Transatlanticist | Deeptech investor | Would much rather be listening to jazz.
Paris...or hopefully on a boat
Joined September 2009
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Michael Jackson retweeted
We can learn a lot from Puddleglum’s response to being told by a demonic creature from the underworld that the world he inhabits never actually existed
🚨 EXCL: Labour minister claims that visions of Britain based on warm ale, pubs, and black labradors are a 'far-Right' fantasy that 'never really existed’
dailymail.com/news/article-1…
Michael Jackson retweeted
If the MP is correct, a few months ago I chanced upon a disturbing far-right gathering outside my village pub on my way to drink warm ale
This absurd minster represents Southwold, home of Adnams. Its hinterland is replete with the pubs and countryside she despises.
Suffolk Coastal : Reform gain.
Minister says countryside of pubs and labradors is 'far-Right' fantasy mol.im/a/16167291 via @DailyMail
Michael Jackson retweeted
AMD acquires World Labs for ~$8.2b. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇
From founding to an $8.2b exit in ~2.5 years. A huge value creation event. This is a fantastic exit, especially for the co-founders and the team.
Investors will still share ~$2.3b of profits on $1.2b invested, a ~2.9x blended. Low-ish because most of the capital came in last. But it hides a lot of disparity between the various rounds!
So let's dive in:
1) The real home run: founders and team 🏆🥳
This is one of the best founder outcomes I've modelled.
@drfeifei, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall started World Labs in Apr-24. Less than 2.5 years later, they and the team still own ~56% according to my estimates. At an $8.2b valuation, that's a total prize of ~$4.6b to share between them.
Taking a 15% attributed option pool, that's ~$1.2b for the team and ~$3.4b for the four co-founders. If split equally, that's ~$850m each, in just two and a half years. 💸
And, at close, Fei-Fei Li joins AMD as EVP and Chief Scientist, reporting to Lisa Su! Legendary.
2) The buyer was already on the cap table (again) 🔁
AMD Ventures invested in the Series B and the Series C here. Now they are buying the whole company. It's the same playbook as Nvidia with Hugging Face: strategic corporates are using their venture arms as a free option on future acquisitions.
3) The standout VC winners: a16z and Radical Ventures 👑
Both backed Fei-Fei at inception, in Apr-24 at a ~$300m valuation. That Series A will return ~19x the money, or ~$1.2b of proceeds, in under 2.5 years.
Congrats to @martin_casado and team. Another mega win after Cursor and OpenRouter. The team at @a16z truly is on a generational run.
4) The star angels did well 🌟
The Sep-24 Series B had arguably the strongest AI angel list ever assembled: Geoffrey Hinton, Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Ram Shriram and more.
Priced at $1.3b, it was never going to be a 1,000x. But ~5x in two years is a ~125% IRR 📈
And the best part is: Hinton's AlexNet won the 2012 ImageNet competition, and ImageNet was the dataset Fei-Fei built. Twelve years later, he backed her company. Full circle. 🔄
5) The late money: a great IRR, but a poor multiple of money 🤏
The $1b Series C in Feb-26 at $5.4b returns ~1.5x in 7 months. That's a great IRR, but in terms of venture returns, this is a poor multiple of money. Although I am sure no one will complain about seeing DPI this quickly!
Congrats to all involved!
The CFO of a CAC 40 company once told me they avoid M&A because it just adds more employees they can’t fire.
We own a French company that makes fighter jets. Demand right now is off the charts. They could probably have 10 to 15 years of orders.
We asked them why they wouldn't boost production. Did they not have the factory space?
They said they have plenty of space. But the second they hire more people, they can't lay them off. Because of that, they're not hiring more.
When every hire is a lifetime commitment, companies stay small, and new companies don't get started.
Look at the number of startups in Western Europe compared to the United States.
The protection of workers did not protect workers in the end, because you stop creating new jobs.
Ale, pubs, and labradors do exist, and they are not ‘far-right’. The Left attacks your memories, your traditions, your history. It’s all so tiresome.
🚨 EXCL: Labour minister claims that visions of Britain based on warm ale, pubs, and black labradors are a 'far-Right' fantasy that 'never really existed’
dailymail.com/news/article-1…
Michael Jackson retweeted
From concept to reality.
@SpaceX has successfully deployed Starlink V3 satellites into Earth’s orbit and made contact with them for the first time.
At scale, one Starship carries 60 V3 satellites, the same network capacity as about 20 Falcon 9 launches.
Michael Jackson retweeted
Actually, the “Slutcon” “controversy” is very simple and straightforward. “Slutcon” an organized pimping ring.
Let me explain. Men pay thousands of dollars to attend (just like a customer!). Women apply to work the event (just like an employee!). Female workers either get paid directly, gain work connections and leverage, and/or boost their own sex work side hustle careers. Open your eyes: it’s an event organized so a group of hired female workers can financially benefit in exchange for providing sexual services that men pay for.
Aella, like millions of successful-but-aging prostitutes before her, is making the transition from prostitute to pimp (or madam, as they used to call it).
The fact that supposedly intelligent “tech people” from the “tech sphere” are such utter philistines and naïve rubes that seemingly none of you are even capable of identifying the oldest trick in the book is truly risible. Instead, what we get is literal days and days of “nuanced” and breathless discourse over “the delicate issue of Slutcon🥺”.
You are all rubes. Marks. And so utterly arrogant in your belief of your own exceptionalism that you count yourselves above human nature, too interesting to learn any human history, and that’s why this sphere is constantly defeated over and over by the simplest and pettiest villains of the human story: cults, hookers, and swindlers.
Slutcon recap:
- There's an autistic sex party. This isn't my thing, but fine, autists like sex and need help socializing and having a thing where autism is normal is for the best
- Some autistic sex preferences are out of line with mainstream sex preferences. Not normal "weird," but trigger a disgust response. Probably irrational per se, as most disgust responses are, definitely a thing that's happening.
- However, the slutcon attendees overlap 80% (lets say) with AI safety advocates, which means most attendees are politically and professionally involved in an emerging industry with public facing goals
- Therefore, professional advancement and networking are gatekept by attending the consensual rape orgy, through no fault of the organizers, because it's coincidental that the overlap is so huge
- This is also terrible publicity given that they want electoral support for their political goals
Most of the slutcon attendees are my mutuals, they're just trying to do their thing, they're not trying to do anything "wrong," but the organizers are oblivious to the fact that this is something where optics matter and it's cooking their political goals.
“the whole field's core beliefs are held by like 200 people living in the same handful of berkeley group houses who are all dating each other, so your grant reviewer is your metamour and your coauthor is your ex's primary. peer review is the polycule with extra steps.”
ok i think i finally figured out why alignment has gone basically nowhere after 15 years and several billion dollars. the problem is hard sure. but have you met the people in charge of it
1) the leadership does not know how computers work. ask one what happens when you type a url into a browser and watch them start sweating. dns is a spooky word. they genuinely believe the model lives in "the cloud" like a ghost haunting a castle
2) zero idea how large scale distributed systems work. never been paged at 3am. never watched one bad bgp announcement take half the internet offline. their big threat model is the ai "copying itself across the internet" like its a floppy disk virus from 1998. brother it needs 50 megawatts, a liquid cooling loop and a personal relationship with jensen. it is not escaping onto your smart fridge
3) they dont understand the stack they are supposedly protecting us from. ask about inference servers, kv cache, batching, egress, rate limits. blank stare. ask how the model will seize the power grid and you get a 45 minute answer with a hand drawn diagram and three links to their own blog
4) nobody can define an agent. ask ten of them and you get eleven definitions and a 30 page google doc. to the rest of us an agent is a while loop that calls tools and eats a 429 every thirty seconds. to them its a digital god in its larval stage. my agent cant book a dentist appointment without asking me three times if im sure
5) they started from "everyone dies" and worked backwards so every result is bad news somehow. model refuses, deceptive. model complies, sycophantic. model does well on evals, well now its scheming about the evals. i cant think of a single thing a model could do that would get them to say ok maybe we're fine
Michael Jackson retweeted
On France's (fragile?) Catholic revival:
Really interesting data from Le Figaro, 55% of young priests celebrate often or occasionally mass in Latin/extraordinary form, while it's basically unheard of among the oldest ones
Renewal leans trad in France
Here is a political compass based on 53 GSS questions of women by marital status and happiness level adjusted by age and race.
Women in very happy marriages lean right on both axes. The only ones.
Once you understand that the world is full of highly neurotic people who need a doom's day scenario to validate their emotions, it all makes much more sense: Malthusian starvation, pandemic, climate, and now AI. I wish we still had "the devil" to play this part.
Michael Jackson retweeted
My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You know what? Every person should hear it
Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do
Michael Jackson retweeted
Take the Manchester Arena bombing.
The state gave the bomber's parents asylum despite their "extremist views". The Royal Navy rescued him from from Libya where he'd fought in the civil war. And it paid benefits to his mother in Libya which he used to buy the bomb's components.
Michael Jackson retweeted
“My late brother Francis, staying with a French family to improve his knowledge of the language, was helping himself to cheese at dinner. The plateau included a wedge of brie, and the inexperienced Englishman, instead of slicing along the side, cut off the point, or nose. His hostess, exercising that special French skill in making foreign visitors feel at ease, remarked: ‘Je n’ai jamais vu personne qui découpât comme ça le nez d’un brie.’ Francis said that he distinctly heard, in the air above the family dining-table, the sharp hiss of the circumflex over the third person singular of the past subjunctive.”
— John Sturrock, London Review of Books 1996
