vc @sparkcapital 🐶 partner to @thebotcompany @discord @descriptapp @meetgranola @instawork @ridezum, prior bod @cruise @postmates Q 🍉 side-gig @BerkeleyTTL
Berkeley, CA
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Old CTO-friend.. "Quietly, a majority of senior engineers still resist AI coding, even in AI co's, claiming it doesn't work.
It's because AI coding is closer to the messyness of managing a human than writing code, and most of them were never good at managing humans either." 😜
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Why isn’t there a startup that teaches programming to kids that approaches it more like liberal arts than math?
Nobody loves programming because they did a paint-by-numbers exercise correctly. I want programming for my kids that encourages the right brain as much as the left.
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Wait. There were no violent protests at Tufts, no occupations of halls, even.
So my, your kid, can now get disappeared from the college they attend if they are pro Palestinian? Or any other speech the party in power doesn't like?
No due process before they are just flown to Louisiana prison? And they are masked? No Miranda rights read?
Yeah. No way this backfires or escalates things.
NEW: I’ve obtained new footage of the abduction of Tufts student Runeysa Ozturk which includes audio of her kidnappers.
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This sounds like someone who came with an agenda mapped to their politics and applies it to everything they see in life rather than actually evaluating the world the way it is and doing the opposite.
Conquering is a legit strategy in every Civ. Over time they made the game more skillful, meaning you had to read the board state to figure your strategy vs brute forcing what you want. That's a positive.
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I decided after the .com bubble burst that being in San Francisco didn’t matter as much anymore. It was one of the worst mistakes of my professional life to not be in that city during the following five years of the tech world rebuilding.
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1/ I was bearish on crypto + games for years. I was wrong, and have been chatting with my game dev friends about why for a few months. Welcome to the great upside down of game dev, it's fascinating. 👇 #thread
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When a founder says “I’m building a metaverse” I literally don’t know what that means.
That’s from someone who’s spent his life in MMOs, Second Life, Discord, VRChat, Runescape, BBSes, Minecraft, and MUDs. It is not clarifying until you talk about what people are there to do.
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Tried to capture today in the East Bay as accurately as possible. Not going to lie, the sci-fi obsessed teenager inside me was pretty excited. The adult is pretty alarmed.
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You have one guess on what Facebook charged developers like Zynga on their own app store. 🙄
Apple blocks Facebook update that called out 30-percent App Store ‘tax’ theverge.com/2020/8/28/21405… via @Verge
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Annual reminder. Holidays are often when your best team members are re-evaluating their lives, what they want to do, where the want to spend their time. Are you doing the same for them?
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Doing a reference check on a VC, and chatting to a founder they worked with years ago. Reminded of that proverb…
“the tree remembers what the axe forgets”
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To one person this is "overengineered" - but what does 100% knowing your bike is safe & will have storage do to your behavior?
There's a big difference between efficiency thinking and innovation thinking, and in startups we conflate the two a lot.
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I worked with my kids for a couple days and built a card game using ChatGPT, Midjourney and some other AI tools. One of a couple AI side projects I did over the holiday break.
Here’s how:
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Why isn’t Silicon Valley more engaged civically? For those that have done well, you don’t see folks engaging in local non-profits (the arts, homelessness, etc) the way people do in NY or LA. And given that we are nothing if not systems designers, can we design a solution? ##
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I've never been prouder of Medium. I hope the other traditional media companies who have been harping on FB/Whatsapp and Twitter for allowing horrifically bad misinformation that endangers note that they are doing the right thing in a global pandemic.
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This is one of several reasons why "star performer at xyz hot company" very often does not transfer to star founder.
People fall in love with the resume and a glittering references, without thinking about how different the sports are. Often the oddball at the hot co is the perfect founder, because they obviously weren't a fit for a bigco, but got to see a lot they can learn from.
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“Don’t be a career”
Loving reading this in snippets throughout today.
stevejobsarchive.com/book
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Formed a two person sci-fi book club with my teenage son over this holiday. Discussions after each chapter. I will stress this is just, the, best, thing. First up, Diamond Age. What should we read next?
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Need an equivalent to Snapchat/Tiktok for writing. Medium feels like The Atlantic, newsletters feel like marketing, every platform trends to calcification. I want a tumblr.
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At Spark, we just raised a new set of funds, same size as previously. I also just passed a decade as a GP.
This last year has been the most excited I've been with work, including when I was a founder. A combo of the deep fulfillment of partnering with founders on their cause, a partnership I love learning from, and the opportunity ahead in the "fog of war" disruption of AI across industries.
We like our particular way of practicing venture. We make decisions as a team, so we can commit as one. We are multi-stage, but keep a small collaborative partnership. It lets us be active with founders directly, because that's the purpose of the work.
It's all enabled because of the amazing founders we work with in creating the new. From Twitter, tumblr, Postmates, Oculus, Plaid, Cruise, Discord, Deel, Anthropic and so many more. Just happy to get to keep doing it with all of you.
nitter.app/sparkcapital/status/17…
The Spark Capital team is thrilled to share that we have raised $2.3 billion in aggregate commitments for our new early-stage and venture-growth funds: Spark Capital VIII & Spark Growth V.
medium.com/@sparkcapital/new…
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Virtually every emergent social behavior people are opining about in their Fornite think pieces have existed in Minecraft, at larger scale, for years. And at smaller scale in MMOs for decades before that. These are not new trends, just the latest iteration.
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Merits of the product aside, best example yet that framing your startup properly matters. The contrast here is pretty enormous.
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Product people. All you have is your customers faith in you. If you add a feature to move the numbers but lose their faith, you will lose them permanently instead of temporarily. @nytimes
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The consumer AI startup I yearn for is not a vertical or market.
It's that feeling 90 mins before bed, your brain is fried and you instinctively reach for.. what? For some it's netflix, IG, a book, or one last fortnite run.
Would be great if we were vibe crafting instead.
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yes. The Athletic today asking about his “first moments” like first goal, first appearance for national tm, etc.
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If you are thinking of starting a new social network in 2019, Facebook Groups would be a pretty damn good target.
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Starting the year determined to spend more time with folks cultivating “but what if it works” energy.
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For instance, you seem to imply the switch to 1UPT (One Unit per tile) is part of some long-term nefarious plot to make "military colonialism bad, diplomacy good" political agenda.
But Shafer was clear the intentions were simple: It encouraged more tactical gameplay in combat and user readability of the game state. The change also increases the realism in sieges, as cities can now be effectively surrounded and attacked from multiple directions.
Sure, it's a big change one could disagree with, but your narrative arc is clearly agenda-filled when the designers were not.
gamedeveloper.com/audio/buil…
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This week I’ve had at least half dozen conversations w/ startup founders excited to be back in the office.
Only, now they are basically alone in there, and it feels like a vacant shell of the energy it used to have. I expect huge employee churn is about to come.👇1/8 #blog
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I've had a good lunch with friends, CEO calls all day, but frankly still ripped up about @Bourdain - can't shake it. His unrelenting message was not about food, it was about empathy, about humanity. And we need those heroes so badly right now.
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Lost in all the IPO hype is that if we had a regularly functioning public market Airbnb, Stripe, DD, etc should have been public years ago. Now worried the pendulum will swing too far the other way.
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This is not news. The "mainstream" of VC has never gotten consumer startups.
Seen this cycle 4 times in my career. Big consumer co exits, VCs pile in, but it's not in their bones so retrat until it repeats. Only a handful of VCs get consumer & actually are successful at it.
Venture capitalists have given up on the idea that they’ll make their career finding the next hit consumer marketplace, retail brand or media company.
theinformation.com/articles/…
Dealmaker by @KateClarkTweets
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I just took an hour long debate with four of us on a side project (will chat about that soon). Fed it into claude with the simple
"what did you disagree with us the most on these discussions, explain what you think we should do instead"
And got back absolute gold. Multiple people's points wrecked & logical fallacies clearly dissected. My mind changed on several key things.
I need to set this up to work live.
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We are delighted to announce Brian Watson (@bwats) is joining us at Spark.
Brian’s work leading products at Apple & VSCO will make him a great partner to founders, and we are excited he is joining our early-stage team. Welcome Brian!
medium.com/spark-capital/wel…
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It feels like 2020 has made everyone in America go through a mid-life crisis at exactly the same time, regardless of age.
So many new houses, new jobs, new cities, new marriages, new puppies, and even sometimes for the right reasons.
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Skillshare, Masterclass, Teachable (Discover), Monthly. Explosions of ways to learn online. For a curious brain looking to explore it's overwhelming, has anyone built the Kayak of online courses?
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These are my Palestinian grandparents in 1941, getting married in Nazareth. My Jido taught me backgammon, my love of arabic food came from my Teta. Sympathy is not enough, it requires empathy to find the collective will to end this. This is my family & it could have been yours.
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So lucky to work w/the crew here @sparkcapital & thankful to the Founders in the family who really make it happen. nytimes.com/2016/11/15/busin…
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As always, Butler being strategic.
In case they don't win this year, he has one more year to do it at GSW w/ Steph. That success will count on adding one or two trades who want to take a paycut & come to GS. He's talking to other players in the league telling them it's amazing.
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What to expect from VC fundraising due to COVID19? What I'm telling founders that ask - the quick answer is, the shortsighted VCs will panic and stop doing deals, the good VCs will keep calm and carry on. But, there are a decent number of shortsighted VCs so plan accordingly.
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Tesla only ever sold 2,400 of their first product, the Roadster, over four years. It takes patience to build real things.
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1/ At Spark, we believe the best way to understand is to build. To tinker. To push against the edges of a technology that’s still forming. There’s no better example of this than AI right now. So we are adding a Hacker in Residence for AI, and opening up the process.
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So my son says is he gonna go play video games with his friends. I joke that he is “abandoning me.”
He says I can watch his Youtube content to hear his voice and feel like I haven’t been abandoned.
🤨 Yeah.
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1. Lockdown until you have testing & tracing, that should be the goal. Anything else and R spikes, many die.
2. Locking down OR economic hardship is a false choice. Those that manage the virus will have the best recovery & economy.
3. Sweden ain't what you think it is.
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Discord naysayers can hate crypto. But speak to artists who do what they love thanks to NFTs, and you change from "how is this broken" to "how do we make it work"
Web2 reduced the value of a creator's work to begging for likes, Web3 restores it. 🧵
Shoutout to everyone in the NFT photography space. I have found so much love, support, and inspiration from each and every single one of you here, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for all of us 🤝 Happy Sunday, friends.
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Local business are going to get hit hard. I’m buying gift cards as a small way to help give them short term cash & in return hearing stories of how they’re going to try to manage through for them and their workers. If you have the means, it’s a small act to help.
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Um. Wouldn't you rather the top scientists get paid more than a top kicker of balls?
Tech firms are luring AI experts from universities with salaries rivalling sports stars' econ.st/1W0yiRe
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Proud to announce @sparkcapital is co-leading a round with Nat & Dan in The Bot Company. @kvogt & team are assembling a hall-of-fame group at taking research into production, and bringing that to the world of home robotics.
And as an aside, getting to work with a founder a second time, where you start from a place of mutual trust, is truly a gift.
I'm back to building! Excited to share I've started a company with @pariljain and @lukeholoubek. We're building bots that do chores so you don't have to. Everyone is busy. Bots can help.
So many things compete for our time - commutes, longer working hours, and the complexities of modern life. Our team has spent years building robots (including the self-driving kind) that give people some of that time back, and we're taking that a step further with this company.
We've raised $150m from an amazing group of investors and entrepreneurs, led by @natfriedman, @danielgross, and @nabeel. Also including @QuietCapital, @patrickc, @collision, @eladgill, @byersblake, @fiftyyears, and many more.
More to come soon! Follow our progress here @thebotcompany.
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Today was never going to succeed as a coup but I hope folks understand this is emboldening to the Maga crowd.
We have a real conspiracy theory problem. It is deep and threatens the basics of society. Has anyone written or spoken about any possible solutions or approaches?
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Got a text last week from @kvogt asking if I would be the very first public rider in a Cruise car.
I mean, what do you say to that!
Thanks @kvogt, @danielkan & the team for partnering at the Series A seven years ago, and proceeding to make sci-fi a reality. In awe of you all.
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I have this book at home that you may like. Look up membership libraries like Mechanics Institute of SF or Athenaeum.
Me and @andrewmason are working on a version of this but it's board games instead of books.
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It's going to be pretty ridiculous when remote control toy helicopters are more regulated than semi-automatic machine guns.
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Met a guy in New York this week who is part of a "members only" soho house style Board Game club. Want.
Ive been designing one for SF in my brain ever since. Theres whiskey, vinyl, floor to ceiling board game bookshelves, but the look feel should be, what do we think?
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The center stage for startups is, startups.
VCs may fund & assist, bigcos may partner & acquire, but the core is small co’s trying to survive & build something new.
Too many here are obsessed w/being the main character. Our story should always be on early stage builders.
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You have built an enduring part of the Internet that helps people connect, and that is an incredible chapter of anyone's life. It's been amazing watching you work.
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Happy to announce Spark's investment in
@descript. It is a truly transformative creative tool for everyone editing audio & video, which is just about all of us. Instead of a typical post, we decided to use Descript to talk about it (how meta).
medium.com/spark-capital/wel…
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Well 1. it has never been marketed as a remote working product, 2. they do have multiple offices, 3. why the hate? They built a product that helped fill a personal need they had in work collaboration and it worked for more people.
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Today we at Spark are happy to welcome @Fraser to the team. He becomes the sixth member of our venture team, coming to us from OpenAI and prior to that as a founder himself.
Welcome Fraser!
medium.com/spark-capital/wel…
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It would have been SO easy for Mayor Pete to stay in the race to accumulate delegates & power for a brokered convention. That he dropped out now, despite being third in delegates, says so much about his character.
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The simple test is, when the kid finishes the programming class does their work look like everyone else who has taken that class?
That never happens in an English class or an Art class. Are they being taught to express through code, since that is the joy.
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You said you’d only do a startup if it was worth spending a decade putting a dent in the world. No question you did @kvogt.
10 incredible years navigating science fiction into reality through insane levels of technical, regulatory, and funding difficulty. And it lives on.👏
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There was this time early in blogging days where founders & vcs sharing best practices/hacks/stories felt like a weekly class in “how to startup.”
Now it all feels like content marketing (exhibit a: this weeks downturn advice). What do founders use now for the real story?
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GenZ spends more time playing video games than on social media or streaming TV. Gaming is their most popular free-time activity.
Yet it still hasn't cracked the "everyone can make a video game" the way that Twitch and Youtube democratized video.
I'm just incredibly excited about the experiments, startups and research being done right now by founders. The last few months have been invigorating seeing all the incredible progress founders are making with new models for game-making. It's going to be a great decade for new ideas in games.
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SF board meeting at Embarcadero today.
Seeing teams in person is just ridiculously better. The energy and connection is just not even the same universe as video. Different sport.
Second, ran into three people coincidentally in just an hour. Density matters.
Long SF
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There should be more on how the kids & adults who play video games are coping better with 2020. What a delicious reversal of the lonely gamer stereotype.
Games like Fall Guys, Amung Us, Minecraft, Roblox and many more are a bright beacon of human connection in an isolated world.
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It’s a crazy time in venture: new entrants, disruptive models, generational change, $ influx, and it is very hard to make a firm prediction on how it plays in the next decade.
It’s so great.
May the stale die away, and the most agile and best for founders survive. Love it.
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Congrats @focalsbynorth on the sale to Google. @srlake is the most dogged founder I’ve known. 2012👨🎓, founded Thalmic & max credit cards, 2013 🔥 Series A out of YC (photo), to brink of death & pivot, then raises $120m🎢, 500+ employees & now they’ll launch Focals 2.0 at Google.
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Tim O'Reilly makes the essential point when talking about on demand workers. bit.ly/1LJh2si
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A Pyrrhic victory (/ˈpɪrɪk/ ( listen) PIRR-ik) is a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat. Winning a Pyrrhic victory takes a heavy toll that negates any true sense of achievement or damages long-term progress.
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In NY next week,
was in NY a few weeks ago,
going to be in NY again in three weeks.🤔 Yeah, this is good. 🏙
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Right on. Give a major investor the same scrutiny you would a C-level exec hire. startupljackson.com/post/114…
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In which I find out that my son would never want to be a VC because it is simultaneously too risky and too boring. slate.com/human-interest/201…
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Portal 2 found to exhibits higher cognitive benefits than brain-training Luminosity. Classic. sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
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I miss building websites. Not for commercial reasons, just the act of making. Might need to brainstorm a bit.
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Team team team. Santo was board member and lead on Oculus, Postmates I don't think we would have won without Bijan by my side, Sonder referred by Andrew and worked on with Kevin.
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Had a gut-wrenching conversation with a founder last week, who broke the news to me that they are having to lay off a key senior executive, likely cutting off some product lines, and then pretty deep layoffs. ##blog#
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In the 90s Wired made these wonderful re-printings of McLuhan that seemed to capture the tone for that age of computing.
What would you print now in this age of AI?
I yearn for a Stripe-press style beautiful anthology of the AI writing that defines this age.
So, @klyap and I put together a little list of the essays and articles on AI that people kept referencing that could be the defining pieces of our time.
teddit.net/r/ai_test_of_time…
Take a moment to lift up your altitude from the latest daily hype moment, give some of these a read, vote for your favorites.
Who knows, maybe we print a few?
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I think this reflects your peer group of VCs getting older and more conservative, which naturally happens. It takes huge energy to keep backing first time founders. Personally, I will always do it.
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This is my grandmother & her eight kids, four born in Nazareth, four in Damascus. Immigrated as Muslims 50 years ago
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After Dune (of course), would love Villeneuve to tackle Snow Crash or Diamond Age.
He seems to get a scifi book is about the world acting on the characters, not just the other way around. I think he could pull it off.
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Generative AI is the innovative force to creatives they said NFTs would be.
Descript, Midjourney, SD, Hugging Face, etc will create a rebuild of the creative process on par with Adobe, Aldus, Corel, Macromedia in the 90s. Software rebuilt w/human pilot & generative AI co-pilot.
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Any free society that does not have some limit on speech will not remain free that’s the paradox of tolerance. The key is for us to fight for that limit to be narrow and clear. But sedition would fall under any definition so this feels like a clear case.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parado…
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Sanity tip for twitter use, 2020.
If the tweet starts by using a in-or out group signal (“millennials” “VCs” “media” “new yorkers”) that argument is part of the problem.
Post Trump I’m trying my best to reject the tribalism, skip the tweet & hang w/folks that do the same.
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Founders: the fundraising advice from your successful boomtime friends & investors is likely wrong for this market.
Find a founder who struggled but won over their favorite investor. Frontier tech CEOs know whats up.
It’s a game of long shot bizdev, not market-making sales.
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The common refrain is how screwed up our kids are gonna be because of social media. But I watch my teenage son navigate it all, knowing how to tune it out, not to fall for the triggering, and realize anyone over 16 is at a distinct disadvantage, and over 30 even worse.
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Discord launched in 2015. Folks still sleeping on it. 3m users by Jan '16, 90m by the end of '17.
There were no new startups which originated in the last five years in the US whose product got > 1 million monthly active users.
This has been an anomaly, where each such previous 5 yr segment (since 1995) always saw many 1MM+ user products emerge.
Many lessons from this era..
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