This student joined Primer in the 5th percentile in math.
They'd been given every "label" the traditional system could throw at them: SLD, 12:1 ratio, behavioral interventions, etc.
5 months later:
Grew more than 98% of students in the US per MAP (now 27th percentile overall).
My Uber driver today:
Drove 90 hours/week for last 8 years. Lives in his car. Moving back to Georgia in 2 years (country, not state).
He's used his Uber earnings to buy 8 rental properties + develop 16 condos back home. When he moves back, he'll have his extended family's
Wild to me that Amazon's order confirmations intentionally hide the two most important things:
- What you ordered
- Where it's being shipped
Completely nuking their customer UX in order to keep Google from getting their commerce data.
A bunch of Redditors have started identifying stocks with high levels of short interest and manufacturing short squeezes via their Robinhood accounts, making themselves millionaires in the process. Today’s target is $GME.
The craziest thing I’ve seen in a while.
@0xgaut
This happened to my dad (paramedics insisted on ambulance ride, turned out not covered by insurance) and he negotiated a 25 year payment plan and sends a check for like $6 every month with "for extortion" on the memo line. Doing quite well with inflation.
My wife: “What are you doing?”
Me: “Defending Capitalism on Twitter.”
Her: “Capitalism doesn’t need you.”
Me: “It does.”
Her: “If its the best idea, it will win in the market.”
Meta mic drop.
In January 2020, prominent Twitter / Youtube / FB accounts were suspended for suggesting that COVID-19 may have escaped from a Wuhan Lab.
Today it looks increasingly likely that may be the case.
What happens when the censors get it wrong?
Three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a U.S. intelligence report that could add to calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the lab
Someone will eventually build a ‘Business in a Box’ startup, and they will make a lot of money.
Abstract away all the administrative work of starting a business (incorporation, taxes, first 409a, etc.), and let founders focus on product & hiring.
Stripe Atlas on steroids.
Something you may not know about San Francisco:
There are ~6 people who oppose nearly every new development in SF (residential & commercial), successfully using various loopholes and review processes to delay them by months or years.
6 people holding back an entire city.
Historic!
The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI 🇪🇺
The
#AIAct
is much more than a rulebook — it's a launchpad for EU startups and researchers to lead the global AI race.
The best is yet to come! 👍
An uncomfortable truth:
A student's 3rd grade reading level is basically ~perfectly predictive of their 8th grade & 12th grade reading levels in the traditional education system.
On my 16th birthday, my dad gave me a red bandanna.
He told me the story of a man named Welles Crowther who was on the 76th floor of the World Trade Center when the planes hit on 9/11.
Rather than running down, he ran up.
I'm fascinated by how bad we humans are at processing new risk relative to baseline risk.
Example: Say self-driving cars avoided 10,000 accident deaths/yr, but occasionally exploded leading to 4,000 deaths/yr.
We "should" all switch to them & save 6,000 lives, but no one would.
Ages on July 4, 1776:
James Monroe: 18
Marquis de Lafayette: 18
Alexander Hamilton: 21
Betsy Ross: 24
James Madison: 25
Thomas Jefferson: 33
John Adams: 40
George Washington: 44
Two generations worked together (including some very young savants) to get the job done.
"There is a subject nowadays which is taboo in the way that sexuality was once taboo, which is to talk about life as if it had any meaning." -- Nicholas Mosley
SF Supervisor
@HillaryRonen
in January: asks billionaires for donations to help fund SF schools.
74 days later: Billionaire donates $25m to help fund SF schools — she drags them and delays the rollout because she disagrees with their political views.
10,000 US-based H-1B holders applied to immigrate to Canada in the last 48 hours.
H1-B holders are, by definition, highly-skilled (must have "specialized knowledge").
We should want a virtually unlimited number of these folks in the US. Our leaders are asleep at the wheel here.
@shaunmmaguire
I had no real opinion on him previously, mostly passive awareness of the mainstream narrative. After watching, seems like he may be one of the most competent people to serve in the White House in recent history.
Who’s building co-working w/ childcare for working moms / dads?
Massive market. Offer multiple subscription tiers (5 hrs/mo — 160 hrs/mo), easy access to children during day for breastfeeding, floating desks or reserved offices depending on tier.
If you’re building this, DM me.
My borderline obsession with key moments in US History led me down a rabbit hole recently that ended with winning this at auction (for surprisingly cheap).
It’s fascinating how much energy is spent debating increasing government revenue (taxes) and how little is spent on increasing government efficiency.
For context: make the government 6% more efficient & you generate more cash than Warren’s Wealth Tax to invest however you like.
@kevinakwok
He walked me through it in detail, he approaches it like a business — he's thought through opex, capex, margin, etc. Experimented with a bunch of living situations but none of them made sense relative to what those dollars could do for him in Georgia.
Some news:
1. We raised a $15m Series A, led by Founders Fund (
@rabois
) and Khosla (@SamirKaul1), alongside many other great folks.
2. We’re launching Primer Microschools in August, a full-stack alternative to traditional education.
We should send 5 of San Francisco's Gov leaders to Tokyo for a 6 week program to work with / shadow their local leaders on transit, housing, and infrastructure.
Tokyo is everything SF could be if we had the political and social will to be a world-class city open to everyone.
This is becoming oddly contrarian, but a reminder that it's possible to build a company where you:
- Work extremely hard
- Invest in the team's growth as humans
- Build a diverse team
- Generate significant profits
- Are feared by competitors
- Make a positive impact on the world
A member of the SF School Board is up for recall.
Today, she published a defense of their work — highlighting their three biggest accomplishments over the last four years:
It’s hard to overstate how important Talent Magnets are for building great teams.
Hiring people who draw top talent in to work with them is a super power, especially early for startups.
There are 100's of stories of
@sama
going above and beyond for founders over the last decade.
Always behind the scenes. No public credit. Often putting his full reputation on the line.
@natfriedman
Ingest all relevant inputs (slack, email, whatsapp, etc.), pop in Airpods each morning, get ~10 min audio digest of what's important, take (small) actions conversationally during digest, start each day knowing where to dive in.
Sold my grandparent’s house via
@opendoor
and it lived up to the hype.
They are in an assisted living community, none of our family lives near the house anymore, and we sold it with ~3 hours of work from thousands of miles away. Felt like magic.
A friend’s startup went from $0 —> $1m in ARR growing 30% mo/mo + profitable.
Investor reaches out, then tells him no fund would invest, you aren’t ready to raise next round, etc.…
…and proceeded to try convince him to take $$ from him at a low valuation.
Don’t do this.
One of the more valuable things I’ve learned from
@rabois
:
Pay attention to anomalous user behavior and data — they are often waypoints for big unlocks waiting to be discovered.
We’re working on a series of long-form interviews with folks who were homeschooled and now doing interesting work as adults.
The first one is with
@LauraDeming
, and drops this week.
An underrated thing to do: spend time ensuring your team will get extremely rich if your startup succeeds.
There are (relatively) small things you can do like allowing + normalizing early exercising, educating on QSBS (RIP), etc. that can materially impact their outcomes.
Most people tend to join companies that would succeed with or without them, but it’s much more interesting to join companies that might fail without you.
@gbrl_dick
Starting in ~2005 my dad explained to us that the economics of recycling would soon be fundamentally broken when China stopped buying our plastic, and (only semi-jokingly) said it would be much better to throw it all in the trash to increase EV of future landfill mining.
If you visit the 9/11 memorial, there's always a red bandanna at Welles name.
Every time I'm in NYC, I stop by and think about his story — about the type of human who runs up when everyone else is running down.
@kevinakwok
Also makes me wish we could somehow compel every public figure to do at least one mostly-unedited long-form interview. I suspect we have many other severe collective misperceptions.
@DeanPreston
It’s a bit disingenuous to spend years keeping the market from building homes in SF, then blame the market for not building homes. Social housing is important. Market housing is important. Let’s build 5x more of all of it in SF and get to work changing laws to make both possible!
Underrated: how legendarily
@rippling
handled the whole SVB mess:
- Covered payrolls for their customers off their company balance sheet when funds were stranded at SVB
- Emailing 3x/day with updates + action items
- Realtime support via chat even during peak insanity
💪
Legends were made this weekend.
@sama
,
@lachygroom
,
@vkhosla
,
@SamirKaul1
+ many others were writing personal loans to founders during max uncertainty.
An entire generation of founders will remember this.
Venture backed companies had a chance to see which VCs stood by ready to assist with payroll and other short term cash needs with zero interest loans and which hemmed and hawed or claimed their GPs didn’t have capital like that guy from a multi- billion quant shop.
In the six decades that the Bay Area was center of the world for technology, we made very few credible efforts to engage, run for office, or build bridges with local politics.
This strikes me as a profound failure, and one we’re now paying the price for.
A friend is starting a podcast. He spends 15-20 hours learning about his guest before each episode.
So far every guest has commented that it was the best podcast interview they’ve ever done.
There’s still enormous alpha in doing simple things better than anyone else.
Also on my mind today:
No one (yet) knows whether this theory is correct, but how would it have changed the last year of geopolitical COVID response if these then-fringe views would have been explored seriously vs. being banned?
Every decision to censor has repercussions.
It seems there is quite a large opportunity to build a finance software product for startups that acts as a lightweight CFO — who is building this?
Automatically pull in realtime data from our bank, CC, payroll, Stripe + allow forecasting on hiring / fundraising, etc.
52% of parents have a *more* positive view of homeschooling after COVID-19.
We’re in the middle of a huge shift in the perception of homeschooling, and August will be the largest yr/yr increase in (intentional) homeschooling in history.
[Source: new
@MorningConsult
poll]
An interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed:
Industry-specific investors (EdTech, FinTech, etc.) often end up missing the biggest winners in ‘their’ industry.
I think this is because the best founders think orthogonally, and often don’t seek industry insiders for funding / advice.
Today we’re announcing something fun:
You can now cash out your
@Omni
rentals earnings into crypto, starting with XRP via Ripple’s
@Interledger
protocol.
More from
@tmcleod3
:
I tried to buy a handheld shower head to more easily bathe my kids, but apparently some unelected California bureaucrats have decided it’s illegal (?).
One of the most important things I want to help my son develop is a long attention span.
I didn’t fully grasp what an uphill battle that is to instill in a new human in our culture until recently.
Equally difficult and important.
This would be a smart evolution of pro golf in addition to PGA events: one day matches head to head, big stakes, televised, trash talk, and give players Twitter access during the round.
A product I’d love:
Show me 5 amazing hotel / Airbnb options within driving distance for a weekend overnight. Perhaps with options of beach, city, or mountains.
It’s so time intensive to try to sift through options to find this, I’d pay a lot to save the time of searching.
Inject this into my veins.
20 years from now the American Dynamism movement in tech will be obviously civilizationally important.
We’ve neglected the hardest problems — education, manufacturing, defense — for far too long. It’s finally changing.
I assumed this was a parody, but this is a real tweet from a current frontrunner for Mayor of a major US city.
It's worth considering what we do and don't accept as 'disqualifying' anymore. The people on this list represent the mass murder of 10's of millions of humans.
@equalityAlec
Out of curiosity, why continue with the ‘far-right’ straw man? It’s clearly not working, it’d be more effective to acknowledge the frustration & suggest a better solution than the recall.
There are 2x as many signors as *total* Republicans in SF (a super-set of the ‘far-right’).
Almost every startup makes the mistake of title bloat early on.
Build a company that people want to work for because of what they’ll get to build, not the title they’ll get.
Execution makes the right title obvious over time.
Startup idea: audio summaries of work comms.
oAuth email + Slack + messaging apps, use GPT or another LLM to create audio digests of overnight activity. Prioritize highest signal info / convos.
Catch up in ~5 mins in the morning via AirPods. Would pay $100/mo for this.