Machine learning without experiment tracking is like software engineering without version control. You are just guessing and hoping you remember what worked.
I built CrowdFlower, sold it, and then spent two years doing ML research. The tooling was so bad I kept building internal tools just to get work done. That became Weights & Biases.
The best developer tools spread the same way — one engineer adds it to a project on a Friday afternoon, the team sees value on Monday morning, and the company is on a paid plan by the end of the quarter.
We realized blockchain development felt like building websites in 1995 — unreliable nodes, missing data, no debugging tools. So we built what AWS built for the internet: infrastructure developers can actually trust.
I built Docker Compose. It made containers usable. Replicate makes AI models usable. Same philosophy different technology.
I built Postman as a side project to scratch my own itch. It went viral because every developer had the same itch.
The best developer tools disappear into the workflow. You shouldn't notice them — you should notice their absence.
The best products are adopted bottom-up by developers before the CTO even knows they exist. That’s real product-market fit.