Scaling TensorFlow, Navigating Startup Pivots, ML Edge Infrastructure and AI Inference Strategy w/ Rajat Monga #256
The Engineering Leadership Podcast · 2026-04-28 · 41 min
Episode notes
Rajat Monga, CVP AI Frameworks @ Microsoft, joins the podcast to discuss his leadership and founder journey, from Google Brain / Tensorflow to inference.io and back to Microsoft. He dissects what it means to refound vs. start from scratch, the value of the open source community, and strategies for discovering what problem to solve when going the startup route. We also cover how to determine your users’ hidden incentives and what that means for both product development & marketing, along with navigating the balance between a product’s usefulness and consumers’ willingness to pay for it. Additionally, Rajat shares about what he’s currently up to at Microsoft and the emerging ML / AI technologies he’s most excited about. ABOUT RAJAT MONGA Rajat Monga is responsible for enabling an efficient AI stack at Microsoft from cloud to the edge. Before joining Microsoft, Rajat was founder and CEO of Inference.io , a smart analytics platform powered by AI. During his decade-long tenure at Google, he co-founded and led TensorFlow, and was a founding member of Google Brain.
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