Founders’ experience ‘75-‘05:
Microsoft-college
Facebook-college
Google-PhD
Apple-2yrs
Box-college

Founders’ experience 2015+:
Rippling-unicorn founder
Anduril-unicorn founder
Ramp-exited founder
OpenAI-SV royalty

The startup game has changed. Why is no one talking about this?

It’s a widely held belief that AI will give us more free time. I think the opposite is true.

As human productivity increases, the opportunity cost of leisure time will increase too, and people will work more.

Grindset sentiment like “weekends are for builders” foreshadows this.

Autonomous delivery robot in LA. Narrow sidewalk so it just stopped and everyone had to get out of its way 😅

Consumer edtech and self-improvement tech are severely underhyped AI trends.

Everyone wrote off those categories because of retention / monetization, but that's because the old products mostly sucked.

Personalized, fun, motivating and effective AI applications can change that.

If OpenAI is Nokia

Does that make Meta… Apple?

The Gen-Z founders we have invested in are some of the most hardworking, capable and fast learning people I’ve ever met.

But then I also hear plenty of stories of useless Gen-Z.

Maybe Gen-Z just has a fatter tailed distribution of abilities than prior generations?

Drivers of the uncanny valley for AI avatars, in order of importance:

1. Voice
2. Lips
3. Delayed responses

ElevenLabs and sync.labs (YC W24) are already solving (1) and (2). After using the demo version I’m now convinced that Groq Inc is well on the way to solving (3).

AMD’s American billionaire CEO Lisa Su was selected as Sky Sports F1’s “Martin’s random person” for an interview on the F1 grid.

First question: “do you speak English?” 😂. Her responses are 10/10.

I just tried Groq Inc with LLama3. It was it almost as magical as using ChatGPT for the first time.

This is not just hype. It feels like a quantum leap for real-time avatars and applications.

Anyone remotely interested in the space needs to try this now.

My beehiiv 🐝 plan (yes I pay) just got upgraded to a higher tier, *and* my pricing went down significantly. Brb investing the savings in beehiiv Boosts

Happy Ramp fundraise day!

The energy is high.

This is one of my answers to the Peter Thiel interview question: “what important truth do very few people agree with you on?”.

Smoking is actually not that bad for you. The widespread negative sentiment towards it is bordering on a psyop.

Congrats to Stripe on their European success story, alongside other international companies like NVIDIA (Taiwan), Google (USSR), Amazon (Cuba) and Apple (Syria)!

.beehiiv 🐝 has long overtaken your email provider, now it’s coming for your website builder.

Mailchimp + Wordpress = very large opportunity.

There is no better proof of the IQ bell curve / midwit meme in investing than the Renaissance Technologies top holdings list

If you weren’t convinced of the power of the creator economy, perhaps you will be persuaded by one creator’s YouTube video sinking a company that raised $230m.