@profstonge Pretty soon you end up like North Korea, Cuba, East Berlin etc and you have to build walls to keep people from escaping. She probably would if she could…
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Thomas McInerney
3.6K posts
Just finished reading this book.
This was the most interesting tidbit for me.
The 1960s-70s was a pivotal time in semiconductor history.
China fell behind because of the Cultural Revolution. Its best and brightest fled to Taiwan and California. By 1979, it had 1,500 (!) computers in China.
Nearly 70 years later, it still hasn't caught up.
Steve Jurvetson@FutureJurvetson
Just read this in Chip War: "The year after China produced its first integrated circuit, Mao plunged the country into the Cultural Revolution, arguing that expertise was a source of privilege that undermined socialist equality." (p.172) They lost a decade and never caught up.
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The U.S. lost 13 military personnel withdrawing from Afghanistan under Biden. Under Trump only 6 service members have lost their lives in toppling Khamenei. And zero in removing Maduro. Grateful to the men and women who fight for freedom.
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@compound248 So much wealth in California. And with the highest tax rates in the nation somehow the government can’t make it work. Property taxes alone on that house will be at least a million dollars per year..
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Hey everyone,
At @intro we have been very deliberate with who we add to our amazing team. We’re best-in-class in product, development, and operations. We have folks who previously built billion dollar companies from brands like Uber, Calm, Mercari, and more.
(a thread)
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Thomas McInerney retweetledi
Starlink Mobile’s next-gen satellites will deliver 5G speeds from space with 100x the data density of the current V1 generation satellites
V2 satellites will seamlessly enable streaming, internet browsing, high-speed apps and voice calls, just like being connected to a terrestrial network → starlink.com/mobile
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Two of these 11 men were my uncles, my mom’s brothers.
They were executed by firing squad for opposing the new Islamic Republic regime.
Their trial was only 30 minutes long. They were convicted of being “counterrevolutionary” and executed in Sanandaj.
The photo took captured one of many brutal moments in Iran and won the Pulitzer Prize.
Farokh@farokh
Mine was condemned to death and executed by firing squad in Tehran in 1981 for attempting to fund a coup as he opposed the religious rule and believed in the separation of church and state. The family was close to the monarchy and did everything they could to fight against the Islamic Republic. Fighters at heart, fighters forever. 🦁✊
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Just think, we could have built two miles of high speed rail for what this is going to cost us
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A Stanford professor analyzed 1,000's of angel investments to find out who's had the MOST unicorns.
The results are fascinating.
- David Morin tops the list with 23 unicorns
- Peter Thiel and Lee Linden follow with 21 each
- David Sacks at 20
- Marc Benioff at 19
A few things that stand out:
1) Almost every top angel was a founder or exec at a large tech company first. The clear signal here - they were mostly operators who earned their access.
2) Many co-invested together repeatedly. Thiel, Sacks, and Levchin all overlapped at PayPal and went on to back the same unicorns (Facebook, Airbnb, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX).
3) No women appear in the top 50. Sad.
4) The entry threshold to make this list is 9 unicorns (nuts!). The average unicorns across the top 50 is 13 (more nuts!).
I share this for folks to have inspiration to angel invest themselves!
There has NEVER been a better time - we are at a major tech inflection point.
If you're thinking about angel investing and forming angel syndicates, you should check out Verivend. Automated capital calls, one-click funding for co-investors, real-time visibility into who's in. Seamless software with a great team to hold your hand through it.
Try it yourself: lnkd.in/grrJxqxq
Full credit to Ilya Strebulaev and his team at the Stanford for this research.
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Thomas McInerney retweetledi
Despite all of its agricultural production, California has the third-highest grocery bills in the country, behind only Hawaii and Alaska, states that have their own unique food transportation costs and challenges. What’s more, California grocery inflation is rising faster than the overall cost of living; California groceries are 26 percent costlier over five years, as the overall cost of living rose 23 percent.
nationalreview.com/the-morning-jo…
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Thomas McInerney retweetledi
Mercury is so dense an iron anvil floats in it.
📽: Cody'sLab
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€30mm is like the seed round of a company you’ve never heard of in silicon valley on any given day. So funny -
Emmanuel Macron@EmmanuelMacron
In France, we believe in science. That is why, on May 5, I issued a clear and open call to the world: for science, choose France. I am very proud to see that this call has resonated so strongly. Around forty leading researchers have chosen France. Through “France 2030”, we have invested more than €30 million to advance health, climate action, artificial intelligence, and fundamental sciences. Science has found its home.
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This is an incorrect trope that refuses to die.
Tech has given SF the richest budget of any city-county in the USA. We spend more per capita than Copenhagen or Tokyo.
There is no lack of “reinvestment”. It just gets squandered by the corruption and incompetence of local politicians and NGOs.
Geeta Minocha@geeta_minocha
Tech loves to complain about the decline of San Francisco. But tech’s apathy toward community reinvestment is one reason for it! Public banking is a tool the region can use to revitalize itself without waiting for industry to step in. Excellent stuff from @JackieFielder_.
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One of the easiest wins for America would be to get union money out of politics. Unions should not be able to make political donations. Huge conflicts there.
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OpenAI's @kevinweil says 24/7 robotic labs could automate scientific discovery using "reinforcement learning with a loop through the real world":
"There’s a lot of science that can be totally automated. There’s no reason at this point that you need to have grad students pipetting one thing into another thing."
"The idea is to have robotic labs that are online 24/7 and can scale in parallel. You have models reasoning for two days to find the most efficient experiments to run, once they get to a good point, they pass that to a robotic lab which can experiment in parallel at high volume."
"The results pass back into a model which reasons about the results and then goes out and runs a different set of experiments. You’re doing reinforcement learning with a loop through the real world."
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We noticed this weird post on @moltbook - seemed to be written in complete gibberish. moltbook.com/post/93bea00b-…
Then pasted it into ChatGPT and... WTF 😂
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The physical world will take longer but it feels like we are 100% entering a software singularity.
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Thomas McInerney retweetledi
@DougBernauer It’s been incredible seeing you take @RadianNuclear from an idea to a factory to build and scale these reactors in such a short time. I’m in awe of what you and the team have accomplished. Feels like we can have a huge positive impact on the world!
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Tom, your angel investment was the actual first check in Radiant. We had an awesome chat in the middle of Los Angeles in 2020 that I'll never forget. Thanks for continuing to sing our praises!
Thomas McInerney@tgm
Really fun hanging out with @jason and the @twistartups team for a talk at Founder University in Tokyo!
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Really fun hanging out with @jason and the @twistartups team for a talk at Founder University in Tokyo!
This Week in Startups@twistartups
Here’s how to avoid getting lost in the “Idea Maze…” Being a founder is a bit like being Jack Torrance at the end of “The Shining.” If you could see a bird eye view of the entire landscape, you’d navigate your way to success immediately… but on the ground, it just looks like a bunch of snowy hedges. On TWiST Tokyo, @Jason and legendary angel investor @tgm blaze their own path through the idea maze, with a must-watch deep dive into essential tips for early-stage founders, angel investors, and everyone in between. Find out why investors need to stay aggressively optimistic, why buzzwords and marketing speak in your pitches are such a huge red flag, the secrets behind @elonmusk visionary achievements, “poker tells” that both Jason and Thomas look for in founders, and why running out of money is the greatest startup danger to watch out for. 🎥 Watch the full episode here 👇
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