Devin Lewtan

Orange is the new Blue (in tech) — A thread 🍊 1. mymind (@mymind)

@jacksondahl @nanransohoff @stripe IM SAT!

Dialectic 51: Nan Ransohoff! @nanransohoff thinks more of the world's most impressive people should work in philanthropy. And that they needn't sacrifice ambition or upside to do so. Nan leads public goods at @stripe. That includes Frontier (carbon removal) and Intercept (respiratory illness). She's also written about how we need more "general managers" (read: more 'Nan's) and how philanthropy is about to undergo explosive growth thanks to AI money. I talked to Nan about: - GMs and identifying orphaned problems to own end-to-end - coordinating the market to spend billions to suck carbon from the sky and end the common cold - how vision is in short supply - what philanthropy can learn from startups and VCs - the third wave of American philanthropy (driven by billions in OAI/Anthropic philanthropic dollars that will need to be spent) - how many things we may want (good, beauty, meaning) may be harder to quantify and thus require a different philanthropic approach - getting off the "gold star" established path and choosing a life and ambition of her own making Timestamps: 0:00 - Opening Highlights 1:15 - Intro to Nan 4:53 - Start: What is a Nan? Nerd-Sniped by Orphaned Problems 12:39 - GMs, Seeing the Chessboard, and Working Backwards from Outcomes 18:55 - Good Taste in Problems, Vision, and Good Finish Lines 35:43 - Advance Market Commitments Tactically Solving Carbon Removal 41:35 - Focus and Sketching Out or Slicing Up Messy Problems 49:39 - Legibility, Public Rallying, and Ambition in Philanthropy 54:38 - Third Wave Philanthropy and Hard to Quantify Problems 1:06:50 - Risk Tolerance in Philanthropy and Scarcity of Funders and Allocators 1:15:22 - The $40B Tidal Wave of New AI-Money and Why Start Now 1:19:53 - Amount of Capital, Government Philanthropy, and Making Philanthropic Founders Rich 1:31:44 - Nan's Mid-Career Inflection Point and Getting Off the Obvious Path 1:39:47 - Grab-bag: Why Stripe Funds Public Goods, Making Things with Friends, Creative Partnership, Iceland Drone, and Scone Heads 1:49:39 - Syllabi for the Squishy Topics & Study vs. Experience 1:57:01 - Inputs & Outputs and GLPs for Attention 2:04:38 - Closing: Interviewing Parents and Imagining an Obituary @DialecticPod 51: Nan Ransohoff - Power Laws for Philanthropy - is out now below and on all platforms.

@MollySOShea @nikhilbenesch @turbopuffer wooooo yaaaaa

Nikhil Benesch (@nikhilbenesch), CTO of @turbopuffer, the AI search engine powering retrieval for Cursor, Notion, Legora, & Anthropic.. says AI's search problem is getting massive: "We used to think in terms of gigabytes or terabytes." "Folks are coming up to me with not just one, but 10 or 100s of petabytes that they wanna search over." But his hot take: "I think search is still too expensive." "turbopuffer was founded because we thought search was an order of magnitude too expensive at the time. We've brought it down by an order of magnitude, but it kills us that there are still products out there that are limited in their ambition because search is still too expensive." "If you're spending $5 on turbopuffer per user, but you're only charging your users $5 a month, the economics just don't work." "But if we can bring that cost down by an order of magnitude so you're only spending 50 cents a user on searches, suddenly you're able to build a product where you couldn't before." "Your margins work, you get crazy growth, you explode." The question he's asking: "What product isn't currently in the market because search is too expensive?"

@rtwlz omg i’ve been wanting to do a scavenger hunt

Do I know anyone at twilio? (helping make an SF scavenger hunt that 9k people signed up for over SMS. we applied for a 1-800 number to increase limits but got rejected 3 times for unclear reasons. me and the 20 friends behind the hunt would be very grateful 🙏)

@theozero @turbopuffer @varlockdev hi old friend!

@turbopuffer @varlockdev finally ordered a shirt :) cc @DevinLewtan 👋

Love the @turbopuffer merch store. I hope we can do something similar for @varlockdev one day! 🧙‍♂️❤️🐡

my daughter and I are having too much summer fun with this ball

@turbopuffer its been a cold and windy sf summer...

TP SUMMER 26: the beach puff 🌞 now live on turbopuffer.supply

our team is remote but our roots are Canadian. when it came time for turbopuffer's first feature, Canada's The Globe just felt right. the piece is a window into our founding story, business, and customers. we're a lean team of 38 + thousands of happy customers. puff with us!

so excited to be working with the lovely @zebriez & @camillericketts! for those lucky enough to spend time with both of them, you know just how magical the experience is. summer of puff 🧡

Women in STEM (storytelling, time travel, ecstatic dance, manipulation)

@jonathan_jlo @grok bitch

@DevinLewtan @grok summarize

I saw an interview recently where this guy talked about how waiting is core to the human experience waiting to hear back, watching something grow, letting an idea ripen, falling in love, scientific progress AI has trained us to expect immediate answers, but this impatience is degrading our ability to connect as well as let time turn information into true knowledge i really like that

@jnnnthnn yes please

👀

@celinehalioua @Muttville big dawg merch, please!

periodic reminder that we have a merch store and 100% of proceeds get donated to @Muttville senior dog rescue merch.loyal.com

@karine_hsu so good

Oura Ring made these cute foam fingers for fans at MSG to highlight themselves as the official wearable of the NY Knicks

a monocle business called Good Eye

pronouncing gen ai like forrest gump

born to be bouba, forced to be kiki

@kyrtosis oh rake is a great one

@DevinLewtan Out: fuckboi In: rake

words that we should bring back: - iconoclast - gumption - divine - sublime - brouhaha - pithy - mercurial - pwned - hip - dunce

@LubaYudasina i put it in my 2026 ins list this year, i love

@DevinLewtan Divine has been back for a while - in very specific circles tho

@NatalieFratto @chartsncrafts @databricks lfg!

I gained 50k Instagram followers in the last 24 hours because of a single video explaining data infrastructure. The internet is a wild, weird place and I’m having so much fun. The @chartsncrafts must flow.