Bridging Silicon Valley velocity and validation discipline.
The Silicon Valley iteration loop, hardened by years of shipping ML into autonomous vehicles.
See How I Work →I'm Jasper Fionn Friedrichs, founder of Fionn Innovation. I was one of the first 40 engineers on Lyft's robotaxi team, scaling the autonomous driving stack from prototype to public road deployment. The effort led to a $550M acquisition by Toyota, where I then spent three years as a Staff Engineer working on ML for autonomous driving.
Silicon Valley taught me how high development velocity can be. Shipping ML into real-world autonomous vehicles, where every release had to be proven better or at least no worse than what came before, taught me how to bridge that velocity with rigorous validation. Now I bring that experience to teams building with AI.
Based in Dublin, working with teams across Europe and the US.
Four principles
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Speed Through Structure
I help teams design their development process around rapid, quantified iterations. Iteration speed needs to be understood and actively improved. Every release needs to move a metric. And metrics need to be meaningful.
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Ship With Confidence
Proving a new system is better, or at least no worse, is the hardest problem in AI development. Seven years shipping code and ML into autonomous vehicles is where I developed the answer. Fionn Innovation is where I am refining it.
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Hands-On, Not Just Advisory
I still build. My advice is grounded in software I've shipped recently, not slides from years ago.
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Drawn to Work That Matters
Climate, mobility, biodiversity, and any work where AI makes the humans in the room more capable, not optional.
Credentials
- Woven by Toyota. Staff Engineer. ML-first transformation. Validation and Release. Two patents.
- Lyft Level 5. Founding team. Robotaxi from parking lot prototype to public roads.
- TUM. M.Sc. Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. Master's thesis at BMW.