Warren

Overheard in Silicon Valley: "Rebranding to 'forward deployed engineer' from 'consultant' one of the great all time recruiting whammies."

Had some fun last night, ran my property through $OPEN to see what it would spit back in terms of a value… it’s only off by about ~50% lol I mean talk about not even being remotely close to in the ballpark… I was in pretty detailed making sure it had everything. Who actually sells a home through this platform?

One of the hardest things to learn as a young investor is what a true top percentile founder looks like. Things get particularly more challenging when you are non-technical investing in technical sectors. Over time, I've come up with rough categorizations of founders that have made it much easier for me to evaluate people. Generally, there are three kinds of folks you will meet building companies. Figuring out which type of founder you are talking to is critical, but it takes time: 1. Not Top Tier: This is both the easiest class of founder to identify and also the most common. Truly exceptional technical founders are not easy to come by. Therefore, most people you meet will not be truly exceptional. These founders will present with only surface level understanding of their field. They might have pivoted into a hot space because their last idea didn't work out. They'll dance around probing follow-up questions that invite them to explain things at a deeper level. They'll offer to have you speak with their CTO or founding engineer if you'd like to learn more. You don't want to invest in these people! 2. Fool's Gold Founders: This is the real trap category. These are founders that are deeply technical but are not hyper-fluent. They can talk at you for hours about what they're building at a depth that is overwhelming. For young investors who can't match the level of technical expertise, you'll walk away from this call thinking to yourself, "Oh my god this person is brilliant! They know so much about this field, I know so little - they must be a genius!" This is a very normal reaction to have but one you must learn to fight against. Just because someone can talk about the deepest technical intricacies of a field does not mean they are the best in the world at building that company (I'll explain more about why this is in the third category). For young investors, the work is to learn to identify the line between baseline info you should probably know going into a call (i.e. did you do your homework on the industry?) and information a founder should be able teach to you regardless of your level of familiarity. 3. The Hyper-Fluent: As described below, these are the founders that can "scaffold their language" in accordance with their audience. If you're non-technical, you'll take a meeting with this type of founder and walk away with the experience of understanding something at a level you've never been able to before. Concepts will "click." They'll make you feel part of the conversation regardless of your technical ability, and then you'll listen to them speak to an engineer and see them go 100 levels deeper. These are the folks you want to invest in! Why? Founders are constantly having to code switch -- one minute they're speaking to an investor, the next a new technical hire, then a potential customer. As such, they need to be able to quickly identify the depth of knowledge of their audience and adapt their speech accordingly. People with this hyper-fluency are the ones with both the deep knowledge and theory of mind to be able to adapt to and speak the language of their audience. It's sort of like the Wired "Explained at 5 Levels of Difficulty" videos. You need a founder who can just as easily explain something to a 5 year-old as they can a PhD. If a founder needs to be speaking to a world expert for their points to land, how do you think they'll fair trying to raise from generalist VCs or talking to diverse shareholders as the head of public company? -- In reality, the boundaries between these categories are much blurrier than they might appear. Someone in the first category might look like the third if you can't quickly identify how deep their knowledge really is. So, in my view, the only way to start to build better instincts around this is to take as many meetings as possible. You simply have to get the reps in meeting many, many founders to start to understand what true hyper-fluent greatness looks like.

NEWS: JD Vance had the Army Corps of Engineers raise the water level of an Ohio river so he could improve the kayaking conditions for his birthday outing (The Guardian)

Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf. The acquisition includes Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark and brand, and strong business. Above all, it includes Windsurf’s world-class people, whom we’re privileged to welcome to our team. We are also honoring their talent and hard work in building Windsurf into the great business it is today. This transaction is structured so that 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially. They will also have all vesting cliffs waived and will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date. At Cognition we have focused on developing robust and secure autonomous agents, while Windsurf has pioneered the agentic IDE. Devin + Windsurf are a powerful combination for the developers we serve. Working side by side, we’ll soon enable you to plan tasks in an IDE powered by Devin’s codebase understanding, delegate chunks of work to multiple Devins in parallel, complete the highest-leverage parts yourself with the help of autocomplete, and stitch it all back together in the same IDE. Cognition and Windsurf are united behind a shared vision for the future of software engineering, and there’s never been a better time to build. Welcome to our new colleagues from Windsurf!

🚨TEXAS Rain ENHANCEMENT "Weather Modification" Projects DIRECTLY over the FLOODED AREAS near Kerr County!