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Post-hype, pre-value: The real AI-pharma shift starts now

I’m personally much more interested in machine intelligence as human augmentation rather than the oft-hyped AI assistant as a separate embodiment.

How might we create teams of human and non-human intelligences in the service of better designed systems, products, environments?

Vertical integration is typically the dominant strategy when industries are in their early stages or undergoing significant transformation, when marke

The downside of lead generation businesses is that they can be a race to the bottom if they're in a crowded and competitive market. The barriers to en

The best lead generation companies usually have some combination of a distinguished and highly trusted brand and a proprietary channel or value propos

The brokerage model is what we employed at Fundera. There are several distinctions between brokerages and marketplaces, but a key one is automation ve

There are many other products where a brokerage model is required to facilitate a transaction such as online insurance and mortgage agencies. Usually

You and your ragtag team of engineers likely won’t be able to create something that is competitive with any big incumbent product. However, you can b

The downside of lead generation businesses is that they can be a race to the bottom if they're in a crowded and competitive market. The barriers to en

The downside of lead generation businesses is that they can be a race to the bottom if they're in a crowded and competitive market. The barriers to en

The best lead generation companies usually have some combination of a distinguished and highly trusted brand and a proprietary channel or value propos

1/ Why AI is not going to replace programmers: When I was in college studying Computer Science in 2005, I was told that out-sourcing to India will re

Why would any company pay when they could get software for free? And yet we saw the opposite: open source software enabled an explosion in software pr

More broadly, what will remain are jobs to be done. Software needs to be stable and predictable and have infrastructure to run on; that is a lot easie

The End of Software

There is no ideal pitch deck. The narrative depends on what you’re building—but I really like this one: 1. Vision for the world in 5 years 2. The nove

There is no heaven for newthings. There is no Hall of Fame. There is only memory and change. Nothing (the opposite of newthing) and no one are immune.

Conviction

The importance of agentic program managers to the success of the ARPA model isn’t surprising or new. The “aha” was that the only way to cut through th

The reality is that there have been successful ARPA programs all over the spectrum. JCR Licklider “just” spelled out an extraordinary vision, found pe

This realization made several things click: All program managers are program leaders but not all program leaders are managers. Licklider and many othe

If you’re trying to replicate DARPA’s success, most of the structural bits are a distraction. They’re certainly useful, but if you don’t get the agent

This is the overall promise of your startup. Expert level performance through appropriate use of your software to speed up a defined part of a busines

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constra

This is one of the fundamental errors of tech thinking. For a certain class of problems caused by technology (e.g., climate change, traffic accident

So when people opt to devote their energy to tracking the latest TikTok star or scrolling content instead of nurturing interpersonal relationships, th

Social media stopped being primarily about connecting socially a long time ago. People still use a range of technologies to connect to friends and bui

Taste for Privacy: How Context, Identity, and Lived-Experience Shape Information Sharing Preferences

The social-platform layer offers the feeling of encounter with the friction surgically removed. As one analysis of Gen Z’s parasocial turn put it, onl

Regretful Accelerationism

I've been trying to create a "social network for makers" for the last 15 years with different approaches. I made what was basically WIP multiple time

With an intake process that emphasizes past accomplishments and interviews rather than bureaucratic credentials, and with an ethos of taking chances o

Entrepreneurs often describe building a company as a harrowing experience and doing this alongside a peer group serves as an emotionally powerful init

Early-stage venture capital investments take a long time to come to fruition. These or other YC companies from after Graham’s tenure may yet prove to

There are thousands of smart people who could start companies and don't, and with a relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place,

Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and mor

We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed o

A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — a

Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and mor

So much value and love for the process of writing and what it does for the coherence between heart, brain, imagination, lived reality, unseen, and see

You can’t write a viral essay that says “it’s complicated and I’m not sure.” But this is the only path to truly novel insight.

Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t faul

The trick is to collide your mental model with the outside world as often as possible. This is what exploring does.

From my POV some people innately have more conviction than others, sure, but most people don’t even try to build any of their own because they’re so u

Samo's Law of Funding: The more money an organization is supposed to give out, the less likely it is to fund unusual people.

The second path is to create an idea, mechanism, feature, or whatever that is so novel and unique that it survives and eventually sifts down on the ba

There should be Retroactive Public Goods Funding for those founders crazy enough to try something truly new that failed as a business but succeeded in

The idea to split us all into mini-Medicis through platforms like Patreon, if anything, has only further diluted the actual value. It's not just about

Samo's Law of Funding: The more money an organization is supposed to give out, the less likely it is to fund unusual people.

Distractions divert you from your goals, while opportunities align with and propel you toward them. For example, Americans spend an average of 11 hour

re: many genAI apps can do 'anything and everything' i used to tell this funny story to a lot of consumer founders: when one-shot TTS first started

A lot of companies don’t make it because in the process of trying to get many things right, they don’t get anything right.Why are they in such a hurry

By yielding a generational wealth creation opportunity that was a strange hybrid of a lottery jackpot and self-made fortune, crypto created an ideolog

For example, it was 30 years after the invention of film that someone first tried telling stories with it — before that, film was mainly used as a dem

Just a moment...

How do you explain the web to people who have never used it? You make it as simple and as accessible as possible.

fyi, this is my application to the OP grant. building bridges from the idealists to the skeptics is my place in this world. @Optimism is putting r

The future is self-employed New businesses formed in the US 🚀 2019: 3.5 million 2020: 4.4 million 2021: 5.4 million 2022: 5.1 million Only about

Americans are back on their entrepreneurial grind, after a 40-year decline in entrepreneurship. New business applications by year: 2019 3.5 million 2

Thiel fellowship should compete head on with Harvard. Backing up: Thiel Fellowship was started with the intent to show that you could get 20 kids a y

In a model, agents are interchangeable. Consumer A and Consumer B have different preference curves, yes, but they respond to the same incentive struct

It’s rare for a member to convert from a lower tier to a higher tier. In most cases, it’s not worth it to have a way for people to pay you $2, $10, $5

To me, a membership is something you pay for to get access to a benefit you’re after. That benefit can be a community of your peers, but it doesn’t ha

We earn trust by stating our business model upfront – instead of ads, we monetize by charging directly. Directly charging creates high expectations fr

Productive Fees : Valuable Protocols / Extractive Fees : Valuable Companies

Productive Fees : Valuable Protocols / Extractive Fees : Valuable Companies

Create ownership in everything. Revenue shares in projects. Equity in micro-companies. Stakes in outcomes. The Old Game keeps you permanently renting

When individual entry is impossible, collective entry becomes optimal. When traditional financing fails, alternative structures win. The groups doing

On Being Lost

Lots of theories have been tried, and lots of them have been given up because of something that looks like contradictory evidence. But the evidence mi

If you have a theory that’s been working pretty well for a while — it made good predictions, it solved real problems, it explained a lot of mysteries

Real explanations will sometimes sound weird, crazy, or too complicated because reality itself is often weird, crazy, or too complicated. It’s unfortu

Things change as contradictory evidence piles up, but even then, it doesn’t mean you should scrap the theory you started out with. Everyone back in th

LLMs have three new capabilities that change the nature of search: Intuitive leaps: LLMs can answer poorly written questions with spooky-accurate ans

Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like the Yellow Pages and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommenda

Bounties Suck. For both DAOs and Contributors ... A short thread on why, and what we should try instead. 👇 1/8

anyone who prioritizes the wellbeing of the “future of humanity” in the abstract over the dignity and care of individuals in the present cannot claim

Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast. Imagi

Our metrics of progress have continuously abstracted: from the tangible bushels of wheat in agricultural economies (with natural physical limits), to

Building a 21st century interface for science

Communities = Human Search Engines?

Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are sti