Avantika Daing

Exciting to see @zoox hitting the streets in Austin. Autonomy unlocks a complete rethink of how vehicles are designed to fulfill different needs – instead of building around the driver seat, we can design around passenger safety and accessibility; goods delivery; and other uses.

Sequoia’s @shaunmmaguire wrote a private hardware manifesto arguing that over the next 25 years, most of the money will be made in hardware: "Every software revolution is preceded by a hardware revolution." "To have the iOS App Store that enabled Uber, DoorDash, and all of these great companies - you needed to have the iPhone." "This AI revolution - we're seeing what it can do from the software layer, but it's still limited by hardware." "The hardware we were doing for a long time was all following Moore's Law. It was all branching out of this decision in the mid-1950s to go all in on the silicon supply chain." "That has created magic, and there's still a couple orders of magnitude of juice to squeeze, but we’re hitting fundamental physics limits - Dennard scaling, things like that." "I think this tech tree is branching into humanoid robots, into silicon photonics, into orbital data centers - all of these new hardware areas where there's going to be 20+ years of progress." "There's going to be incredible businesses built on the back of this. And a lot of dumpster fires."

Exclusive: Andromeda started out as a project by AI-focused VC firm NFDG. Now it's a standalone startup with a run rate of $100M and a $1.5B valuation after raising $60M from Paradigm. I spoke to CEO @WMoushey about his plans to build a better market around global AI compute.

Ovaries age 2.5x faster than any other organ. For decades, nobody studied why. A weekly rapamycin pill just changed that. @ColumbiaOBGYN's VIBRANT trial: egg loss dropped 70%, from ~50 to ~15 per month (n=50). VIBRANT II expanding to 1,000 women. Why it works: a @NatureAging atlas mapped 3,455 aging genes in human ovaries and found mTOR hyperactivity as the dominant ovary-specific aging pathway. Rapamycin inhibits mTOR. The biology lined up. Why everyone should care: -> Women live ~5 years longer but spend 25% more of their lives in poor health. -> The 290 genetic loci controlling menopause timing sit in DNA repair pathways that govern aging itself (Ruth et al., @Nature 2021). -> Early menopause predicts accelerated biological aging. -> Menopause timing isn't just a fertility marker. It's a longevity biomarker. In November, the FDA reversed two decades of hormone therapy warnings. The science caught up. We excluded women from aging studies until 2016. The fastest-aging organ in the human body was in women the entire time.

At 26, @chadbyers invested $250k into Robinhood after everyone passed. That bet turned into $400M+. Before he wrote the check, two experts told him: “This was tried in the 2000s. It will never work.” He still wrote the check. Later, an expert warned him off Plaid. He listened and missed out on millions. Chad’s takeaway is not “ignore experts.” It is this: experts explain how the system works today. They are worse at seeing when the system is about to change. In this week’s episode of The Library of Minds, the co-founder of @SusaVentures breaks down the full Robinhood story, his unicorn filter, the new data moat, and what comes after AI. 1:45 - To make money, don’t listen to the experts 2:50 - Inventing the “data moat” thesis 5:05 - How to Find “Spiky” People 8:10 - Why 48-Hour Deal Cycles are a Mistake 10:40 - The crumbling SaaS moat 16:55 - “Oh shit, oh fuck” is the real startup journey 18:00 - How Chad raised Fund I with no track record 22:50 - When to act on your conviction 25:39 - How living w Neuralink founders shaped his diligence 27:50 - What comes after the AI wave

Much thanks to the one & only @McConaughey for sharing the stage at @UTAustin to discuss my new book. The original talk preceded the book was given right here on this same campus. "What starts here changes the world." Hook'Em 🤘🤘🤘

Wonderful conversation between @bgurley & @McConaughey about Bill’s new book.