The best example of this alternative product is Indie.VC, run by Bryce Roberts. Over the course of 6 years, Indie invested in 40 companies. It held the two key components of limited fund size and gave equity optionality through redemption clauses or equity buybacks. The results are encouraging, with a 51% IRR and 4.3x TVPI, while 87% of the... See more
By the mid-20th century, foundations had reached the height of their power and influence, triggering a congressional investigation into whether foundations were manipulating public opinion and thought. The lawyer Rene Wormser, who wrote the final report, described foundations as a “cartel” that threatened to direct our entire intellectual and... See more
Web 3 will have ads too. It already does in fact, they’re called NFT or token drops (essentially, giveaways that exploit the ability to send to any wallet). Not only do we have ads, we have ads fraud. When Optimism, a Level 2 chain that tries to make transacting cheaper, announced their token drop, thousands of fake users signed up to ‘farm’ the... See more
So what’s the alternative? Well, novelty search is a form of non-objective search. Instead of following the stepping stones that appear to lead to the objective, simply collect stepping stones that lead in interesting directions. Focus on newness, regardless of where it leads.
By analogy, it should act like a Google search, in that users can ask questions of any part of the scientific record. However, it should be unlike a Google search in that it synthesises information across all search results to produce a systems-level understanding of the search query, accessible to the user through many kinds of rich, dynamic... See more
Defined broadly, ‘ads’ are pieces of paid, targeted media meant to drive user behavior in a specific direction .... Web 3 marketing will be radically different in ways that are hard to imagine now (though we’ll try in a moment), which is why it’s key to get the attribution system right first. With the media cash register in place, the budding web 3... See more
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 year to drop out of school and that they would be more successful as a result.
It's clearly been a runaway success and the results of the... See more
As we see base models continue to proliferate, and fine-tuned models begin to sit on top of them, our hypothesis is that these “thin layer” products should focus on having a clear opinion of how they form the output or how they shape the human to AI interaction layer. Put simply, the maximally viable product in AI is likely not where the vast... See more