Jordan Stephanou

I've looked back on the 500+ startup chats I've had this year, and reflected on trends I've seen - these are my predictions for the 365 days ahead known only as "2022": pineapplesareinmyhead.blogspot.com/2021/12/2022-t…

This is really cool

Undoubtedly the right decision moving forwards but what he brought us with number 20 shouldn’t be forgotten and how he handled the almost impossibly difficult tragedy last summer shouldn’t also. Thanks for everything, Arne 👏

I think/hope history will remember Arne Slot kindly. Ultimately think a clean slate this summer is the right call for both parties but the scale of his achievement last season - and of the dignified manner in which he led the club last summer - should never be understated.

100% agree - now that we can zoom out, Arne Slot did an incredible job as Liverpool manager in extremely difficult circumstances. He will forever be a Liverpool Football Club legend.

Everyone is talking about the impact of closing the Strait of Hormuz on oil and gas. I haven't seen much discussion of the war's impact on helium. Most people think of helium as being a fun gas you use for children's balloons. But helium is actually one of the most important industrial gases, used in rockets, MRIs, quantum computers, and most importantly, in the production of semiconductors. Qatar produces ~30% of the world's helium as a byproduct of its natural gas wells, and that supply is now cut off from the global market. 🧵

As AI makes it trivial to build and launch products, the biggest challenge for product teams is quickly becoming distribution: getting people to pay attention to your product in the increasing cacophony of launches. One of the most powerful tools to cut through that noise is positioning. Strong, specific positioning grabs people’s attention and helps them instantly understand why your product is for them. April Dunford (@aprildunford) is the world’s leading expert on positioning, and today's in-depth guest post, she offers a guide to advanced B2B positioning—four lessons for getting past the trickiest and most common roadblocks that teams run into: 1. Disagreement about what to position against 2. Product pessimism blinds the team to product strengths 3. The differentiated value is poorly defined 4. The company doesn’t know what they are positioning As April shares, “a single shift in positioning can mean the difference between a product that flops and one that breaks through.” Don't miss this one: lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-guide-to-a…

Using the new Launch platform to get visibility for a tool I've been working on to cut down ramp times for B2B sales teams - Igi (AI for Faster Sales Ramp). Check it out - trylaunch.ai/launch/igi-ai

Europe is building momentum. We’ve been building @nothing out of London, proving you can build ambitious tech companies in Europe. Shipped millions of devices globally, crossed $1B in sales last year. @andreasklinger, co-initiator of @euinc_petition and host of “Europe’s Most Ambitious Startups,” came to London to visit Nothing’s workshop. We talked about competing with Apple and Samsung, why manufacturing in Europe would be challenging for our product categories, and how AI will make every phone’s OS personal to its owner. The tailwind is building for startups in Europe. For years, the narrative has been brain drain to the US, weak capital markets, startups relocating, and that is changing. Ursula von der Leyen announced EU-Inc at Davos this week, a pan-European company structure letting startups scale across all 27 member states under one rulebook. What started as a grassroots initiative co-initiated by Andreas is now becoming policy. €5B Scaleup Europe Fund launches this spring for AI, quantum, semiconductors. European Innovation Act coming in Q1 to remove barriers. The EU is moving. Check out my interview with Andreas: youtu.be/Vc5o9aD8vZE

Insightful + refreshing take by Sangeet Paul Choudary open.substack.com/pub/platforms/…

I’ll go out on a limb to claim @NotebookLM is the best AI product of the year! It’s unbelievably good! I no longer read PDFs or slides or other docs; I upload them to NotebookLM and convert them into audio/video overviews, infographics, mind maps, or flashcards. It’s just crazy!

Everytime I get mad at people in the cheap seats criticizing founders in the arena, I remind myself of what Giannis said. Arguably my favorite response to a reporter ever.

A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights: 1. You will never be able to detect the use of AI in homework. Full stop. All "detectors" of AI imo don't really work, can be defeated in various ways, and are in principle doomed to fail. You have to assume that any work done outside classroom has used AI. 2. Therefore, the majority of grading has to shift to in-class work (instead of at-home assignments), in settings where teachers can physically monitor students. The students remain motivated to learn how to solve problems without AI because they know they will be evaluated without it in class later. 3. We want students to be able to use AI, it is here to stay and it is extremely powerful, but we also don't want students to be naked in the world without it. Using the calculator as an example of a historically disruptive technology, school teaches you how to do all the basic math & arithmetic so that you can in principle do it by hand, even if calculators are pervasive and greatly speed up work in practical settings. In addition, you understand what it's doing for you, so should it give you a wrong answer (e.g. you mistyped "prompt"), you should be able to notice it, gut check it, verify it in some other way, etc. The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators. 4. A lot of the evaluation settings remain at teacher's discretion and involve a creative design space of no tools, cheatsheets, open book, provided AI responses, direct internet/AI access, etc. TLDR the goal is that the students are proficient in the use of AI, but can also exist without it, and imo the only way to get there is to flip classes around and move the majority of testing to in class settings.

RT @rorysutherland: This is exactly my problem. Tech arrives as an option and ends up as an obligation. As an option, it is mostly benign.…

The "pie fallacy" misses a deeper point, too: value creation doesn’t just grow the pie. It reshapes it. Entire new slices appear that didn't exist before. For example, Google didn’t just grab ad dollars from newspapers. It created an ecosystem of SEO, analytics, SaaS tools, and small businesses that never could have advertised at scale. According to me, wealth creation is less about slicing bigger pieces, more about inventing new categories of pie.

"...there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth." Paul Graham on the Pie Fallacy:

Welcome to Essential. Your phone, created by you. A Playground for you to create, share, and remix.

This looks great

The 10 most powerful paradoxes of life: (a visual thread)

A major cheat code in life: The ability to reset fast. You're allowed to start over at 10am, 2pm, or 6:30 at night. Zero reason to let one bad hour carry into the rest of your day. You can’t control what hits you. But you can control how long you sit in it.

The best investment advice I’ve ever received: If you work a fast-growing company, look at where your company spends money every month and invest in those companies (private or public).