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🎙️ Watch now: podcast available on all platforms.
Episode 3: Luana Lopes Lara on “Confession with Ali Partovi”
– A $1B valuation, yet she put Kalshi’s odds of failure above 90%.
– “I'm supposed to be the optimistic one”: hiding fears from her co-founder.
– “I’m betting the company”: suing Kalshi’s regulator despite board objections.
… and much more with @Kalshi co-founder & COO @luanalopeslara.
(0:00) “Took three years. It was awful”: getting Kalshi regulated
(1:58) Growing up in Brazil and training as a ballerina
(6:01) Choosing MIT despite being told she shouldn’t
(8:03) “Ballet was never a hobby to me” and giving it up
(9:46) “Even when we were worth a billion dollars”: fearing Kalshi would fail
(22:12) Employees leaving, layoffs, and offering severance
(23:38) “You’re gonna kill me”: telling Tarek they should sue the government
(32:17) “Tarek was right and I was wrong”: the fallout from suing their regulator
(33:16) “I just feel lighter”: winning in court
(36:44) “I am gonna have to bluff”: convincing Tarek to follow through
(40:11) “You can psych yourself out of doing anything”: overthinking risk
Dara Khosrowshahi’s family lost everything when they moved to the US from Iran. He and Ali talk about growing up with parents who had to start over.
Watch the full episode: youtu.be/90WmbQ5p2Oc?si=cElP…
“I’m definitely not getting this job!” Satya Nadella recalls a lesson from his interview to join Microsoft.
Watch the full episode: youtu.be/2fD2HXr9HXo?si=26GB…
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi talks about hitting rock bottom during COVID.
Watch the full episode: youtu.be/90WmbQ5p2Oc?si=cElP…
Neo retweeted
Today we are finally coming out of stealth with a few announcements:
- Founding @thirdmomentres with my friend Jeffrey Yan: automatically improving inference endpoints (with focus on data research).
- Fundraise at $250M valuation earlier this Summer with investors including @neo (@apartovi ), @Mascobot , @adamdangelo and more.
- 0 -> 8 figures in revenue within ~6 months of founding the company. In just this past month, we won $10M+ in contracts.
- Hiring ~15 more engineers in the next 45 days. Currently based in SF, opening a NYC office soon.
Jeffrey and I are building Third Moment to do two things: (1) make it effortless for enterprises to deploy state-of-the-art AI tailored to their workflows, and (2) build best-in-class RL environments that push the frontier of model capabilities. The design of a reinforcement learning environment has an underappreciated impact on the resulting behaviors of the models trained on it.
If you are interested in pushing the frontier of ML systems and data research, reach out to us ([email protected]). Check out OpenAI’s blog post on some of our experiments in the comments.
Dara Khosrowshahi on the importance of being honest with your team, no matter how hard it feels.
Watch the full episode: youtu.be/90WmbQ5p2Oc?si=yMMj…
“I gave up and that bugs me a lot”: in 1999, Satya Nadella saw the importance of Search and didn’t press hard enough for it.
Watch the full episode: youtu.be/2fD2HXr9HXo?si=v_tG…
🎙️ Watch now: podcast available on all platforms.
Episode 2. Dara Khosrowshahi on “Confession with Ali Partovi”
– Leaving Iran in the revolution with nothing but family
– The Priceline deal he failed to push through at Expedia
–"I lost confidence... I just backed off."
– Uber’s COVID layoffs and hitting rock bottom
… and much more with Uber CEO @Dkhos.
(0:00) “85% of our volume disappeared overnight”: COVID hits Uber
(3:23) “We lost everything the family had”: Leaving Iran to start over
(10:12) “We’re getting a second chance”: the grit to rebuild
(13:26) “It was ignorance and desperation”: rising to lead Expedia
(17:42) “Not a particularly good one”: Dara rates himself as CEO
(20:16) “But I lost confidence”: the missed opportunity that haunts him
(23:49) “I didn’t hire you to be average”: Barry Diller on taking risks
(27:06) “At first I said no”: Turning down the Uber job
(29:45) “Everyone has a bullshit meter”: Being honest with the team
(37:10) “I was trying to put off the decision”: dreading a layoff
🎙️ Watch now: debut podcast available on all platforms.
Episode 1. Satya Nadella on “Confession with Ali Partovi”
– The interview question he still thinks about decades later
–"We won the browser war, only to lose the web"
– His son Zain and how his empathy journey began
… and much more with Microsoft CEO @satyanadella.
(0:00) “You need more empathy”: a job interview gone bad
(0:27) Welcome to Confession
(1:06) Growing up in India
(4:13) “See the world through his eyes”: the birth of his son Zain
(11:27) “I didn’t care. I didn’t listen”: failing as a manager
(16:07) “It haunts me”: lacking the courage to speak up
(19:50) “We didn’t understand that the economic value is all in search”
(26:19) Ali: “I was essentially fired… I’ve never told anyone”
Neo retweeted
I'm starting a podcast, "Confession," where I invite tech veterans to share their painful lessons.
We all connect through shared pain. Hear founders & CEOs like Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), Luana Lopes Lara (Kalshi), and others share their stories and lessons learned.
Subscribe to Confession on...
✅ Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/6x2J7r…
✅ Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=sd5spHYX…
✅ Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
@SatyaNadella @Dkhos @luanalopeslara
Neo retweeted
Important update. 🔥
Meet the @adaption_ai Grady plushie.
Cognition’s $2B raise, 100x cheaper code search, & more | Neo & Noteworthy
Check out our September recap of learnings and announcements by Neo portfolio companies and community members 💙
neo.substack.com/p/kepler-ch…
The team at @appliedcompute shared how a specialist model built with turbopuffer made large-scale code search 100x cheaper in its tests.
We can’t wait to see what the Neo community will learn, accomplish, and share in October. 🎉
Full post here:
neo.substack.com/p/kepler-ch…