Gradient Dissent · Monday, August 3, 2026
Fireworks CEO Lin Qiao shared her journey to becoming a founder, motivated by a desire to impact the broader industry. She drew significant lessons from her time at Meta and with the PyTorch team, particularly valuing the 'extreme sense of ownership' she observed at Facebook. Her motivation for starting Fireworks stemmed from recognizing industry-wide challenges with AI infrastructure similar to those faced at Meta in 2017.
“Um, I think to me, um, about 10 years ago, I start to count me, I want to be a founder. Um, I want to found a technology company.”
“My main motivation is to learn what this culture look like. Why this company so unique? Why what is so unique about their people?”
“Um, so my other co-founders and I, we are very gravitated towards impact. Um, we almost like impact machine.”
“And, uh, and, uh, uh, I think around 2017, uh, we build, we all joined during similar range of time, build AI infrastructure from ground up and build PyTorch, you know, the user community.”