TWiST ICYMI! Founder jam sessions, "The Art of Picking," AI extinction risks
Let’s recap another great week of TWiST!
Quick snapshot of last week’s episodes:
Monday (E1764) - Gavin Baker breaks down the AI platform shift, the impact of recursive improvement, and extinction risks
Tuesday (E1765) - Founder Jam Session featuring EyeRate’s Ray Weisberg, then, Steve Jurvetson gives a presentation on discovering and identifying disruptive new technologies
Wednesday (E1766) - Founder Jam Session featuring StoneAlgo’s Devin Jones, then, Mar Hershenson gives a presentation on “The Art of Picking”
Friday (E1767) - Jason breaks down a couple of trending news topics: “Toxic Wealth” and Meta pulling news content in Canada, then, Elizabeth Yin gives a presentation on her five major learnings from 700+ startup investments
Producer’s Picks:
Jon:
Last week, the biggets “stand-out moment” Jason’s jam session with EyeRate CEO Ray Weisberg on E1765
EyeRate was a part of the LAUNCH Accelerator’s 17th cohort
Key topics include:
Lessons learned from scaling $0 to $10M in revenue
Understanding market pull
Branding, category creation, and “owning” a category
EyeRate is a unique product
Basically, it’s a customer communication platform that can turn feedback into marketing by incentivizing employees of real-world businesses to get mentioned online
The team branded itself as “employee-driven growth,” essentially creating its own business category
Jason noted how helpful branding and category creation can be for helping customers (and investors) understand your business
Hiring “bar raisers” as you scale: “What got us here might not get us there,” continually assess leadership, because as your startup scales, you need a team that can keep the train on the tracks
This is an AWESOME jam session with a bunch of tips and tricks for founders
Brian:
My highlight of the week was Mar Hershenson's presentation at Angel Summit, where she went deep on “The Art of Picking”
In the broader context, she was talking about VCs picking founders
But, to start, Mar drew a parallel between picking companies and Clive Davis's ability to identify musical talent over his 40-year career
Basically, she argued that that four traits set Davis apart, and these same traits are usually leveraged by the greatest VCs:
1) Have a unique insight and BE THERE
2) Get some early wins
3) Take advantage of the “Halo Effect”
4) Paranoia
Mar also provided an in-depth explanation of each characteristic
Make sure to have a pen and paper ready for this one! (YouTube | Apple)
Nick:
Gavin Baker joined Jason on stage at LAUNCH Angel Summit for a fireside chat
Gavin runs Atreides Capital, a crossover fund focused on technology companies
He’s also an expert on semiconductors and AI
During their chat, he broke down how impactful he thinks the generative AI platform shift will be
His take:
"If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, to quote Steve Jobs, generative AI is somewhere between a race car and a spaceship for the mind."
Generative AI should not be compared to recent tech platform shifts, like cloud, mobile, etc
Instead, it’s more akin to the invention of the rotary steam engine in the 1700s
Why? Because the rotary steam engine spawned the industrial revolution and changed every aspect of life
Humans went from ~90% working jobs in agriculture to less than 1%
Gavin believes generative AI will be bigger than the internet…
And that its impact will be somewhere between the internet… and the invention of fire
He also gave another reason he’s incredibly bullish:
"(GPT-4) is already superhuman at doing things that no human can do ... And that's just in 1-3 years (since GPT-3), without a huge amount of funding."
"$100 billion went into crypto. OpenAI basically did this on a shoestring."
"Now, that $100 billion is coming to THIS!"
Definitely check this one out. What a performance from Gavin! (YouTube | Apple)
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