@bloombergbeta; of the San Gabriel Valley; investing in 2050; working to improve the second derivative; looking for troublesome ringleaders!

Palo Alto, CA
Joined October 2007
Sometimes, all it takes is to find kindred souls to feel like the world is an amazing place.
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James Cham retweeted
Theory Ventures asked founders what they wanted from AI in GTM. 41% said they were aiming to improve rep productivity. But the real question is: when every rep can do more, does the team win more business? Or does every buyer just receive more outreach?
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James Cham retweeted
is there anyone in New York that can print and bind ~100 beautiful 150 page books within 7 days
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Some VC advice is very good!
Got to catch up with multiple friends from high school (30+ years ago) in the past few days Conversation flowed just like it was yesterday, and easy to see how we have grown and stayed the same from who we were then If you haven’t pinged an old friend in a while, do it now
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"There are some 8 billion of these tiny supercomputers spread around the planet, interconnected via the internet" and we should help them be as weird and personal as possible... kevinkelly.substack.com/p/mo…
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Rambler is nice on the new pixel phones but the big disadvantage is that you don't see what you're saying so it misses out on one of the fundamental advantages of a pixel: voice typing has been so fast that it feels like it's reading your mind.
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James Cham retweeted
Lots of VCs kindof sound like this: "Your basketball team doesn't have a moat, any healthy human can throw the ball into the basket thingy. " People who have not run companies before don't understand how much the team matters more than some imagined structural moat.
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What happens when the quant barbarians invade your industry?
One of the most important trends in business over the past few decades has been industries "going quant." Think Renaissance Technologies in finance, Obama's quantitative campaign operation, or Billy Beane's Oakland A's. Applying systematic, data-driven prediction to important decisions improves how an industry works and, more importantly, changes who wins. I think AI is setting up the next wave. My three bets: trial law, entertainment, and general management. Why now? AI makes far more information available for systematic prediction and makes it possible to generate and test alternatives that were previously too expensive to experiment with. In my latest Faint Signals, I explore what makes an industry susceptible to going quant and where the next opportunities might emerge. What other industries would you bet on? What Goes Quant Next? faintsignals.substack.com/p/…
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Replit + Stripe Atlas + one of Bill Gross’s 1.2 million startup ideas = something you should work on today. idealab.ai
prompt -> corporation
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The smartest investor in the world pay Matthew a lot of money to hear his thoughts. Kind of a miracle that he’s just giving them away for free on substack now. Highly recommended!
One of the most important trends in business over the past few decades has been industries "going quant." Think Renaissance Technologies in finance, Obama's quantitative campaign operation, or Billy Beane's Oakland A's. Applying systematic, data-driven prediction to important decisions improves how an industry works and, more importantly, changes who wins. I think AI is setting up the next wave. My three bets: trial law, entertainment, and general management. Why now? AI makes far more information available for systematic prediction and makes it possible to generate and test alternatives that were previously too expensive to experiment with. In my latest Faint Signals, I explore what makes an industry susceptible to going quant and where the next opportunities might emerge. What other industries would you bet on? What Goes Quant Next? faintsignals.substack.com/p/…
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James Cham retweeted
This is an interesting question because the answer is not obvious. Which, by the way, does not mean AI coding tools are not leading to massive improvements, but, as research keeps showing, the bottlenecks to product improvements are often elsewhere.
What is a piece of normal software that has improved the most because of its its developers using AI extensively? (Claude code doesn't count)
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James Cham retweeted
Electricity was dangerous before it was convenient. Before it could be widely adopted, we had to find a way for electricity to fail small. (Think fuses and circuit breakers.) AI needs a way to fail small. A new @common_fabric lab note: commonfabric.com/notes/fail-…
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James Cham retweeted
Went deep on AI memory and model intelligence with @jordihays and @johncoogan earlier this week We've invested deeply in memory at Tolan, starting with our early work in partnership with @OpenAI: openai.com/index/tolan/ (if you want to work on realtime AI memory alongside @evangoldschmidt: we're hiring! [email protected])
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“How to build a bad research center” by someone who made very good ones… www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/…
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We gave @AirSpaceIntel a term sheet in the middle of Covid when no planes were flying. @pbuckendorf signed it (the very first @RenegadePtnrs term sheet!!) and picked @rquintini to lead his Series A. Here’s to 6 years and counting on betting on each other!! Congrats on this amazing milestone!
Critical infrastructure is being run on software from the 1980s, says ASI CEO Phillip Buckendorf. He explains how ASI uses AI to orchestrate complex systems like air traffic control and energy transmission bit.ly/47rtE9E
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James Cham retweeted
No one changes the world alone Introducing Ampersand - the first model built for us. Ampersand is a collaborator trained to help people achieve their individual and collective goals. In multi-month simulations, users collaborating with Ampersand accomplished more than with Fable and other frontier models Available to everyone through our API
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“ASML runs on the belief that if you recruit people who don’t know enough to recognize that the job before them is hopeless, they might surprise you.”
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“His instinct was to turn it in what was, mathematically speaking, the obviously incorrect direction. For some reason that remains largely incomprehensible, it worked.”
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James Cham retweeted
I’m thrilled to release this course on Context Engineering!
Models perform worse as their context grows. In Context Engineering, built in partnership with @trychroma you'll learn to give agents the right information, in the right format, at the right time. Taught by @jeffreyhuber with guest speaker @dbreunig. Enroll for free: bit.ly/4BxLVA3
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