Recent startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings: “The user is never wrong” — Larry Page

Here’s the last one.

The average return on a token that paid for media space on DexScreener was -50% over only a 24 hour period.
Heuristic: If someone is paying cash to make sure I see a token, it’s so they can dump on me if I’m stupid enough to pay attention.

Close to 3/4 of startups work fully remote — in Alliance DAO

Aggregations of opinion polls in the 1960s have shown approval of the moon landing was consistently lower than disapproval. One poll of astronomers showed a majority against the mission. Even President Kennedy’s own head of Science Advisory Committee – Jerome Wiesner – opposed a manned mission, releasing a critical report on the notion.
Popular opposition isn’t something you often hear about regarding the Apollo program. It is conveniently missing from America’s collective memory, in lieu of a tale of collective patriotic triumph. A narrative that pleases Democrats as an example of successful big public programs and Republicans, as a triumph of the capitalist west against the communist east.
47% said it was worth it a decade later, in 1979 and it would take 20 years for amnesia to set it and this number to reach 77% in 1989.

There are just 21 million #bitcoin after all… How scarce that number. There are something like 59 million millionaires in the world (not enough for all of them to hold even 0.36 BTC).

Josh Kopelman: VC is anti network fx. The more you invest the harder to help them

5 levels to AGI according to OpenAI:
1. Chatbots
2. Reasoners
3. Agents
4. Innovators
5. Organizations

Level 3 is when the AI models begin to develop the ability to create content or perform actions without human input, or at least at the general direction of humans. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO has previously hinted that GPT-5 might be an agent-based AI system.

@feketegy
This is exactly my thought too, think of programming mainframes in FORTRAN or COBOL in the 70s then PCs with ASM and C in the 90s and now LLMs plugs into many languages giving context to code bases where there were none before.

The above figures are clear: There is almost no persistence in CEO performance. The observed number of CEOs in each category is indistinguishable from what we would expect if the process were entirely random

44% of Bitcoin nodes are currently at the chain tip (fully synced with the network), with an additional 48% synced within 5 blocks of the chain tip, resulting in an enormous 92.8% are synced within 5 blocks. Only 7.2% of nodes are more than 5 blocks behind.

While we kept plodding on the “pure dual-core”, Intel, still smarting from the x64 defeat just slapped two 1x cores together, did some smart interconnects, & marketed it as “dual core”. Joke at AMD was that Intel’s marketing budget was > our R&D (true fact). Customers ate it up.

We did launch a “true” dual core, but nobody cared. By then Intel’s “fake” dual core already had AR/PR love. We then started working on a “true” quad core, but AGAIN, Intel just slapped 2 dual cores together & called it a quad-core. How did we miss that playbook?!

Today ‘summarise this document’ is AI, and you need a cloud LLM that costs $20/month, but tomorrow the OS will do that for free. ‘AI is whatever doesn’t work yet.’

power is becoming the main constraint. US electricity production has barely grown in a decade
– the US could solve this with natural gas. we have abundant supply and could build out capacity fast (my note: i wonder if bitcoin miners can help this?)

algorithmic secrets are worth 10x+ more compute. we’re leaking these constantly
– model weights will be critical to protect too. stealing these could let others instantly catch up

Looking at the spending behaviour of long-term holders, it can be seen that although the spent volume by these players constitutes only 4%-8% of the total volume, the profits realized from this spending typically account for 30%-40% of cumulative profits realized over bull markets.

Every Wednesday morning, Amazon’s executive team gets together and goes through 400-500 metrics that represents the current state of Amazon’s various businesses. The meeting lasts 60 minutes, except for when it’s the holiday shopping season, in which case they sit together for 90 minutes. Amazon’s leadership meets for the Weekly Business Review every week, without fail, even when the CEO or CFO isn’t present. They’ve been doing this since the early 2000s.

The Amazon-style WBR is designed to answer three questions:
What did our customers experience last week?
How did our business do last week?
Are we on track to hit targets?

It is easy to trade social capital for financial capital. But while you can cloak yourself in blue-chip designers all you like to impress your fellow financiers, it is extremely hard to trade financial capital for social capital.
You’ve seen this with every washed-up celebrity you know: when the coolest people become rich, even they can’t remain cool.

Larry Page: the user is never wrong

Empower your employees to build their social presence.Tap into those audiences for key company announcements.Build a culture around this so that net new employees can replenish the distribution when people inevitably leave.

Reason Google took so long to build cloud service is because it was lower margin than ads. No internal incentives. Same reason Amazon did it so quickly — higher margin than retail, “your margin is my opportunity”

All this to say that I’ve shifted my thoughts from “crypto and web3 will absorb tradfi” to “crypto and web3 serve as the base layer for AI”
Web3 isn’t our internet… it will belong to the machines

Laffont / Coatue:
$100T in CPU / PC infra investment
Believes all this will be replaced by $100T or more in GPU infra investment — but quantum will be very small part of it

China has commenced operation of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, for which China asserts it developed some 90 percent of the technology.
Overall, analysts assess that China likely stands 10 to 15 years ahead of the United States in its ability to deploy fourth-generation nuclear reactors at scale

1) Many international individuals decide to start their company in the US (for example Snowflake was founded by 3 French people but it is an American company) as there are fewer regulations (Europe is very complicated given different states have different laws)
2) Source of Capital: the US has an amazing venture capital environment with investors who can act quickly and are willing to lose capital. In Europe, raising capital is much harder and lengthy

In 5 years, it’ll seem bizarre that we ever allowed anyone to email or text or call us AND the norm was to at least think about replying to them. Being reachable 24/7 by anyone and for anything will have been a blip in time, an absurd anomaly in the long arc of the hyperconnected digital age.

This gave those labels a lot of power over Spotify, but not all the labels, just three of them. Universal, Warner and Sony, the Big Three, control more than 70% of all music recordings, and more than 60% of all music compositions. These three companies are remarkably inbred. Their execs routine hop from one to the other, and they regularly cross-license samples and other rights to each other.

As we pored over the code, we found that, although there were a few human women on the site, more than 11 million interactions logged in the database were between human men and female bots. And the men had to pay for every single message they sent. For most of their millions of users, Ashley Madison affairs were entirely a fantasy built out of threadbare chatbot pick-up lines like “how r u?” or “whats up?”

Value of information is the amount of surprise — information theory

Crypto’s trends from the ICO boom; to NFT summer; to socialFi, to memecoining, show me that people like to do their own research, get some sense of market advantage and then buy in size.

This past week we had one of the most bullish signals for the crypto industries with the SEC dropping its case against ConsenSys, alongside an imminent launch of the $ETH ETF. Despite this, $ETH has drawn down 12% from local highs, with majority of altcoins down anywhere from 10-50% in the past week when I first expressed this view.

Crypto-native positioning is more relevant for alts, where liquidity and thinner and % of participant that is crypto-native is higher. For $BTC and $ETH, the consideration is more PvE in nature vs PvP, and my believe are these two are still flag-bearers for the market, especially given the decimation in TOTAL3.

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

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.

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! :-)