Quick links + thinking out loud
Hi all, I had a bit of free time this week - so sharing with you 3 things I’ve been thinking about and 10 reads I found particularly interesting. These thoughts are unrefined and unbridled, so feel free to respond, riff, or disagree. Hit reply to respond. Give this post a 🖤 if you like the format
Also, if you didn’t read my summaries of what happened in robotics and tech geopolitics in 2024, you can do so here and here.
💡Things I’ve been thinking:
The only that will matter in VC is assessing founders in-person - VC will become a pure access game - with assessment and movement as the core strategic pillars
AI is collapsing the price, cost and time of analysis, sourcing and thesis development to zero. Hell, you can have GenAI even lead video calls with founders TODAY!
Many firms have developed an edge in “proprietary” sourcing channels, insight development, and depth of diligence.
Your reputation and ability to sit in front of a founder will be the only thing that matters.
If founders haven’t heard of you (surface area), want to work with you (reputation), and you can’t sit in front of them (assessment and movement), you’ll be dead in the water 🪦
Trump is a contrarian, and he knows what he’s doing - He is deliberately giving up the dollar hegemony and accelerating the multi-polar world. Why?
Trump enabling Russian victory in Ukraine ensures the end of uni-polarity.
China’s rise is inevitable. The best-case scenario for the US would have been as the facilitator of the shift to a multi-polar world.
The second best option is to accelerate the shift while protecting its own interests, which is what Trump is doing now.
Trump’s calculus is that protecting and promoting critical domestic industries will be more fruitful economically and security wise.
By creating chaos (tariffs, insults, threats of invasion) and pivoting from Europe to Asia. Chaos is a feature not a bug.
Trump is creating leverage and wants to catch competing nations off guard, to negotiate favourable economic terms for the US in the new world order.
VC group-think is worse than you think: popularity is not a virtue, in fact, it’s a cost
in VC, familiarity and popularity is viewed as a virtue. A proxy to the quality of your network and access to deals.
Clubby VC events propagate groupthink, consensus deals and trends.
There is some money to be made in doing so but no outperformance or alpha.
How do you remain connected yet independently minded?
Some quick reads I enjoyed:
😇 BYD ships “God’s Eye” self-driving on all their EVs (Digitimes): some are as cheap as $10k for an EV. There is some discussion about how good their self-driving is. Though, this is an insight into how far ahead BYD are in terms of electric vehicles
🔬 Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist (Google): fascinating work using LLMs as a co-scientist to generate novel hypotheses, refine research proposals, and accelerate scientific discovery across disciplines
🧬 Arc Institute’s Evo 2 model, which can design entire genomes (Asimov Press): a good write-up on Evo 2, a large context window LLM that processes ultra-long genetic sequences efficiently, enabling rapid disease mutation predictions and genome design
👁️ Figure releases their own VLAM for humanoid robots after canning OpenAI: the humanoid company has cooked their own model which runs on low-power embedded GPUs and consists of dual-system VLAs: System 2 and System 1. Enabling full upper-body dexterity, zero-shot object manipulation, and multi-robot collaboration
👑 We live like Royalty and don’t know it (New Atlantis): Modern Westerners live in a world of abundance and security, unimaginable even to historical elites like Thomas Jefferson, yet most remain oblivious to the vast, intricate systems—water, food, energy, public health—that sustain this prosperity
It’s Time for Europe to Stand Up (Noah Smith): With the US ending its security guarantee of Europe, a look at what Europe needs to do next
🇦🇷 Taking the chainsaw to Argentina’s bureaucracy w/ Federico Sturzenneger (Dimitri Kofinas): A podcast with Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation and State Transformation, which has inspired much of DOGE. Interestingly they cut government spending by 5% of GDP and grew the economy by 4% of GDP
🇪🇺 Forget the US, Europe has successfully put tariffs on itself (Mario Draghi, FT): Draghi pulls no punches, highlighting the EUs regulatory regime is equivalent to a tariff of 45% for manufacturing and 110% for services
🇺🇸 The US DoD is reforming acquisition with a focus on rapid prototyping (Breaking Defense): Pete Hegseth is likely to issue new guidance aimed at accelerating the Pentagon’s acquisition process, focusing on rapid prototyping to deploy new technologies faster
💥 How Boom Supersonic stopped the sonic ‘boom’ (Aero Mag) - How startup Boom used Mach cutoff physics, where a sonic boom refracts in the atmosphere and never reaches the ground.
😈BONUS: Dominic Cummings on DOGE + the next Industrial Revolution + AI and how to combat the political uni-party: “Valley companies have already made clear they will simply not release models in the EU rather than follow EU regs. Taliban today can download new models now blocked for Brussels elites”
I’ll be back with the regular scheduling in a few weeks. Catch you soon!