Games, AI, startups, shitposts. Venture Partner @theresidency, prev. Co-Founder, ErthAI; CoS/GM, Zynga; team Workplay Ventures, ReinventCap.
San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2008
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Dan Garon retweeted
Simple: ship a working version of the @theranos vision powered by SI
Could be 10% of the original vision, with the promise to keep iterating
For bonus points open source all the technology and patents
And given the pace of super intelligence, someone will and then folks will start saying “seeeeeeeee! @ElizabethHolmes was just too early!!!”
I will leave it to @nathanfielder and @JohnCarreyrou to adjudicate that moment! 😂😂😂
[ go see the film ]
Congratulations! you’ve been hired by Billy Evans and Liz Holmes to handle their PR.
What do you advise them? Options below (collected from my various sf tech group chats). What did I miss?
1) Deflect.
- Issue a short, timid statement
- reiterate her innocence, acknowledge mistakes
- suggest the filmmakers misled the audience / the family
- ask for privacy for the kids
- then lay low.
Most popular recommendation.
2) Disappear.
- Decline press,
- stop posting from Holmes’ X
- avoid any public fights with Fielder.
- Anything they say will be used against them
- The time to reappear in public, if ever, is after Holmes is out of prison and the public has moved on.
Second most common recommendation.
3) Mea Culpa.
- solely Holmes, no Evans
- accept substantial responsibility
- a chance to earn sympathy / reframe the damaging parts of the story. (“I wasn’t fully honest with our wealthy investors, but I feel so bad I hurt the people who trusted me” kinda thing).
- vibe is she has learned and matured; deep voice is gone.
- Focus on humanizing, including that she was in her early 20s and clueless.
- narrative is second chances + overly zealous prosecution
- Hard to pull this off logistically if she can’t do an interview from prison; may need to wait until she is in a halfway house next year. Nobody thought either of them would actually go for this.
4) Full Trump.
- Come out SWINGING.
- Focus is on Evans, who arguably has a much bigger reputational problem than Holmes
- Produce LOTS of evidence, including trial defense. show this case was less clear than everyone thinks.
- publicly confront the filmmakers
- truly “own” Holmes’ and Evans’ roles as the villains
- press on that Fiedler has a history of tricking people, and say they were tricked.
- framing as ambitious entrepreneurs with powerful enemies, eg powerful lab diagnostics oligopoly they are taking on.
- Compare Holmes to other founders who were doubted but overcame. (Evans somewhat adopted this in the film when he spoke of his vengeance and powerful enemies.)
For this to work, Evan needs to be so relentless that he earns support for his grit and chutzpah.
Dan Garon retweeted
Bringing the science of training models to you.
Learn more & connect with us.
bryel.ai
We’re on a mission to build a billion AI models, not trained by us, but by you.
Introducing @bryel_labs we help your company build its in-house AI lab and give you the software to make model development and continual improvement simpler. We are backed by @ycombinator and have trained models at Apple, Framer, and F500s.
We’ve enabled companies to train:
• Classification models that are 20x faster
• Search models that cost 5x less.
• Long horizon agent models that match the frontier at 5-8x lower cost.
Are you interested in partnering with us? Reach out.
bryel.ai/
Dan Garon retweeted
Two charts showing extremely important, widely held AI assumptions are outdated:
Assumption 1: Chinese models are cheaper & more efficient. In fact, at almost every level of intelligence @ArtificialAnlys finds US models cheaper per task. Chinese models might be cheaper per token, but US models tend to be MORE efficient with tokens.
Everyone seizes on papers from Chinese labs with architectural improvements for efficiency and assumes US labs are undisciplined. But ask yourself what OpenAI/Anthropic/Google have behind the scenes that would cut down on their #1 cost. And then add that they have more efficient chips. Should not be surprising that US labs can undercut!
You can't undercut free, though, as anyone can download CN open weight models and use w/o paying the labs anything. BUT unless you have your own compute (few firms do), the days of firms running Chinese models for the cost of compute are numbered or over because Chinese AI labs are reportedly asking for 30% cut from cloud providers serving their models. This is likely main way these models are accessed, and the costs are going to be passed on.
Assumption 2) US company spending on AI is spiraling out of control.
@arakharazian finds that companies are getting better at picking the right cost/capabilities tradeoffs and getting better deals from competition between Anthropic and OpenAI. Use continues to rise, but at a cost that is leveling out. Controlling cost will put less pressure on firms to move to Chinese models, esp if they aren't cheaper anymore!
Dan Garon retweeted
Building AI inside your company? These are your people. Two @bryel_labs events at SF @Techweek_ next week for founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders:
Tuesday evening: Join me and @vinitra_s from @ScholeAI to discuss what it takes to level up your intelligence within your company. (Co-hosted by @thehousefund)
🗓️: partiful.com/e/wmdrrEPxrjo20…
Thursday afternoon: Curious about training your own models? Building your intelligence stack? Come swap notes with other pioneers making the same decisions.
🗓️: partiful.com/e/BgX5jT0yxM3fa…
Dan Garon retweeted
> Harvey cold messaged lawyers asking for demos, pulled their own court fillings before each and had their product find holes in their arguments and the lawyers suddenly started paying attention.
> Legora cold-messaged lawyers and offered to pay their normal hourly rate just to sit down and learn how their work actually worked.
> Corgi started selling insurance policies themselves, bought a fax machine just to deal with carriers, then realized the real problem was the insurance product itself.
> Granola targeted VCs as its earliest users because they spent all day in meetings and knew everyone, turning them into the perfect word-of-mouth distribution channel.
None of them started with a network. They just found a way into the room.
Dan Garon retweeted
It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.
In 2002, I had outsourced customer service for order tracking and returns but still handled product-related questions myself. The result? I received more than 200 e-mail per day, spending all hours between 9–5 responding to them, and the volume was growing at a rate of more than 10% per week!
I had to cancel advertising and limit shipments, as additional customer service would have been the final nail in the coffin. It wasn’t a scalable model. Remember this word, as it will be important later.
It wasn’t scalable because there was an information and decision bottleneck: me.
The clincher? The bulk of the e-mail that landed in my inbox was not product-related at all but requests from the outsourced customer service reps seeking permission for different actions:
The customer claims he didn’t receive the shipment. What should we do?
The customer had a bottle held at customs. Can we reship to a U.S. address?
The customer needs the product for a competition in two days. Can we ship overnight, and if so, how much should we charge?
It was endless.
Hundreds upon hundreds of different situations made it impractical to write a manual, and I didn’t have the time or experience to do so regardless.
Fortunately, someone did have the experience: the outsourced reps themselves. I sent one single e-mail to all the supervisors that immediately turned 200 e-mail per day into fewer than 20 e-mail per week:
"Hi All,
I would like to establish a new policy for my account that overrides all others.
Keep the customer happy.
If it is a problem that takes less than $100 to fix, use your judgment and fix it yourself. This is official written permission and a request to fix all problems that cost under $100 without contacting me. I am no longer your customer; my customers are your customer.
Don’t ask me for permission.
Do what you think is right, and we’ll make adjustments as we go along.
Thank you,
Tim"
Upon close analysis, it became clear that more than 90% of the issues that prompted e-mail could be resolved for less than $20. I reviewed the financial results of their independent decision-making on a weekly basis for four weeks, then a monthly basis, and then on a quarterly basis.
Dan Garon retweeted
the app business much like saas is now entering decline. culture now moves faster than software companies can build, distribute, & retain attention. not to mention ai has commoditized every part of the traditional software value chain.
if you’ve followed me for any length of time none of this should be surprising to you at all.
the world is moving from apps you operate to agents that operate for you. that is a profound shift in how every part of the software business functions & it has deep implications for both b2b & consumer experiences. if you do not shift your thinking to how software will work in the ai age, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Dan Garon retweeted
I went to see “The Odyssey” and have thoughts on what liberals can take away from Christopher Nolan’s film.
The moral progress of the West has been one of its greatest achievements. But that does not mean that ambition and heroism must be set aside.
My take:
Dan Garon retweeted
I wrote about being Highly Online in tech right now, and how some founders and VCs can’t stop, won’t stop mainlining content on this very site.
upstartsmedia.com/p/column-t…
Dan Garon retweeted
assuming the current u.s. life expectancy of 79 years as a baseline, in your life you get:
~4,120 weekends
~8,240 weekend days
79 summers
316 seasons
79 birthdays
~980 full moons
~28,850 nights
~86,500 meals
at common frequencies post childhood:
- one major trip/year: 61 trips
- three major trips/year: 183 trips
- one great dinner/month: 730 dinners
- one memorable night/month: 730 nights
- one book/month: 730 books
- seeing a friend annually: 61 meetings
- seeing them every five years: 12 meetings
- moving every five years: ~12 homes
- building one startup every six years: perhaps 7 serious attempts during a conventional working life
- owning each car for five years: ~12 cars
- getting a new dog every 12 years: ~5 dog eras
- taking one proper family vacation/year: 61 vacations, but only ~18 while each child lives at home
- spending two weeks/year with parents after leaving home: 40 weeks over 20 years, versus ~936 weeks spent together during childhood
life feels long cuz days repeat. measured in meaningful repetitions, it is shockingly small.
Dan Garon retweeted
Noetik CEO @Ronalfa on why AI in drug discovery is dramatically underhyped: you can now ask a model a question and get an answer that would take a researcher many years to figure out
"What's under-hyped is how different it is right now. Things are actually very different than they were 10 years ago when I joined the first company I was at. We are seeing very rapid progress on a timescale that's unprecedented. It's months. Every month things are getting better."
"Objectively, the state of where we are in terms of the technology is dramatically under-hyped. People might not believe that when I say information is commoditized. But literally information is getting commoditized."
"We are getting to the point where you can just ask a question to a model, and get an answer that someone would have to spend many years researching."
@NOETIK_ai
Dan Garon retweeted
Theres almost twice as many dollars in the economy today as in 2016.
Thats why prices increased.
Dan Garon retweeted
NEWS: You've read profiles of Dario Amodei before, but not like this one.
Here's some of what I learned from ~6 weeks of talking to insiders, rivals, investors about the unusual man leading of capitalism's greatest success story and pissing off Silicon Valley in the process:
Dan Garon retweeted
Since our first jam session in 2015 — the one that seeded Uber Elevate — @travisk has been all in on electric flight. He's one of the most dynamic founders of his generation, with a rare ability to see the whole system and turn ambitious ideas into real industries. Thrilled to be building this next chapter with him and the Atoms team.
Joby is partnering with @travisk’s Atoms to build America's vertiport network.
Today, Joby and Atoms announced a definitive agreement to develop next-generation transportation hubs where electric air taxis, autonomous ground vehicles, and ridesharing converge, anchored by GEACS, our open-source Global Electric Aviation Charging System.
The work starts in Florida, New York, and Texas, the markets where Joby is preparing to launch early operations under the White House-backed eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), as well as California.
Full release ⬇️
