Doing things @stepchange_vc Climate Papa. Ex-Stripe, Ex-Google product shipper.
Seattle
Joined January 2009
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The Grid: The Largest Machine Ever Built - now live in all podcast apps! stepchange.show/grid
The grid powers everything around you. And it is in crisis. We cannot build AI, decarbonize our economy, or deliver affordable electricity if we don’t rebuild. And yet, the largest machine humankind has ever made is a miracle.
For nearly a century, electricity got cheaper every decade and the grid became so reliable that we stopped thinking about it altogether. This machine was not designed; it accumulated through a century and a half of decisions with unforeseen consequences. And now we are demanding that this aging, fragmented system grow faster than it has in generations.
To understand the struggle and opportunity of this moment, we have to understand how the grid came to be. It is an epic story of inventors and electrocutions, of a man who brought power to the masses and then lost everything, of an America that built massive new industries to win wars, of regulatory ambition and regulatory failure, of catastrophic blackouts, and of a trillion-dollar energy transition we are living through right now.
Thank you to @CrusoeAI, our presenting sponsor.
This is the fourth episode of @stepchange_vc where we explore the technologies and systems that have transformed human civilization. Hosted by me and @anayshah.
Ben Eidelson retweeted
A favorite optimistic view of the future of AI is from a pessimistic book that not about AI: "Rise and Fall of American Growth," which argues that we had a one-time explosion in living standards from 1870 and 1920 (& later outside the US).
In 1870: no toilets, no city plumbing, lamp light, no central heating, little public health, horses for local travel, etc. In 50 years, all of this was solved & the nation was electrified. In the next fifty modern medicine, air travel and telecommunication happened.
The book then points out that we have had no changes in lifestyle of similar scale since the 1970s. Written in 2016, it argued that we would likely never experience another boom like the "Special Century." The positive view of AI should make us ask "But what if we do?" and "How do we make it all go right?"
Turns out the market likes the sane rule of law. Maybe it’s good for long term investing.
Often said by @reidhoffman
I don’t think founders realize how brand damaging it is to have Claude make their decks.
Use it to help improve and edit. Lean too hard and it feels like you don’t own your business outcomes.
One of the best ways to make a long last battery is... many small batteries.
So much for the myth that long-duration storage doesn't already exist.
It has for a long time.
Many scientists did not even understand that it is possible to concatenate short-duration batteries to run one after the other to produce long-duration storage.
And the 17.3 GW of batteries on the CAISO grid, if bought new, cost only ~$0.003/kWh-grid-electricity produced, or 1/100th the retail price of grid electricity.
Why AGI will take a long while to do things…
diffusion of technology is MUCH slower than it should be.
Fun fact, @UCSF still requires faxes for referrals. It is the year 2026.
Less fun fact: they sometimes truncate long faxes, and then reject referrals for "lack of sufficient clinical notes"
The time and money wasted here (not to mention deferral of care) is mind boggling
We need to spend a lot more time talking about good vs. bad ways to build out infra.
Example:
Also, let's be honest. The real cure to the know-it-all issue was the invention of podcasting.
Let all the know-it-all tendencies go into the feed.
But when you do actually need to know-it-all, @falconer_ai is there.
Trillions are pouring into the race to build the first general superintelligence, but leveraging your own specialized know-it-all is now possible as of today.
I built the knowledge systems at @stripe and @uber. Then I helped Anthropic, Metronome, and Graphite build a killer developer experience. Everyone wants Stripe-level quality, but that bar is too low.
Falconer gives you and your customers complete, specialized intelligence: an internal knowledge base and external documentation in one beautiful package. Falconer is the ultimate trust engine to manage your context: self-driving, observable, and agent-friendly.
I co-founded @falconer_ai with @mbenedetto212 and assembled a team of know-it-all builders. We're backed by fellow know-it-alls @thegp, @BoxGroup, @svangel, @karimatiyeh, @benln, @zachlloydtweets, @CeciStalls, @MerrillLutsky, @scottmac, @malthe, and @adamjstevenson, with angels from Anthropic, Stripe, Meta, Cursor, Replit, and more.
Frontier intelligence companies like @FireworksAI_HQ and @⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛; fintech companies like @payabli and @vori; and healthtech companies like @thatch_ai use @falconer_ai because they all share the same vision as us: the knowledge you earn should belong to you.
Now you can know everything, so you can build anything.
Masterclass in marketing.
Proud to be following @capitaltruist on the journey to building the best knowledge system for everyone.
He and the team will keep chipping away until everyone has this problem solved.
And proud to be a (minor) investor.
Trillions are pouring into the race to build the first general superintelligence, but leveraging your own specialized know-it-all is now possible as of today.
I built the knowledge systems at @stripe and @uber. Then I helped Anthropic, Metronome, and Graphite build a killer developer experience. Everyone wants Stripe-level quality, but that bar is too low.
Falconer gives you and your customers complete, specialized intelligence: an internal knowledge base and external documentation in one beautiful package. Falconer is the ultimate trust engine to manage your context: self-driving, observable, and agent-friendly.
I co-founded @falconer_ai with @mbenedetto212 and assembled a team of know-it-all builders. We're backed by fellow know-it-alls @thegp, @BoxGroup, @svangel, @karimatiyeh, @benln, @zachlloydtweets, @CeciStalls, @MerrillLutsky, @scottmac, @malthe, and @adamjstevenson, with angels from Anthropic, Stripe, Meta, Cursor, Replit, and more.
Frontier intelligence companies like @FireworksAI_HQ and @⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛; fintech companies like @payabli and @vori; and healthtech companies like @thatch_ai use @falconer_ai because they all share the same vision as us: the knowledge you earn should belong to you.
Now you can know everything, so you can build anything.
Some may call tomorrow a festivus, for the rest of us.
Big @AcquiredFM drop!
“This is, of course, a tremendous breakthrough. In centuries past, scientists and mathematicians were limited in their ability to solve problems by their ability to understand the solutions. This bottleneck has been removed, and now there is no theoretical limit to the amount of scientific and mathematical factoids we can fail to understand.”
This looks very cool.
Our newest book is finally here!
Making the Modern Laboratory is a spectacular 504-page hardcover that tells the story of everything in the research laboratory and how it came to be, from pipettes to heat-resistant glass to microscopes and more.
It features dozens of articles (most of which will never appear in print), 100+ full-color images, and original writing from 36 authors. It's printed on Arena Natural Rough paper from Fedrigoni. These books are THICC and would make a great gift for both the science-curious and the working scientist. :)
We have spent the last year working on this project. It has been an insane labor of love. The best way to support our independent science journalism is to buy a copy. <3
Pre-order for $49, with free shipping: press.asimov.com/articles/mo…
It's finally a joy to enter K1s at tax time.
(tip: first redact SSNs, then process, then have agents fill out forms and double check work, etc.)
h/t @neidelson
Wild how fast the cost curve is moving in AI models.
We unpack this whole era of flat growth in stepchange.show/grid
"Energy Capacity = Economic Capacity"
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on why America's power grid is the ceiling on growth:
"We went through 10 to 15 years where essentially I was taking coal offline at the rate I was adding renewables, and essentially the nation was flatlined in terms of overall energy capacity."
"So essentially our economic capacity as a nation, flat for fifteen years."
"Even with that, we've gone to maybe increasing our national energy capacity 4% per year. Going from essentially zero to one."
"Nuclear as base load is a fabulous thing that we want to go build more of. Unfortunately all of our renewables have deep dependencies in China."
"Energy capacity somewhat dampens how euphoric we can get on AI. Why build a new data center and buy the million GPUs if I can't power them?"
@PGelsinger @RaghuRaghuram @appenz