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Interesting Niches – Simply Interests (Notes from March 30 to April 5, 2020) December 30, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Blockchain, Coronavirus, Data Science, Digital, education, experience, finance, FinTech, Founders, global, Healthcare, marketing, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, Venture.
Tags: Data, Downturn, finance, Open Source, Package, Risk, SDLC, Services
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Nat Eliason, of Roam and productivity-type videos fame, mentioned that consistency has been the primary driver for his content rise. It’s refreshing to come across his newsletters as well as Tiago Forte and David Perrell’s for how varied their content is. Typically, we don’t have one specific idea we follow. It’s a collection of all of our readings and experiences. My collection has probably been more evident in this – especially if you pay attention to the notes – generally around startups but also finance, vc, sports, media. Plenty that interest me.

So, this is hopefully my last WordPress post on here and moving to Webflow to move my thoughts and musings for the recent time further.

In light of this, I am going to be doing something with lists. Specifically, around startups. But I’ve been obsessed with historical rankings / lists for a long while. Only now going to be putting the together (I lied – I’ve been piecing the together for a while). Hopefully it leads to explorations and transparency with connecting various lists around them. Be it industry, job hunt, maybe put some clarity to the lists that are typically without much detail. We’ll see! Look out for further info.

Corona Investing (Meb Faber Podcast Part II, III)
- Staying rich and dealing with downtrends
- Cash / yield / gold all have drawdowns > 48%, so if you lose half of your money, does it matter?
- Mixture of trend following and yield can get drawdown to ~30%s
16min on the News
Yaron Haviv, CTO of Iguazio & Mahesh (ML Ops Webinar 3/31/20)
- Develop and test locally and then turning it into production
  - Package (dependencies, parameters, run scripts, build)
  - Scale-out (load-balance, data partitions, model distribution, AutoML)
  - Tune (parallelism, GPU support, Query tuning, caching)
  - Instrument (monitoring, logging, versioning, security)
  - Automate
- Streamlining collection of data, prepare at scale, accelerate training and deployment
- Why are ML Projects not deployed seamlessly? (Survey results)
  - No starting with clear business obj – why are we doing this? Similarly, not a good business case
  - Management failure including insufficient investment
  - Poor communication or not having the right skills for the job
  - Management resistance (“gut” and “real-world insight” over analytics and data)
  - Selecting the wrong uses, especially in an overly ambitious project
  - Data scientists asking the wrong questions due to lack of domain knowledge, primarily
  - Disagree on enterprise strategy
  - Big data silos
- Analytic Lifecycle – ML Eye
  - Define business mission (eg – Reduce churn rate in cc usage by 15%)
  - Project definition and resource evaluation (eg – Estimate propensity for cardholders to churn)
  - Analytic solution design – translating objectives into data science tasks, workflow (eg design churn prediction solution)
  - Capture and data preparation leading in to Algorithm Prototyping (eg prototype)
- ML Ops – key drivers for success for ML Platform
  - Resource management (ability for multiple people to use multiple GPUs/machines running environment)
  - Experiment management (ability to trace code, CL parameters, dataset for trained model – ability to keep track of result with envs)
    - Capability to store models automatically, hyperparameter optimization (framework that helps search over optimal hyper param settings)
    - Provision to store and manage ML datasets, models using tagging, automated versioning and querying capabilities
  - ML Flows (drag and drop, visual tool to build pipelines), rapid experimentation, share & re-use
  - Deployment
- Data science needs to quickly adapt
  - What worked before won’t work now or in the future – concept drift
  - Need for fast, iterative changes
  - Synthetic data to create a basis for models in times of uncertainty – no time to deal with complexities in deployment
  - Need to see business impact quickly
Wade Arnold, Founder of Moov.io with Sam Maule MP of North America at 11:FS (11:FS FinTech 4/2/20 morning)
- Services consuming vs what we’re paying for
- Moov.io as free connection of services for banks using GitHub and pulling data from gov sites, for instance
  - Project in Australia to update them
- For the big 3 core banking – they weren’t to be used on the internet originally
  - He helped add an abstraction layer
- He wants fintech to be more of a d2c term than services and layers in banking
- In the past, using Microsoft SQL or Oracle – now, you wouldn’t want that
  - All Open Source, especially internet and cloud providers enabling them
  - Not much different than IBM adding mainframes before
  - Open Source vs proprietary tech is scale

Better Foundations in Learning (Notes from March 9 – March 15, 2020) November 24, 2020

Posted by Anthony in community, Coronavirus, Digital, education, experience, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, Learning, marketing, NFL, questions, social, sports, storytelling, Time, training, Uncategorized.
Tags: Author, Coaching, Coronavirus, Learning, marketing, NBA, NFL, NYT, Professor, Records, Teaching, Vulnerability
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Foundations. Linear effects. And continuous learning. How are they interrelated?

If you skip foundational learning because we’re too task-focused or hoping to land at an end result, you may luck into some 1:1 mapping of a linear effect. If successful, it may not even be a bad thing. After all, you completed your project / passed your test, whatever it may have been. However, that foundation that you may have missed out on (whether known or unknown) leaves something to be wanted. If the foundation is there, or often when you have the time to recognize the weakness and think systematically from there, you can make connections that surpass linear effects. Learning up from there doesn’t just climb a ladder, it adds others and helps you make connections that can be fruitful in further and further adjacent areas.

We see quite a bit of the ‘jack-of-all-trades’ or ‘generalist vs specialist’ conversations, especially in tech / data science. It’s hard to cover the depth if you start in a niche, unless you had or build a great foundation. Then it becomes easier to recognize opportunities that are similar to what you have done or learned previously. Cross referencing or adapting yourself to new language and key points that pretty much match. Then, knowledge over your foundation compounds and connections present new ideas in a better light. I’m sure this fails in some roles of various industries – but the deeper / broader your foundation is, the more likely you land on a similarity that can make it easier.

In this age of more information, it’s hard to sift through where to start foundation-wise. I think we could do a bit better on that front. I suppose this is somewhat the appeal of schooling – you get someone to hand you a syllabus and a guideline for what the frameworks are for some sort of foundation for a topic. Not up to you at that point, but it’s a block to start. After schooling, you hope that a job is a good starting point for giving you those basics while also creating your own style / fitting into processes. Rough to find yourself a machine in the cog where there’s little room for your own flare – blockers for expanding into other avenues.

What are the best ways to develop these foundations? Are there online curricula that demonstrate starter points or ones that people have found topic-specific? Each of us have our own style, so feel free to share – videos / courses / online / books / etc….

Matt Mochary, Coach to VC’s and Founders (20min VC 3/9/20)
- Benchmark, Sequoia, Brex, Coinbase, Flexport, Plaid and others
- Investor at Spectrum Equity & cofounded Totality – sold to Verizon
  - Growth equity fund in late 90s, heyday of growth internet – junior partner but couldn’t make a wave yet
  - Founded Totality with a friend, raised $130mln and hired a ton of employees
- Academy Award shortlist for shortlist documentary and Doing Good for Mochary Foundation
- Came back to SV after having kids, best place to raise a family but didn’t want to start a company
  - Wanted to become a coach, strategic thinking and coaching – students at Stanford were his first
    - They recc’ed to friends that had graduated already
- Replaced fear with joy as the motivator
  - Prefrontal cortex where creative thought occurs, amygdala is fear and anger – fight/flight
  - In world of modern thoughts, recognizing fear/anger is being self-aware – he tells others to tell him if he has them
    - If there isn’t urgency, he can wait – but otherwise, he tells someone else and has them decide
- When he has a group together – withholding neg thoughts is bad
  - Think about it and once you have it, that’s powerful – if you don’t hear the thought process, you can’t fix it
  - How to share difficult subjects that doesn’t trigger the counterparty – books “Difficult Conversations” or “Radical Candor”
  - Timing of this has to be a good thing
- Having anger named and thoughts named “Hey, I sense that you’re feeling a lot of anger and I guess is that your thoughts are _”
  - The person visibly relaxes but often less than what he says
- Imposter syndrome is fear – pick where you feel joy and take the things you don’t feel joy and remove them
  - Energy audit, essentially – hour by hour (red/green markers)
    - Could outsource tasks, stop doing them, or find out ways to be energy-raising for the things that need to get done
  - Repeat the process in 30 days and then again in 60 days
- CEO role has to take care a lot of things – need to get done and get done well
  - Cofounder example – extreme introvert and extrovert (half reports one, half reports other)
    - Introvert loved internal meetings and extroverts loved external ones
- Boards are the death of every great investor – if you sell to founders, you join their board forever – lots of time (4x year)
  - 10, 15, 20 where 40-50% are board meetings and 20-30% with partners, other time for support of portfolio co’s
    - Lose time to do what you really want to do – instead, ask “How can I be the most helpful to you?”
  - You have a network and they need introductions, customers, recruits, etc
- Every single interaction he has – always asks for feedback “What did you like?” and “What was effective?”, brutal, possible
  - Declares an action for recognition of the questions
  - If feedback doesn’t resonate with you, don’t need to accept it
- Favorite book “High Output Management”
- He was a glutton for coaching, not seeing his family – really enjoys both but needs to find balance
  - He gains energy from coaching vs the draining
- How does he feel about rising Chiefs of Staff – extension of yourself after automating and inbox zero but people still asking for more
  - Training them is key – full access to your email/calendar and sitting beside you for every meeting/call for ~2 months
  - Correlate and pattern match as you on your behalf – start with them and that gets your shit together
- If I don’t respect you, I won’t tell you about it – other will hate you for it – letting someone KNOW about being on time
- All companies should try to do Pledge 1% and act on it – feels SV doesn’t quite do its part
Peter Feigin, Kevin Quealy, Graphics Editor at The Upshot and NYT (Wharton Moneyball 3/11/20)
- Propensity scoring for people matching on probability of using a shot – marathons and faster times with shoes
- Would love to randomize experiments for everything, but tough to do that with marathon winners
  - How big an effect might a shoe matter?
- Regulations for heel heights are at 40mm but 38mm is where Alpha are (popular shoes)
  - World records have kept coming down
- Why are early returns nonrepresentative – cities tend to report last
- Rule changes for NFL that they’ll vote on: sky booth ref, continue/restart a possession after scoring as 4th and 15
- With no crowds in NBA games, possibly to identify randomness of home/away splits
  - Is it refs that end up being influenced or is it the crowd/home cooking, etc
David Brooks, NYT author (KindredCast on WhartonXM)
- Was going through a tough time while a professor and told his class – they proceeded to let him know if he needed anything, they’d be available
  - One of most powerful times of showing vulnerability and changing the design of the class thereafter
- Relationships on which are the most important – focus in class – Marriage, Vocation, etc

Into Building/Growing? Check out these Communities (Notes from March 2 – March 8, 2020) November 2, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, community, Data Science, Digital, experience, finance, FinTech, Founders, global, Hiring, marketing, questions, social, Strategy, Time, Uncategorized.
Tags: Building, ecommerce, finance, FinTech, Hiring, IndieHackers, low-code, Makerpad, No-code, SaaS, Strategy
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I think we can see a bit where we’re going as a society. Need some more community and less individual pieces. This has likely been exasperated by the current pandemic and the uncertainty of the approach taken to present a future. Thankfully, the internet does allow us connections from nearly any and all places, so for that, we can be grateful.

So, Trends would be if you want to learn from some excellent experts in the widest variety of industries. It’s for the curious, bold and excited. Ecommerce, SaaS, storage facilities, other real estate, business, professional services, whomever. There’s someone for every problem, ideas aplenty for solutions otherwise. Talk to a ton of people who just seek to do. This is all without even mentioning there’s a newsletter with a wide swath of input on the most prevalent (or soon to be) trends based on a heavy dose of research.

If that’s not enough, then whoever/wherever you are in your career, there are members that have volunteered to be mentors depending on what you’re seeking. Bounce ideas? They have that. Grow to $1mln, sure. Exit plans? Check. It’s the group to figure out what you think may be the next step. See it here: Trends link (yes, referral but I promise it’s worth it)

Next two revolve around code/no-code and building/hacking your way to product. IndieHackers, fairly split I’d guess between those that can code / develop and those that choose not to – as well Makerpad – a community of no/low-code people trying to replicate big scale/functionality with little effort. If you’re a student, especially, these are incredible – Makerpad‘s community/videos/walkthroughs are awesome value. Better if you’re a student, too. It should inspire you to start something – or at least see what it may look like.

IndieHackers – similar. Plenty of hustlers and side businesses there that you can interact with, as well as a podcast that is top notch, both for inspiration as well as knowledge/insights. See basic problems with solutions turn into full-blown businesses (Rent a Card Sign to Wedding Card printing, as two examples). The knowledge and people, from a straight global environment, is intoxicating. With the good kind.

Hopefully you’ll take these to heart and check them out. For now, these are the notes below. Some more experts, successes and adventures.

Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures (20min VC 3/2/20)
- Dropbox, Revolut, Supercell, Plaid and Transferwise – all financial things
  - BizOps at Dropbox, where company 10x’ed while he was there
  - Went from 200-1500 people while he was managing there
- Was looking for a new thing, possible operator – talked to Index and some of other best ventures
- Importance of hiring / hypergrowth – 8 week interview process at time at DropBox
  - 80% of time would be on hiring, not what he was looking forward to doing
- Highly commoditized as venture capital now – industry sees more money but offer is needed
  - Evolution over last decade – Andreesen as services, others as sector expertise, data for a few
  - Relationships as differentiator – connecting good investors, trust as foundation
- He was 30 years old in joining Index as an associate – flat hierarchy though, ton of autonomy and start investments
  - Had been associate in a p/e firm 8+ years prior
  - Find platform for the autonomy to increase your risk and search there
  - Titles have become meaningless – true question: can you lead your round? Associates can at Index.
- To ask partner for looking for seed or traditional venture fund – are you going to dedicate the time to help get to next stage?
  - If answer is no because it’s a rounding error, not worth it, likely. Earlier stage investments = more time, often.
- More angels joining – extremely risky and making money is hard
  - Upside has limitations
- If he were to leave Index, he’d ask who are the smartest people to add to cap table – rolodex for increase business
  - Historically, meeting the demand – all these great founders/operators on deeper side
- As an early board member – listen – don’t need a loud voice or overplay position as new member
  - Being judicious about when to weigh in, praise, critique – impactful areas for you to dive in
  - Favorite board member – getting to be in meetings with many at Index – Mike Volpi
    - Offering hard conversations and messages to founders
- Lessons learned while passing or no – not focused, be direct
  - Meet with an investor and then they get ghost you – try to close meetings
  - Complement or help founders with an intro or interesting cases
- Thinks fintech is booming – not a bubble currently – trillion dollars in incumbents
  - Just beginning to shift to the new crop – the 50th largest bank is $50bn in market cap
  - Rise of Monzo and Revolut for UK / Europe – are they not going to just add student loans/mortgage/lending
  - Best ones should, he thinks – Robinhood / Chime / New Bank (Brazil) – current account and then cross sell otherwise
- Favorite book – Barbarian Days by William Finnegan about surfing and surfing in SF
- Looks to see more climate tech investing
- Plaid selling to VISA – as a big win
- Enterprise software founders – “Have to get to $1mil ARR to get series A” – not true if it’s a solid business
- Data privacy company investment – new category of software to go after data privacy
Jeff Lawson, founder & CEO of Twilio (Invest Like the Best ep 158, 3/3/20)
- How to build a platform – cloud comms platform to customers like Twitch, Lyft and Yelp
- At his office – “Draw the Owl” – best values as needing to explain
  - Call to action for builders – go figure it out – doing what you do as 2 step process of draw a few circles, then beautiful
  - Early customers needed product (as API) opposed to the investor method which said it’s not a product
- Content center app, marketing – developers can take APIs that provide infrastructure to build an app at scale, quickly
- Twilio has virtualized the communications center much like AWS does computing and storage
  - Stripe / Google Maps for similar functionality
- New era for enterprise software – initially, CIO made the buying decisions and things cost millions of dollars, years to implement
  - On prem and expensive
- SaaS around turn of millennium could buy online and their heads could provision the services they needed
- For the scale and software – it’s a platform of things in their API
  - Build or die compared to buy or build
- Incorporating software into business model – company would need new back-office financial
  - Buy from vendor or build it – already built / reinvent but this would be solution after solution
- Banks with core competency for amazing software – digital banks
  - In response, incumbents can do the same thing (one of Twilio’s is ING – few years ago promoted a new CEO)
    - Becoming Agile, outside of devs, set of Agile teams – each part of small team
  - Agile at ING video on YouTube – one of largest banks’ leadership in business saying they have to build to be successful
- At AWS – customer intimacy to align by customer needs
  - A product company with a solution makes a lot of assumptions for what their customers’ needs – may not intersect with differences
  - A platform, however, can be utilized to build anything by customers – ING built a whole contact center on Twilio
    - Lots of companies as on-prem for contact centers because the contact center market was broken – move to cloud
- Their billboard in SF that’s been there for 6+ years – “Ask Your Developer”
  - Merging business with tech and developers but many companies just give them the tasks instead of the big business decisions
  - How can we do that?
- Developers often enjoy doing the work over the weekend – Hack-a-thons over weekends or doing stuff then
- Finding what it means to be a part of your tribe – heroes, symbols and rituals
  - Skip Potter – CTO of Nike, building unbreakable relationships with customers, being Agile, serving Nike
  - ING story
  - Nations / religions have many rituals – companies have rituals (say, bagels on Thursdays for all-hands)
  - Wednesday night dinner at the offices – defining who they are, with a theme each week
  - Symbols – what matters to the tribe – powerful thing you have are the values
    - Culture: what you feel when you walk into work every day, whether articulated or not
      - Can be good, can be bad during the interactions within the company
    - Values: handles on the culture – allow for you to describe and guide the culture
      - No shenanigans, foolish/nonsense – can’t just create/invent values
      - Introspect the feeling when you walk in early – pooled 15 of people about 1/3 at the time to debate
      - Be an owner
      - Wear the customer shoes – customer-centricity
        Way you are customer-centric, looking at problem/company from perspective
        Go to a customer – I will trade you a Twilio-branded shoes for your shoes
- Kindest thing anyone’s done – Kevin O’Connor as founder of DoubleClick was an angel investor in one of his first company’s (dotcom era)
  - Come to my Hampton’s house in the winter, bring a cofounder and figure out what you’re going to do, I’ll put in some money
  - No plowing of roads – would order Amazon/UPS would plow the road for them – took about 9 months
  - Invested in first company, and then believed in him as entrepreneurs
Tomer London, Gusto co-founder (20min VC 2/28/20)
- Raised $520mln for Gusto, people platform for small businesses providing one place to run payroll, manage benefits, support
  - General Catalyst, CapitalG, KP, T Rowe, Fidelity, and more – also angels Shopify founder Tobias Luttke, Sam Altman, Max Levchin,
    Matt Mullenweg, Kevin Hartz and Elad Gil – did a PhD in EE at Stanford before founder/CEO at Vizmo (customer care for enterprise)
- Originally from Israel, parents have a small clothing store in Hypha – started by picking up a VisualBasic book for the store at 11 yrs old
  - Count inventory, sizing, and could do it via a computer with inventory management software – helped his dad, grandpa, cousins and friends
- 10 years ago, moved to the Bay Area to start his PhD at Stanford – met his cofounders Josh and Eddie – family history and connection to SMB
- Fundraising = creating change as a tool
  - New channel to acquire customers that may be able to scale – $100mln ARR in 7 years, but maybe take 4 years with funding
  - Might be making promises that can’t be fulfilled
  - If you have a product, but you see an R&D opportunity for a new product to similar customer-set that may have a good opportunity
  - Investors have a lot of time to talk about start-ups so they set the tone for “requirements” for seed/A/B/C
- Fin/VC Twitter and social media – he tries to be away and off of it
  - Echo chamber may not enable the creativity of different thoughts
  - Hard to have the mental space to think different/contrarily
- Gusto started in YC 2012 Winter – had good traction, knew people and were oversubscribed
  - Josh came up with thinking about investors similarly to culture fit – values/motivation alignment sharing with Gusto
- Raised a $200mln round, working with 100k small businesses including dentists, lawyers, tech, barbershops and working
  - Look for opportunities and purpose – less about being big but around specific R&D initiatives, scaling growth channels
- Try to make sure to bring people on the cap table that can add value – specifically, VP of Product Adam Nash at DropBox has been sounding board
  - Be really picky about the people you bring on
- Delightful experience really matters
  - Product / design reviews: product quality with function, ease of use, and delight (can’t add this later, has to be inherent)
    - Delight is something of value and in a way that may be unexpected
  - People come to them because someone has told the prospects that they love their payroll/benefits provider
  - They don’t use the MVP, they use MLP (lovable product) – don’t waste time building things people won’t use
    - Scoping down to test and ship it
- How does it feel like to get paid? Maybe not anything at all – boring, just a check in the bank, missed opportunity
  - Did a design sprint (a la Google Ventures) – short period of time/process for an email experience in payday – celebration
- When you meet someone for the first time – first 20-30 seconds really matter, personality shines
  - If you understand personality of a product and brand, you can bring people in through copy/illustrations
Justin Jackson, founder of Transistor.fm and Tyler Tringas, Earnest Capital founder (The Indie Hackers podcast #152, 3/6/20)
- Picking the right market to get started in that originated from Justin’s blog post called “The Main Thing”
  - Justin was following curiosity – somewhat interesting after talking with Nathan Bashez – main thing swallows most value
    - Eating out in college with limited $, he’d order entrée and water – most folks just do that
    - Is that applicable to how we think of products? Can we frame it the way we build products?
    - Josh was doing subscription forms for embedding in Medium posts – Medium increasing audience
      - It was a nice-to-have to store
  - Insightful posts for nice, concise wrappers around important things to consider
    - Justin has a series and Tyler’s been the “reply guy”
    - This is important to think about, and then what should we think about?
    - Areas of disagreement are the implications for doing business outside of this – narrower (think: bootstrappers/indiehackers)
      - Currently, Tyler believes indiehackers should be shying away from big things and verticals
      - New twists on WP hosting, Todo app – not paying attention to 2nd order effects and incumbents
- Don’t build on top of other platforms vs building on top of others (Jason Cohen on an app store where someone else pulls you with)
  - To get traction, need big ideas and concepts and then niche down by product or audience
    - Distribution or differentiation – typically this is often in main spaces
      - CRM, PM tool, ToDo, basic ecommerce, CMS hosting – chock full of stuff
    - Tons of successful ones, lately (last 5 years), are apps – automated collections on Stripe, error collections on Rails, bolt-ons
  - Developer market is one of most unique markets – things that work there may not work outside of it
    - Devs have a larger #, avg revenue and highly incentivized to get better at what they do – maybe parallels with doctors
    - Reachable online, congregates online and tons of opportunity to reach them
    - Ecommerce first may share this, content-based, ad/news/blogs similarly compared to pure offline markets
- ConvertKit – state of union surveys between bloggers and creators – cognitive ceilings of bubbles after meet-ups and conferences
  - Differences of WP plug-in, Shopify extensions for ecommerce entrepreneurs, etc – big market differences
    - Characteristics of markets matter – pointing yourself in some direction to pull yourself, it matters what you’re first 1% is
- Size of market does matter – leaning too far – have to quantify the demand for a product in a specific category
  - Number of potential customers, new customers, average spend, frequency of purchase, growth rate, % reachable
  - His market for Transistor.fm as moderate sized podcast hosting – say, 70k customers, potentially
  - Tyler considering “side dishes” in the main verticals because of differentiation for your product and jump into distributions
- $10k MRR per founder may be the “default alive” amount but completely depends on what you’re doing
  - Young Indie Hacker as total time without massive audience/trust can’t launch a direct competitor to Google Analytics
  - Privacy-focused analytics as a trend, simple analytics, too – big audiences launch failed products all the time
  - Experience matters, everything you bring to bare matters – Justin started blogging in 2008 – built the audience over time
    - Reuben Gamez doesn’t care for audience – he knew SEO and had timing to help
- What trade-offs do you have to make for a market?
  - Where are you in your life? Stage matters – spend some time on the slopes/get your experience
- Affiliates for Justin’s foot off the ground to succeed
  - Nathan Berry – pattern in his life earlier than Justin – early 20s blogging and publishing then, selling early
  - The practice and experience matters
- Main thing for niche audience or side thing for huge audience – questionable unfair advantages, main thing in huge market
  - Pretty core product for them – “Crossfit gyms, for instance – Mind/Body went after yoga studios and everything for it as SaaS product”
    - If you have a particular product insight into P/M or payment txns – try to match the niche product where insight is overvalued
- IndieHackers as afraid of competition they make this product that nobody really wants to pay for as Unique
  - Justin brought up going to meetups in other cities/states to be the outsider and find out what they want
Gaming & Chrome OS / Steam, Going Cashless, Coronavirus Latest (a16z 16min on the News 3/8/20)
- Jonathan Lai and Andrew Chen from Consumer team, Alex Rampell from fintech team
- Steam – Valve corporation as the largest PC distributor of games after starting as Valve game
- Publishers controlled access to physical retail points – devs would take 20-30% of their games
  - Developers actually made it 70% with Steam partnership – just took 30% otherwise, indie developers rise
  - 30k games under Steam – not all would run on ChromeOS hardware, but can see smaller indies get access
    - 90mn MAU, 1 bn registered accounts – social graph that may get ChromeOS more information
- K12 education – 60% of computers are Chromebooks now – Roblox, Stadia, Minecraft as possibilities for younger
- Google Stadia may unlock tiers of games for longer sit-down sessions because they wouldn’t be able to target all platforms
  - Entertainment over long-term, new gameplay experiences – click to play alongside as an ad or video, social onboarding
- Going cashless – no employee theft, checkout line, armed trucks vs cash only (cc fees and tracking)
  - Both sides of consumer cutting and for small businesses – rich people monetized at interest margin but others on fees

What next? (Notes from Feb. 17 – Feb 23, 2020) September 25, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Hiring, marketing, questions, Real estate, social, storytelling, Uncategorized.
Tags: Ads, Automation, experience, Founders, Gaming, global, Investors, Learning, Operators, Privacy, video
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So, we are into September of the pandemic year. Fires, hurricanes off the Gulf Coast, bubbliness of tech, political turmoil, and chaos in general driving the narratives. I know that it’s been a while since we last talked. Whirlwind of finding a new place (without seeing it in person), hiring movers, figuring out the best way to move, when to pack up from my place, when to pack up everything in the girlfriend’s, moving physically, purchasing new furniture, building and organizing has swallowed almost all of the time and sapped creative energy. Pile on to that that there were fires in southern California that had reached our new paradise, enveloping the sun. Suffice to say, we finally enjoyed a weekend (still very active, though) and now room to breathe this week brought me back to WordPress.

You know how many boxes there are in moving? I can completely relate to streamers or Dave Portnoy’s adventure. It’s rough. Covid seemed to jack up prices, as well, which seemed annoying. People that had moved double the size and similar distances were 30-50% less simply due to covid risks, I suppose? The misunderstanding of how contagious or how volatile the infection is clearly resulted in a few industries that got to take advantage in the name of “safety” (moving holds the same risk as it normally would unless you weren’t being cautious/careful in who you hired and brought onto jobs employee-wise). But hey, in options, you pay for the tail risks or you implode.

I still think drones or a body camera that projects out house / apartment layouts would be fantastic for realtors, buyers, sellers, websites related to the space. However, I’m more convinced now that moving companies could do a quick consultation of job requirements with them, designers could customize spaces with accurate measurements of space (blueprints / measurements of rooms don’t do justice to the nooks and crannies, as well as the ‘efficient’ space there may be with windows, shelves, etc). I know that various websites have independently done ‘customize your room’ with their products but if there’s an easy way to copy/paste urls or route APIs with image requests to an easily-replicable copy of your room (a la body-camera / drone), you may have an easier time selling across many products/offerings/sites.

Again, the drone technology continues to improve, so it’s possible we’ll have this or something from the phone to test out as image and object recognition improve. Could likely hack together something that did this. Attach a camera to one of those Costco drones that are $15 that are supposed to stay above ground upon simply detection of walls.

Anyhow, take a look at these awesome founders and investors that I listened to on various podcasts. The mix of serial entrepreneurs, big tech aspirations and side hustles was very fun to listen to.

Ashton Kutcher, Founder & GP at Sound Ventures (20min VC 2/17/20)
- Portfolio including Lambda, Calm, Gitlab, Affirm, Bird and others
  - Ashton’s wins include Spotify, Alibaba, Skype, Airbnb, Optimizely and Time’s 100 Most Influential
- Started at Univ of Iowa studying biochem engineering – power of a computer and learning to program
  - Piqued his curiosity but he wanted to be an actor – started a production company at 25 (reality TV including Punkd, Beauty & Geek)
  - AOL Chatrooms early on – marketing Dude, Sweet in various rooms – continuation in marketing movie
  - Buffering speeds increasing – content would be digital
- He wanted to find companies that could quantify distribution of content and accelerate distribution of content
  - Met Sarah Ross over at T/C, working for Mike Arrington – hired her to run his digital divison
    - Introduce me to everyone that matters in the Valley (T/C 50), Jason Calacanis, Mike Cuban, Kevin Rose, etc…
    - Asking all the questions – made his first investment into Optimizely (A/B testing platform)
- Arianna Huffington as how does he introduce himself – as a father, first, apparently
  - Future of internet are perpetually young, tech capability – learning and an ambition for new/useful/different
  - Cutting edge of technology became his 3 teenage step-daughters so he mined them for ideas (as he was 35+)
- Major VCs and partners have a technical background, as entrepreneurs formerly or study to allow understanding of tech
  - Toward companies with technical innovation and build company off of it – but isn’t their first lens
    - Cultural narrative that may be important and valuable that you can build a product from
    - Example – #metoo as here to stay or enduring – shift towards filling the void as rightful demand
      - Looking at fertility space as trend for expansion
  - Send a snapshot of the home screens for people’s phone on Twitter/Instagram and source ones he’s unaware of
- Most brilliant people going to companies – which – did a survey with the founders
  - Distance traveled by an individual – $1k to $1mil, a dime to $100k (as incredible)
  - Growing up, he would probably say that his twin brother going through a heart transplant at age 12
  - Going through a divorce of his parents that was tough
  - Companies failed that didn’t feel good – not particularly rough since there are multiple
- Strong intuition in products not familiar – hard to get familiar
  - Eating the dog food – before investing in Airbnb, he lived in them for 6 months
  - Apple-ification of app ecosystem for UI/UX, enterprises getting smart also
    - Consumers would use their enterprise software and to use the nomenclature would be better for their CTR
    - Understanding what people want and simplify that – 3 things on a screen, where would you put the most important
- Spending time with founders mostly
  - Ability to increase distribution funnel (his 5-10+ million Twitter followers), Spotify gave him an affiliate site with a discount code
  - Largest music management side for partner, collective on branding and helping
  - Versed on being in PR – public mistakes, apologize or utilize to get out of jams, crisis/preventative PR
  - Product-sensibility, where you want to be – business, also – what does a company need to measure
    - Which metrics matter, industry standards on metrics, how to improve them
  - Portfolio manager from growth team on Stripe that works with them – narrative/storytelling
- Scaling angel to much larger institutional checks – Ron Conway was one of his earlier mentors, as well as Dan Rosensweig
  - Cap table becomes your early board – value add outside of employees, low burn, grow team, disciplines
- The Undoing Project, Scale by Jeffrey West, Trillion Dollar Coach about Bill Campbell
- Misnomer about him – he’s cold (social animal, but super awkward)
- True happiness is being able to take your time
- Biggest challenge – Building a high quality team is hard with Sound Ventures
- Celebrity investing rise – lot of people are going to lose money, Wish he’d known: kindness doesn’t always come back around
- Recent investment with Sound Ventures that he’s excited by – Community (partner helped incubate) – luxury text messaging
Jude Gomila, Founder & CEO at Golden (20min VC 2/10/20)
- Self-constructing knowledge database built by AI and human-intelligence
  - Raised from Founders Fund, a16z, SV Angel and others
- Also a successful angel in 150 companies including Carta, Airtable, Superhuman, Gusto, Linear and others
- Jude started Heyzap alongside the founder of Mercury, Immad
- Passions around tech, learning, universe working – physics in tech form (hardcore engineering) or abstract theorems (randomness/computability)
  - Never wanted to work for someone – wanted to build things, but wasn’t aware of tech scene in London
  - In uni, at 18, he wanted to start a company – formed a consultancy with a few friends
    - Large Chinese manufacturer of egg packaging into Europe – wrote a plan to how they could do this
    - They wanted them to run the business – he called every farm in the UK but they didn’t want to change
  - Wanted to find something they could do themselves for a product that people would want with margin
    - Digital photo frames – own brand into higher side of market – surprising
- April, had burnt through YC money and wanted to raise a round for Heyzap – 6 per day back to back
  - Not impressive investors, go back on their word, converged on better investors instead
    - USV pitched and they got the deal – Naval and USV for board – cool conversations on angel investing
    - Mechanics on legal terms, contracts – part of something larger
  - Put all of his money into angel investing in the next 7 years, advising as well
- Reality is out there, fairly objective – all follows similar rules, working together
  - Ethics – both sides should have ethical framework/grounds – how to act during exit or bad situation
  - One side making money, one on future – is it to top Roth IRA or something else?
  - VC wants you to win the gold medal – that’s what is important because of model
    - A personal best for you is better risk:reward, $20mln or 50 or 100 that’s fantastic, but not for VC
- Praying / spraying – he doesn’t like the praying part – more rational
  - Numbers do matter, so spraying doesn’t fit this
  - If there are nonlinear returns, you have to do 10-20+ investments (since network effects are nonlinear)
    - Nonlinear market caps of monopoly or something like this are higher but capped at $1tn, likely
  - Need to see different learning processes for various investments – has a lot of bullets and time
  - Red/black flags for situations that you’ll always say no – yellow flags that you may be able to fix
    - Markets and dynamics shift, but not human behavior – processes that identify these are very good
- Ability to get in to deals – how did he convince founders to take the money ahead of market?
  - What companies need to exist? Knew that Paychex and ADP were terrible software, similar share, org charts broken
    - Put it into a blog post of ideas that he wanted to see. Simple UI and great CX around payroll.
    - Talked about culture of Gusto that wanted to exist and be unique. An hour of no business stuff, just the culture.
  - Difficult to say whether you have confirmation or not – didn’t do well for a certain reason, can go again on the hypothesis (2-4 times)
David Sellinger, Founder of Deep Sentinel (OkDork w/ Noah Kagan, 2/14/20)
- Early Amazon work on ad-buying tech & first AI systems, directly with Bezos
  - Started RedFin, real estate, as a side hustle (8pm – 4am)
    - UX as the centerpiece, especially for investment deck:
      - They wanted to build quick, interactive maps, simple straightforward
      - He stumbled into Amazon after doing another ecommerce problem
        Google AdWords in 2001 – $0.50 per click for niche products with 50% conversion and 100-300% margin
        VP of Consumer wanted to go thru economics – $0.50 per click, $1 per conversion & repeated
  - Bezos funded Deep Sentinel
    - Provides 24/7 guards that monitor your home and best in market at a reasonable price
    - He’s not in a place to solve climate change or global politics, but can build this safety of people in their homes
- Looks like Howie Mandel & he can pull it off fairly easily (but taller)
- Line between crazy and brilliant is quite blurred – Shawn Parker for Kagan
  - Bigger visions? He has AppSumo where it’s like Amazon for software
  - Big problems that are chosen – in-depth interviews (Shawn’s with Fortune) realizing the craziness, intellect, drive to problem selection
  - Safety net for trying things worth trying because you get to rich, or super rich
- Day he launched RedFin (after year of working on it), was on the front page of Seattle Times in 2004, Imran Real Estate
  - 400k visitors on first day – ISP called saying they don’t support porn sites (didn’t believe traffic numbers)
  - Left Amazon 2 weeks after launching
- Believes that Amazon is a culture of Bezos – future holds more change than today, destroy the business today and go forward
  - Senior executives to try out and do this – categories that don’t work, Fire Phone, Amazon Music or Photos
    - David says he pays for Google Photos $150/yr – embodying the mantra
    - One day in 2003-04, advertised Madonna book “Sex” and lost $100k Google Advertising Project but they weren’t looking for it
  - Initially, Amazon didn’t run ads at first, for a while
    - If you’re looking at Samsung TV, you’ll find a cheaper or different TV for conversion
      - Had CATE algorithm (ML, Bayesian optimization) – stumbled on ad on website Code Red at Amazon credit card
        No matter what they showed before that, the most profitable thing to show the user was this ad
      - Proved the ad was the way to do it – data backed it up (after saying it was terrible and they’d never do it as retailer)
  - Balance is always a judgment call – willingness to re-litigate with any suggestion by new data
    - Process of optimization vs innovation, Thomas S Koo by Structure of Scientific Revolutions book
      - s-curve with normal science (optimization – some paradigm to optimize with evidence), build up that the model doesn’t work
        Early – matter was earth, water, fire and air before coming to atomic model
      - What are the things that don’t fit into the model – the exceptions to figure out a rationalization
- Jeff giving advice to him while starting at Deep Sentinel, launching
  - Design of the product, speed at which they move, and willing to experiment with the way they interact with customers
  - Design award for being most aggressive camera – top part is LED light ring, battery-powered and was initially designed to not turn on
    - Changed it so that the AI turns on the ring and spins – accidental launch after his team came to him saying it
    - Camera will turn on red LED light on and say “we’re watching”
- Top of funnel for Deep Sentinel – cheeky top of funnel, but tech is done very well
  - If you shoot someone, you’re the suspect, even if righteously
  - Israeli security system, and he does contracts for background checks – (In California, has to do that) – uses HireSafe once he does that
  - Mentioning that an Uber driver would be a security agent for a billionaire in the bay area – Noah asked him and it was $70k to sleep outside
- All the pieces but what would keep you from being larger?
  - Markets can be very engrained and it’s a trick to get a customer to buy a different way
    - Enterprise – wiggle your way into customer market and then switch it
  - Nobody searching “cameras with someone that actually protects house” – should be this way, but not since people are used to others
    - Redfin as them figuring out hook – address searches, neighborhoods and data for it – found the customers
    - Have to take people buying burglar alarms and getting the market that they don’t work (99% false alarms)
      - 15% of LA County budget is spent on false alarms – once people pass yard sign, it’s ineffective
- After his neighbor got burglarized, he went through and called all the security companies
  - ADT, Bay Alarm, Brinks, SimpliSafe, camera people, all standard questions – how does it prevent crime? How does it work? What do you do?
  - Salesman for ADT at his home, what’s the new tech that PREVENTS crime? “The sensor was wireless.”
  - Value was the slice of time in the interactions – AI changes the business process to make the human part efficient
    - Average home needs 24/7 availability for ~700 seconds of security a day – when people are entering or exiting the property
- Intense decision for lifetime of relationships – pitched investors, got feedback
  - Bunch of his money in to build his prototype to do first tests, F&F of $1mil for in-market prototypes
    - Put together market research, addressable market, problem and pricing
  - Shasta with Series A went from $7mil to $23mil round, did it over tranches because hardware expense
  - Using other people’s cameras, 3 months, to get to own cameras and prototype about 18 months, then 6 months for market
- Noah did his own checklist for “Operation Dragon Flame” to keep his house safe – reddit as one of the best in home security
  - CPTED – Crime Protection Through Environmental Design – active crime and other stuff
    - Front door with ivy, for instance, or a fountain with stones in it – rule #1 – answer the door
  - Ring as picking up because insurance policy and Amazon as the biggest thing for packages getting stolen
- Peleton as interesting because of being expensive enough to only get people with the money, so they don’t even notice the subscription
  - Choosing to not give away the camera because of attracting the wrong customers
- For Deep Sentinel in the future – looking at small business offerings and working on making AI faster, as well as faster hardware
  - New one coming out in 6 months, new stuff broadening platform
Emmett Shear, Twitch co-founder and CEO (20min VC 2/21/20)
- Starting Kiko calendar, just wanting an online, collaborative calendar
  - Getting funding and going to YC with a $15k fund for the summer – felt like they were doing something
  - Eventually raised $60k, used to build it out until Google launched their calendar
    - Went to sell on ebay – had a bid for $50k – took listing down because of 2 links they had
    - Ended up getting traction and selling for approx $250k – seemed like it was worth it compared to other classmates
- Took the money and made Justin.tv with his cofounder – other cofounder had a visa issue and had to work elsewhere
  - Turned it into Twitch, saw how they had to change around 400 to managing people, letting go of product control
Gabriel Weinberg, founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo (20min VC 2/14/20)
- Physics major who didn’t want to do academia and startups seemed the thing to do in 99-00
  - Idealistic right out of college – started an educational software co that went nowhere – liked the industry, though
  - Tried to raise money but failed – started next company in the bust and didn’t think about raising
    - Sold but didn’t have investors or employees – just him and a partner
  - Didn’t take venture until series A
- Bootstrapped DuckDuckGo until series A in 2011, 4 years in
  - Relatively risk averse, world heading toward data collection and saw privacy
  - Wrote every line of code, marketing and such
- Some founders have lots of net worth tied up into company (uses himself as 12 years in to DDG) – take some money off the table
- Data monopolies that underlie the data duopoly due to the network effects
  - He did a “do not track” litigation and he tried to put teeth to automatic parts for browsers
  - Scale of market and advertising auctions in place are much stronger than the previous generations of tech strength
- One channel often drives the bulk of a winning strategy – experimentation in different channels
  - Diversification play for doubling down – ends up as creative solution
  - Andrew Chen’s “Law of Shitty Click Throughs” – over time, channels saturate and CTR go down
    - CTR used to be 30%, now 1-2% – with a new channel, can be through the roof
      - He was one of the original Reddit advertisers
  - Constant measurement to see if it’s reaching a diminishing return – trying to find next channel
  - Avoid spreading yourself too thin
- Market is pretty big & DuckDuckGo has crossed 30% for market awareness – standard of trust online, be the consumer priv. brand
- Traction trumps everything – metrics depend on business you’re in
  - Generally, if you have highly engaged users, you’ll attract anyone – no numbers/tractions is all narrative/storytelling
  - Numbers there – storytelling can be terrible and you’ll still be able to get funding
  - Marketing will only get you so far – PMF underneath – constantly find counter-metric of retention/inbound funnel
    - Look at both – for Gabe, his metric was # of searches (was public as DDG.com/traffic) and now they have apps/extensions for privacy
    - Tracker blocking, private search, browser extension and now look at MAU’s (and can’t track their users as policy)
- Key is to keep business processes going – everyone on same page, develop them as 15 employees because of a distributed company
  - Scaled nicely once they figured it out but was chaotic at first – Advantage by Patrick Lencioni
  - Building a remote team – all organized and tactical – everything in one place so people can see
    - For them, it’s Asana (big view called “Our Current Objectives” – all projects and anyone can follow along, owner/responsibility)
- Feedback mechanisms and culture of accountability – has to be built into the values of the company
  - Experimental mindset – fails are good if the hypothesis and data is there at the end, running a good post-mortem for experiments
- Post-mortems for every single project – no stigma for them in the first place
  - Good projects have no blame – what could have been done better? What could change and nobody to blame?
  - Action items, templated and what went right/wrong/different
- Wrote a book called Superthinking on Mental Models – what he learned is that you can skip to the strategic thinking
- His first check into DDG was his own, but angel was Scott Banister that was a user who followed and emailed him to reach out
- Tons of people that are great in Philly, but distributed surpasses this because being open to this creates a talent pool

Disorganized Trying to Organize (Notes from Feb 3 – Feb 9, 2020) August 4, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Blockchain, Coronavirus, Daily fantasy football, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, global, Healthcare, Leadership, NBA, questions, social, sports, Strategy, Streaming, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: Bill Gurley, Bitcoin, Blockchain, contracts, Coronavirus, Gaming, Healthcare, ideas, investing, Investments, medtech, sports, Strategy
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Productivity tools have been all the rage. Those familiar with adoption of new technology or tools in an office setting bigger than 20 people have likely been through what’s described as the J curve for adoption, popularized by Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock in their paper (see: https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/brynrocksyv_j-curve_final.pdf) of September 2018 on general purpose technologies. There is a slope downward to start for the adoption because the productivity decrease and difficulty in trying to set it up often leads to a loss. Over time and the consistent use, it can go away and lead to the productivity gains we sought in the first place.

Well, I’m in that too many tools, too many valleys section. Bundle and use a tool that tries to do it all? Or unbundle and use multiple tools. If you are trying to optimize notes for one platform and it doesn’t work for your other platforms (mobile/to-go/car), is it optimal? Is 90% great if you miss on the 10% you don’t have a good solution for? I’m not sure. I’m hopeful that audio can work easily – may even jump into Otter.ai for transcription there.

A family friend of ours was so obsessed with keeping track of all his clothes, colors and features that he took it upon himself to build a database of his closet. Upon telling someone else, I recall a similar story for someone who went further and did bar codes on their clothes. You spend so much time obsessing over something you’d love organization over until that organizing takes up the time you were hoping to save. We could take this further and draw similar analogies to corporate, big companies compared to start-ups in growth as an early employee – always something to be done, may not be optimizing the work, just attempting to get something out compared to optimization runs for something that worked until it breaks. Exciting work on either end but ultimately, there’s a line you must draw.

There are tons of benefits to organization for notes, processes, documentation in that someone could come in at any point and figure out what connects to what. There’s a context. I think YourStacks is doing something like this for personal / professional use of tools and games and everything one comes into contact. There have been corporate / enterprise stack technology sites that break down webpage technology or company technologies. Then there are transparent people / companies who document it both privately and publicly for others to see. We try what we think may improve but it’s tough to know where to start.

There’s a lesson to be learned here in starting, trying to going from there. Some of us want to try to optimize all the tools or one tool to its fullest before moving forward. How good is good? Or not good enough? At what point do you pass to the next or add another tool? How many tools are too many? And will we get a bundling or unbundling of different aspects? I’m hopeful we get voice tools that enable bundling for all sorts of this. Currently, I’ve yet to find the solution. Let me know what your set is!

Dr. Tara Smith, Professor of Epidemiology at Kent State University College of PH, Erik Moses (Wharton Moneyball 2/5/20)
- Hockey – East and West split of conferences currently, top 4 teams in the East and defending champs Blues in the West are 5th
  - More or less deterministic (coin flips previously) – 50% as max from a conference if coin flips
- Mookie Betts as trying to get 10 year, $40 mil per because he’s so young
- Joined in August 2013 after being at Univ of Iowa in Emerging Infectious Diseases
Chetan Puttagunta, GP at Benchmark Capital (Invest like the Best 1/28/20)
- Investing in early-stage, MongoDB, Elastic, Mulesoft and advice for POS in enterprise software building Canvas
- MongoDB – 2012 and had experience building consumer apps from 2007-08 trying to build tech that was pretty limited
  - Felt like an advantage between large companies with proprietary data and tools compared to DIY
  - Met Elliott (MongoDB founder, from DoubleClick) – would ask best devs to work with Mongo and they responded “Don’t need”
  - DB expert – MySQL can work with everything but would miss the class of devs that wanted without planning for scale, app may not work
  - DB could handle scale, millions of users, transactional data by 2015-16, right place right time
  - Oracle as building a great database business and moved into application tier with their apps built on their db
    - CRM, HCM (Peoplesoft) to serve application – 1977 to true leader in databases in 80s, relational
  - Other timing – 1992, for instance, and it would not have worked. Cloud has been so open to these techs.
  - Cockroach for globally scalable, relational db – TimeScale for time-series IoT model, for instance after cloud enabled it
    - Specific use cases have more specifically-tailored results
  - Initiating and potential TAM Salesforce estimates from the start compared to now, where it’s much larger now than suspected
- Now, enterprise software permeates into companies all over for IoT and consumer tech
  - Caterpillar, Pharma, Financial Services, Shipping companies are all buyers
  - Diva built a CRM system for healthcare vertical on general CRM, Salesforce – multibillion dollar company
  - Client facing software is very important – system that will be helpful and customers will tackle that and tell you directly
- People come to work and complete a specific job or task – not to work or be an expert with your software
  - New tool into a workflow, only certain amount of walls to learn the software before leaving
  - Go slow to go fast – if you’re building a software solution in the start, build for 5-10 important users
    - Address the needs of those customers – generally applicable to the market (not just the single customer)
    - Won’t become an outside services or dev shop if you deliver services to the general customer
  - Workday and Viva early days – 50% of revenue were services since they entered enterprises (large installation of PeopleSoft)
    - On-prem CRM for Viva – lots of handholding, data migration and such
- Duffel (Global Distribution System) for airlines selling to consumers
  - Convoluted system to sell and the flows is astounding – entrepreneurs in payments looking to innovate in these instances
  - Found airlines and approached them to “Shouldn’t it work like this?” to get your first partners/customers
  - Patient capital of “go slow to go fast” to super efficient business – spreadsheet vs software
    - Example at Greg Shaw – Mulesoft – burned $8mln from $100mln to 200mln in revenue and burned $4mln from 2-300mln
      - Inside Salesforce, they’ve grown top-line revenues further
- Unlikely that someone else is building what you’re building
  - 2004 – Salesforce selling CRM, main competitor was Seibel – Salesforce had ACV of $4k and 15 licenses at a time vs Seibel $100k/1k
    - Go after the larger competitors when you have thousands of customers and users ecstatic about your product
  - Won’t run into competitors directly, just objections to your own system, since it’s incomplete
    - Valuing you against their internal/custom solution – take time to create product maturity before prematurely scaling
- If you’re not missing as an investor, you aren’t taking enough shots
  - 1x your capital if you miss compared to if you pass, miss on 10x or 100x
  - At Benchmark, they’re making 5-10 investments per year, so it’s 1-2 per partner
- Recruiting and sales – candidates have to feel very good as they go through the proces
  - Only way to scale the software business is to hire the best people to make the software
- Hard to stand out in SF as an enterprise software integration problem (Mulesoft)
  - Competing with FAANG in a limited labor market, have to be able to recruit amazing talent
  - For start-ups, they have 2 advantages: really exciting for them to embrace remote talent (global market)
    - Running a remote company at scale has very little to do with the tools, and more so with the work culture that’s friendly
    - Everyone meets remotely on video, even in same room
    - Writing a lot of documentation, transparency about thinking in the wikis docs so anyone can catch up
  - Offline ad inventory is very efficient – account-based enterprise software ads at airports – targeting top of funnels
  - How do you transmit a culture that was highly efficient in 10 person to 20 or 100 or 1000 and further, if you’re doing 100% each year
    - 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 haven’t been there for more than 1 year, 2 years, 3, etc..
- Most portable of early stage investing – Bill Gurley’s blog on CAC and LTV
  - Going down unit economic traps are widely applicable to all tech businesses, consumer, enterprise, etc
    - Can’t drive spreadsheet growth with CAC/inorganic growth for LTV numbers
  - Product engagement – customers in consumer and enterprise
- Benchmark as 5 equal partners at the firm, no juniors or others
  - Don’t have a NEXT topic that they have to move on to because of this, so open-ended discussions can go very deep
    - Wide networks so they can get useful people to talk
  - Probably not a question that they can’t answer
Adam Draper, Founder & CEO of Boost VC (20min VC 2/24/16)
- Seed stage accelerator, blockchain and VR
- Before Boost, angel invested in 20+ co’s, including Coinbase, Plangrid, Practice Fusion
  - Geography – heart of SV and ecosystem of entrepreneurs, recently adding V/R to build
- Founder of Xpert Financial after UCLA graduation, helping later stage companies raise capital in private markets
  - Made every mistake – funding, hiring, firing, product
  - Helped early-stage companies build product and raise capital, including for a friend – wanted to mentor in bulk
    - As a family, helping people get to where they want to go
- Meeting a lot of people while raising money and helping – took him 12 months to raise his fund
  - $6.6mln after reaching out to 3k, 350 meetings and closed ~35 – basically rule of 10
- Had 52 investments in blockchain accelerator (had about ~120 companies) among currency/contracts-based work
  - Been in industry for 3 years, seeing mature products and higher quality
- Mentioned MuggleNet as his favorite blog and TechCrunch
- JoyStream by a solo founder, trying to merge BitTorrent / BTC
Coronavirus (a16z 16min on the News #21, 1/29/20)
- Judy Savitskaya – 2019-nCoV – 10-20% common cold vs epidemic ones would be severity
- Sequencing this virus has been incredibly quick (within 2 weeks of genome) whereas it’s taken longer in past
  - If someone in SF said they had a cold at a general clinic, they could decide if it’s this or not
  - Figuring out treatments and protocols based on genome and live medicine
- Spike proteins used to enter into lung cells didn’t look as bad as SARS, so they thought it was fine
  - Turns out that it’s actually very similar to the protein
- Nobody really knows – animal sources of viruses (evolving away from human hosts, time in animals)
  - R0 – number of people you’d expect to get sick for every one person that has it
  - Breaking down variables in R0 – how well does virus transmit itself (easy in air, for instance)
    - Is it good at infecting cells? What’s the population like? (Chinese New Year and traveling often)
  - If virus is not that deadly, additional time in the host that can get infected (individually, if deadly and fast, population better)
- Increase in genomic medicine – Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations gave out 3 grants to pharma co’s totaling $12.5mln
  - 12-16 weeks time to develop new drugs based on the new sequence
Epic Battles in Healthcare, FICO Changes (a16z 16min on the News #22, 2/6/20)
- FinTech GP’s Angela Strange and Anish Acharya
- Starting with what is a FICO score – 5 factors: payment history, credit utilization, length of history, new credit, credit mix
  - FICO 2, 3, and 10 now as FICO comes out with reweighting
    - 1 trillion in credit card debt now, so people refi from 25% to 12% loans, but it doesn’t change user spending habits
    - Better job of incorporating debt over a long period of time
  - Designed in 1950s to create a proxy for willingness to pay, originally – now, it’s mostly lenders that have their own algorithms
  - Good lenders will use FICO as a factor but they have their own robust models
- Hacks such as adding kids as authorized users
- Old time, 50-100 years credit decisions made on generations, kids play ball with bankers, etc
  - Bank of Italy (now Bank of America), would make loans to Italian immigrants that other banks wouldn’t lend to
  - 2 drivers – willingness and ability to pay
- International vs US – in US, most decisions decided on score/report, not alternative data
  - In international countries, great way to bootstrap a lending business as a proxy for consumer
  - Difficult to introduce alternative data in the US , cash flow streams for instance
- Epic’s CEO (EHR information on data) letter sent – with Julie Yoo bio GP
  - Rule that’s been around for 1 year in context of a longer standing law
    - Opening healthcare records from ONC (Office of National Coordinator for CMS), gov agencies overseeing healthcare spend
  - 21st Century CURES Act – Upton and Waldon – means by which we implement the act (healthcare costs will rise, care will suffer)
    - Contending with nonprofit orgs with slim margins
  - Uniquely stored in healthcare data is the doctors’ context (and dialogue) – for what reason would you need the context vs “code”
  - Connecting data between APIs and interoperability – major concept
- Clause in rule about screenshot sharing – contractual obligations not to share screenshots
  - In trying to see a workflow in a system to connect yours efficiently – one of Julie’s customers at EHR company got hand-slapped for sharing
- Annual meeting with OMB and ONC for driving sharing and interoperability – Epic wasn’t there – everyone else, systems, plans, incumbents, big tech, EHRc
  - HHS secretary was saying that scare tactics won’t affect what they’re looking for
Introduction to ARK’s Big Ideas 2020 (FYI 1/13/20)
- James Wang interviewing Cathie Wood, CEO/CIO at ARK Invest
  - Building on other years – DL, EV, 3D printing, autonomous ride hailing, automation, genome sequencing, digital wallets and Bitcoin
- New ones – streaming media, aerial drones and biotech R&D efficiency
- Streaming media – changing behavior patterns should catapult the industry, roughly $80-90bn, projecting $400bn+ in next 4 years
  - Most people couldn’t understand why she was buying Amazon at $5bn cap at her old firm (when no profits)
    - Believed about their revenues would increase CAGR at 25% for 20 years, deep value play (exp growth wasn’t understood)
  - Terrible sales out of box retailers – want to survive and go to online
  - Gaming could consume media, so is value in content or platforms (say, Tencent showing the way, maybe) – larger than box office now
    - Every time music has come out, it has cannibalized the other, older parts as replacement
    - Gaming was different – expansive, explosive market as stacking (mobile only added to consoles and others)
- Aerial drones – early side of S curve still – released a paper in 2014 suggesting that if FAA would allow Amazon to deliver parcels over 10 mi
  - Amazon, at that time, could have done it profitably for just $1 per parcel for 5 lb package, for instance
  - Food delivery now, air taxis / passenger drones and given battery tech, could save 20k lives associated with heart attacks – drone faster than ambulance
    - Projecting $275bn food delivery (3mi Delivery for cars is about $4.85 – $5) – drones could do it for $.20, profitably
- Biotech R&D Efficiency as converging Nextgen sequencing, AI, CRISPR editing
  - Impact on pharma and biotech sector
  - Fewer trial failures with DNA sequencing and companion diagnostics for trials, time to market decrease
    - Human trials, CRISPR is curing things such as Beta-_ and sickle cell (2 people)
  - Value-based pricing could be installment payments, for every year you live – reduction of trials and drugs to market, higher pricing utility
    - Margin structure could follow more of 1980s and 90s (mid20-30s) – innovations were exhausted from there, but now should be innovative
  - CRISPR and gene therapies are delivering great results, cures and evidence of these
    - AI and software side with mundane, life science has supported SaaS company in Viva – extremely motivated for productivity structure
    - Most AI companies doing R&D drug discovery are early, M&A ripe – tech in Alpha Go search problems, for instance
  - Analysts can’t just be healthcare, have to be technology as well – permeating every sector
- Over past year, innovation has been highly valued in private space – too few opportunities with too much capital
  - Private is valued much higher – seeing some disappointments, public markets should be ripe (P/E ratio is not ideal)
  - 5 year opportunities, not 1-2 timeline and finding out how much growth they’re going to deliver

Failures as Public (Notes from December 30, 2019 to Jan 5, 2020) June 9, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Data Science, Digital, education, experience, finance, global, marketing, medicine, questions, RPA, Strategy, Time, training, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, content, experiences, fitness, health, humanity, ideas, life, marketing, Microsoft, reading, research, social, training
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In the book “The Rise and Fall of Nations”, Ruchir Sharma goes through the emerging and developing countries that have shown patterns in growth or stagnation. How do we see that they failed? How did they succeed? Was it spending as a percentage of GDP? Is it the change in political party? Infrastructure? Social services? So many factors are at play for a nation. And any that have risen have also seen falls. It’s the natural business cycle that we see happen in macro all the way to micro. Why do I bring this up?

Because it happens to the smallest business units like startups, as well as individuals. We can’t help it. Some of us hide the falls, others wear it on our sleeves, open. I think there’s a combination of good for both. I will say that more reviews such as Top 10 Startup Failures of 2019 can be interesting case studies.

Maybe it’s not the companies themselves doing the reflection, but instead outsiders. This is a review exercise that can be useful for any individual to provide thoughtful reasoning. Granted, there were likely other, unseen circumstances that created a downfall but the exercise still works to recognize a large event like that. If more people see that through a lens, we would expect some growth overall. That content creation drives more people to start their own things. And that can only be good.

On to the notes!

Seth Juarez (@sethjuarez), Microsoft cloud advocate (Data Skeptic 12/15/19)
- ML: don’t want to write an algorithm because it’s too messy but use data to extract knowledge, use ML
- “I don’t know how to do ML, so call an API” vs “I know how to do TF, PyTorch, Deep Learning-custom stuff”
  - Build in control things
- Unstructured data into folder, word doc, picture, extract knowledge into an intelligent way (any set of files)
  - Making more intelligent Indexing with Skills
  - When a doc is indexed, an Indexer cracks open doc (text, images, metadata)
    - Skillset aggregates series of skills in step order to go through them (ex: sentiment of text, added to tree)
  - Very similar to an ETL but customized
- Predictions inside PowerBI, for instance – ML on rows of data to show this
  - Azure ML ModelInsights – vary features and see how it affects the predictions
  - Hoping bad ML models don’t affect or bias other models
- Video Indexer – upload video, take text out, show when different people start talking (pictures in a row, for instance)
  - Sequence of audio and pictures – can get sentiment with text
  - When you create an indexer, you marry it together with data storage (where files are) and the SkillSet
- Skill-builders as Excel-jockeys – his interview with a Rotterdam woman Faelina and getting innovation there
- His question: Ethics in AI – models building and make sure there is fairness in their generation
- Azure Cognitive Search links
Greg Zuckerman (@gzuckerman), WSJ writer, author of The Man Who Solved the Market (Resolve’s Gestalt University 12/23/19)
- How asset management has changed after Renaissance book, how relationships have evolved since releasing
- Was fascinated by buy-side investors, bewildered by trade ideas but over time, become cynical
  - 2 and 20 aren’t providing unique, much value
- When you don’t have outside LP’s, you can do other things that you can’t otherwise
- Trend following in clusters of stocks, not necessarily a single stock – baskets against each other
  - Unique methodology into one equities model
- When you talk to Simons and others in the firm early, you’d think they’d be quants but not the case
  - Still human – family office still will look at the office anyhow
- 30 pages of NDA, had issues when he was starting the book
- Everything they have is pattern investing and trading, so this is a problem eventually changing
  - Sophisticated or others that have money in market, but happening gradually
Dr. Rhonda Patrick (@foundmyfitness), scientist (Kevin Rose Show, 1/1/20)
- Discussing Omega3, metformin, sulforaphane research
- Published paper on phospholipid form of omega3 supplementation, DHA – found in marine sources
  - Interest in getting it to the brain – DHA that is bound to albumane
    - DHA-free fatty acid transported blood-brain by passive transfusion
    - Blood-brain barrier erodes as you age
- Brain glucose levels as important for Alzheimer’s disease
- Fish contain 1 – 1.5% of DHA in phospholipid form, whereas fish roe contain 70-75% (including flying fish)
- More from a gram of fish oil (she takes 3g) and eating fish/salmon roe – Nordic Pure3 for Rhonda Patrick
  - High dose EPA can have issues with blood thin
- Epithelia cancers vs blood cancers (in mice)
  - Much of metformin studies are based on Type 2 diabetics – lived longer after metformin with age controls
  - Physical exercise and metformin were not synergistic
- Activation of pulsing metformin – half-life
  - Exercise activates and lasts 48 hours, metformin does 36 hours after last dose
- During fasting, NAD levels increase
- 36 hour monk fast
Roy Bahat (@roybahat), Head of Bloomberg Beta (20min VC 10/18/19)
- - NYC / Valley with portfolio companies in Kobalt, Textio, Rigetti Computing, Flexport
  - Former co-founder at Ouya, new kind of games console raising over $33mn
- “Messy career” where he ran a nonprofit in government in nyc, fortune 500 media company, started the company and now investor
- This day – October 18 – started a third fund, same build as the prior 2 – $75mn, same thing and sticking to strategy
  - Fund size is fund strategy
    - In terms of valuations – company valuation as marker of VCs rating company, but that’s a mistake
    - Want to own as much of the few winners
    - Competitive lanes issue – every time you write a check, you lose out on other companies in the space in a category
- Egg toss of trust – model to be careful, customer calls at the end
  - VCs that ask to talk to customers immediately – slow them down, could be out of order
  - When he met Ryan Peterson at Flexport, he was still a board member at his hardware company and could try it out
    - Flexport reached out easily and offered to help him with his freight of hardware and team member made connection to CEO
- As companies become successful and grow quickly, expectations keep raising
- Fear from 6 years ago was if the VC was founder-friendly – not going to screw you
  - Greylock led a Series A for a friend’s company because Reid Hoffman had said Greylock wouldn’t screw you
  - Most people now are behaving to nudge the company’s upward – at Bloomberg Beta, company is the customer
- Investment decision making – speed of investment decision
  - They try to avoid asking about other VC’s in the process (but want to know if there are timing issues)
  - Their offers are encouraged to be shopped – lots of funds moving down to write checks
  - Concerned about Seqoia, NEA, other funds? Frustrated because they’ve lost a few but have won a few.
    - Had a founder called them after 2 years prior – shouldn’t have taken that money to convince you – nothing
    - Founder mentioned he could do the raise and turn to others and they’d know who it was
- Dependent variable – valuation (not the independent variable as most think)
  - Fund has strategy, do you want to invest? Check size – determined by fund size.
  - Strategy is to know the ownership target. 10-25% (Valuation as a function of fund size and check sizes with the ownership target)
- Ownership to build over time – bigger check – they own what they want to own the day they invest
  - He wants to be on the team the day they want to be on the team
  - Generally, if new investors are there, pro rata and investment is hot
  - First check – anyone can say yes – good accountability, avoid groupthink
  - Following checks – unanimous to follow on
- Greater fool dynamic – if actions reveal that you prey on greater fools at later times
  - Viable strategy in the current market, but maybe not going forward
- Boards at the earliest stages – pretty useless but has sit in Series B’s
- Favorite book: Waters Shut Down, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennit, Ain’t No Making It – how to develop empathy
- Founder secondaries – fan of this, most personal and important underdiscussed aspects of a company
  - Will drive the decisions of a company because the founder is distracted – many valuable reasons
- Thinks the heroes that are set up in the technology industry now have too much power – mainly as a result of money success
- Mistakenly believed that starting a company and investing in a company are similar
  - Completely different roles – wanted to focus on one of these
- Scout programs – Bloomberg Beta has Open Angels – giving money to individual investors is awesome
  - Angels, dollar for dollar, are more valuable in the ecosystem – issues can be lack of transparency (money comes from X)
- Most recent investment – founder named Max Sinkhov – business help close businesses on home purchases
  - Title insurance States Title – validation that the owner in fact owns the home – super big before a website
Arvid Kahl (@arvidkahl), founders of Feedback Panda (The Indie Hackers Podcast, #140 12/16/19)
- Him and girlfriend are founders of Feedback Panda, 2 years to $55k MRR and sold it
- Commuted from Hamburg and Berlin 3 times a week – 2.5 hours each way, 15+ a week
  - Connection was poor so he read and listened to podcasts – automating and taking yourself out of the business
  - Built to Sell book and podcasts – SaaS as online teacher feedback
- An agency keeps you as a freelancer, essentially – so try to make it so that it doesn’t have to be you
- All advice being anecdotal – truth can be applicable to every business, just a matter of you selecting it
- Started with the docparser and mailparser founder podcast with Indie Hackers (sold to Fortress Capital, also)
  - Found it interesting that there would be people to acquire the type of company
  - Received an email from them
- Documentation of prcoesses, business processes and building – make it easy to transition into them
  - Connection from beginning and met Kevin recently
- He started a blog after vacation, thebootstrappedfounder.com
  - Started out Feedback Panda – he was a software developer part-time, she was an opera singer & teaching English to Chinese
    - Feedback writing process took forever – 20 students ~5 min for next lesson and what was taught
    - Built her own system and templates to reduce the extra 2+ hours automatically
  - Knew what the market was because it was her exact same issue. If they could fix the problem, it’d be all over.
- $10/mo would save hours and made one Facebook post as advertising, then word-of-mouth
  - Allowed them to communicate and have discussions – teaching online blog posts
  - VIPanda – interesting person from user base and interview them
  - Engaging enough, relatable content for their strategy – she’d already been in her groups before she got to the part
- Teachers as very underpaid and overworked – good spot for business opportunity but not great for employment
- How to run – he said he probably should have hired for customer service – always did it from the beginning
  - Live chat and messages, would build up an article if others saw the issue again
  - Time when volume happens will be interrupting because there’s new stuff going on while features were coding
  - Forced him to do as much automation as he could build from the software stack
    - Deployment, failure errors, alerting and restarting system
    - Elixir Phoenix, Docker containers and on Kubernetes with ViewJS and other API / browser extension
  - If something broke, it’d come back up – errors automatically reported, etc
- He didn’t know how to hire, so he didn’t do it
  - Did an 11 hour video series for his next developer so he could send the link and felt great for it
- Adding a yearly plan near the start was productive – $110 where people would commit to something for a year
  - After a year, noticed they added a lot of features – had a cloud template sharing system
  - Machine learning for pronoun translation, snippets with text extender and manipulation
  - Product was much better – charge more – grandfathered all existing customers to $10 before $15/mo
- Hooked by Nir Eyal – instrumental – trigger, action, reward, investment – putting own template to share
Keith Devlin (@profkeithdevlin), “Math Guy” at NPR Weekend Edition, Stanford Mathematician (School’s In on Wharton XM, 9/1/18)
- Math throughout the week and your life day-to-day
- Using Tupperware dish – missing the size repeatedly, for instance
- In Alaska, teaching algebra to students – remembers having to teach the quadratic equation repeatedly and lengthily
  - Math as a discipline, potentially
- Math Guy license plate – content of math has changed throughout history, but not necessarily how we’ve done it
  - Save for 2 exceptions that are the printing press and then computing
  - Changes throughout history as connection with ancient Greeks, geometry, and in response to how society grows
    - 18-19th century – chemistry and physics drives, 20th and 21st century – biology and math through commerce, society
- Cell phones as answering 95% of undergraduate exam questions in fractions of a second, execution of procedure that can be coded
  - Faster, better, quicker for as many variables as you want, just from your phone
  - Shouldn’t test these things anymore but how to do them and when to use them
- People should have a general sense of numbers sense – different people have levels of it
  - Tips, for instance – example of doubling tax and then taxi cabs or restaurants starting at 20/25/30% since min ppl will enter own
  - Don’t need to learn to execute – won’t get the right degree of understanding without doing it
    - Teach not for execution, but for understanding now – bunch of high school students reverse engineering UPS/FedEx algorithms
    - Had to understand little things to figure out what would go on – Nueva school
- If you start with technology to interest them, they’re already engaged – good teacher can ask interesting questions given the motivation
  - We shouldn’t have to ask Why’s and How’s and What’s
- Research in 1990s watching adults after buying things and seeing things
  - If they have to do it mathematically, can get to near 98% quickly
    - if you take it out of the context but the same types of problems, it goes to 37%
    - Children doing licorice (to count 10s) won’t work once you remove it from the context
  - Embodiment of math in video games (Kevin’s been working on it) – reward in it to achieve the reward which pulls away from content
    - Small number that do it right – find a way to represent it that’s natural (in process, for instance – thinking process is math)
    - Slides he shows audiences with the same problem and same situation – one side is math symbols, other is game designed
- He got a grant for games where the problem adjusts for the game and shows the manipulation of the symbolic representations
  - Intuitive quantitative symbols – working on online course for teachers/parents
  - Introduce problems (from movies, for instance) where you have to begin with writing a paper

Organizing the Mind, Studying (Notes from Dec 9 to Dec 15, 2019) May 6, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Data Science, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, medicine, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, books, content, directlistings, experiences, finance, humanity, ideas, IPO, life, marketing, medicine, Money, Netflix, questions, reading, research, sports, Time
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As I try to stay organized overall, and especially in our current environment, it does seem that I have hit a snag in where/how to curate all information. I’ve attempted to settle on Roam to do notes since it keeps bi-directional links and essentially enables a personal wiki. However, this is awesome once we get to enough notes/details/lists. It’s a pain in the ass until then because it’s just not set up.

Until I get to the point where I can export all of what I want and stylistically group it, it will be a very large work-in-progress. Why? Well, I started to list a few things of what I like to keep track of. Here’s a few off the top of my head:

Notes from Podcasts/Webinars that I usually keep in OneNote (top include 20min VC, FinTech Insider, a16z, Wharton Moneyball, The Indie Hackers podcast, among others)
Book notes that are either in OneNote if they’re older or, if in my Kindle, potentially on Readwise/Overdrive
Daily/weekly updates including investment research via Crunchbase, lay of the land from a16z, Futurism interesting stories, StockTwits Daily Rip, Makerpad/Product Hunt updates, as well as Beta List products
Newsletters and Trends – Morgan’s Blogging, Nat Eliason’s Medley and other notes, Justin Gage’s Technicality, Trends report from The Hustle, Polina Marinova’s The Profile
Then there are the finance and investment articles that go to my RSS feed (OfDollarsandData, Ritholz, Datanami, Tomas Tungaz updates, plenty of others
Last but not least – bookmarked websites, Twitter likes/bookmarks that I just don’t get a chance to go back to, GitHub starred pages, anything shared in Slack or LinkedIn groups

How the hell do I organize all of that? Well, we’re trying and I’ll update you on where we land. All I know is that I should curate it down to my favorites or just try to learn less. Who wants to do that, though?

Week of December 9, 2019

Yaron Kniajer, Jared Kash, Cofounders of Sababa Ventures (Wharton XM)
- Discussing how safe and nice Tel-Aviv is
  - Rising of AI and tech in Israel ecosystem
- Bridging the gap between entrepreneurs and investors
- Talkspace – mental health app from Israeli creator
- 18 million in revenue to New York, knowing the market and opening doors
- Host, Randi, is a GP
David Sinclair (@davidasinclair), Prof in Genetics and Aging at HMS (Kevin Rose Show, 10/30/19)
- Cofounder of 7 biotech co’s, co-editor of Aging journal, boardmember and 25+ patents
- Book – Lifespan most recently Book link
- Genes in yeast cells for aging while 29 entering Harvard finding red wine part
  - Media swinging from “wow we’ll live forever” to the opposite
  - Mice had a healthy longevity even if obese on wine part (caloric restriction without)
- Sirtris Pharma – 2004 started and focusing on activators of Sirtuins – GSK purchased in 2008 for $720mln
  - 2010 people at Pfizer and Amgen published saying their research was wrong
  - 1 amino acid and 1 protein in living mouse as not living longer for resveratrol
  - Scientific debate limiting patients, potentially (needs to be taken with fat / drug-like molecules at GSK)
    - Patent life is 20 years and he doesn’t have the extra $20mln to get the clinical trials going again
- For his book, we age similarly to yeast cells aging – loss of information (1 is genetic and other is, fragile, analog)
  - Backup copy of information for aging / cells came in 2018
- Claude Shannon as one of his heroes – backup copy, need an observer and the rest of backup (when he did computer science/internet)
  - Remembering in 1999 that he woke up in middle of night to write out the theory of aging
  - Gene therapy doesn’t work in the eye – compared to a clock for memory of time, cog, removing hands or resetting
- Nanoworld and subatomic in DNA – if secret is there, Methane compared to subatomic
- Going as fast and safely to get it to humans – eye regeneration for a few cases
  - Nerve crush (spinal damage), glycoma in mice and restore vision, 1 year old blind mice with gene therapy can see
- NAD and InsideTracker for genetic results and following the mixture / output
- Nuances to how CGM and monitors react to individual foods (brown rice vs others, for instance)
- NR, NMN and NAD checking for longevity and how to raise NAD
  - All cells need NAD to grow – if you put them up to levels of younger, you likely won’t cause cancer
  - Guesses for couple hundred thousand people on NMN supplements and nobody has died, to date
- Pulsing and hormesis – what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
  - Information on trees where older ones will send a notice to younger ones that a danger is coming
- His father as 80 and healthiest in a while – post-stroke, heart attack and had heart disease
  - Taking metformin, NMN, resveratrol for a bit now
  - 500mg metformin with resveratrol and yogurt (stomach gets upset a bit) in morning – may have some in evening
  - 1g a day of resveratrol – 150mg typical (he mentioned knowing 14 years of research on animals, toxicity and human trials)
    - Min dose from animals at 250mg typically – liver enzymes are fine
Ryan Caldbeck (@ryan_caldbeck), founder & CEO of CircleUp (20min VC 2/11/16)
- Online investing platform that allows to invest in consumer companies
- Previously, worked in consumer product and retail-focused p/e at TSG Consumer Partners and Encore Consumer Capital
  - Hundreds of investment firms that love consumer retail and its returns, love cash-flow characteristics, only after $10-15mln revenue
  - 3.5x average in ~4 years for younger companies – not enough money in that space
- Crowdfunding as group of people coming together to fund something (debt, equity, product, donations)
  - Separate as an investing platform so the investors should thrive
- Title 3 of JOBS Act – if company raises capital there from non-accredited investors, the hoops you have to go through aren’t worth it
  - Less cost to going with accredited investors without benefit – Title 3 will require the yearly book opening
    - Majority of companies don’t need the significant amount of users 100-200 to make a dent in what they’re looking for
  - Would have to prove to a company before taking on the cost – more likely that companies will fail at accredited investors and go to unaccredited
    - Maybe a tech raises up for the inefficiencies to solve this, but not so far
- Lack of institutional capital in the sector of crowdfunding – for Ryan, explosion of institutional on the platform
  - Average in 2012 was $12k individual accredited to 2015 where the check was $100k into one deal and half is institutional
    - Similar to LendingClub growth as individuals to ind, then family offices, small funds and larger funds
- Seed round was with Maveron and Clayton Christenson after ~60 some investors that passed (hard to get them excited)
  - Union Square had said they would never invest in online equity investing platform and changed view for Series A – marketplaces solve need
  - Series B was 30 days from start to invest and series C was easier
- When someone else doesn’t believe in him, he further believes in himself – energizes him (when teammates believe in him and opponents don’t – at his best)
  - Very small details for most meetings that are still vivid for him – uses as fuel
Arielle Zuckerberg (@ariellezuck), Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (20min VC 2/14/16)
- Joined in 2015 and focuses on early stage investment in digital practice
- Started as PM after CS and Philosophy at Claremont McKenna
  - Wildfire Interactive acquired by Google in 2012 where she then worked on social ads
  - then went to small startup called Humin for 2 years and started angel investing
- A lot of investments since you chase after 1 company that likely returns the portfolio
  - How to evaluate the team, market, differentiated product, terms of valuation
- Being a great listener – give them feedback and they would come back every time with a better pitch
  - First few months of venture – personal challenge for thinking of people based on their intellectual capital
    - How can they be helpful? Will this person be helpful toward portfolio? Will this person be a potential founder?
    - Struggles with this as she’s becoming more transactional. Didn’t experience it as an angel investor.
- While interviewing for firms, many people offered to give her introductions (warm, mostly)
  - Small handful of interviews – conversational in nature, questions on background – what motivates her and how she’d fit
  - Taking Tyler’s class gave her energy for VC
- Google, AI and CV – AI as a service – ubiquitous as in the cloud
  - Many industries being productized for first time – likes blockchain and smart contracts
- Goals: Source a deal for Kleiner within a year that will have invested where world is better place/impactful
  - Inspire more women to be in VC and female founders – although talked about finding and talking with many women in VC
- NYE: blog more for 2016, had concrete resolutions for doing a pull-up and moonwalk – did at firm holiday event
- Favorite book: The Symposium by Plato
- Respecting founders who have a belief that others don’t really have – ex: Evan Spiegel as phones being more a camera than anything else
  - John Doerr and Mary Meeker
- Best part of VC – talking to amazing people and hearing other opinions (as youngest of 4 siblings)
  - Introduction of creative conflict, vision for where future is going
- Firm’s recent investment – team execution is crazy, tons of time with customers, great listeners, improved deck 20% each time
Barry McCarthy, CFO of Spotify (former CFO of Netflix), Stacey Cunningham, Pres of NYSE (a16z 12/10/19)
- Direct Listings, Myths and Facts – architecting the direct listing as it currently stands and how they talked to the SEC
- The Street interpreting compared to guidance and what to expect – analysts wanted to BEAT guidance instead of get something close
- Pricing inequities – price discovery in direct listings compared to offerings
  - Large portfolio (AUM) has IPO immaterial – first day pop is meaningless and they have limited ownership in IPO but not direct listing
  - Institutional investors can dump the truck for direct listings for how they want
- Lock-ups are artificial constraints
- DMMs and financial advisors exist anyhow – still need s1 and filing/investor days involve same people
Michael Salfino, Ben Baldwin (Wharton Moneyball 12/11/19)

The Parallel for Company Building (Notes from Dec. 2 – Dec 8, 2019) April 13, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Data Science, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, global, medicine, NLP, questions, social, Uncategorized.
Tags: #business, content, datascience, ideas, Money, questions, research
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Keeping this short because I’m working at putting the idea together. Love the parallel for a gym atmosphere and company building.

I bet it’s already forming in your head. Imagine the big class at a big box gym, the personal ones, classes, aggressive combat, cycling, different personalities in weight lifting, cardio spending and all the pairs of trainer + clients you can imagine. It’s in the works!

I do hope you enjoy the deep dive and notes I took in hearing Buck Woody’s AI podcast. You should also review Louis’s app for Total Brain. Wrap that up with Dustin Dolginow’s review on how to utilize the power of the internet to own the VC and investing interest.

Week of December 2, 2019

Louis Gagnon, CEO, Cofounder of TotalBrain (Work and Life, WhartonXM)
- Talking about each person having different brains, therefore different treatments
- Making sure that the brain is merely a part of you, not all of you – racing
  - In these years, it’s a large amount of stress – good or bad
Buck Woody (@buckwoodymsft), Applied D/S at Microsoft (Data Skeptic 12/3/19)
- Lots of intricacies in bonsai trees
  - Last thing you get to learn is the watering can – easily under/over-water trees
  - Scissors as the primary tool
- ML/AI/BI and advanced data analysis – rigor of right spread, amount, representation, statistics things are the watering can
  - If base data is wrong, the model is pointless
- He works in the industries teaching classes on MS platform for SQL Server (which contains Spark and many other things), data science
  - Simply looking at the data – where did I get this? Say, financial projections: financial data (how do you know it’s here)
  - Predictions as pedantic/boring: preventative/maintenance predictions – wanted to ensure units wouldn’t fail
    - Half the time, predictions worked well, half the time, worked awful
      - How did the data report from the machines? Had to go to manual of machine (there was older, newer) to see data
      - Anomaly was that the older machine was reporting every 60 minutes, not minutes (which the newer was doing)
- Works with many users – fraud and anomaly detection
  - Use case example of gaming company with cheating and making sure the data was good
- Regionalized languages – programming as how you think of your solutions
  - Big things to do: Kubernetes and Containers – be very familiar with environments to make sure infrastructure is done well
- Looking through data science process – who wears what hats, data engineers and DBA having overlapping roles
  - Many he comes across that don’t know that database guys can do much of what they’re looking for
  - Often the requirement, if given to data scientists late, will be multiple projects
- Containers run-time – (docker) vs Docker
  - Text file (yaml) with Python 3.5, MySQL and code as file – compose into an image (gathered up version of those runtimes)
    - Tell Docker to run it – container – description to image to container – not representing memory and disc, just using that on station
    - Docker smart enough to recognize that it will run similar versions
- Kubernetes – KAS
  - Another yaml file and engine, on a node (physical or virtual) with docker runtime, couple of services (networking, part of cluster) with

Master node that makes sure everything is happening – wrangles everything for you in a persistent volume for the pod since storage was an issue

Thinking of SQL as declarative language – select * from mytable isn’t what we do
- Containers are declarative language for computers, essentially
- Kubernetes is the platform or network for a full declarative network
Business intelligence in 90s – specialized people as parts of it with only some people knowing how to use, prechew for users and it took months
- 5-6 years ago, this still remained – data scientist would spend 99% of time in economic data or weather data or whatever model, version or experiment
  - Walk out with tablets, thus save the data – maybe another she was working with, maybe not
- Data engineer is most sought after job title – “everything but the algorithm” at Microsoft (LinkedIn)
  - Link – aka.ms\tdsp, defines out team structure for data science team with guides – devops, mlops, aiops, mlops
  - People are used to BI projects – one cube, answer lots of questions but with a data scientist, if you question “this and this and this..” – separate
    - 2 or 3 different data sets, can’t answer clustering question with regression algo, how many of these vs which things do they belong to
For large orgs: Do you know if you have a DB team? All data in its forms.
- Showed someone SSIS done after a minute after they started pulling up R and his algorithms – “wizardry”
  - Used to work at NASA, talked of a friend scientist who landed a round camera on the moon ahead – had to turn it away from sun because it’d melt film
  - Some of cast of Star Trek would show up all the time at NASA, large glass rooms (lab coat, tie, white shirt)
    - James Doohan, Scotty was gonna show up. Scientists would go to break room and watch Star Trek in 60s (debate whether or not stuff was possible)
      - Mentions automatic door as someone being off camera in the 60s, possible or not on physics
    - Taking notes and turns camera back on – “Fascinating” from Leonard Nimoy on the outside of glass
- He wants to make people know that they have people that can fold into data science team
  - Cultural that DBAs think they’ll need to be data scientists and data scientists that are territorial (don’t want people messing around)
Young: computational basics, logics, data processing
- High level math – stats/linear algebra
- Domain expert: particular vertical like healthcare, finance or patterns available for a width of an application of a tech
- Learning to learn: how to pick up and put down knowledge – pace of learning something (can’t be an expert in the timeframe)
  - Pick language you like and then figure out how you’re learning it – then, do it again for others
- Hours of studying that can be pre-chewed – lack of focused time, spend too much time on all of it
  - Confs where people get away to focus on a topic (until they get on their phone and blow it)
Where’s AI going? He says – going away. “Nobody says they have computers at the company anymore”
- “I” or “e” in front of company and get funding anymore, same with cloud – just ubiquitous, computing/drive
- Predictive/prebuilt AI now – text analysis, image processing, predictions
- Need to know how to trust it or trusting it too much – aka.ms\ai-ethics
- Flash fill, for instance, in Excel – Microsoft Research done in PROSE AI in the cell, disappears into product
Ex: PowerPoint presentation coach with mic on and it will critique you

Dustin Dolginow (@dolginow), GP at Maiden Lane (20min VC 2/10/16)
- Online venture fund using AngelList as its o/s, capital partner to best angels in the world, investments in Getable, PipeDrive, Beepi
  - Also venture partner with Accomplice, was previous operator at Social Swipe allowing merchants to gain value from txn data
- Went to college in East Coast, Wall Street at Lehman Brothers during crash and decided to do a product idea in payments for 1.5 years
  - Product dev, front-end and shifting from finance world – introduced to partner Jeff (running Atlas Ventures, renamed to Accomplice)
- Started taking introductions to companies as Nidhi, Naval and AngelList would be giving them – since 2010 and normal user
  - Atlas lead the AngelList series A and every round since – 2012 moved to SF and make VC legal – 2013 for syndicates start
    - Lead a syndicates fund only in 2013 with Jeff – learn by doing and figure out what it meant – $25mln named for Maiden Lane in SF
      - Irony was AngelList HQ was on it, one of bailout funds for Goldman Sachs real estate was Maiden Lane
  - Figured Syndicates could be impactful for institutional investors, also
- Moved to SF in 2014 to close the fund, April started investing in the fund
  - Native app on AngelList – (like saying Uber is Apple because on Apple) – put in their docs 50% off-A/L, 50% on but realized it was moving quickly
  - AngelList as unbundling the activities of VC – funds are containers for capital / infrastructure
    - AngelList has more flexibility but it’s a small container – box – they’re doing product first with data that it creates
- Working with set of angel investors that take their money and invest on their behalf – share carried interest within GP’s (30% carry, no mgmt fee)
  - 15-20% of carried interest goes to syndicate leads – driving brand, operating within company, adding value, interacting
  - His goal is to shepherd to create resources for community (most syndicate leads have other jobs) – live work loft, for instance
- Community and flexibility is a big part of it – consensus-based decisions, non-consensus (conviction for solo), LPs as direct investments for bigger broader
- Entrepreneurs as understanding users’ needs – great community done by Ryan Hoover at Product Hunt
- Most overhyped – prescription delivery, underhyped – Canada as country, developer tax credits
- Goal for Maiden Lane – kickass set of syndicate leads that get called upon by lane
- Last impression from a book: Development is Freedom by Amartya Sen
- AtVenu – as most recent investment

Back from Vacation (Notes from Nov 11 to 17, 2019) February 11, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, cannabis, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, gym, Leadership, marketing, NFL, NLP, questions, social, Strategy, training, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, Analysis, cannabis, college, content, education, experiences, finance, freedom, Google, humanity, ideas, investing, life, marketing, Money, NASCAR, NFL, questions, reading, research, social, sports, Strategy, Time, training, Transition, TV, video
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It had been a long while – 9? months since taking more than 1 day off extra and closer to 20 months since I’d had a week off in a row. I visited the Big Island in Hawaii and stayed primarily on the west side of the island. Gorgeous weather and awesome beaches will bring me back, hopefully shortly.

I want to write a bit further about the escape, but I also want to get these notes out, so I’ll write further in later this week – Thursday.

Enjoy these notes on some of the fascinating people of Eniac Ventures, other investors, founder of EasyPoint, ReSolve quant, research professors, former professional football player and a Nascar driver.

Hadley Harris (@Hadley), Founding GP at Eniac Ventures (20min VC 2/3/16)
- First mobile venture, Soundcloud, Airbnb, Vungel
- 2x entrepreneur in mobile – Vlingo (acq by Nuance for $225mln) and Thumb (acq by Wipulse)
  - Was one of first employees and execs running marketing and bd while working with product
- Worked at Samsung and Charles Rivers Ventures
- Studied engi & math as undergrad @ Penn, joined MSFT & Samsung
  - His 2 really good friends at Penn and him came together for Eniac in 2009
  - Mobile – next place for computing – cleantech was hot at that time, as well
- SF was 50%, NY as 25% and the rest was elsewhere – won’t lead but will do a pro rata and be key in fundraising for next
- Living & breathing the co – coming to right valuation, inevitable for down or flat rounds
- 18-24 months from seed to series A or pre-seed to seed – funds becoming more institutionalized
  - Leading rounds for Eniac at $1.2 – $2mln
- Favorite book: Freakanomics, read it in one sitting
- Tools: gmail, relayedIQ for deal tracking, as todo list, also
- Don Valentine – godfather of VC, great investors but great entrepreneurs and fund raisers
- Favorite blog: Nuzzel – curation of reposts
- Underhyped: mobile enterprise; Overhyped industry: big fan and he does work in social, but lot to weed through
- Most recent investment: Phhhoto – knew the founders, they’d known each other for a while, great design and numbers – self-funded
Zach Resnick (@trumpetisawesom), founding EasyPoint (IndieHackers #130, 10/28/19)
- Iterating your way to founder-product fit, currently at 10 people, 5 full-time, $600k ytd with 15% yoy organic growth
- Traveled, worked and lived abroad in Jerusalem before school, infected with wanderlust
  - CC churning and manufactured spending while he was learning at school in Ohio – VISA gift cards to $1k
- Banking often makes more money on the chance that you’ll become a customer for other areas of business (mortgage, checking account, brokerage, etc)
- Started when he was 19 – would give advice to parents/family/friends on the year before getting an hourly rate for paying customer as consultant
  - Enjoyed his help, he liked helping others – he was getting $1k/mo from hourly before going up
  - Consulting clients – he was helping optimize for business or vacation trip for the points
- Started Land Happier to solve a problem of having everything in one place
  - Cultural norms, transportation, 6 other things for information in a fun and compelling app product (MVP on app store)
  - Wasn’t solving a problem that nobody has, but nobody would pay for – product/founder fit wasn’t there, either
- What he wants – enjoys negotiating, strategic thinking, interesting conversations and sales moreso than product focused than customer focused
- While working on Land, he productized his consulting – generally was helping family friends that were parents’ age
  - Amount of effort he was putting in compared to the value wasn’t the same – not high enough
  - Started to focus on small business or medium enterprise owners to put spending on the right cards and get 6 figures on spend return
  - Focused on people he knew through referrals, points optimization plans for small owners – acquisition and spending for more value
- Early stage owners – hey, this isn’t free
- Playing poker for relatively high stakes – teaching important principles, statistics, risk management and psychology
- Consulting to productized consulting service – had a family friend with small business who would see a $50k in increased return on spend
  - He could do a quick analysis and understand business more, try to get a customized points optimization plan for points
  - Small business owners are leaving 1.5%, maybe 2.5% on the table – using points better for things you already want to do
- Providing value but people didn’t know what it is or weren’t hurting – show them math for 5 figures within a year saving
  - Guarantee: if you sign up points optimization plan, if he doesn’t get you double what his fee is within first year, he gives money back and $10k
  - Making people aware of the problem was going to be a lot of work – never really got off the ground for outbound
    - Was just a way to make money, not necessarily grow it really fast – customers’ needs
- Concierge service now (v3 EasyPoint) focusing on business and first-class international long-haul service
  - Over whatsapp and telegram groups – makes a flight request and they get back to them 24/7
  - They use miles and points that they buy from clients and then use those to book for others
  - Brokers buying all kinds of points and miles – so the arbitrage there contained issues with ToS and such
    - They’re buying transferable points like Chase / AMEX directly to frequent flier accounts
- Working for someone else – interned with The Points Guy and when he was looking at doing it, he posted on the Facebook group
  - Cameron, now their COO, was very good – would he want to have his hires over for dinner?
  - Team of 10 now: Cameron manages concierge, growth marketing (5 on team, looking for Asia now)
    - Part-time business development consultants, full-time that have been searching
  - Revenues and loans for growth/cash flow, venture debt and possibly equity raise
- Concierge service with product-market fit and being focused – enterprise value of $100mln probably but not billions
  - Not much needs to be tweaked for core product – fund raise would be for a different product
    - Help consumers decide on if they want to use their points or cash when booking – trying to automate this for concierge/back-end
    - Chrome extension and booking engine to use or not – this may be billion dollar opportunity
Andrew Butler, ReSolve’s Head of Quant Research (Gestalt University, 10/2/19)
- Machine learning in markets: Silver bullet or Pandora’s box
  - Unsupervised, supervised and reinforcement learning differences in application or finance
- Student of mathematics, physics in undergrad, keen on not memorizing a lot of stuff – enjoyed the applied side
  - Oil reservoir simulators that modeled tidal flow in Bay of Fundy, wind turbines in giant field for optimization
  - Next step was working on a sub problem of simulators – complex, computationally expensive and trying to optimize NPV in 60d oil field
    - Navigating the nonlinear, nonconvex solutions – how to make a reasonable model approximation by sampling sparse reps of simulator
- How would simulator/emulator apply to financial world in momentum and moving averages
  - Sample distribution would fit well to out-of-sample distributions in physical world but finance wouldn’t – nonstationary
  - Caused him to use simpler models, momentum models (and transformations) and ensembles of simple factor models
    - Mean-variance optimization, error maximizing, in-sample won’t perform well out of sample
- Wanted formal training in financial engineering, so went and got a MFE
- Practitioner compared to theorist – after a conference talk, his construct was mean-variance was same as regression
  - Subspace reduction and regularization as identical terms for mean-variance
- Machine Learning as 3 subspaces
  - Unsupervised learning -> clustering and dimensionality reduction
    - Targeted marketing, customer segmentation and in finance: signal processing, optimization or portfolio construction
    - Trying to uncover relationships/groupings/clusters contained within a dataset
  - If total error is dominated by bias, it’s likely overly simplistic – X as model complexity and Y as Total Error (Bias / Variance)
    - Increase complexity, bias term can decrease, increasing the variance (instability/overfitting)
Kelly Peeler (@kellypeeler), founder / CEO NextGenVest (20min VC FF#034, 2/5/16)
- College Money mentor, empowering students to live full lives, history of financial crisis for motivation to start
  - Went over to Iraq, started and enabled some companies to build there in 2012
- Went to JPMC after graduating to make some money before starting NGV for students
- Financial organization to financial efficiency – going from Mint (organizing money for a user’s financial lives)
  - Now people need efficiency – time priority, optimizing time through automation and personalization
    - Leverage trust to improve time in the background (automation and not wanting to have to look)
- High school trust and students have nobody they can trust for guidance – 8% trust banks and financial institutions
  - If you can build a product/service, on your way to building trust
    - Save users time, money, customized experience
- Serving their customers with SMS and Snapchat – smarter push notifications for the right service in the right way
  - Couldn’t customize communication inside an app, so they did channels that they chose
- NGV clubs at high schools across country – new high schools brought in, engagement and grassroots
- First product that they brought on was for the financial literacy test that 17 states need
- Favorite book: The Thank You Economy – best people outhustle to get more customers
- As visual person, can focus on 1-3 things at a time – preps in the evening, large index cards
- Adam Nash at Wealthfront – build trust with dynamics of product and the culture of company
- Spent too much time at focusing her weaknesses but has tried to get better on that side
Sam Yagan (@samyagan), Starting OkCupid, Sparknotes (Wharton XM, Marketing Matters)
- Turning down consulting job for OkCupid start – told he was crazy but wanted to take the chance
  - Free model and how do you value customers but competitors were Match and eHarmony
  - Had to get enough people on all sides of the market and then could use the data to help
- Internet wasn’t designed to take an expert’s ideas and just use those – bigger than that
  - “You know what you want.” We’ll pull it out and figure it out.
  - Google comparison – index all the pages and figure those out to place on first page
  - Creating a platform to ask all the questions and focus on them
- Sold Sparknotes in 11 months, took OKCupid 8 years (sold to Match, was there for a year)
  - Got the job running the company for another 3.5 years as Match CEO and created Tinder
Rob Gronkowski (@robgronkowski), All-Pro tight end (The Corp, 10/1/19)
- A-Rod investing into Rob’s brother’s, Chris, company Ice Shaker
  - Were able to put money in, along with Mark Cuban, when they were on Shark Tank (all brothers)
  - Rob, upon retiring, bought Arod out of his shares in the business with Chris
- Fitplan – Arod gave Rob a discount on the shares in Ice Shaker and he just wanted Rob to look through his company
  - Rob invested with Arod – parents were in business (gym equipment for retail/commercial for 28+ years)
- Kraft being an owner for the team and being around the game – interested in everything
  - Rare to see owners in the locker room and talking with players – many players say they’ve never seen others
  - Brady, Kraft and Belichick as being the greatest people and diagnosing problems/plays and adjusting
- Rob wants to travel – done a lot in the US
  - Traveling a week from that day to Israel with CEO Barry of CBDMedic there
- Being reckless as single Gronk in the NFL (loves Camille now, though)
Horst Simon (@hdsimon), Chief Research Officer at LBNL (Curious Investor 9/3/19)
- Difference between ML and programming – validity of an email, for instance
  - Computer looks for “@” and domain name, iterative of if-then’s, marking valid or invalid
  - ML – give details of valid and invalid email addresses and have the computer figure it out with a statistical model for rules
    - Relationship between information
  - ML more as being able to see if something is a cat in a picture – hard to program that
- Helped establish the Berkeley supercomputing center – big role all across the world now to complement theory by simulations
- More data than ever before, 90% of digital data created in last 2 years – more in 2018 than all of human history
  - Finance can’t generate more data like autonomous cars, for instance (100 cars means 100 more data points)
  - Markets/economics are dynamic – return predictions of signal:noise approaches zero
    - Driven by economic features of markets – competitive, profit-seeking traders that act on it
  - HFT as real barriers to entry so they’re less efficient and more predictable, potentially
  - Quantitative traders don’t use raw data – they use transformations such as log of equity, cross-sectional rank of book to market ratio
    - Neural network tries to find what the best transformations are (X -> Y and explore all the connections)
- Bonds example: predict if issuer will default or not with firm information using random forest
Rajiv Shah (@rajcs4), Data Scientist @ Data Robot, Adjunct Prof UChicago (DataSkeptic, 10/22/19)
- Started engineering, studied philosophy and law, PhD in Comms before doing research as academic
  - Worked at State Farm and Caterpillar before going to Data Robot
- Deep learning applications in motion data like NBA player data, motion tracking arms and legs (PoseNET, for instance)
  - Nature paper published that used deep learning to study after-shock patterns for earthquakes
- Going through paper – simple starting point or baseline model was skipped – how much value is really added, then?
  - Looking at the 6-layer problem – approach wasn’t unexpected when using keras to add layers
  - Results generated: AUC of 0.85 compared to naïve benchmark of simple, physical model – AUC of 0.58
  - When he reproduced it, test set results were higher than training set – yellow or red flag for model
- Group partitioning – 130 earthquakes happening right after each other, near each other and related
  - Make sure the information for an earthquake/customer doesn’t get split between training / test sites to avoid leakage
  - Basic grounding of fundamentals for setting up initial training data, partition based on time to avoid that, as well
- As community, ensure that there are best practices and guidelines – reproducibility as a large problem lately
  - How to police boundaries for the general field – influence of institutions in publishing (for this, Harvard/Google/Nature mag researchers)
  - Good from them: the data and model for the code was freely available and he could do it on his laptop / notebooks
  - Academics from the earthquake field reached out to him with some qualms and he’s partnered with them for a blog on efforts
- Interpretability focus trade-off with accuracy – that he’ll speak on at Open DS Conf
  - Lots of tools for explaining models with transparency now, though
Julia Landauer (@julialandauer), NASCAR driver (Stanford Pathfinders, Wharton XM)
- Being on Survivor (suggested by a friend while Soph in college), racecar driver
  - Picking Stanford because of so many people that were awesome / ambitious
  - Mentioning Andrew Luck saying that this was why he chose it – people wouldn’t particularly care
- Driving at such a young age and in Manhattan – not getting a license there until 18 on campus
- Having to pitch and learn how to pitch at a young age for sponsorships, running a team and the cost, even at minors – $500k+
- Some 12 female drivers and being competitive

Find Your Own Value (Notes from Nov 4 to Nov 10, 2019) January 21, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Blockchain, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, marketing, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: #business, books, community, content, credit, experiences, finance, freedom, Google, humanity, ideas, investing, life, marketing, questions, reading, research, social, Time, TV
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One of my favorite pieces and follows on Twitter of the last 3 months has been Tyler Tringas, founder of Earnest Capital. He came to realize that there existed a massive opportunity to fund companies that may not require or need the VC model of capital infusion – just a starter amount to do testing, easiest when people look to make sales and revenues early (maybe not the model for certain industries – marketplaces/user-dependent network effects not-withstanding).

Wild for micro and seed funding, when companies have yet to establish a true product-market fit or business model each time, typically stick with one financing style. I wonder how much innovation has been restricted by the funding style. There are advantages and disadvantages for each of those. But I’ve yet to come across more than 2-3 VC’s (out of 1000s) that do multiple and have a separation / adjustment. Makes sense from the LPs sense, but not necessarily if you want the companies to be SOMEHOW getting to a growth/scale that fits.

Less Annoying CRM Tyler King was cognizant about the capital and efficiency standpoint in business – everyone that doesn’t create value seemed expendable. Those that did will make it. I find that an important takeaway and general attitude toward either doing your own thing or being a part of a bigger company.

Hopefully each of these excite everyone enough to check the fantastic people/content out further!

Tyler Tringas (@tylertringas), founder of Earnest Capital (Indiehackers #131, 11/1/19)
- Funding for entrepreneurs, founders, outside of the ecosystem – profitable and sustainable
  - Not competing with other options – just found a large group of bootstrappers that aligns with the goals
  - RBF doesn’t work for some
- Green field space in the past – no competitors and could gobble the market – big risk early but if it’s worked, it can be massive
  - Launching and building became cheaper and more niche for diversifying the opportunities – limiting VC scale
  - When he sold his first business, he handed over his Stripe account, Github and Roku
- Software companies – no retail shop meant your option was “raise money” = “raise venture capital”
  - If you were doing a bakery or something, you had a plethora of options
- 5 years ago, he was one of the loudest critics and blogger
  - If he was bootstrapping, can you work backwards and what would you have wanted to work with
    - Is it actually a fit for you
  - No board seat, mentors for long-term
- Raise money when you believe the money will unlock value in the business
- Had Storemapper – where he figured out what he wanted to do next
  - Derek Sivers – Tarzan move – need the second vine before letting go of the first vine
  - Pivoted to finance to do finance models behind wind/solar farms
  - Then to micro SaaS Indiehacker before noticing people struggled to get businesses off the ground early (his $50k cc debt)
- His basic bet is that it’s not an iron law of physics that 90% will fail
  - His fund will fail if it is an iron law – and his investors are aware of this
  - He believes the VC model is circular in that if you require growth is 11% a month for 12+ months, more likely to become unicorn
    - But if they don’t hit that, then they’re failing
- Really interested in niche markets for a piece of software that serves a market – eg Hostify, Endcrawl post-production credits, etc
Tyler King (@lessannoyingcrm), cofounder of Less Annoying CRM (Indie Hackers #128, 10/21/19)
- Bouncing between companies after college, had joined a startup that grew after Series A, only to be acquired
  - Everyone was fired except for 5 cheapest employees (including him)
- Marketing channels not working – word of mouth, sometimes paid ads, Google AdWords or Facebook
- Customer support – competitive advantage as going slow, not being held to revenue standards
  - Can focus on customer service and product features
Maren Bannon (@maren_bannon), cofounder & Partner at Jane VC (50inTech Podcast #11)
- Cold-pitching VC – for cold emails, take time to research the investor and explain why they’d be interested
  - Adjacent industries, past role in competitive area, resonating project
- Nailing the one-liner / 10 second offering in a sentence
- Bullet points, succinct including certain things
  - Traction for user/revenue/notable customers
  - Advocates, angels with industry expertise
- Why you? Brief description for the ideal team.
- Include an ask – why are you contacting? Advice, seed round, etc…
- Include right materials (letter can be brief, but more info attached or deck or 1-pager)
Ok Boomer, Microtransactions (16min on the News by a16z #13, 11/3/19)
- NYT Taylor Lorenz – (perennially behind others but gets credit for the writing of it)
- Taking on a meme, protest for what’s rigged – Gen Z affected by Boomers “hurting us”
  - How memes can turn into clothing, sales for songs, be further monetized
  - Social media generating social phenomenon and transactions and merchandise
    - V1 was ad-based, then quasi-based for sponsored ads (protein powers and such), direct transactions for monetizations
    - Can get demand and feedback for multiple types of merchandise before launching and sending out efficiently
- In China, commerce is already in the app – button after 2nd loop you can complete purchase inside the app
  - Close the loop on-platform in China
- Marketplace on games for platform – supporting size/scales that fraudsters can open up accounts and quickly find monetization structure
  - Build false economy and cash out quickly – advanced fraudsters for automation, maybe with virtual trades and purchases
  - If it’s $10k, they’re wrong – probably multiple millions, if not more
AI in B2B (a16z 10/23/19)
- Oleg Rogynskyy from People.AI, for sales and marketing
- Very few users that give you private, anonymized data is much harder to make them comfortable with this data
  - How valuable is the promise you’re making to customers vs the cost to achieve it
- For entrepreneurs: if there is human activity that generates data for how they do it that isn’t being captured, there’s a ripe opportunity
  - Shipping containers, wind farm, location of Uber driver – reliable data, aggregate and figure out what may be the next best action would be
    - Significant growth and acceleration for these actions once network effects apply
  - More sensors, edge computing, salespeople, drivers in network – more data collected and more patterns you can see
    - Smarter the graph becomes, better the predictions may be allowed to become – then, more money and lures in other network participants
  - Wind farm operators: know it will break after it breaks but someone in comes in that was there collecting data ahead of you, they are up still
    - Competitor automates process, you can go to same vendor and catch up but if you miss AI, you can’t catch up
  - Oleg mentions that he thinks AI is zero-sum and that the Fortune 500 will look very different in 10 years
- All customers benefit from generalized data – first customers have to do a lot more than others
  - People writing contracts: only sell to me, but customers would be relics
- When the data model changes, systems of records die – Andreesen
  - Hierarchical first, then on SQL, then cloud SQL and Salesforce
    - Next gen data model should be graph – federated shared graph model – instead of you pulling data and searching, it will push to you
    - Personalized actionable insights – pushed through the channel you’re most likely to engage with – maximum focus
  - Level of intent for the user should be known – don’t have to expose the complexity but you can be shown and execute that
- Difference between autopilot and co-pilot
  - As human, something mundane or repetitive – automating the functions to make it more efficient use of your neurons
  - Augmenting ability to make decisions – racecar that may know what’s around the curve, making us super-productive – more human
- Needs to be 10x on the platform vs off the platform if you’re afraid of the set-up
- Sales & Marketers specifically
  - Shifting how they work – day-to-day: 1/3 of time on manual data entry, 1/3 on prospecting (classic problem), 1/3 on face-to-face doing selling
    - First should be gone, 2nd should be done with help on ML and AI for value-add prospecting and automate outreach
    - Face-to-face: Machines can’t replace this but may be able to help out
  - Training on the end point – best way to sell, unbundling learning management system
- Wants to do bottoms-up but currently top-down – through standard procurement channels
  - Users will demand data-hungry approaches and solutions – apps that built AI on user data but not merging with enterprise data
    - Have easier time for value adding in these cases because you just want data to increase (single player can do single player)
- Biggest surprises: inside sales for Oleg starting in 2006 pounding phones, went out and did a software change before downturn
  - Learned timing matters at that time.
  - Then started Symantria – sentiment analysis API in 2011, size of market matters – 20-30 companies needed it (80% of market)
  - Remembered that he was put into a conference room with COO (head of sales), cleaned Salesforce and within a month it was in ruin again
  - Couldn’t understand sales team when he took over, why it wasn’t ramping up quickly, losing deals, hiring more people but productivity was fine
    - Supposed to have data in CRM but never had it
Martin Mignot, Investor at Index Ventures (20min VC 2/1/16)
- Investments including Deliveroo, Blablahcar, Algolia, SwiftKey, others
- Worked on 50 transactions like CodeAcademy, FlipBoard, Soundcloud
- UBS Investment Bank on TMT team and co-founded beauty subscription company called Boudoir Prive (acquired by BirchBox)
  - Comes from entrepreneur family and action/doer and the creative
  - VC seemed to be between acting and thinking part of the job as he’s followed it for 10-12 years
- Split on idea of career VC without operating experience
- 3 ways to look and slice companies: at Index, they have thematic and geographical approach since they need to have ppl on ground in Europe
  - Stage-focused: seed / growth
  - Thematic: fintech, adtech
  - Geographical: Germany, France, London, Amsterdam and building the network there with angels, seed funds
- 6 hour drive test or drunk test with founders – no formal founder test to determine invest-ability
  - Are they able to attract and hire the people they need
  - Trying to decide if the risk is worth reward – not beholding themselves to a valuation cap if they believe
- Favorite book: I have America Surrounded by Tim Leary
- Investor who has shaped his theses is Fred Wilson – being right, companies and sharing insight, communicating as USV and himself
Elaine Beak, consulting and HBS (Career Talk, Wharton XM)
- She wasn’t too scared but whenever she had problems, the solutions would arise
  - For others, the security blanket is the scariest for most people when she tries to help them on decisions or convincing them
- Writes her books in 2 weeks each – written and published 80+
- Word of mouth, should have 6 months saved up, and have 50 people that you can contact for saying you’re going out on your own
- Following own rules:
  - Billing clients the same day that you finish a project.
  - Clients may have 30 day billing window, so if you waited 2 weeks, they’ll forget or not be as appreciative.
- Don’t discount, add to the service instead – charge more
  - Bad reputation for discounting.
- Go for the big fish – large companies but the time to get smaller companies is the same for larger. Repeat business is there
  - Repeat business and more of a budget to continue work.
- Learn to say no. Non-paid speaking engagements should be limited.
- Manage your time well – make sure it pays off.
  - Find ways to automate things – invoices, payroll, accounting, responses to common questions
    - Make a standard paragraph or find an app/template once you have these
- Project will end but not relationship – stay until the end and do a good job for the client.
- Incorporating, LLC for sure

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Interesting Niches – Simply Interests (Notes from March 30 to April 5, 2020) December 30, 2020

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Better Foundations in Learning (Notes from March 9 – March 15, 2020) November 24, 2020

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Into Building/Growing? Check out these Communities (Notes from March 2 – March 8, 2020) November 2, 2020

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What next? (Notes from Feb. 17 – Feb 23, 2020) September 25, 2020

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Disorganized Trying to Organize (Notes from Feb 3 – Feb 9, 2020) August 4, 2020

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Failures as Public (Notes from December 30, 2019 to Jan 5, 2020) June 9, 2020

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Organizing the Mind, Studying (Notes from Dec 9 to Dec 15, 2019) May 6, 2020

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The Parallel for Company Building (Notes from Dec. 2 – Dec 8, 2019) April 13, 2020

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Back from Vacation (Notes from Nov 11 to 17, 2019) February 11, 2020

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Find Your Own Value (Notes from Nov 4 to Nov 10, 2019) January 21, 2020

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