Luke

1/ After building social consumer apps for the past three years, I often get asked by friends working on social apps how to test them. Going to share some of what I learned here: [thread]

Doesn’t get much clearer than this

@kventuroconerly Big congrats !

Really happy to share that I #appic matched!!!! Sending my best to everyone going through this process. I cannot wait to meet everyone else in the cohort at MGH!

@gregisenberg 100%

YouTube JUST announced this new thing called Hype and it's lowkey genius imagine you're scrolling and see a wonderful video from some small creator. you wanna do more than just like or share. enter Hype. okay, here's how it works you get 3 "Hypes" a week to boost videos you dig. it's like a supercharged upvote. more Hypes = higher on a special leaderboard. but here's the thing it only works for creators under 500K subs and vids less than a week old. plus there's a "small creator bonus" so the little guys can compete. why's this smart 1. turns passive viewers into active supporters (people want to support the up and comers!) 2. gives smaller creators a shot at blowing up 3. YouTube gets more engagement without messing with the algorithm 4. promotes niches so everything isn't watching the same thing (increase watch time) "In just the first four weeks of our beta tests in Turkey, Taiwan, and Brazil, users hyped over 5 million times across more than 50,000 unique channels" - YT Team it's not about killing the big creators. it's about giving the underdogs a chance to be seen. it currently being tested let's be real, social's been feeling stale. same big accounts, same content, rinse and repeat. you either dont get seen or you go ballistic. Hype. it's like CPR for the internet dream. suddenly, that person making weird videos in their bedroom could be tomorrow's viral sensation. just like the good ole days. it's bringing back that wild west vibe of early YouTube. when any random video could blow up overnight. i totally can see a hype-type feature for platforms like X/Twitter too. i hope it takes off. it's about keeping the internet weird, creative, and unpredictable. so yeah, Hype might just save us from an endless feed of polished corporate content and put the "social" back in social media. maybe its the domino we need to get other social platforms to do the same. let's see who/what the internet decides to make famous next. time to make the internet weird again.

@AlexandraSukin @BessemerVP Congrats !! :)

Very grateful to be a part of team @BessemerVP and so excited for this next step!

@hoppermori awesome job team!

U CAN PLAY NIKNAK NOW IT’S A REAL THING

@johncoogan @mwseibel @theallinpod Founders podcast is great! Nice shoutout!

They are listening to their customers, not a joke and not a diss! This is a natural progression for all media products. You start with a niche, fans love it because you’re the best at that one particular thing, but eventually you exhaust that niche and need to go broader to keep growing. Rogan started with MMA & comedy, now talks politics + everything. Lex was literally “the artificial intelligence podcast” now talks politics + everything. This is win win because it creates an opportunity for new figures to enter the scene (see Dwarkesh) and allows the original figures to keep growing. Plus lots of creators get bored focusing on one tiny niche for decades. Die hard fans (or “customers”) want a 360 life view of the people they follow. The customers *do* actually want to hear political takes from venture capitalists, even though that probably wouldn’t have made sense on day one. If you like Acquired, you’ll love @FoundersPodcast btw.

What’s happening to the @theallinpod? They used to talk about what’s interesting in Tech. Now feels like politics and conspiracy theory debunking have permanent segments each week. I’ve listened for years - why are they messing with what was working?

straightforward ways to determine whether you could use AI in your company: if you could bring in 300 summer interns that were happy to do anything, what would you have them do? Can you have AI do this? What’s something that no one wants to do because it’s tedious? Can you have an AI process do the first pass and then have people review it? Do you have a unique data source that you could train a model on and then sell other companies in your space access to as an endpoint? Does your company rely on large documents? Would time be saved if these were summarized for consumption?

@FairOppProject just got backed by another national non profit funder - more deets to come

Yo i've been burning through $$ on FAFSA ads to get students to file. Interesting to see that across demographics, almost zero engagement when we lead with FAFSA-forward content. Besides be a debacle rn, that agency also needs a PR lift

@CookingWong I like framing this like a cover letter. For juniors, we have them write a common app essay, and it's to get at that reflection piece

@HeineLuke No resume - something more substantial like a cover letter or life narrative

My quest to give out $60,000 to high school students continues. What do you think of this criteria for college seniors - You have to open a tax-advantaged account (roth/529) - gotta complete the FAFSA - gotta write a resume - and then book a 30 min college mentorship session here: fairopportunityproject.org giving it out in $100 increments to Wis students while supplies last

Might have them set up a Roth IRA

Thinking about allocating $60k to micro grants for high school juniors over the summer. If students complete a set of tasks that helps them be financially / life prepared, they’ll get $100 each meant to cover future post-high school fees. What should those tasks be? Some ideas: - give essay topic that makes them write out pros and cons on a variety of life paths - gather parents tax forms for FAFSA filing - write their common app essay so they already have momentum moving

Hear me out. Apple buys TikTok

Kinda feel like LLM’s are at dial up speeds rn. When that latency comes down (and cost), giddy up !

So epic hosting the 3rd Annual Northland Hackathon. Shoutout to all the participants, mentors, and judges who make it possible! The winning team (Tech Titans) built an interactive tech map to explore Minnesota's tech resources. This year to get the word out we also: - sent physical mail to every public MN high school - bought up billboards around the state - emailed most MN science and math teachers. If you want to get involved: northlandhackathon.com

Sun gives all life. We can’t look at it.

Buying billboards across Minnesota for northlandhackathon.com - but how could they be cooler + readable

this is too real

Did you know that Oregon Trail was made by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium? mecc.co/history/the-or…