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.

Is text all you need…? Do you even need text? (Ribbonfarm on AI)

A thought provoking post from Venkatesh Rao (@vgr / Ribbonfarm) on AI:

Yes, there’s still superhuman-ness on display — I can’t paint like Van Gogh as Stable Diffusion can (with or without extra fingers) or command as much information at my finger-tips as the bots — but it’s the humanizing mediocrity and fallibility that seems to be alarming people. We already knew that computers are very good at being better than us in any domain where we can measure better. What’s new is that they’re starting to be good at being ineffectual neurotic sadsacks like us in domains where “better” is not even wrong as a way to assess the nature of a performance.

There are, by definition, only a handful of humans whose identity revolves around being the world’s best Go player. The average human can at best be mildly vicariously threatened by a computer wiping the floor with those few humans. But there are billions whose identity revolves around, for instance, holding some banal views about television shows, sophomoric and shallow opinions about politics and philosophy, the ability to write pedestrian essays, do slow, error-prone arithmetic, write buggy code, and perhaps most importantly, agonize endlessly about relationships with each other, creating our heavens and hells of mutualism.

Link: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/text-is-all-you-need

I don’t think humans are all that special. Yes, each human is special in some limited way, and together as a species we have built some very special things.

But it’s increasingly clear that some of those very special things we have built — such as AI and coming soon, smart robots — will expose our own flaws and imperfections, a kind of inverse magic mirror, and there is and will be a deepening divide between those who use or even love the magic mirror, and those who want to look away or smash it.

This divide is already a driver of the world’s growing income inequality (though I think the generational divide has been a much larger cause of this, at least in developed economies), and I think it will become *the* driver in the coming decades.

Two Degens crypto podcast – latest episode with Steven from PressStart Capital

Hi, I’ve been recording podcast episodes 1-2x a week with my cohost George (crypto OG, started WeTrust and CitaDAO), and in the latest episode we invited our friend Steven to discuss web3 gaming, state of the market, AI, and a grab bag of miscellany.

Podcast website is here.

Do have a listen:

Let me know what you think. Still a long way to go to improve our comfort level and my skills as a moderator (which is totally the opposite of my ADD-ness), but we’re enjoying it and we have a lot planned!

Highlights from J.G. Ballard’s wicked gripping novel High-Rise: “Of course, as he realized now, no one ever changed, and for all his abundant self-confidence he needed to be looked after just as much as ever.”

Lord of the Flies, but instead of stranded kids on a deserted island, it’s bourgeois adults in a luxury high-rise condo.

His writing is just *word nerds’ kiss*. Some highlights, sans spoilers:

—

Laing’s fondness for pre-lunch cocktails, his nude sunbathing on the balcony, and his generally raffish air obviously unnerved her.

The internal time of the high-rise, like an artificial psychological climate, operated to its own rhythms, generated by a combination of alcohol and insomnia.

His relationship with Charlotte Melville was hard to gauge—his powerful sexual aggression was overlaid by a tremendous restlessness. No wonder his wife, a pale young woman with a postgraduate degree who reviewed children’s books for the literary weeklies, seemed permanently exhausted.

It was difficult to imagine any kind of domestic reality, as if the Steeles were a pair of secret agents unconvincingly trying to establish a marital role.

Unlike the majority of parties in the high-rise, at which well-bred guests stood about exchanging professional small-talk before excusing themselves, this one had real buoyancy, an atmosphere of true excitement. Within half an hour almost all the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party.

…because their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes.

But even before they sat down together on her bed Laing knew that, almost as an illustration of the paradoxical logic of the high-rise, their relationship would end rather than begin with this first sexual act. In a real sense this would separate them from each other rather than bring them together.

Her hair immaculately coiffured, Mrs Steele hovered about him with the delighted smile of a novice madam entertaining her first client. She even complimented Laing on his choice of music, which she could hear through the poorly insulated walls.

Of course, as he realized now, no one ever changed, and for all his abundant self-confidence he needed to be looked after just as much as ever.

Thinking of those distant heights, Wilder took his shower, turning the cold tap on full and letting the icy jet roar across his chest and loins. Where Helen had begun to falter, he felt more determined, like a climber who has at long last reached the foot of the mountain he has prepared all his life to scale.

This central two-thirds of the apartment building formed its middle class, made up of self-centred but basically docile members of the professions—the doctors and lawyers, accountants and tax specialists who worked, not for themselves, but for medical institutes and large corporations. Puritan and self-disciplined, they had all the cohesion of those eager to settle for second best.

Some kind of wayward sexuality was at work. For a grotesque moment he was tempted to expose himself to her.

Laing laughed aloud, amused by Alice’s notion that somehow he had been unaffected by events in the high-rise—the typical assumption of a martyred older sister forced during her childhood to look after a much younger brother.

At least, however, his affairs had prepared the ground for his ascent of the high-rise, those literal handholds which would carry him on his climb to the roof over the supine bodies of the women he had known.

In a sense he depended on the uncertainties of his relationship with the dentist, following his murderous swings like a condemned prisoner in love with a moody jailer.

She had accepted him as she would any marauding hunter. First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him.

Podcast notes – Stephen Kotkin on China and Xi – Hoover Fellows podcast: “At least 600 million Chinese who are (still) not part of the world economy”

Hosts: John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster
Guest: Stephen Kotkin
Recorded November 2022

Xi’s perp-walk of Hu Jintao
Not sure if pre-meditated, or if it was triggered by Hu reaching for a key personnel document

Never had an economy this large run by a political system this opaque

China’s Leninist structure never went away – you can’t be half Communist just like you can’t be half pregnant

Central Party School – Soviet collapse is #1 subject there, terrified of Gorbachev reform and the subsequent collapse

Xi will shave off as much GDP as necessary to keep Party monopoly

China’s economy went from $200B -> $18T
$500 -> $20K per capita

Soviets reached US military parity in 1970s – despite 1/3 economic size – but nothing like what Chinese have done

Mao in 1966 – targeted own state, destroyed planning mechanism (planned economy personnel), peasants decided they didn’t want to starve again
Peasants instituted market relations with each other — ignored collectivized statutes and norms
Communist Party latched onto this
Under Deng, grudgingly and in stages, accepted this growing market behavior and tried to control it
“Party hijacked the process and the credit for it”

Mao didn’t care about trade, wasn’t economically literate

Deng visits the US, decides to change partners – divorce Soviet Union and marry US
Why? Saw the success of Japan, Korea
China took Japan model — free and open access to US market

Peasants moved to towns, cities, and built enterprises from ground up

Party steals credit too from HK’s success
All the foreign money came through HK, which then invested into China’s Special Economic Zones

Niall:
-US essentially sponsored China’s development – technology transfer and access to higher education
-Xi made clear he prioritized Party’s success over the economy

Apple can make 10M phones in Vietnam, but 500M in China — scale is irresistible

At least 600-800M Chinese who are not part of world economy, didn’t finish high school, no healthcare, invisible China

We didn’t think it’d happen this quickly – that China would become a peer competitor in 1-2 generations

Niall:
-Hubris of Xi – reached climax in 2020, thought pandemic exposed US
-now China has a latent economic crisis, controlling covid, “building tower blocks for nobody”

Does the Party need the private sector? Or does it care more about its Leninist system?

ONTO RUSSIA — 34:00

Shocking for young Russians what’s happened to their country

(stopped here)