch since then, but I remember being proud as can be every time I delivered a fully functioning website. That same feeling lives in me still, I’m a problem solver by nature and over the years I’ve moved towards working with machine learning — for me as a programmer that’s truly where the magic happens.
I was ten when the Iron Curtain fell and communism in Poland ended. As a result a massive wave of opportunities suddenly hit the whole country, shaping our perspective of what was possible. Within a few years the world went from black and white to color TV. Having a desire to be a well-rounded entrepreneur in the future, I went to law school and at the same time ran an interactive agency building interactive media, games and animations. My ambition has always been high when I set my mind to things…
Working with major clients with a force of around 15 people, we had a good run with the agency for a few years, but I found what many people in the creative industry have found before me — when working with clients, there’s very little creative freedom — unless you are at the forefront of change at all times. At that time, browser games were the new black, allowing us to have fun and spread our wings. It was an adventure and I collected both experience and a decent IP portfolio (Intellectual Property, yes I’m a law geek too) from this period. A few years later though, big corporations dominated the landscape (AppStore, Google Play etc.), forcing developers to follow rules and hence restricting freedom. This ended up being my call to action.
Presence
I took the best of what I had — custom, energy efficient algorithms (including my AI prototypes) — and decided to challenge the machine learning heavyweight champions with new lightweight architecture. With this in my backpack we started developing an AI for future ways of streaming.
The agile AI we are using at Hint, will give us so much more flexibility and freedom while unlocking the potential of brilliant data scientists. What makes me extra excited is that this is the shortest path to connecting tech talents with intelligent products and users. Currently the learning curve and skills required to develop any Machine Learning and AI tools are a major hurdle and only the elite of developers are populating the niche. With more democratic tools we pave the way for creative people to start adding value. What we are experiencing now is nothing less than an equivalent of the no-code revolution. Pretty exciting, if you ask me.
When you look at Netflix’s recommendations — especially if you know what you like — they don’t really seem tuned to your needs but rather to the KPI in their headquarters. Still, behind the scenes you have hundreds of brilliant engineers working on the best solutions you can measure yourself against. On a stage ruled by heavyweight champions like Netflix or Amazon your algorithms need a lot of sparring matches, there are really not that many places where you can wrestle a little bit with giants but this is definitely an opportunity to take a few of them on.
Future — join us and let’s shape it together!
To build stellar personalisation algorithms is something big tech has been doing for decades by now but it seems like they are stuck in reverse. We have an advantage as we can learn faster and the mistakes we make will always meet instant feedback from users and opponents. For me it’s the fastest way to make great things for our end users.
Now we’re on the lookout for hungry data scientists and engineers that want to join us to rebuild the experience and make streaming fun again!
Do you want to build the future of streaming with us? Don’t hesitate to reach out on hey@hint.media . We’d love to hear everything about your frustrations, solutions and suggestions in this matter.
About Me
Hi, I’m Marcin. Former game developer and algorithms designer.
Currently working on a novel, general purpose algorithm, you can use offline on any device. My dream is to deliver solution that could be trained, up trained and work as a swarm, solving insanely complex problems.
This is how MarieAI (https://marieai.com/) was born.
Concept of a Digital Hippocampus
Data Layering technique, explained here.
Find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcin-rybicki-qa/
