Lucas Faria

Don't (Start) Work in Venture Capital Almost every day I get a note from a student saying they want to get into venture investing. got a nice one yesterday from a rising senior at Harvard (comp sci major), here was my response: my strong, strong recommendation: don't start in venture capital or even investing! this is the greatest time in the world to *build* something. investors are parasites. they (we) need a host. as an investor, your destiny is basically whether you can find somebody to hitch your wagon to. but if you're technical and determined, you can now create anything! that having been said, when you are 21 you aren't exposed to a broad array of problems in the world. most college students i meet just know homework, dating, and food -- and consequently start companies/build products around those areas. so my recommendation (even if you want to end up as an investor): join a very exciting company now. there are only two jobs at real companies: making the thing, or selling the thing. choose which path you want. and as you get more experience there, and are exposed to more problems in the world, and more people in a work environment, maybe you'll start something. and THEN, you'll have a powerful network, an understanding of how products work vs don't work, deep insights that you can coach people with, etc. and you'll probably already have done a few little investments here and there. and THEN you will be interesting for a venture firm. i didn't reach out to any vcs to get a job, they all pursued me, which is not meant to sound arrogant -- rather it's how most firms operate. most venture firms don't hire mbas anymore. we want people who enhance our ability to find, pick, and win deals, and overwhelmingly this means people who worked at a startup. there are exceptions, but they're rare. it's the inverse of the world 30 years ago. good luck!

@rayandabbagh @speedrun Chipotle is a must

whole a16z @speedrun cohort building together from the a16z office hard not to be inspired

@eptwts the courage to be disliked ; discourses - epictetus

has any book that actually impacted how you live your life & helped you get to where you are? i'm trying to stack up my bookshelf so gonna do a bulk order of books - any input would be appreciated ideally marketing, business, psychology, etc.

we really quickly went from "one-person billion-dollar company" to "it's over, only big startups survive"

Is it checked into the repo? Yes. Every page committed same as code. The catalog (_index.md) and backlinks are regenerated from the files, not hand-maintained - delete them, rerun the rebuild script, they come back identical. That's the whole point: files are the source of truth, the index is just a cache. What stuff goes in there? Only stuff with a sources: field pointing at raw material - a transcript, a doc, a video. No scratch notes, no unsourced opinions. Every type is declared up front in a schema file, capped around ~12 types with a mandatory catch-all bucket, or you get taxonomy explosion by week two. When do things get added? Planning or implementation? Neither, honestly - and this is the part people get wrong. It's not "oh right, let me jot this in the wiki while I code." It's a separate pipeline stage: new source lands → queue script diffs it against what's already absorbed → an actor processes the backlog in batches, async from whatever else you're doing. If you try to bolt wiki-writing onto your normal dev flow it rots in a week, because nobody remembers to do it mid-sprint. How do you avoid mismatches? Layered, because no single layer is enough: 1. A write-time hook rejects bad frontmatter, broken links, sources that don't exist on disk. 2. A second pass, different model/context, reviews every new page against the actual raw source. Doesn't match → rejected. This catches fabrication, which is the failure mode that actually matters. 3. Cheap deterministic scripts (link validator, quote-anchor checker) run every session, zero LLM cost - catches drift before it compounds. 4. Pages can't silently shrink if a rewrite drops sources or cuts the body by a lot, it needs an explicit flag saying why. 5. An expensive full "does this contradict itself" LLM pass, but only at real milestones (50/100/250 pages), never "just to check." The honest caveat: layer 2 (fabrication check) works well. The soft stuff - tone drift, two pages quietly disagreeing, subtle scope creep - that only gets caught by the expensive milestone pass or by someone actually reading it. If you skip that because it's expensive, the wiki looks clean and slowly isn't.

llm-wiki has been incredibly useful to me personally, but not in code yet. Folks who are doing this, some questions: - Is it checked into the repo? - What stuff goes in there? - When do things get added? (during planning? implementation?) - How do you avoid mismatches?

bro got knowledge... rule of thumb: never doubt against strawberry man

@tunguz You know that this can't be cured. Right?

AI has commoditized neurodivergence.

AI security advances when the industry builds in the open, together. We're introducing the Open Secure AI Alliance with industry leaders to develop new techniques and tools to safeguard software and agents. By sharing models, tooling and research in the open, we can broaden the community of defenders. Learn more about the founding members’ contributions: nvda.ws/4pD8Fc5

My favorite thing about working with AI agents instead of humans is that I never have to deal with any meetings.

@viktaur27 @Teslarati The rate of improvement from original GPT to GPT-3 is impressive. If this rate of improvement continues, GPT-5 or 6 could be indistinguishable from the smartest humans. Just my opinion, not an endorsement. I left OpenAI 2 to 3 years ago. Am a neutral outsider at this point.

We are in the Singularity

Jeff Bezos wanted to be a theoretical physicist Here is the exact moment he decided not to become a physicist It’s very important to get involved in things where you have an edge

@antonosika Bad interpretation quite often too

The road to entrepreneurship is filled with bad advice. Don't listen to anyone who tells you to try less. Build what matters to you, and if looks like shit, try again.

@El_Capitano_O @NorthstarBrain

@fariavalue @NorthstarBrain before that I will share an article or 2 to set some context before I go into an AI agnostic setup The why matters more for some people and also I’m running an experiment I will share later. Worth maybe a benchmark that might be incompatible with some big labs business model

wait a minute, ChatGPT Work is GOOD! You guys still getting emotionally blackmailed by Fable?

5.6 sol is so good at removing bad things maybe that's why it's out there nuking your databases

@El_Capitano_O @NorthstarBrain Worth an article!!! I'd really like to understand how you work/your setup! 🚀

@NorthstarBrain I’m AI-agnostic. The architecture I designed lets me swap models and harnesses as often as I change my underwear.

Demis Hassabis has written a piece about AGI, and rarely has he sounded so optimistic. Read his article; the golden future of science lies ahead of us; we are on the threshold of the singularity: "AGI cannot be compared to standard technological breakthroughs, not even ones as consequential as the internet or mobile - it is much more akin to the discovery of electricity or fire. The magnitude of this technology’s impact will be unprecedented, perhaps 10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed." He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold. He has spent years as the industry's designated sceptic, correcting inflated timelines and pushing back on the loudest AGI claims. He does not do hype. So when he writes that AGI is probably only a few short years away and that we are standing in the foothills of the singularity, that lands differently than the same sentence from a founder raising a round. His case: AGI is closer to the discovery of electricity or fire than to the internet, with an impact he puts at 10x the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed. The risks are already real in cybersecurity, with bio and nuclear threats plausibly next, and control over agentic, self-improving systems as the problem on the horizon. The cause he identifies is structural. A commercial and geopolitical race is pushing capability past our understanding of it. Thats the danger. However: A Nobel laureate who built his career on peer review rather than demos is now asking for regulatory infrastructure he expects to need within a few years. Incredible times ahead.

"If—" is a poem by English poet Rudyard Kipling If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too: If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise; If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same: If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools; If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings ⁠And never breathe a word about your loss: If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you ⁠Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!' If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much: If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, ⁠And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!

Telling smartest people what they should be doing is not very smart.

Blackstone President and COO Jon Gray made a very good point. Any rule-based businesses, like accounting, legal, finance, will be completely disrupted by AI. 🎯 e.g. JPMorgan dropped proxy advisors for shareholder votes, replacing them with AI.