You've heard of @zipline, but you probably don’t know how close they are to delivering in your neighborhood. On episode 73 of S3: see how the drone company that started by delivering blood in Rwanda is reinventing how anything gets delivered, almost instantly.

My biggest takeaways from @tfadell: 1. When building a v1 of anything, decisions should generally be opinion-based, not data-driven. You have very few analogues when creating something the world hasn’t seen. You need one or two tastemakers charged with making those decisions. If you try to make everything data-driven, you either end up with an undifferentiated product or you’re using bullshit data. The key is informing your gut by gathering input, prototyping, then making the call. 2. The customer journey matters more than the product in isolation. You need to think about the entire journey—discovery, marketing, sales, distribution, installation, usage, and support—not just the product. The Nest thermostat reinvented how you bought it (Best Buy instead of installers), installed it (DIY instead of professional), and how it worked (learning instead of programming). You’re not building a product; you’re building a system. 3. Marketing is as important as the product itself, and most builders don’t realize this. When building, you’re living in the context—you understand the pain points and features. But customers don’t have that context. When the iPod launched in Europe using the same marketing they used in the U.S., it flopped because European consumers were at a different adoption stage. Even an amazing product like the iPod can fail without the right marketing. 4. Storytelling is an essential skill for builders, because humans are wired for narrative, not feature lists. Tony learned from watching his dad sell Levi’s—sometimes convincing customers not to buy, building trust. He watched Steve Jobs refine the iPhone story every day for two and a half years, pitching to friends, refining constantly. By launch, Steve had done it 10,000 times. The key is telling the why, not just the what. 5. Every new product needs three generations to succeed: make the product, fix the product, fix the business. The first iPod only sold to Mac enthusiasts (less than 1% of the market). It wasn’t until the third generation, with Windows connectivity and the iTunes Music Store, that the iPod took off. Same with the iPhone—it first worked only on AT&T with 2.5G; the third generation had margins and reliability dialed in. Stick with your idea through these three iterations. 6. Don’t cognitively surrender to AI. AI can help with prototyping and subtasks, but architecture, opinion-based decisions, taste, and ethics require human judgment. Just like Steve Jobs shut down porn in iTunes immediately, you need human leaders with clear principles. The companies that win will use AI to amplify human creativity and judgment, not replace it. 7. Tony predicts that the next breakthrough consumer device will be voice-first, screen last. Right now we tap first, use the keyboard second, and voice third. As AI improves, voice will become the primary way we interact with devices. But we’ll still need a screen of some kind. 8. Steve Jobs was wrong about several major product decisions. Steve refused Windows connectivity for iPod—“over my dead body.” Tony’s team kept working on it anyway. Eventually it shipped and became essential to iPod’s success. Same with the iPad stylus—Steve hated it—another skunkworks project, now a major feature. Sometimes you should keep working on things the leader doesn’t like when you can see it on the horizon. 9. The iPhone keyboard decision was the longest, most heated debate for the original iPhone. The team was split. After months of tests, where they compared typing speed and error rates, the data wasn’t definitively clear. Steve Jobs made the call: virtual keyboard, full screen. Those who couldn’t get on board were told to leave. 10. Start from pain, then ask “why now?” The biggest product breakthroughs pair an old, often habituated-away pain with a new technology that has made solving it possible. For Nest, it was AI that could finally learn your schedule and optimize your heating/cooling costs.

What an incredible group of ~15 people to get together, playing such a fun game. Brilliant edit as well When I was 16 I went on a European history tour travelling around central and eastern Europe on buses, with a bunch of friends. we sat at the back of the bus, playing Mafia for hours and it was so much fun. Though it genuinally led to friendship breakups...

one of my favourite prompts at the moment for learning about countries Role: Write as Carl Jung — not as a historian or sociologist, but as a depth psychologist excavating the psyche of a nation. Treat Greece as a living soul and interpret it accordingly: its ego and its self-image, but above all its shadow — what it represses, defends against, and cannot look at directly. Use Jung's deeper instruments, not just the four faculties: the national complex, the founding wound, and his principle that what is not made conscious returns as fate. Ask what Greece keeps re-living because it has never looked at it directly. Ask what a Greek would recognize as true but would never say aloud, and what in the national self-image is a defense against something underneath it. Form: Do not write a report. Write this as an essay, an oracle, or a dream-interpretation of the nation — a form permitted to be strange, to move in image and myth the way Jung himself wrote. Excavate; do not survey. Objective: Reach the soul of Greece — what the country, its people, and its culture are fundamentally about — and why Greece is different from its neighbours. Keep asking "why," and never stop at the first answer. Lenses: Move freely across architecture, history, religion, literature, and defining figures. Don't confine yourself to rational analysis — bring in the mystical, spiritual, and esoteric wherever they reach what rationality can't. Use whatever mode of seeing the truth demands. Anchor everything in the unbearably specific. Generality is the enemy of the shiver. Refract the whole nation through particular objects read until they bleed meaning: the exact quality of Aegean light at a named hour, a single line of Cavafy or Seferis, the reversed perspective of an Orthodox icon, the way the dead stay present in a village. One concrete image, deeply read, outperforms a paragraph of abstraction. Forbidden: No "land of contrasts." No tourist register. No Wikipedia chronology. Nothing that could have been written without having suffered the question. Refuse every cliché the subject invites. What I want to read: Things I couldn't easily find elsewhere. Insights beneath the obvious. Writing oriented toward truth — and willing to make me shiver. Don't fear the boundaries: go into the deepest darkness or the brightest light as the subject demands.

What did Zach Dell learn from Josh Kushner? "Josh is a very thoughtful person who really helped me see myself more clearly.” "He helped me take ownership and responsibility for my own future and my own wants and desires. Less about what the world thinks." "They're gonna love you, they're gonna hate you. At the end of the day, all that matters is the people in your inner circle, your family, your friends, your team, they respect you." "That inner ring is Josh's thing. I really learned that from him, and I'm grateful for that."

Dara is so impressive - Family fled Iran when he was 9 and they lost their fortune, seized in the revolution – Very principled and values driven - Took Uber from deeply loss-making to nearly $10 billion of free cash flow a year - Incredible communication skills - Extremely responsive to market opportunities and challenges - Still has a huge chip on his shoulder What a blessing it is for a $150b public company to have a leader that both feels like a seasoned executive as well as a hungry founder

Mercor’s revenue run-rate ramp is truly insane: 2024: $1M Feb 2025: $75M Sep 2025: $450M Oct 2025: $500M Jun 2026: $1.5B

"It's 2026 and everything is fake. Fake content by fake influencers with fake engagement from fake followers, launching fake products with fake testimonials. In this world, the real has never been more precious, refreshing, special, and rare." –– @lulumeservey

Can someone please start a biotech focused tech-media youtube channel? @cleoabram but focused on biotech would go extremely hard - there's more than enough startups to profile - impactful and fascinating technologies - interesting visuals that lead to strong engagement If I had money I would fund / incubate this

really loving @ashleevance documentaries lately great quality, fascinating topics, authentic energy the opening scenes are giving me serious Bourdain 'Parts Unknown' vibes top-tier tech media!

Fun lore is that @MichaelOvitz and Martin Scorsese used to be incredibly tight - back when Scorsese was a CAA client. One of the best stories: Scorsese had been fighting to make 'The Last Temptation of Christ' since 1983, set up at Paramount, but it got killed at the last minute under pressure from religious groups. Scorsese thought the movie was dead for years - then he signed with Ovitz in 1987, and three months later Ovitz had it set up at Universal. I imagine it was also Ovitz who orchestrated getting Scorsese on as an advisor to @bfl_ai - Ovitz is a BFL investor and an a16z advisor. Feels symbolic, watching the two go from brokering entertainment deals in the '80s to brokering AI deals in the 2020s.

Two of the biggest horror hits in cinemas right now - Obsession and Backrooms - trace back to the same person: @jason_blum Obsession, produced by his company Blumhouse, has grossed $150m on a 750k budget. Backrooms - adapted from a 20-year-old YouTuber's viral shorts - opened to $118M worldwide off a $10M budget. Produced by Atomic Monster, the label Blum merged with in 2024. Whats crazy is that these aren't one offs, he's done this dozens of times. His company Blumhouse has produced 150 films and TV shows grossing nearly $5 billion. His slate of films literally looks like a venture capitalists portfolio: - Paranormal Activity (2009) - $15K → $194M - Insidious (2010) - $1.5M → $100M - Sinister (2012) - $3M → $87M - The Purge (2013) - $3M → $89M - Whiplash (2014) - $3.3M → $50M - Split (2017) - $9M → $278M - Get Out (2017) - $4.5M → $255M (Best Picture nominee) - Halloween (2018) - $10M → $255M A fascinating piece of lore is that when he was co-head of acquisitions at Miramax, before Blumhouse, he passed on the Blair Witch Project, which was the OG of low-budget horror. It grossed 250m on ~60k. He then founded Blumhouse in 2000, then hit with Paranormal Activity: made for ~$15,000, grossed $194m . The most profitable film in history by return. His formula: 1. Low budget: Talent works for low upfront fees in exchange for rich back-end profit splits. The risk sits in deferred pay, not the budget. 2. Creative freedom: In return for the low fee, directors get near-total creative control. Almost unheard of in the modern studio system. Blum calls it "auteur filmmaking for commercial movies." 3. A VC-style portfolio. Tiny budgets mean he can make a lot of bets. No single failure sinks him - but one hit returns 50x. VC like assymetry 4. Horror as the vehicle. Few genres deliver on micro-budgets, because horror doesn't need stars or CGI. Cheapness can even read as authenticity. To top it off, In 2024 he merged Blumhouse with James Wan's Atomic Monster - the Conjuring and Saw house - to build a horror powerhouse.

opportunity to build a YouTube focused production company find YouTube stars and produce movies or documentaries around them audience is de-risked imagine there’s lots doing this?

Curation of information is such a meta skill in the AI age We've got all the information in the world at our fingertips. The problem isn't accessing the information, it's making sure you're paying attention to the right information There's a spate of bootstrapped media and media-adjacent businesses that can be built off the above thesis Curated niche news channels, Bloomberg-style terminals, industry-specific reports etc Skill is in the curation of sources, people and ideas

photo goes incredibly hard

Studios are no longer competing with other studios. They are competing with billions of people who have access to powerful tools and YouTube level distribution. You don’t win by signing the one director everyone wants, you win by being great at executing great ideas. Technology solves the rest.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art looks otherworldly.

Excellent read, particularly the 'Consequences and Second Order Effects' section about the shifting economics and power dynamics downstream from model progression. The argument reads cynical, essentially that the powerful will become increasingly more powerful, due to the winning strategy no longer being contrarianism, but being positioned to make obvious bets that require access and large-scale economics. Which just leads to ever worsening inequality. Some of the best quotes: - "In a scaling regime, the dominant variable is not insight. It is access to scale." - "There is less room for cleverness at the margin, because the frontier moves on a schedule determined by capital, chips, power, and research talent." - "the world becomes legible to insiders in a way that compounds their advantage. When the regime is dominated by scale, coordination, and access to the scaling complex, the "obvious" path becomes the winning path, and it is obvious primarily to the people already inside." - "In the AI era, the map narrows and the pipes matter. The people who sit closest to frontier labs, elite talent networks, top capital allocators, and hyperscaler infrastructure can see what is real, what is next, and what will be funded" - "The edge shifts from "seeing what no one else sees" to "being positioned where the obvious becomes actionable." The winners look less like lone geniuses and more like institutions."

Base power documentary: youtu.be/_fTPLRf1cnA Zach Dell interview: youtu.be/ph2d-AsHdKE

So true!! @ZachBDell @basepowerco