Backing founders with capital and sprints @charactercap. Author of SPRINT, CLICK, and MAKE TIME. ex-@gvteam @youtube @google
Joined July 2006
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John Zeratsky retweeted
Folks, this is the most underrated tweet of the day. @jazer and Jake Knapp truly wrote the bible on this concept. It literally contains several examples shown in this infographic (gardening and making your own dinner).
There is a blog article on the book website mentioning similar adjacent ideas. The blog article is titled: "Adding Friction is Key to Breaking a Habit of Distraction" : maketime.blog/article/wendy-…
It is truly one of my favorite books though, so instead of liking or bookmarking the attached tweet, and never actually reading the tweet or thinking about it, maybe you should just buy the paper copy of the OG book:
maketime.blog/
Realized I’ve been right on schedule with this stuff too…
In 2016–17 I writing the Time Dorks newsletter which turned into my book Make Time
In 2006-07 I was getting books from Chicago Public Library about minimalism and “the simple life” and financial independence
In 1996-97 I was in high school, and the two things I was most obsessed with were playing music and sailing
In 1986-87 I was really into toy tractors and wooden blocks
God I just endlessly love how this becomes a thing every 10 years
— says the guy who wrote a book about this thing ~10 years ago
Sometimes I like to think about how, in Mac OS, pressing the Return key renames a file.
Of course there's a story about this. Apparently in the original Mac OS, if you clicked on a file and started typing, it would rename it.
Can you imagine?! Was renaming files like way more common in 1984?? I don't know!
Anyway, upon seeing this, the team said, "hey that's not great we should make it more difficult to rename files. I KNOW... how about THE RETURN KEY!!"
And that's it. That's the end of the story.
42 years later, this bizarre interaction remains. It's really weird!
Be careful out there, folks. And choose your keybindings carefully.
Oh and let's not forgot the other totally intuitive and not weird at all way to rename a file in Mac OS: Click on the file, and then click on the filename, but not too fast or it'll register as a double-click and open the file, and the filename will become editable.
Of course, this got much simpler in 1997 when Mac OS finally added right-click! But the old ways remain...
John Zeratsky retweeted
1) Today we're announcing Atomwell, our state-of-the-art foundation model for predicting experimental outcomes, alongside scaling laws for molecular discovery.
We trained models from 800M to 9B parameters on ~80M experimental measurements, and found clean scaling laws in both model size and data.
AI has made fraud easy. Extend makes catching it easy, too. Absolutely huge launch!
AI-generated fake documents grew 500% last year, and humans can no longer tell the difference
That's why we’re launching Extend Verify, the first document fraud detection API built for agents
Verify catches the fastest growing types of document fraud, including:
- fully AI-generated documents
- localized AI edits (down to a single modified character)
- patched text, overlays, and in-painting from Photoshop, PDF editors, and coding agents
- digital tampering after a document was signed
- and many more
In our internal evals, Verify detected over 96% of AI-generated and tampered documents.
Verify is available today: extend.ai/verify/request-acc…
Having just finished 60 interviews for Character Labs (and reviewed a few thousand startups so far this year), a few observations:
• the sheer number of brave and driven people who want to start companies is simply inspiring
• many of them are not from the US; India is remarkably overrepresented
• many of them are solo founders; that's cool!
• feels like the floor is much lower now because of AI; you used to need a pretty good engineer to start a software company, now it's much more accessible
• very few of these companies need to or should raise venture capital
• very few are on the "venture-scale" path; it's not clear to me whether that is intentional on their part or not (I assume not because they are reaching out to a venture capital firm)
• very few are truly ambitious; not a bad thing, and I admire anyone who starts a company, but only <10% of the startups we see are properly BIG ideas
• the difference between builder and founder feels greater than before; again, it's easier to build, but founding/growing a company and business is still exceptionally hard
• there has always been a venn diagram of "good business" and "venture backable," and I think the overlap is really small right now — not totally for principled reasons; a lot of it is fashion and consensus
Instinct should get its recs from recleague.com
Instinct Selections
We’re bringing human taste to the core of our product. We’re partnering with local chefs, designers, architects, travel guides, and more to create curated recommendations in the areas they know best.
The next time you're looking for a restaurant, Instinct can pull from a list handpicked by chefs who know the hidden gems in your area. If you want to find a new trail to explore, Instinct can draw on recommendations from local guides and suggest a few routes that fit your preferences. And if you're looking to add some color to your home, Instinct will find pieces from independent designers that match your style, space, and budget.
Our goal is to deliver world-class recommendations that are differentiated in quality from what you might find on the internet, and from what other chatbots produce.
We’re rolling out access to Instinct Selections to our early access program, and plan to make it generally available soon. This is a project we’ve been working on since the start of the company and one that I’m personally extremely excited for.
Next week is our demo day for Character Labs!
We have room for a few more investors... if you are actively writing checks at inception/pre-seed and want to join us, DM me!
It's Tuesday, October 20 in downtown SF.
And here's a sample of the companies presenting:
• Ex-Stanford engineering team building GPU benchmarking and reliability optimization
• Ex-Caltech research team building whole brain models for animals and human
• Ex-Amazon geospatial experts building the AI harness for rapid land-use decisions
• @TimeCopilot, the open-source agent for accurate and complex time-series forecasts
This type of closed-loop context is the unlock for AI applications that deliver results.
Easier to do with code/math, where the data's already there.
Harder to do in the physical world, where you need a lab to close the verification loop.
So cool to see portfolio company @bindwell sharing this publicly!
We built an 8000 sqft. high-throughput wet-lab in 30 days, to solve molecular discovery - starting with pesticides.
Most teams in drug-discovery don’t receive target-organism verification until clinical trials. Pesticides allow us to rapidly validate our model in the target organism directly. With the help of our high-throughput lab, we were able to generate compounds that killed a $13 billion pest, the Fall Armyworm.
We believe that the bitter lesson is coming for biology.
[On competition with the frontier labs]
Expired: The opportunity is big enough for multiple winners
Tired: Anthropic won't do this because [reasons]
Wired: Anthropic is doing this but we're better
There are only three kinds of podcasts:
1. TBPN — CNBC for tech
2. Invest Like the Best — Oprah for tech
3. All-In — we decided to record our zoom call
Guess I'll have to get a Duo!
Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo. Open the Duo to pick and 'insert' the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening.
Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman!
It was fun making this at @bitrig hacks today.