Podcast notes – Solana with founder Anatoly Yakovenko – Bankless: $20M valuation for Solana at seed round “was ludicrous”

Guest: Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana founder
Hosts: Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman

2017 – was following crypto, wanted to build a faster crypto miner
Family left Soviet Union, saw the devastation of a bad currency and economy

Ethereum demonstrated an application platform

Qualcomm, Perl engineer who helped build platform for all those original mobile games

Mining crypto while building deep learning hardware
Had a eureka moment – encode passage of time as a data structure
At that time, it existed as a “verifiable delay function”
Quit job, met Raj Gokal
Raised $3M in seed, network price at that time was $20M – “thought it was ludicrous” – included Multicoin
5 cofounders, colleagues from Qualcomm
Built single node – was doing 100K+ TPS – prove potential of network
Raised $14M Series A in the “last vapors” of the 2017-2018 market
Competitors during that time were raising $100M+ (eg, Hashgraph)

Censorship resistance is like a communication channel – it guarantees delivery

Wireless protocols create a schedule – from X time to Y time, A gets to talk, then B gets to talk, etc
Very ordered and structured, gets you 100% utilization

Tendermint – 100 validators – each has 1 vote, there’s a known block producer who proposes a block, 2/3 vote on a block

Hired a lot of coworkers from Qualcomm who he worked with for 10 years

Solana thesis – smart contracts are good for finance, and finance depends on info propagating as fast as possible around the world
Solana data can move as fast as a piece of news travels

Currently ETH validators have same bandwidth requirements
With sharding the requirements will be reduced

Trustlessness comes from full nodes that can validate

Bitcoin and Ethereum see themselves as money – what about Solana?
Store of Value is a social construct, a meme, and important not to be tied to a sovereign (a nation)
The function of a token is to prevent spam

In PoS, once all full nodes have finalized, you can’t go back – you can only fork – which is a socially messy process

Store of Value that is awesome can be built on Solana, that can surpass bitcoin

How to bootstrap an ecosystem without piggybacking off Ethereum – was a huge unknown when Solana started

2020 – had 9-10 months of cash left, market crashed, thought they might be done

It was Solana’s second hackathon (Break Point) where he really believed they had something
Quality of builders went up, attendees went up

Solana was worth ~$100M at network launch

Thinks VC branding is dumb – most of the “crypto VCs” in last cycle were simply Ethereum ICO investors

Alameda’s balance sheet leak was first time Anatoly learned about the troubles

Sam had supported Solana a lot – especially saying they’d build Serum on Solana drove a lot of defi and builder interest

Bear market is a purge

Bitcoin supporters said Ethereum was full of mercenaries in early days — same criticism that Ethereum supporters had of Solana

“Getting through this phase sucks for sure”

NFT community is very thriving — second to Ethereum – very proud of it

Exhausted by negative news — want to see wins, see people building cool shit

David: Solana is one of only blockchains after Ethereum that has a second client (Firedancer + Jump)
Anatoly: you’re trading liveness for safety; Ethereum’s goal is 4 clients (can maintain liveness if 1 client goes down)

Still focused on monolithic chain with no sharding

Innovation in next 12-18 mos will probably be more than everything that’s come before in crypto

“Pretty sure” Solana can do more TPS than all ETH L2s combined

Podcast notes – Buying Caitlin Pyle’s Proofread Anywhere for $3M (online course) – Acquiring Minds

Guest: Dom Wells
Host: Will Smith

$3-3.5M annual sales with extremely high margins

Proofread Anywhere – teaches people how to make money online as proofreaders
Female founder was face of the course

One-time fee, various tiers
Community access
Smaller courses as side offers

Buyer didn’t think of it as just a proofreading course, but as one of many ways to “make income online”

$500 course is main offer

How can she charge that much?
-Premium positioning
-Large audience, with existing brand affinity
-Course has a good reputation

Launched in 2014
Founder is Caitlin Pyle
50K people have done it
Backend uses Clickfunnels
Well-known in Clickfunnels community

Buyer was already familiar with her brand

She started as a proofreader herself, teaching her own experience and story

Big risk if buyer takes over a brand whose founder is the face
In this case, Caitlin created all the content, but she wasn’t running the business – already had a professional operator
She wasn’t actively marketing it, either — mostly from Facebook ads
She’d already created 6-12 months of ad creatives
They bought rights to use her image for 2 years after acquisition

Buyer had previously done a similar transaction – had sold his own business and was face of that brand, saw it play out successfully

One way is slowly transition a new face in
Did it with a podcast host before

“Most people don’t care”
New users won’t really know or remember

Plan to hire some of her best students as brand evangelists – already 50K (or 15K?) students
Could be even more powerful story – took the course and now make living as proofreader

Most users’ intro to brand is a free webinar, free workshop – but stepping up immediately to $500 course can be jarring
Want to implement a lower priced ($29) offering

Downside of Udemy – difficult to build sales funnel to really grow students (top classes on Udemy have say 1000 students)
Proofread Anywhere uses Clickfunnels
Buying a course and taking it off Udemy can be risky – but could be potential strategy

“Cars get better by some modest amount each year, as do most other things I buy or use. LLMs, in contrast, can make leaps.” – Tyler Cowen on AI

Must read if you’re interested in AI and its implications; Tyler’s commentary on the recent explosion of AI into the popular consciousness (driven in large part by ChatGPT) has been, in my view, the most realistic+pragmatic:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-23/chatgpt-is-only-going-to-get-better-and-we-better-get-used-to-it

“I don’t have a prediction for the rate of improvement, but most analogies from the normal economy do not apply. Cars get better by some modest amount each year, as do most other things I buy or use. LLMs, in contrast, can make leaps.”

“I’ve started dividing the people I know into three camps: those who are not yet aware of LLMs; those who complain about their current LLMs; and those who have some inkling of the startling future before us. The intriguing thing about LLMs is that they do not follow smooth, continuous rules of development. Rather they are like a larva due to sprout into a butterfly.”

Interview notes – Sam Altman on OpenAI, ChatGPT, Helion, Hermeus – StrictlyVC

He doesn’t read the news
Likes trolling on Twitter…”Twitter’s fun”
“Twitter’s gonna be fine”

HIS INVESTMENTS

400 personal investments, a few thousand including YC
All the companies he’s added value to are those he thinks about in his free time – while hiking, texting the founder an idea

Most successful investment? Stripe on a multiples basis

Helion – fusion energy
Personally invested $375M (!)
Other thing besides OpenAI that he spends a lot of time on
New energy system that works on super low cost
Hardest challenge is how to replace all (current) generative capacity on Earth really quickly
“Who can deliver energy the cheapest, and enough of it”
Simple machine, affordable cost, reasonable size
If fusion works…will change dynamics of what’s possible – enables more downstream (eg, more powerful planes)

Hermeus – supersonic jet company
Led $100M round
Was also involved with a competitor Boom – but different tech and approach
Huge market with multiple needs

Worldcoin
He’s a cofounder, on the board, but not day to day involved
Will tell its story soon – believes it will go over well (unlike earlier negative media coverage)
We give up more privacy to Facebook than Worldcoin
Phenomenal team
Launch in months
Interested in any tech to experiment with global UBI (versus what one country can do)

Re: crypto — “honestly not super interested”
“Love spirit of web3, but don’t intuitively feel why we need it”

Inception Fertility
In-vitro gametogenesis
In shadow of AI
Next 5-7 years of biotech will be remarkable
Human life extension – “yeah maybe that’s gonna work”

Investing for 20 years, president of YC for 5-6 years
Garry (new YC president) will do a lot of things differently and be wildly successful
Last few years were really hard for YC
YC can remake itself now – tourists are leaving now

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

OpenAI has pulled together “most talent dense” AI team
“Gonna be tremendously good”

Why did ChatGPT and DALL-E so surprise people?
“Don’t know…reflected on it a lot”

If you make a good UX on top of something – believed users wanted to interact via dialogue
Pieces were there for awhile

Standard belief was AI would take over low skill / truck driving / generic white collar
Going exact opposite direction – taking over creativity where we thought humans might have special sauce
It’s not an intuitive finding

Released GPT-3 three years ago – thought ChatGPT would be incremental, was surprised by public reaction

ChatGPT will cause societal changes – eg, academic integrity
“Stakes are still relatively low”
Covid did show us society can update to massive changes faster than he expected

Given expected economic impact – “more gradual is better”

GPT-4 will come out when we’re confident we can do it safely and responsibly
Will release tech much more slowly than people will like
GPT-4 rumor mill is a ridiculous thing

Re: ChatGPT – built a thing, couldn’t figure out how to monetize it, put it out via an API, and users figured out how to use it

Would like to see AI super democratized, have several AGIs in the world
Cost of intelligence and energy trends down and down
“Massive surplus…benefits all of us”
Believes in capitalism – best service at lowest price

Society will need to agree on what AGI should never do
Broad absolute rules of the system
Within that, AI can do different things – safe for work one, edgier creative one – different values they enforce
A user can write up a spec of what they want, and AI will act according to it – “should be your AI…to serve you”

Microsoft – only tech company he’d be excited to partner with this deeply
Satya, Kevin Scott, Mary McHale
Values-aligned company

“We’re very much here to build AGI”
“We wanna be useful to people”

Re: Google’s AI – hasn’t seen it, assume they’re a competent org

We’re in a new world – generated text is something we all need to adapt to, like we adapted to calculators
“I’d much rather have ChatGPT teach me…than read a textbook”

Anthropic – rival AI, stressing an ethical layer
Very talented team
Multiple AGIs in the world is better than one

Society decided free speech is not quite absolute – in similar ways AI / LLMs will need to have bounds too

Video is coming… no confident prediction about when
Legitimate research project – could take awhile

AUDIENCE Q&A

When fusion online?
By 2028, could be plugging fusion generators into grid (pending regulators)

Re: AI worst and best case?
“best case is so unbelievably good that it’s hard to imagine, discovering new knowledge in a year instead of 70K years”
“Bad case is lights out for all of us”
More worried about accidental mis-use in short term, less about the AI itself being evil

How far away is AGI?
Much blurrier and gradual transition than people think

Re: state of San Francisco
Real shame we treat people like this
How elected leaders don’t fix the problem
Tech has some responsibility for it
But other cities do better than this
Super long in-person work and Bay Area

Re: ChatGPT reaction
Expected one order magnitude less hype, users, of everything
Less hype is probably better
The tech is impressive, but not robust
Use it 100x, see the weaknesses

How Sam uses ChatGPT?
Summarize super long documents, emails
For translation

Re: Google code red, threat to search
When people talk about new tech being end of a giant company, they’re usually long
Change is coming (for Google), but not as dramatically as people think

Before Google, memorizing facts was important – and now we’ll change again – and we’ll adapt faster than most people think

Prefers hybrid work, like YC – few days at home, few days in office
Skeptical that fully remote is thing everyone does
Most important companies will still be heavily in-person

Safety engineering for AI is different from standard safety engineering – consequences are greater, deserves more study

Raising capital now is hard, especially later stages – but other things easier – easier to rise above noise, hire, get customers
What he’d do now — recommends for founders – “do AI for some vertical”

Advice for AI startups
Differentiate by building deep relationships with users, some moat like network effect
Plan for AI models continually improving
OpenAI is a platform, but also wants to do a killer app (platform + killer app) to show people what’s possible

Podcast notes – Overpriced JPEGs – guest Tim Ferriss: “Assume there’s always a market for quality in any medium — and just get fucking great”

Guest: Tim Ferriss
Host: Carly Reilly (w/ Bankless)

“The way you do anything is how you do everything”

Experimented with NFTs for last 2 years

Describes himself as writer or podcaster to unfamiliar people

Very competitive person – wants to suffer a little

Cockpunch – origin story
-Started w/ desire to be less precious about creative projects, looking for joy and fun and laughter
Likes playing with new technology sandboxes
-Was drawing characters with gauntlets – the name Cockpunch popped into his mind
-Lets him play with 3d modeling, rigging, voice acting, music – lets him acquire skills that can be transferred to other places – vehicle for learning

AI art competition
-entrants had to show their work
-based on Cockpunch characters
-teaching himself – and then teach others

Chose fiction to let himself focus less on metrics, a “quantitative prison”

“Most people who want feedback…want positive reinforcement”

In any new space, tries to find someone with 10K foot view across many projects to get advice

Lots of folks get lost in weeds with NFTs / web3

Decided on 5555 mints – wanted to make sure it sells out

“There are a lot of whiny bitches in web3”

Likes advice of Scott Adams (Dilbert creator)
Thinks in terms of 6 month projects and 2 week experiments
Snowball of relationships and skills from project to project

Created term “Emergent Long Fiction”
Fiction lets him learn from new people
Set a few conditions upfront – a few characters, realms, drivers
There’s competitive games
But where it goes from here – he doesn’t necessarily know (hence “emergent”)

Set constraints and explore how creative you can be

Most people don’t know what they want

Hard to get clear signal when you ask a large audience what they want

Bullish on tokenized assets and digital scarcity

Been thru many cycles of tech
Always some new tool / platform that people say you have to use (eg, Vine)
“Assume there’s always a market for quality in any medium — and just get fucking great

Web3 isn’t going away
But NFTs – he doesn’t know – it’s one of the meanest most aggressive communities

In this bear market, he’s down 70% net worth – but it doesn’t entitle him to behave like an asshole

Public perception of NFTs (in his audience) has soured tremendously – like a dirty word
But he likes to cull his audience from time to time if they don’t have patience or understanding

Cockpunch as an unlock has exceeded all his expectations – relationships, what he’s learning

Fiction doesn’t always mean a novel – it means story telling
Didn’t plan to do a Discord – it self-organized
In Discord – use your Cockpunch NFTs, with attributes – uses ChatGPT to write a match summary (blow by blow) of a cock fight
Others added music, voice commentary

// stopped taking notes after ~1 hour