Early anthropic employees commuting to work post IPO

“Head of Partnerships” at every high growth fintech: > he is a very handsome 38 year old white guy that got his MBA at kellogg > went straight from Deloitte to startups (???) > he manages the partnership with Visa or some shit > he joins calls and says things like “let’s think long term” > doesn’t touch a single spreadsheet or deck > is actually a pretty nice guy > he gets laid off in 7 months

I have legitimately seen this a few times in my career. I call these people the professional slackers. They show up just enough to seem important and knowledgeable. They are highly selective in who they respond to on slack and email. Their calendar is full of meetings they never show up for. They dodge and weave hard questions and scrutiny like Shaolin masters. All their effort goes into managing optics. They build a series of symbiotic relationships and alliances with other people who make them look good. In turn, they take care of them with great compensation and perks. Some of these people even do the hard work willingly. And when the scrutiny finally catches up with them, they peace out for their next Director level role elsewhere.

He's training a two layer CNN on MNIST. Set dropout to 0.95. Good, now set the learning rate to 10^-8 and remove all of the 7's from the train set.

know the Claude rules

Founders are the hottest hiring market right now Startups want founders, VC funds want fund founders Everyone wants people who've actually built something

over the past few days people have been sharing stories about their awful interactions with VCs. Here is a roundup of the most hilarious, embarrassing, bizarre, and backstabbing stories 🧵👇

.@creatine_cycle i want this next time

Once pitched a reasonably well-known seed VC at The Battery. They loved the idea and invited me sailing a few days later out of St. Francis Yacht Club. Day of: no reply. I texted, called, texted again, then went down to the marina anyway. Standing on the dock, I watched them pull away on a yacht stocked with champagne and catered food. A few days later they ghosted me. One of the more efficient diligence processes I’ve experienced.

BREAKING: Anthropic files their S1 and OpenAI files their S1.5 with improved reasoning and a 2x longer lockup period

The Silicon Valley I came to in 2016 -- once a low-status refuge for weirdos, naive tinkerers, and missionaries -- has been overrun by input-maxxing Kumon striver types. Company-building for this class of “entrepreneurs” is an exercise in performative escalations between startups touting their inputs: who can burn the most tokens, who can work the most hours, who can get the most views on an over-produced launch video. This is why even “ARR,” which should be (and once was) an output of an excellent product and sales engine, has become a noisy, somewhat fake input -- into a machine designed to capture the zeitgeist for 15 minutes, dupe VCs, and maximize fundamentals-agnostic capital flows into a business. Actual company-building is a sideshow for the “cracked” YC-backed founder-striver. When you talk to many of these people, they have no idea why they’re building what they’re building in the same way that a 16 year old doesn’t really know why he joined 12 clubs or took 15 AP classes -- only that they desperately want to maximize their visible, measurable inputs, tell you about it, and collect their gold star. It’s easy to place the blame on YC, and they surely deserve plenty of it, but YC’s turn towards performative, low-stakes, incrementalist entrepreneurship is really just another symptom of the broader problems plaguing Silicon Valley: the inevitability of industry maturation and the playbook-ization of startups, demographic change, financial nihilism downstream of bad policy and psychopathic rhetoric coming from some leaders, etc. The real progress being made amidst all of this is astounding, but the increasingly absurd shenanigans won’t stop until the culture punishes bad behavior and we prosecute, literally, some of the criminals running these companies.

im afraid of the copper diggers

RT @ConnorJBates_: FRIENDLY REMINDER: It's a bull market. You're not a genius. Stocks go up in bull markets. Always have. You're not an e…

the bigger a city's tech week, the weaker the city's tech

POV: you joined a startup

“Yeahh I dumped my $NVDA to go buy the next bottleneck in the supply chain. Ticker symbol is $0028.0006 it trades on the Sri Lankan stock exchange. They make some kind of glue or something man i don’t even know haha, but it’s a big bottleneck i heard”

Semiconductor wafer supply situation circa 2027

“You don’t get rich by diversifying into 50 mediocre assets. You get rich by finding 2 or 3 asymmetric home runs.” — Stanley Druckenmiller.

The contrarian take is to like the new Ferrari Luce. Follow all other contrarians and like it!