AI & Community Engagement @ #WHOOP #MassAICoalition
Boston, MA
Joined November 2008
- Tweets3.7K
- Following1.1K
- Followers1.3K
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WHOOP CEO, Will Ahmed: 50B Hours of Health Data, a 4 Million Member Data... youtu.be/Uc6xXNBWjfc?is=ht-e… via @YouTube
Durkin retweeted
A few months ago someone close to me lost her husband out of nowhere.
He handled all the money. She didn't know what accounts they had, where the insurance was, or who to call first. She's still piecing it together.
It made me realize how many families are one person away from the same thing.
So we built Silvia Legacy.
You choose the people you trust. If something happens to you, they get a package with a summary of your finances, a spreadsheet of every account and asset, the documents you uploaded, and a personal note from you.
I can't change what happened to her. But I can make sure fewer people end up where she was.
cfosilvia.com/blog/silvia-le…
Let’s go!
Cambridge has always been the best place in the world to be an academic researcher. These days, a lot of cutting edge research also happens in industry, and Cambridge is the home to many amazing research startups, spanning AI research, robotics, biotech, defense, and industrials.
We'd love for these two worlds to meet eachother, so we're bringing YC Paper Club to Cambridge!
if you're a researcher in industry or academia, request a spot below.
Durkin retweeted
I spent years thinking I’d never get married or have kids. Now I come home to my best friend and 4 kids yelling ‘Dad!!’ as they run at me. To me, that is success. Here’s why:
Success was always something I had difficulty defining. One individual may measure success by money in the bank. Another may place importance on their professional accolades. And someone else may define it via their material possessions. Each person is optimizing for something different.
Eventually, I found a description of success that resonated and became my personal definition.
WHOOP founder @willahmed said, “Success is being excited to go to work and being excited to come home.”
What a perfect encapsulation of how I view the world.
In my perspective, success has never been about a number, an award, or any single accomplishment. Frankly, I like to compete too much to ever admit I have ‘made it,’ so my definition of success is naturally more about the process of my life rather than a specific outcome.
A large percentage of people do not enjoy their job. They either dislike their industry, company, or colleagues. They may stay in the situation because the money is attractive or they are scared to leave for the unknown. Regardless of the reason, these individuals are unhappy for a large chunk of their day.
Many people are also dissatisfied with their personal lives. Some are single and frustrated that they haven’t found the right partner, while others are married but unhappy because they feel like strangers in their own home. And plenty of people have health or financial issues that are gnawing at them daily.
Although I have faced similar daily struggles as others, I have always felt fortunate that I enjoyed going to work and coming home each day.
Professionally, I sacrificed my time and short-term potential earnings in order to work on what truly mattered to me. I was able to become my own boss and design a career that was satisfying and exciting.
The excitement in my personal life is entirely because of my wife and my kids. Getting married and having children has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. There is nothing better than walking in the door after a long day of work and hearing the sound of little kids yell “Dad!!” as they run towards me to give me a hug.
@polinapompliano and I are genuinely each other’s best friend. We enjoy spending the majority of our time together and we feed off each other’s energy and ambition. Maybe most importantly, we are happiest when we talk about ideas and help make each other’s dreams come true.
I am just as excited to go to work as I am to come home. I know it is probably rare, but I have achieved all the success I ever wanted.
My hope for you is that you can do the same.
This is an excerpt from my new book, How To Live An Extraordinary Life Volume 2. You can buy a copy of the book here: amazon.com/How-Live-Extraord…
Durkin retweeted
Boston-based AI company ASI has raised $325 MILLION at a $3 BILLION valuation.
Its technology is already used by the FAA, U.S. military, Delta, United Airlines and National Grid.
The company plans to expand its AI research and engineering teams in Boston.
Durkin retweeted
Fun having @bryan_johnson by @Ginkgo ! Lucky to have his early support and robotic labs + AI agents in your pocket open the door to lots of new ways to approach wellness and longevity. Going to be fun coming up in this space !
Maintaining health during 10 days on the road
> to washington dc speaking with politicians
> america by design launch
> @drmichaellevin lab deep dive
> @Ginkgo AI automated biology lab
> tobi lutke car racing
Durkin retweeted
My kids are 6 weeks into @Alphaschool Park City and my primary takeaway so far is I'm mostly jealous this didn't exist when I was a kid.
Durkin retweeted
It is insane that home values go up over time.
The home should be most expensive when it is initially built. At that point, the structure is new and unused.
As the home experiences wear and tear, the home becomes used and should be worth less money over time.
A used home should cost less than a new home.
But that is not what happens.
Home prices continue to grow to the sky because the debasement of the dollar distorts the market, which enriches the home owners at the expense of the home buyer.
This is a silent wealth transfer that requires the home buyer to pay more for a less valuable product.
Just insane.
Durkin retweeted
I gave @claudeai free reign to plan our office holiday party (including the hype video). Registration in comments
Durkin retweeted
Writing this headline about this out-of-this-word presentation marking a monumental technical achievement reiterates that WSJ has given up writing credible accounts of reality for regular people to read.
Durkin retweeted
Brian - this is a worthy mission.
We should figure out how to work together, since @cfosilvia has the most accurate AI model on the important personal finance topics.
We accomplished this by reducing our dependency on the frontier models and owning our own stack, including a proprietary harness, custom model router, fine-tuned models, proprietary data pipelines, and a custom built internal coding agent.
In addition, we have over $60 billion in assets already connected to the platform and likely one of the largest data sets in the world of wealthy people talking to AI models about personal finance topics.
You know where to find me when you are ready :)
Durkin retweeted
Spoke with a 70 year old skeptical about AI and I asked him why: massive $$ investments with unclear returns, water usage (I debunked that one in realtime with data), huge energy needs, risks of rogue agents hacking, and massive labor shifts.
Then I asked him about the best arguments he’d heard in favor of more AI investment: “hmm… maybe curing cancer?”
We’ve got a lot to do. We’re not talking about all the ways this is going to improve quality of life for all humanity. And no one outside our bubble sees the spectacular opportunity ahead
Durkin retweeted
Cambridge, MA lab space owners should take this advice and make all those empty biotech buildings into robot startup space
Boston lab space is 28.9% empty. The Bay Area is at 30.7%. Houston is at 26.3%.
The XBI is up more than 20% this year. So why is no one moving back into these labs?
Honestly, it shouldn't surprise anyone. Back in 2021 and 2022, the whole game was cramming as many researchers and benches into a building as you could. A few things changed that pretty fast.
- AI-native biotechs lease about a third less space per person.
- Pharma is licensing molecules and sending manufacturing overseas. When we ran a talk at MBC Biolabs, we heard that close to 80% of the companies there outsource some or all of their manufacturing to Chinese firms.
- Later-stage companies want office, not lab. They're managing assets already in trials.
The lab of 2026 just looks different. Teams are smaller. The science is AI-native. And a lot of the actual work isn't happening in Boston or SF anymore. It's happening in Shanghai and Suzhou.
The R&D that does happen here is smaller, leaner, and set up to scale out somewhere else. Those teams don't need rows of benches. They need machines. If your building has 500 benches but not a single mass spec, liquid handler, or flow cytometer, nobody's going to want it. The equipment is the real bottleneck for early-stage work.
The few groups that still want big footprints are building them around robots and power. @LilaSciences grabbed about 244,000 sq ft at Alewife Park in Cambridge for autonomous labs. @medra_ai put hundreds of robots into a concrete industrial building in SF.
So here's the uncomfortable part. These buildings were built for a tenant that doesn't exist anymore. That tenant isn't coming back. Leaving the space empty and hoping 2021 returns isn't a plan.
You have to rebuild it for who actually needs space now.
- Deep tech and hard tech. I've been talking with groups here in SF, and a lot of robotics and hardware teams are looking for exactly this kind of space. Strong floors, real power, good ventilation. Retrofitting a lab is way faster than building new.
- Incubators built around machines, not benches. Rip out the bench rows and put in the instruments early-stage companies can't afford on their own.
MBC Biolabs is already doing this. Shared instruments, shared equipment, small teams that don't need 50,000 sq ft.
Landlords who follow that blueprint will fill their buildings. The ones waiting on 2021 are going to keep sitting empty.