plover labs (yc f26) • previously AI research + neural rendering + vision pro
San Francisco, CA
Joined June 2020
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If you like 3D graphics, I wrote a high-level post on the difference between Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). It's a ten min read, and aims to educate those not as familiar with the field of neural rendering. Link and some snippets below. 1/5
you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself get vibe coded
I recreated subvocal in 9 minutes with one prompt for AirPods Pro 3.
Source: github.com/joeblau/subvox
hmm not just a human alignment problem, it's a talent scarcity problem
there's actually not a lot of truly ai-fluent engineers out there, and the ones who are work for top ai-native companies
I encourage anyone who is leading an engineering org to read this in its entirety. It is short, extremely well written, and very much directionally correct. The job and the organization needs to entirely change to take full advantage of these tools.
That path is largely a human alignment challenge at this point. If you are a leader, your job is to get people on the new ship, and get them sailing together. The old ship doesn’t exist anymore, although many people wish it did and are incentivized to continue to believe it exists.
Software Engineering is an entirely different thing now, and the faster you can get your org to understand this and align on how to work now, the less painful it will be for you long term. If you don’t do it, I simply believe your org won’t exist because it will get disrupted by an org that does
dm me if you’re a @CarnegieMellon founder!
our community is fragmented and we’re trying to change that
our talent beats any other college
im a 2nd time VC-backed founder and think joining YC was the best thing i could've done
we got connected to the vps of meta, apple, etc from this event
come at me with your reasons why you think yc isn't a good fit for you and ill debunk every single one of them!
Your first enterprise customer is the hardest one to get.
At YC, they come to you.
Last week we launched Early Access Network: 30 companies, 100+ enterprise leaders, one room, months before Demo Day.
Now part of every YC batch. Apply for W27 by Nov 2: ycombinator.com/apply
every few months the memo gets a little more honest
today it’s anthropic tomorrow it’ll be someone else
if you had 2 cofounders, raised from top teir vc, exited for a few billion dollars, you still wouldnt make as much as employee #400 at Anthropic will from the IPO.
Just let that sink in for a moment
we’re so far away from general purpose robots
continually surprised how this is such a hot take to have
but hey what do i know, not like i was a former robotics researcher (i was)
I see how some people can watch flashy robot demos on the timeline and think with a shiver that the robot apocalypse is around the corner, but reality check:
There is no robot in the world that can change the batteries in a jack-o-lantern.
If you have a robot friendly door handle it might be able to walk outside, pick it up, and carry it back inside. The robot could open the drawer with your batteries in it, but then things get tough.
Opening the package of AA batteries?
Extracting a precision screwdriver from its case?
Unscrewing four tiny screws that require a hard press and twist?
Popping batteries out of the case?
Yes, you could build and train a specialist robot to do that today, but there is a very long way to go to replace the full range of human capabilities. Near term doomer scenarios should stop at “secretly controlling humanity” instead of “wiping humanity out” 😀
in the current yc batch at it seems like:
- the hot startups are selling commoditized products. this is good and bad. good because you can get fast revenue. bad because you have many similar competitors and they're all also making money
- it's still super unclear who the standout winners will be, esp as some teams are just 3 months old, others are 3 years old
- some teams are very focused on optimizing for demo day. some aren't at all. only time will tell which wins, but i bet demo day success isn't correlated with long-term success at all
- that said, the smartest teams will benefit from YC nonetheless. e.g. instead of blindly following YC advice for "sell more", it forces the best founders to actually answer whether it's right for them to sell more right now, or if they should focus on something else. and that critical thinking will lead to increasingly more conviction to win
to my xr folk:
anyone else still geeking out about the 3d reconstruction scene from you can see everything? that camera set is wild
pity that at the dinner table they were just using a big monitor to render the final mesh, not a light field display like the looking glass 65in
won a @CarnegieMellon robotics competition with the same approach!
goal was to self-drive across the campus. this was 2015. our robot used a smartphone as it's brain. chassis was lego and 3d prints
here's a pic of him
not surprising, the best programmers i know have changed how they develop software now with AI
"[Linux] is *NOT* some kind of "social warrior" project, never has been,
and never will be." — Linus lore.kernel.org/linux-media/…
owning your intelligence means owning your own evals
can't do one without the other
META’S HEAD OF AI SLAMS AI BENCHMARKS
"it’s some PhD student who made these benchmarks"
"you’re kind of outsourcing all of your product thinking to this viral benchmark"
"so clearly that’s wrong"
I think there is something to this. the whole industry developed so rapidly that there was hardly any time to establish proper benchmarking. companies used what was available, competitors then had to catch up on the same benchmarks, and some of them eventually became industry standards
apparently there is quite a lot of randomness and chance in how we are measuring AI progress today
in a world where we can take nothing for granted in software engineering, vim reigns supreme
can attest as someone who swims with some crazy people
the only problem is mac studios that can run this are sold out til feb 😭😭
Muse Spark Open -- weights releasing today -- runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple.
nightmare fuel if you’re a female founder lol
so far this past 2 batches of yc founders have
1. tried to enter my apartment by following me and making small talk at 11pm
2. hit me with a car outside of my house
3. doxxed my gf's tiktok
4. tried to talk to me while i was at the bottom of a squat
5. grabbed my arm before getting into an uber to pitch me their startup
please guys be normal
another one is know your funnel metrics
years ago this would be annoying but you can literally have codex crunch through this in an hour
we do linkedin so the metrics we tracked were connection acceptance rate, reply rate and demo rate
@ycombinator taught us this!
quick lessons from signing a six-figure b2b deal the other day
- takes way longer than you'd think (took us 6 months)
- initially the deal fell through, but with b2b you never know if it was just initially a timing issue. so just stay in touch
- the advice that people buy from friends is true. and makes sense, that's how we found our design agency too, from a college friend of mine
- founders really care about 10x-ing their company right now. and we're enabling that so we got the deal. cost is still not a big issue yet
- be ready to close. i got an out-of-the-blue call that they're intersted, so we dove in and closed it the following week. momentum is everything
bonus: i thought i'd celebrate but the deal took so long that now im just relieved it's closed haha
will post more learnings as i reflect more this week
quick lessons from signing a six-figure b2b deal the other day
- takes way longer than you'd think (took us 6 months)
- initially the deal fell through, but with b2b you never know if it was just initially a timing issue. so just stay in touch
- the advice that people buy from friends is true. and makes sense, that's how we found our design agency too, from a college friend of mine
- founders really care about 10x-ing their company right now. and we're enabling that so we got the deal. cost is still not a big issue yet
- be ready to close. i got an out-of-the-blue call that they're intersted, so we dove in and closed it the following week. momentum is everything
bonus: i thought i'd celebrate but the deal took so long that now im just relieved it's closed haha
will post more learnings as i reflect more this week
