Category: Startups

Podcast notes – Dylan Field (Figma founder) with Elad Gil – AI, crypto, his startup journey

Guest: Dylan Field
Host: Elad Gil

Started Figma at 20, Thiel Fellow

Did some great tech internships
Cofounder Evan was TA at Brown, most brilliant person he knew
Knew he could learn a lot from Evan even if it was a failure

Got Thiel Fellow – $100K over 2 years – enabled him to focus on Figma – no dilution, helped with network

YC is good for enterprise – sell B2B, get initial customers

// Elad – early YC Demo Days – only 10-15 angels in audience – had program to help educate angels

Useful to ask “why now” when you start a company
For Figma, in 2012, WebGL arrived, initially experimented with computational photography, then went into design
Thought it would only take 1 year, but took 2 – could have moved faster if they hired faster

Microsoft told them they had to start charging so they could spread it internally (at Microsoft) – knew then they had product market fit

Customer wrote 12 page document telling them what they should go build – another moment of product market fit – the market was there, was trying to pull product out of them

Never managed before Figma, it was tough as they scaled
Bringing first manager was catalytic – meant he could learn from the manager

// Elad: Bill Gates would hire COO, learn from him, then fire him and hire another one, learn from him, etc

Interesting areas
-people move in herds a lot – right now people excited about AI
-look for different under explored areas
-lots of good ideas out there – more important is find personal passion, if you’re 3 years into an idea you hate, you’ll burn out, happened with his friends

Thought he was late to crypto, but people tell him now he was early
Got emails in 2009 talking about bitcoin
In Thiel Fellowship – people were very excited about it (first bubble in 2013-ish)
Got more interested in Ethereum’s technology
Wife started crypto company Ironfish
They talked about crypto collectibles at time (digital items fascinated him)
He really liked to play NeoPets – virtual economy – felt exact same as Ethereum and NFTs
Buy things you’ll want to keep forever – only sold 2 NFTs in his life

Problems in crypto
-privacy very important – holding crypto is big security risk
-scalability taking off now
-regulation desperately needed – lack of it is blocking crypto’s advancement – especially in the US, crypto will move elsewhere if we don’t solve regulation
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Every industry will be touched by AI
Pace is staggering
Completely new tooling method
Already world changing tech even if it stops improving
AGI is difficult to define – AI will make fundamental research contributions
By 2030, there will be AI co-author for pure math research journal

New version of Turing test – multiplayer AI – bunch of humans and AIs
// Elad – already happened with Cicero the strategy game

How will AI impact education
AI tutors and therapists will happen – but make it local not cloud based
Colleges are scared of ChatGPT – but if it’s copying essays and hurting education, isn’t that a deeper issue? You can already hire someone to write essays

University is multiple components – mating system, credentialing system, social club
As AI proliferates, credentialing decreases in value, social club aspect increases in value
// Elad – similar to what internet did to media – mid-tier outlets got hurt, big brands thrive
Wants online universities that are better than YouTube, more structured, more social

Don’t ignore power of a well-written cold email
Communities that were on Twitter are now going private
But find those communities, learn norms, be helpful
// Elad – help open source communities

Thiel Fellowship
Haven’t seen similar programs
Even Thiel applications, sometimes it’s hard to fill a class (of fellows)
Not enough people who are risk on, willing to drop out and commit

Doesn’t believe standardized testing is correlated with IQ as much as most of Silicon Valley thinks
Access to tutors, prep programs – equity component to this

// Elad – people who drop out to do startups, you gain an additional cycle of technology (eg, a few years of school, plus a few years of the first job), which is powerful experience

Still very focused on Figma
Interested in data visualization / doesn’t feel it’s done quite right

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My friend and I started a crypto podcast called Two Degens. We talk about markets and share interesting links and sometimes invite guests. You can listen to it here.

“Artificial intelligence has the verbal skills of a four-year-old”

This was written in 2013.

Over the decades it has become apparent that simply throwing more processor cycles at the problem of true artificial intelligence isn’t going to cut it. A brain is orders of magnitude more complex than any AI system developed thus far, but some are getting closer.

And in the seven years since this post, we now have GPT-3, capable of writing essays at least as good as college graduates, on just about any topic that interests you, whether that’s cryptocurrencies or the history of feudalism or the chemistry of marijuana.

I’m not trying to single out this article. It’s just a powerful reminder of how difficult it is for anybody to properly assess current technology, because of our inability to fully grasp the effects of exponential growth and the surprises of non-linear innovation.

We keep trying to peer into the future, and we keep being surprised when the future actually arrives.

What else are we getting wrong about our technologies of today? What other technologies have the skills or experience of a four year old?

A few come to mind: Virtual reality. Blockchains. Robots (although this is increasingly not the case).

A very thoughtful long essay: Jeff Lonsdale’s 2020 predictions

Below are some of my favorite bits, and here’s the full essay.

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A very small subreddit will have experts happily engaging with neophytes, while a place with a large commentator base will often put discussions around tribal dynamics first and foremost.

You can say things about people you could never say on Twitter or in blog format. This makes for a golden age of podcasting that might not last as long as we would like.

In a move called the yellow economy, protesters are using apps that lets them know which businesses are in favor of the protests so they can support them and ignore the so-called blue businesses that are owned by people who support the CCP and current establishment in Hong Kong.

There will be a continuing fight between governments who want cheap telecom technology and are willing to expose their infrastructure to the Chinese and those who want to stick to systems that implicitly allow surveillance by the US and its allies.

Korea already implemented a Cinderella law, doesn’t let kids under the age of 16 play between midnight and six o’clock in the morning. But that wasn’t enough for some mental health professionals in Korea, who saw games as a cause of problems among young men, and they lobbied the World Health Organization to add an internet gaming disorder to its International Classification of Diseases. The WHO announced in 2019 that it will include the disorder in the its 2022 ICD.

Making games is expensive, and anything that can be done to derisk games is going to be done. This isn’t new. Farmville, the first major success on social, was really just a remix of Harvest Moon. League of Legends is a version of Dota, modified to increase the twitch gaming and remove aspects that overly complicate the game.

One thing that has been underrated this past decade is that most people were only cancelled after they let themselves be cancelled. Trump is the politician who blew this open, he didn’t let any allegation, true or false, bring him down. The people most at risk from cancel culture are the individuals and institutions who have enthusiastically wielded the tools of cancel culture.

the court of public opinion is stronger than before and it is vital to come out swinging against false allegations that other people see as credible. Making a lukewarm apology and then disappearing from public life is the equivalent of ceding the field to your enemies. For those looking for a non-Trump model for how this plays out, Carlos Ghosn’s very public pushback on the allegations made against him by Japan’s prosecutors and Nissan will serve as a template for others who have been unjustly accused.

Startup advice that’s too good not to share: “More than one benefit is a negative”

Advice from the legendary Andy Rachleff (Wealthfront, Benchmark) on how to find product market fit:

  • Savor surprises
  • Look for the good and double down on it
  • Stealth doesn’t matter
  • Don’t evaluate your growth hypothesis until you confirm your value hypothesis
  • The best ideas can come from the most unlikely team members
  • Word of mouth trumps promotion
  • Slowing decay can be more valuable than adding users
  • More than one benefit is a negative
  • Foolishness is the price of genius

See @daveambrose twitter thread for the complete list and more! :-)