#startups
"Founder Mode", by Paul Graham of YCombinator.
"At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember."
"The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as 'hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.' He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple."
"In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode."
"Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground."
"One theme I noticed both in Brian's talk and when talking to founders afterward was the idea of being gaslit. Founders feel like they're being gaslit from both sides -- by the people telling them they have to run their companies like managers, and by the people working for them when they do. Usually when everyone around you disagrees with you, your default assumption should be that you're mistaken. But this is one of the rare exceptions. VCs who haven't been founders themselves don't know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world."
"Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. 'Skip-level' meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there's a name for it."
"For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart."
"Top 5 YC S24 Startups (according to AI)"
The AI in question being nFactorial AI, "Perplexity for researching 240+ companies from YC S24".
Here are the 5 startus:
"SureBright: Offer your own Apple Care-like warranty program in 10 minutes!"
"Mito Health: AI-powered concierge doctor"
"Rewbi: Uses AI to increase grid-connected battery storage revenue 2x"
"Domu Technology Inc.: Automating debt collection calls for banks."
"Unriddle: Read and write research papers faster."
I was curious for more, so I clicked "View Full Leaderboard":
"Cartage: Autonomous freight operations"
"Planbase: Workforce management for modern healthcare"
"Fazeshift: AI agent for Accounts Receivable"
"Kontigo: USDC-Smart Neobank for Latinos."
"FINNY AI: Using ML to supercharge organic growth for Financial Advisors"
"Tabular: AI Autopilot for Accounting Firms"
"Saturn: Backoffice and compliance automation for wealth managers"
"Presti AI: Product photography for furniture companies with generative AI"
It keeps going. I'm up to top 12 out of 240.
For each startup it grades them on "traction", "team", "market", and "overall".
For each startup, it has an additional "AI Insight".
"AI Insight: SureBright demonstrates strong traction with existing partnerships and a unique offering that differentiates their warranty program, the founders have significant experience in major tech firms and entrepreneurship, and they are operating in a large and growing market with potential to expand the warranty segment by $45 billion."
nFactorial AI - Perplexity for researching 240+ companies from YC S24
A startup called Attio claims to be using AI to reinvent customer relationship management (CRM) software.
"CRM needs a ground-up reimagining. This vision drove us to found Attio and it's why we spent three years building such a strong foundation before our launch last year."
"This funding will vastly accelerate our vision of CRM in the AI era, which is built on three pillars:"
"A system of record: Our powerful, AI-native data model is designed as the modern system of record. It can match any business or data model with custom objects, and it stores information with rich, structured metadata. It's incredibly fast, handling massive workloads with millions of records at sub-50ms latency. We spent four years painstakingly building this foundation."
"A system of context: Attio will automatically ingest and understand all of your data -- structured and unstructured -- capturing the details of every video call, meeting, email, document, and even data from the web. It will present this information in a way that is always relevant and useful to you."
"A system of action: A comprehensive platform where you can architect and drive your entire GTM strategy, leveraging proactive AI agents to anticipate needs, automate complex tasks, and initiate processes across your whole stack without manual effort."
"In the 1930s, Disney invented the multiplane camera and was the first to create sound-synchronized, full color cartoons -- eventually leading to the groundbreaking animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
"Marvel and DC Comics rose to prominence in the 1940s, dubbed the 'golden age of comics,' enabled by the mass availability of the 4-color rotary letterpress and offset lithography for printing comics at scale."
"Similarly, Pixar was uniquely positioned in the 1980s to leverage a new technology platform -- computers and 3D graphics."
we believe the Pixar of the next century won't emerge through traditional film or animation, but rather through interactive video. This new storytelling format will blur the line between video games and television/film -- fusing deep storytelling with viewer agency and 'play,' opening up a vast new market."wo
So says Jonathan Lai of Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley investment firm.
"The promise of interactive video lies in blending the accessibility and narrative depth of TV/film, with the dynamic, player-driven systems of video games."
"The biggest remaining technical hurdle for interactive video is reaching frame generation speeds fast enough for content generation on the fly. Dream Machine currently generates ~1 frame per second. The minimum acceptable target for games to ship on modern consoles is a stable 30 FPS, with 60 FPS being the gold standard. With the help of advancements such as Pyramid Attention Broadcast (PAB), this could go up to 10-20 FPS on certain video types, but is still not quite fast enough."
("By mitigating redundant attention computation, PAB achieves up to 21.6 FPS with 10.6x acceleration, without sacrificing quality across popular diffusion transformer-based video generation models including Open-Sora, Open-Sora-Plan, and Latte.")
"Given the rate at which we've seen underlying hardware and model improvements, we estimate that we may be ~2 years out from commercially viable, fully generative interactive video."
"In February 2024, Google DeepMind released its own foundation model for end-to-end interactive video named Genie. The novel approach to Genie is its latent action model, which infers a hidden action in between a pair of video frames."
"We've seen teams incorporate video elements inside AI-native game engines." "Latens by Ilumine is building a 'lucid dream simulator' where users generate frames in real-time as they walk through a dream landscape." "Developers in the open-source community Deforum are creating real-world installations with immersive, interactive video. Dynamic is working on a simulation engine where users can control robots in first person using fully generated video." "Fable Studio is building Showrunner, an AI streaming service that enables fans to remix their own versions of popular shows." "The Alterverse built a D&D inspired interactive video RPG where the community decides what happens next. Late Night Labs is a new A-list film studio integrating AI into the creative process. Odyssey is building a visual storytelling platform powered by 4 generative models." "Series AI has developed Rho Engine, an end-to-end platform for AI game creation." "We're also seeing AI creation suites from Rosebud AI, Astrocade, and Videogame AI enable folks new to coding or art to quickly get started making interactive experiences."
"Who will build the Interactive Pixar?"
The Next Generation Pixar: How AI will Merge Film & Games
#solidstatelife #ai #genai #computervision #videoai #startups
"Of the 17 Y Combinator companies that went public, 14 have lost money for investors."
The 3 that made money for investors are Reddit, Instacart, and Airbnb. The 14 that lost money for investors are Oklo, Dropbox, Coinbase, Doordash, PagerDuty, Weave, GitLab, Pardes Biosciences, Amplitude, Rigetti, Ginkgo Bioworks, Presto, Notable Labs, and Momentus.
Of the 17 Y Combinator companies that went public, 14 have lost money for investors
#solidstatelife #ipos #startups #venturecapital #ycombinator
