Essays, empirical models, and curated reading notes across deeptech, AI systems, biotech, and strategy.
One of the great lessons of the last few years of geopolitics and economics is that it’s not enough to simply have moral/legal authority and money, real power and prosperity requires actual physical inventory and manufacturing capacity. In a world where Russia is willing to buck sanctions and condemnation to invade a sovereign nation and where trade barriers / epidemics can...
When I was an elementary school student and first heard of “global warming”, I thought the solution to climate change was simple: just plant more trees! 🌳 While I now know there’s a great deal more complexity to the problem than that, I have always wondered what would happen if someone had tried out that little boy’s instinct.
Immune cell therapies like CAR-T continue to provide some nearly miraculous therapeutic power. In addition to handling solid tumors, it turns out CAR-T can also be used to treat autoimmune disorders like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and ulcerative colitis. By engineering CAR-T cells to attack B-cells, the body’s factories for the autoantibodies that do the damage in an...
What makes this social change — where parents, especially in East and Southeast Asia, previously heavily favored having male children and now much less so — extra surprising is that many of the technological factors that drove the gender selection preference (such as access to early gender testing and IVF) have dramatically improved over time. ---
Despite all the speculation over why Amazon is laying off 14,000 workers, as of this writing, and with a few exceptions I’ll note below, I don’t personally worry a great deal about AI taking away jobs currently. The reason is that while new AI agent based services and products are becoming better at replacing humans at certain tasks: * Many tasks are not automatable —...
Earlier this year, a Chinese company called DeepSeek took the AI world by surprise by releasing an incredibly cheap, performant reasoning model called DeepSeek R1. The result was an outpour of commentary on how Meta’s open sourcing of Llama led to its creation, whether or not the reported lower training cost for DeepSeeek’s model meant the end of NVIDIA’s business, and whether...
Source: Nano Banana Turning 40 is a milestone that should come with a manual. It doesn’t, of course, but it does come with a decade’s worth of receipts for lessons learned the old fashioned way. As I ponder the next decade ahead of me, I’ve been reflecting on the things I picked up in the last one that have shaped my understanding of people and the world around me.
Huntington’s Disease is one of the classic “uncurable” neurodegenerative diseases. A genetic mutation produces a mutant form of a protein (called Huntingtin) which leads to sudden onset of symptoms which gets progressively worse until death. It’s so bad that it’s considered a “textbook” example of the need for genetic counseling when people are considering getting their DNA...
Let’s summarize the case for measles vaccination: Measles is deadly — prior to the measles vaccine, of the 500,000 cases/yr that were reported, 400-500 died and 48,000 were hospitalized. Measles clears immune memory, making people who recover more susceptible to infections afterwards — This phenomena is called “immune amnesia” and seems to be mediated by the measles virus...
Nutrition is a field that is fraught with studies that are not powered or designed well enough to make strong conclusions about what types of diets are the “best”. So it was interesting to see this article dig into the evidence over whether or not ultra-processed foods, a category that itself is a little hard to pin down — somehow we’re supposed to find it “natural” that...
Among the obvious hallmarks of authoritarianism are: 1. Arbitrary paranoia from on high — where students singing patriotic songs on bike rides are suddenly viewed to be a threat 2. Contradiction between reality and what the state wants you to believe — where state media simultaneously can champion “Labubu blind boxes” as signs of cultural & economic success but also frivolous...
It’s been a long time coming but China Evergrande (which I blogged about nearly 2 years ago!), once China’s largest property developer and who’s debt crisis is widely viewed as the “Lehman Brothers” moment in China’s property crisis, has finally been de-listed, about 18 months after it was ordered to be liquidated.
One of the major contributors to improved healthcare outcomes and reduced mortality in the post-World War II era was the widespread use of antibiotics. Able to treat infection, these miracle drugs literally transformed bacteria from humanity’s primary killer to a manageable problem. But, in recent decades, the decline in the discovery of novel antibacterials (and other...
Tech strategy is difficult AND fascinating because it’s unpredictable. In addition to worrying about the actions of direct competitors (i.e. Samsung vs Apple), companies need to also worry about the actions of ecosystem players (i.e. smartphones and AI vendors) who may make moves that were intended for something else but have far-reaching consequences.
Helsinki, Finland (population: ~650,000) has not had a single car cash related death in over a year! That is impressive! They believe a combination of lower speed limits, improved pedestrian / cycling infrastructure, public transit improvement, and traffic camera all contributed. While Americans love cars (this writer included!), the fact that roughly 40,000 Americans die each...
(Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting) If you’ve been following my selfhosting journey, you’ll know that I host some web applications — among them, network storage for my family, tools for working with PDFs, media streamers, a newsreader, etc. — from an inexpensive home server on my home network.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated they can do many things well enough, it’s important to remember that these are not “thinking machines” so much as impressively competent “writing machines” (able to figure out what words are likely to follow). Case in point: both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot lost to the chess playing engine of an old Atari game...
Republicans have declared a “war on Harvard” in recent months and one front of that is a request to the SEC to look at how Harvard’s massive endowment values illiquid assets like venture capital and private equity. What’s fascinating is that in targeting Harvard in this way the Republicans may have declared war on Private Equity and Venture Capital in general.
The promise of immune cell therapies is to direct the incredible sophistication of the immune system to the medical targets we want to hit. In the case of CAR-T cells, we take a patient’s own immune T-cells and “program” them through genetic modification to go after cancer cells. While the process of the genetic modification to create those cells is still incredibly expensive...
This is an old piece from Morgan Housel from May 2023. It highlights how optimistic expectations can serve as a “debt” that needs to be “paid off”. To illustrate this, he gives a fascinating example — the Japanese stock market. From 1965 to 2022, both the Japanese stock market and the S&P500 (a basket of mostly American large companies) had similar returns.
I am a selfhoster (as anyone who’s read many of my more recent blog posts knows). I’m also a fan of the selfh.st site (which documents a lot of news & relevant interviews from the self-host world) so I was delighted to see the owner of selfh.st get interviewed in Ars Technica. Nothing earth-shattering but I appreciated (and agreed with) his breakdown of why self-hosting is...
Medical Guidelines are incredibly important — they impact everything from your doctor’s recommendations and insurance coverage to the medications your insurance covers — but are somewhat shrouded in mystery. This piece from Emily Oster’s ParentData is a good overview of what they are (and aren’t) — and give a pretty good explanation of why a headline from the popular press is...
I spotted this memo from Oaktree Capital founder Howard Marks and thought it was a sobering and grounded take on what makes a stock market bubble and reasons to be alarmed about the current concentration of market capitalization in the so-called “Magnificent Seven” and how eerily similar this was to the “Nifty Fifty” or the “Dot Com Bubble” eras of irrational exuberance.
As a Span customer, I’ve always appreciated their vision: to make home electrification cleaner, simpler, and more efficient through beautifully designed, tech-enabled electrical panels. But, let’s be honest, selling a product like this directly to consumers is tough. Electrical panels are not top-of-mind for most people until there’s a problem — and explaining the value...
One of the most exciting technological developments from the semiconductor side of things is the rapid development of the ecosystem around the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). One landmark in its rise is that the architecture appears to be moving beyond just behind-the-scenes projects to challenging Intel/AMD’s x86 architecture and ARM (used by Apple and...
While growing vehicle electrification is inevitable, it always surprised me that US automakers would drop past plug-in hybrid (PHEV) technology to only embrace all-electric. While many have attacked Toyota’s more deliberate “slow-and-steady” approach to vehicle electrification, it always seemed to me that, until we had broadly available, high quality electric vehicle charging...
Inspired by some work from a group at Stanford on building a lab from AI agents, I’ve been experimenting with multi-agent AI conversations and workflows. But, because the space (at least to me) has seemed more focused on building more capable agents rather than coordinating and working with more agents, the existing tools and libraries have made it difficult to carry out fast...
The shipping industry is known for being fairly dirty environmentally due largely to the fact that the most common fuel used in shipping — bunker fuel — contributes both to carbon emissions, significant air pollution, and water pollution (from spills and due to the common practice of dumping the byproduct of sulphur scrubbing to curtail air pollution).
One of the most exciting areas of technology development, but that doesn’t get a ton of mainstream media coverage, is the race to build a working quantum computer that exhibits “below threshold quantum computing” — the ability to do calculations utilizing quantum mechanics accurately. One of the key limitations to achieving this has been the sensitivity of quantum computing...
I had never heard of this framework for thinking about how to address problems before. Shout-out to my friend Chris Yiu and his new Substack Secret Weapon about improving productivity for teaching me about this. It’s surprisingly insightful about when to think about something as a process problem vs an expertise problem vs experimentation vs direction. ---
The best return on investment in terms of hours of deep engagement per dollar in entertainment is with games. When done right, they blend stunning visuals and sounds, earworm-like musical scores, compelling story and acting, and a sense of progression that are second to none. Case in point: I bought the complete edition of the award-winning The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for $10...
Everywhere you look, the message seems clear: early detection (of cancer & disease) saves lives. Yet behind the headlines, companies developing these screening tools face a different reality. Many tests struggle to gain approval, adoption, or even financial viability. The problem isn’t that the science is bad — it’s that the math is brutal.
The rise of Asia as a force to be reckoned with in large scale manufacturing of critical components like batteries, solar panels, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and semiconductors has left US and European governments seeking to catch up with a bit of a dilemma. These activities largely moved to Asia because financially-motivated management teams in the West (correctly) recognized...
Beautiful map laying out when humans settled different parts of the world (from 2013, National Geographic’s Out of Eden project) ---
A few months ago, I shared that I had built an AI-powered personalized news reader which I use (and still do) on a near-daily basis. Since that post, I’ve made a couple of major improvements (which I have just reflected in my public Github). Switching to JAX I previously chose Keras 3 for my deep learning algorithm architecture because of its ease of use as well as the...
The pursuit of carbon-free energy has largely leaned on intermittent sources of energy — like wind and solar; and sources that require a great deal of initial investment — like hydroelectric (which requires elevated bodies of water and dams) and nuclear (which require you to set up a reactor). The theoretical beauty of geothermal power is that, if you dig deep enough,...
A recent preprint from Stanford has demonstrated something remarkable: AI agents working together as a team solving a complex scientific challenge. While much of the AI discourse focuses on how individual large language models (LLMs) compare to humans, much of human work today is a team effort, and the right question is less “can this LLM do better than a single human on a...
(Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting) I’ve been using OpenMediaVault 6 on a cheap mini-PC as a home server for over a year. Earlier this year, OpenMediaVault 7 was announced which upgrades the underlying Linux to Debian 12 Bookworm and made a number of other security, compatibility, and user interface improvements.
As a kid, I remember playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0 — while I can’t say I really understood all the nuances of the several hundred page manual (which explained how ailerons and rudders and elevators worked), I remember being blown away with the idea that I could fly anywhere on the planet and see something reasonably representative there.
It is hard to find good analogies for running a startup that founders can learn from. Some of the typical comparisons — playing competitive sports & games, working on large projects, running large organizations — all fall short of capturing the feeling that the odds are stacked against you that founders have to grapple with.
Until I read this Verge article, I had assumed that video codecs were a boring affair. In my mind, every few years, the industry would get together and come up with a new standard that promised better compression and better quality for the prevailing formats and screen types and, after some patent licensing back and forth, the industry would standardize around yet another MPEG...
The Dartmouth College Class of 2024, for their graduation, got a very special commencement address from tennis legend Roger Federer. There is a wealth of good advice in it, but the most interesting point that jumped out to me is that while Federer won a whopping 80% of the matches he played in his career, he only won 54% of the points.
Strong regional industrial ecosystems like Silicon Valley (tech), Boston (life science), and Taiwan (semiconductors) are fascinating. Their creation is rare and requires local talent, easy access to supply chains and distribution, academic & government support, business success, and a good amount of luck. But, once set in place, they can be remarkably difficult to unseat.
Fascinating chart from Bloomberg showing level of economic freedom and prosperity under different Chinese rulers and how Xi Jinping is the first Chinese Communist Party ruler in history to have presided over sharp declines in both freedom and prosperity. Given China’s rising influence in economic and geopolitical affairs, how it’s leaders (and in particular, Xi) and it’s...
Summary Electrifying our (Bay Area) home was a complex and drawn-out process, taking almost two years. * Installing solar panels and storage was particularly challenging, involving numerous hurdles and unexpected setbacks. * We worked with a large solar installer (Sunrun) and, while the individuals we worked with were highly competent, handoffs within Sunrun and with other...
The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (aka “The Jones Act”) is a law which requires ships operating between US ports to be owned by, made in, and crewed by US citizens. While many “Made in the USA” laws are on the books and attract the anger of economists and policy wonks, the Jones Act is particularly egregious as the costs and effects are so large.
(Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting) Through some readily available Docker containers and OpenMediaVault, I have a cheap mini-PC which serves as: * ad blocker for all the devices in my household * media streamer (so I can play movies and read downloaded ebooks/documents anywhere that has internet access) * acts as my personal RSS/newsreader *...
As a California homeowner, I’ve watched with dismay as homeowner insurance provider after homeowner insurance provider have fled the state in the face of wildfire risk. It was quite the shock when I discovered recently (HT: Axios Markets newsletter) that, according to NerdWallet, California actually has some of the cheapest homeowners insurance rates in the country! It begs...
Historically, Intel has (1) designed and (2) manufactured its chips that it sells (primarily into computer and server systems). It prided itself on having the most advanced (1) designs and (2) manufacturing technology, keeping both close to its chest. In the late 90s/00s, semiconductor companies increasingly embraced the “fabless model”, whereby they would only do the (1)...
On one level, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Globally always available satellite constellation = everyone and anyone will try to access this. This was, like many technologies, always going to have positive impacts — i.e. people accessing the internet where they otherwise couldn’t due to lack of telecommunications infrastructure or repression — and negative — i.e.
One of the most disappointing outcomes in the US from the COVID pandemic was the rise of the antivaxxer / public health skeptic and the dramatic politicization of public health measures. But, not everything disappointing has stemmed from that. Our lack of cheap rapid tests for diseases like Flu and RSV is a sad reminder of our regulatory system failing to learn from the COVID...
Anyone who’s done any AI work is familiar with Huggingface. They are a repository of trained AI models and maintainer of AI libraries and services that have helped push forward AI research. It is now considered standard practice for research teams with something to boast to publish their models to Huggingface for all to embrace.
The Dunning-Kruger effect encapsulates something many of us feel familiar with: that the least intelligent oftentimes assume they know more than they actually do. Wrap that sentiment in an academic paper written by two professors at an Ivy League institution and throw in some charts and statistics and you’ve got a easily citable piece of trivia to make yourself feel smarter...
The human heart is an incredibly sophisticated organ that, in addition to being one of the first organs developed while embryos develop, is quite difficult to understand at a cellular level (where are the cells, how do they first develop, etc.). Neil Chi’s group at UCSD (link to Nature paper) were able to use multiplex imaging of fluorescent-tagged RNA molecules to profile the...
Until recently, I only knew of the existence of cat(astrophe) bonds — financial instruments used to raise money for insurance against catastrophic events where investors profit when no disaster happens. I had no idea, until reading this Bloomberg article about the success of Fermat Capital Management, how large the space had gotten ($45 billion!!) or how it was one of the most...
Maybe you have shopped on Shein or Temu. Maybe you only know someone (younger?) who has. Maybe you only know Temu because of their repeat Superbowl ads. But these Chinese eCommerce companies are now the main driver behind air and ship cargo rates with Temu and Shein combined accounting for 9,000 tons per day of shipments! This is scale. ---
The data centers that power AI and cloud services are limited by 3 things: * the server hardware (oftentimes limited by access to advanced semiconductors) * available space (their footprint is massive which makes it hard to put them close to where people live) * availability of cheap & reliable (and, generally, clean) power If you, as a data center operator, can tap a new...
Cheap and accurate continuous glucose monitoring is a bit of a holy grail for consumer metabolic health as it allows people to understand how their diet and exercise impact their blood sugar levels, which can vary from person to person. It’s also a holy grail for diabetes care as making sure blood sugar levels are neither too high nor too low is critical for health (too low...
Read an introspective piece by famed ex-Frog Design leader Robert Fabricant about the state of the design industry and the unease that he says many of his peers are feeling. While I disagree with some of the concerns he lays out around AI / diversity being the drivers of this unease, he makes a strong case for how this is a natural pendulum swing after years of seeing “Chief...
Nice piece in the Economist about how Costco’s model of operational simplicity leads to a unique position in modern retail: beloved by customers, investors, AND workers: * sell fewer things ➡️ * get better prices from suppliers & less inventory needed ➡️ * lower costs for customers ➡️ * more customers & more willing to pay recurring membership fee ➡️ * strong, recurring...
Once upon a time, the hottest thing in chip design was “system-on-a-chip” (SOC). The idea is that you’d get the best cost and performance out of a chip by combining more parts into one piece of silicon. This would result in smaller area (less silicon = less cost) and faster performance (closer parts = faster communication) and resulted in more and more chips integrating more...
Thermal energy storage has been a difficult place for climatetech in years past. The low cost of fossil fuels (the source for vast majority of high temperature industrial heat to date) and the failure of large scale solar thermal power plants to compete with the rapidly scaling solar photovoltaic industry made thermal storage feel like, at best, a market reserved for niche...
An oldie but a goodie — the story of how the YouTube team, post-Google acquisition, put up a “we won’t support Internet Explorer 6 in the future” message without any permission from anyone. (HT: Eric S) ---
Very cool that we’re still finding new things we can control that can be applied to making the lives of people better. ---
Intel has been interested in entering the foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) space for a long time. For years, Intel proudly boasted of being at the forefront of semiconductor technology — being first to market with the FinFET and smaller and smaller process geometries. So it’s interesting how, with the exception of the RibbonFET (the successor to the FinFET),...
Immune cell therapy — the use of modified immune cells directly to control cancer and autoimmune disease — has shown incredible results in liquid tumors (cancers of the blood and bone marrow like lymphoma, leukemia, etc), but has stumbled in addressing solid tumors. Iovance, which recently had its drug lifileucel approved by the FDA to treat advanced melanoma, has demonstrated...
I’ve always been astonished by how many things we use now came from Renaissance Italian merchants: the @ sign, double-entry bookkeeping, banking, maritime insurance, and now the decimal point ---
This one chart (published in Canary Media) illustrates both the case for optimism for our ability to deal with climate change as well as a clear case of how geopolitical pressures can dramatically impact energy choices: the rapid increase in use of renewable energy (mainly at the expense of fossil fuels) as source of electricity in the EU. ---
(Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting) If you’re like me, every few months you have to do something with PDFs: * Merge them * Rotate them * Crop them * Add / remove a password * Move pages around / remove pages * Sign them * Add text / annotations to them This ends up either being a pain to do (via some combination of screen shots, printing, scanning,...
While much attention is (rightly) focused on the role of TSMC (and its rivals Samsung and Intel) in “leading edge” semiconductor technology, the opportunity at the so-called “lagging edge” — older semiconductor process technologies which continue to be used — is oftentimes completely ignored. The reality of the foundry model is that fab capacity is expensive to build and so...
Every standard products company (like NVIDIA) eventually gets lured by the prospect of gaining large volumes and high margins of a custom products business. And every custom products business wishes they could get into standard products to cut their dependency on a small handful of customers and pursue larger volumes.
Fascinating data from the BLS on which jobs have the greatest share of a particular gender or race. The following two charts are from the WSJ article I linked. I never would have guessed that speech-language pathologists (women), property appraisers (white), postal service workers (black), or medical scientists (Asian) would have such a preponderance of a particular group. ---
Commercial real estate (and, by extension, community banks) are in a world of hurt as hybrid/remote work, higher interest rates, and property bubbles deflating/popping collide… ---
(Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting) It’s been a few months since I started down the selfhosting/home server journey. Thanks to Docker, it has been relatively smooth sailing. Today, I have a cheap mini-PC based server that: * blocks ads / online trackers on all devices * stores and streams media (even for when I’m out of the house) * acts as network...
One of the core assumptions of modern financial planning and finance is that stocks have better returns over the long-run than bonds. The reason “seems” obvious: stocks are riskier. There is, after all, a greater chance of going to zero since bond investors come before stock investors in a legal line to get paid out after a company fails.
As reported in The Information a few days ago, former design tool giant InVision, once valued at $2 billion, is shutting down at the end of this year. While much of the commentary has been about Figma’s rapid rise and InVision’s inability to respond, I saw this post on Twitter/X from one of InVision’s founders Clark Valberg about what happened.
So, you watched Silicon Valley and read some articles on Techcrunch and you envision yourself as a startup CEO 🤑. What does it take to succeed? Great engineering skills? Salesmanship? Financial acumen? As someone who has been on both sides of the table (as a venture investor and on multiple startup executive leadership teams), there are three — and only three — things a...
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the “gold standard” in healthcare for proving a treatment works. And for good reason. A well-designed and well-powered (i.e., large enough) clinical trial establishes what is really due to a treatment as opposed to another factor (e.g., luck, reversion to the mean, patient selection, etc.), and it’s a good thing that drug regulation is...
We have a Nissan Ariya and currently DON’T have a home charger (yet — waiting on solar which is another boondoggle for another post). As we live in a town with abundant EVGo chargers (and the Ariya came with 1 yr of free EVGo charging), we thought we could manage. When it works, its amazing. But it doesn’t … a frustrating proportion of the time.
The collapse of China’s massive property bubble is under way and it is wreaking havoc as significant amounts of the debt raised by Chinese property builders is from offshore investors. Because of (well-founded) concerns on how Chinese Mainland courts would treat foreign concerns, most of these agreements have historically been conducted under Hong Kong law.
It’s both unsurprising but also astonishing at the same time. ---
Market phase transitions have a tendency to be incredibly disruptive to market participants. A company or market segment used to be the “alpha wolf” can suddenly find themselves an outsider in a short time. Look at how quickly Research in Motion (makers of the Blackberry) went from industry darling to laggard after Apple’s iPhone transformed the phone market.
I’m over two months late to seeing this study, but a brilliant study design (use insurance data to measure rate of bodily injury and property damage) and strong, noteworthy conclusion (doesn’t matter how you cut it, Waymo’s autonomous vehicle service resulted in fewer injuries per mile and less property damage per mile than human drivers in the same area) make this worthwhile...
My good friend Danny Goodman (and Co-Founder at Swarm Aero) recently wrote a great essay on how AI can help with America’s defense. He outlines 3 opportunities: * “Affordable mass”: Balancing/augmenting America’s historical strategy of pursuing only extremely expensive, long-lived “exquisite” assets (e.g.
As a parent myself, few things throw off my work day as much as a wrench in my childcare — like a kid being sick and needing to come home or a school/childcare center being closed for the day. The time required to change plans while balancing work, the desire to check-in on your child throughout the work day to make sure they’re doing okay… and this is as someone with a fair...
Silicon nerd 🤓 that I am, I have gone through multiple cycles of excited-then-disappointed for Windows-on-ARM, especially considering the success of ChromeOS with ARM, the Apple M1/M2 (Apple’s own ARM silicon which now powers its laptops), and AWS Graviton (Amazon’s own ARM chip for its cloud computing services).
Gene editing makes possible new therapies and actual cures (not just treatments) that were previously not. But, one thing that doesn’t get discussed a great deal is how these new gene editing-based therapies throw the “take two and call me in the morning” model out the window. This interesting piece in BioPharmaDive gives a fascinating look at all the steps for a gene editing...
The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act earmarked hundreds of billions in subsidies and tax credits to bolster a U.S. domestic semiconductor (and especially semiconductor manufacturing) industry. If it works, it will dramatically reposition the U.S. in the global semiconductor value chain (especially relative to China).
Something is wrong with the state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). In 2019, Disney/Marvel topped off an amazing decade-plus run of films with Avengers: Endgame, becoming (until Avatar was re-released in China) the highest grossing film of all time. This was in spite of an objectively complicated plot which required a deep understanding of all of Marvel Cinematic...
This article resonates with me on so many levels: both as the child who came to the US and saw his language skills deteriorate as he assimilated and as the parent trying to preserve his kids’ connection to their cultural heritage ---
I am a big Google Pixel fan, being an owner and user of multiple Google Pixel line products. As a result, I tuned in to the recent MadeByGoogle stream. While it was hard not to be impressed with the demonstrations of Google’s AI prowess, I couldn’t help but be a little baffled… What was the point of making everything AI-related? Given how low Pixel’s market share is in the...
Anyone who’s ever seen a NICU or statistics on the health outcomes for extremely premature babies understands how artificial womb technology could be incredibly impactful. At the same time, it poses some tricky ethical challenges: * How can you get informed, ethical consent to trial this? It’s nigh impossible to predict who will need a premature delivery.
Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ll know the tech industry has been rocked by the rapid advance in performance by large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. By adapting self-supervised learning methods, LLMs “learn” to sound like a human being by learning how to fill in gaps in language and, by doing so, become remarkably adept at solving not just language problems but...
I have followed TSMC very closely since I started my career in the semiconductor industry. A brilliant combination of bold business bet (by founder Morris Chang), industry tailwinds (with the rise of fabless semiconductor model), forward-thinking from the Taiwanese government (who helped launch TSMC), and technological progress, it’s been fascinating to see the company enter...
Charter and Disney recently made peace over the recent ESPN carriage fee dispute. Three things are happening in video delivery world that are colliding here: 1. People are “cutting the cord” as they become less dependent on cable for high quality content (due to things like YouTube and Netflix) 2. Because you’ve lost the “cable bundle” economics (where cable subscribers would...
One reason much of the modern produce we buy tastes so bland is because our agricultural system has bred modern varieties for ship-ability and the ability of produce to be picked by machine, rather than flavor. While this has expanded the access to produce (both geographically but also in terms of cost due to the ability to use automation), it’s meant that consumers often have...
Bloomberg had a great article over the weekend about the events leading up to the (partial) UAW strike against the Detroit Three (GM, Ford, and Stellantis [fka Chrysler]). I’m not surprised (nor should anyone) by the strike. New UAW management, years-long grievances, and tight labor market favoring workers means a strike was almost certainly always going to be the first move...
This article in the Economist paints a dismal picture of the state of life for the youth in China: youth unemployment so high the government has stopped reporting on it (as if that was going to change anything…), housing and childcare costs so high that young people have given up on having traditional families, a government and state-run media that actively scolds them for...
This is an older piece (written in 2016) but remarkable in how well it resonates even 7 years later. Given that I have a home server and opinions on Matter/Thread, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I have many smart home gadgets in my house. And while I’ve made many purchasing and configuration choices in the spirit of this manifesto, it still boggles my mind that I still fall...
When I first heard about the use of psychedelics (like ketamine and psilocybin) for treatment of mental illness, I was skeptical. It just seemed too ripe for abuse. But, there is a growing body of credible academic work suggesting that psychedelics when dosed properly and used in conjunction with therapy / other drugs can be a gamechanger — especially for treatment-resistant...
The fires in Maui have had a devastating human toll (111 dead, 1000 missing as of this writing). It is not surprising that it’s raising some questions about the role of Hawaii’s utility (Hawaiian Electric/HECO) played in the disaster. While it will take time to sort out the investigation and the class action lawsuit, it’s clear that investors and Hawaiian Electric management...
(Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting) I recently shared how I set up a (OpenMediaVault) home server on a cheap mini-PC. After posting it, I received a number of suggestions that inspired me to make a few additional tweaks to improve the security and usability of my server. Read more if you’re interested in setting up (on an OpenMediaVault v6 server):...
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… Adoption of a technology is being impeded by too many standards. The solution? A new standard, of course, and before you know it, we now have another new standard to deal with. The smart home industry needs to figure out how to properly embrace Thread (and Matter).
As a former “Excel monkey”, I am extremely tickled by the fact that what used to be analyst bravado about Excel skills (being able to create big spreadsheet models without touching the mouse was a big thing) is now a sport with viewers. But it’s a testament to how powerful and versatile spreadsheets are. And how many people know what it is.
I’ve been pitched by numerous flow battery companies in my days as a deeptech/climatetech investor. The promise of the technology has always been: * Long cycle life (the number of charge-discharge cycles you can do before the performance degrades) * Easy to scale: you want 2x the storage? Just get 2x the electrolyte! * Low fire risk: most flow batteries use water-based...
(Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting) I spent a few days last week setting up a cheap home server which now serves my family as: * a media server — stores and streams media to phones, tablets, computers, and internet-connected TVs (even when I’m out of the house!) * network-attached storage (NAS) — lets computers connected to my home network store...
Source: NPR Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been rightfully called “the twenty-six words that created the Internet.” It is a valuable legal shield which allows internet hosts and platforms the ability to distribute user-generated content and practice moderation without unreasonable fear of being sued, something which forms the basis of all social media, user...
Amazon’s Lightsail service has made it remarkably cheap and simple for people hosting webpages (including this blog) and simple web applications to get access to high quality virtual private servers (VPS). Beyond the ability to do really stupid things with your VPS powers, my only real complaint with the experience thus far has been that getting HTTPS working with Let’s...
If you’ve been exposed to any financial news in the last few days, you’ll have heard of Gamestop, the mostly brick and mortar video gaming retailer who’s stock has been caught between many retail investors on the subreddit r/WallstreetBets and hedge fund Melvin Capital which had been actively betting against the company.
Mea culpa. I’ve been a big fan of moving my personal page over to AWS Lightsail. But, if I had one complaint, it’s the dangerous combination of (1) their pre-packaged WordPress image being hard to upgrade software on and (2) the training-wheel-lacking full root access that Lightsail gives to its customers.
S&P500 Performance for 2020 (Yahoo Finance), pulled Jan 17, 2021 2020 has seen the greatest market volatility in history for American stocks. The roller-coaster ride investors have experienced over the last 6 months included a steep ~33% single-month drop followed by a four-month bull market run taking the S&P500 back roughly to where it started.
It me. (Source: They Can Talk) I’ve been reading a lot of year-end/decade-end reflections (as one does this time of year) — and while a part of me wanted to #humblebrag about how I got a 🏠/💍/👶🏻 this decade 😇 — I thought it would be more interesting & profound to instead call out 10 worldviews & beliefs I had going into the 2010s that I no longer hold. 1.
Despite the recent spotlight on the staggering $1.5 trillion in student debt that 44 million Americans owe in 2019, there has been surprisingly little discussion on how to measure the value of a college education relative to its rapidly growing price tag (which is the reason so many take on debt to pay for it).
You can learn a great deal from reading and comparing the financial filings of two close competitors. Tech-finance nerd that I am, you can imagine how excited I was to see Lyft’s and Uber’s respective S-1’s become public within mere weeks of each other. While the general financial press has covered a lot of the top-level figures on profitability (or lack thereof) and revenue...
There’s been a fair amount of talk lately about proactively regulating — and maybe even breaking up — the “Big Tech” companies. Full disclosure: this post discusses regulating large tech companies. I own shares in several of these both directly (in the case of Facebook and Microsoft) and indirectly (through ETFs that own stakes in large companies) Source: MIT Sloan Like many,...
Source: Eric Hamilton Having been lucky enough to invest in both tech (cloud, mobile, software) and “deeptech” (materials, cleantech, energy, life science) startups (and having also ran product at a mobile app startup), it has been striking to see how fundamentally different the paradigms that drive success in each are.
(Update Jan 2021: Bitnami has made available a new tool bncert which makes it even easier to enable HTTPS with a Let’s Encrypt certificate; the instructions below using Let’s Encrypt’s certbot still work but I would recommend people looking to enable HTTPS to use Bitnami’s new bncert process) I recently made two big changes to the backend of this website to keep up with the...
Source: Someecards I thought I’d re-post a response I wrote a while ago to a question on Quora as someone recently asked me the question: “What advice do you wish you could give but usually don’t to a startup pitching you?” Person X on your team reflects poorly on your company — This is tough advice to give as its virtually impossible during the course of a pitch to build...
I’m oftentimes asked what determines the prices that companies get bought for: after all, why does one app company get bought for $19 billion and a similar app get bought at a discount to the amount of investor capital that was raised? While specific transaction values depend a lot on the specific acquirer (i.e.
A look at what Snap’s S-1 reveals about their growth story and unit economics If you follow the tech industry at all, you will have heard that consumer app darling Snap Inc. (makers of the app Snapchat) has filed to go public. The ensuing Form S-1 that has recently been made available has left tech-finance nerds like yours truly drooling over the until-recently-super-secretive...
How to realize the promise of applying machine learning to healthcare Not going to happen anytime soon, sadly: the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager); Source: TrekCore Despite the hype, it’ll likely be quite some time before human physicians will be replaced with machines (sorry, Star Trek: Voyager fans)).
Technology in the 1990s and early 2000s marched to the beat of an Intel-and-Microsoft-led drum. Source: IT Portal Intel would release new chips at a regular cadence: each cheaper, faster, and more energy efficient than the last. This would let Microsoft push out new, more performance-hungry software, which would, in turn, get customers to want Intel’s next, more awesome chip.
Much has been written about what makes Google work so well: their ridiculously profitable advertising business model, the technology behind their search engine and data centers, and the amazing pay and perks they offer. Source: the book My experiences investing in and working with startups, however, has taught me that building a great company is usually less about a specific...
In recent years, it’s been the opposite of controversial to say that the tech industry is in a bubble. The terrible recent stock market performance of once high-flying startups across virtually every industry (see table below) and the turmoil in the stock market stemming from low oil prices and concerns about the economies of countries like China and Brazil have raised fears...
I recently read a short column by gadget reviewer Vlad Savov in The Verge provocatively titled “My reviews are biased — that’s why you should trust them” which made me think. In it, Vlad addresses the accusation he hears often that he’s biased: > “Of course I’m biased, that’s the whole point…subjectivity is an inherent — and I would argue necessary — part of making these...
Last week, I attended a MIT/Stanford VLAB event on 3D printing technologies. While I had previously been aware of 3D printing (which works basically the way it sounds) as a way of helping companies and startups do quick prototypes or letting geeks of the “maker” persuasion make random knickknacks, it was at the event that I started to recognize the technology’s disruptive...
Source: Paul Whitten For January I decided to blog a paper I heard about on the excellent Nature podcast about a deliciously simple and elegant experiment to test a very simple question: given how much time and effort boa constrictors (like the one on above, photo taken by Paul Whitten) need to kill prey by squeezing them to death, how do they know when to stop squeezing?...
This month’s paper (from open access journal PLoS ONE) is yet again about the impact on our health of the bacteria which have decided to call our bodies home. But, instead of the bacteria living in our gut, this month is about the bacteria which live on our skin. It’s been known that the bacteria that live on our skin help give us our particular odors.
Source: Healthy Soul November’s paper was published in Naturein 2006, and covers a topic I’ve become increasingly interested in: the impact of the bacteria that have colonized our bodies on our health (something I’ve blogged about here and here). The idea that our bodies are, in some ways, more bacteria than human (there are 10x more gut bacteria – or flora — than human cells...
I’m pretty late for paper of the month, so here we go “Omics” is the hot buzz-suffix in the life sciences for anything which uses the new sequencing/array technologies we now have available. You don’t study genes anymore, you study genomics. You don’t study proteins anymore – that’s so last century, you study proteomics now.
While code names are not rare in the corporate world, more often than not, the names tend to be unimaginative. NVIDIA’s code names, however, are pure marketing glory. Take NVIDIA’s high performance computing product roadmap (below) – these are products that use the graphics processing capabilities of NVIDIA’s high-end GPUs and turn them into smaller, cheaper, and more...
When Steve Jobs first launched the iPhone in 2007, Apple’s perception of where the smartphone application market would move was in the direction of web applications. The reasons for this are obvious: people are familiar with how to build web pages and applications, and it simplifies application delivery.
Many forms of technology requires standards to work. As a result, it is in the best interest of all parties in the technology ecosystem to participate in standards bodies to ensure interoperability. The two main problem with getting standards working can be summed up, as all good things in technology can be, in the form of webcomics.
This seems almost made for me: I’m into comic books. I do my own “corporate style” annual and quarterly reports to track how my finances and goals are going. And, I follow the biopharma industry. Source: United Therapeutics 2010 Annual Report So, when I found out that a biotech company issued its latest annual report in the form of a comic book, I knew I had to talk about it!...
Source: Next Generation Growth I’ve blogged before about how the economics of the venture industry affect how venture capitalists evaluate potential investments, the main conclusion of which is that VCs are really only interested in companies that could potentially IPO or sell for at least several hundred million dollars.
Let’s say you pitch a VC and you’ve got a coherent business plan and some thoughtful perspectives on how your business scales. Does that mean you get the venture capital investment that you so desire? Source: Toothpaste for Dinner Not necessarily. There could be many reasons for a rejection, but one that crops up a great deal is not anything intrinsically wrong with a...
Source: Precision Nutrition The paper I will talk about this month is from April of this year and highlights the diversity of our “gut flora” (a pleasant way to describe the many bacteria which live in our digestive tract and help us digest the food we eat). Specifically, this paper highlights how a particular bacteria in the digestive tracts of some Japanese individuals has...
The paper I read is something that is very near and dear to my heart. As is commonly known, individuals of Asian ancestry are more likely to experience dizziness and flushed skin after drinking alcohol. This is due to the prevalence of a genetic defect in the Asian population which affects an enzyme called Aldehyde Dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2).ALDH2 processes one of the by-products...
One of the dangers of a consultant looking at tech is that he can get lost in jargon. A few weeks ago, I did a little research on some of the most cutting-edge software startups in the cloud computing space (the idea that you can use a computer feature/service without actually knowing anything about what sort of technology infrastructure was used to provide you with that...
Unless you just discovered YouTube yesterday, you’ve probably seen countless videos of (and maybe even have tried?) the infamous Diet Coke + Mentos reaction… which brings us to the subject of this month’s paper. An enterprising physics professor from Appalachian State University decided to have her sophomore physics class take a fairly rigorous look at what drives the Diet...
Most people know that viruses are notoriously tricky disease-causing pathogens to tackle. Unlike bacteria which are completely separate organisms, viruses are parasites which use a host cell’s own DNA-and-RNA-and-protein producing mechanisms to reproduce. As a result, most viruses are extremely small, as they need to find a way into a cell to hijack the cell’s machinery, and,...
This month, I read a paper (HT: my ex-college roommate Eric) by a group from Beth Israel about systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) following serious injury. SIRS, which is more commonly understood/found as sepsis, happens when the entire body is on high “immune alert.” In the case of sepsis, this is usually due to an infection of some sort.
The paper I read for this month brought up an interesting question I’ve always had but never really dug into: how do individual cells find things they can’t “see”? After all, there are lots of microbes out there who can’t always see where their next meal is coming from. How do they go about looking? A group of scientists at Princeton University took a stab at the problem by...
A cab driver the other day went off on me with a rant about how new smartphone users were all smug, arrogant gadget snobs for using phones that did more than just make phone calls. “Why you gotta need more than just the phone?”, he asked. While he was probably right on the money with the “smug”, “arrogant”, and “snob” part of the description of smartphone users (at least it...
Company culture is a concept which, while incredibly difficult to explain or measure, is very important to a company’s well-being and employee morale. Too often, it comes in the form of vaguely written out “corporate mission statements” or never-ending lists of feel-good, mean-nothing “company values”.
Genius? Source: Softpedia Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft’s products, you have to appreciate the brilliance of their strategic “playbook”: 1. Use the fact that Microsoft’s operating system/productivity software is used by almost everyone to identify key customer/partner needs 2. Build a product which is usually only a second/third-best follower product but make sure...
Source: the book Knowing my interest in tech strategy, a coworker recommended I pick up HBS professor Clayton Christensen’s “classic” book on disruptive innovation: The Innovator’s Dilemma. And, I have to say I was very impressed. The book tries to answer a very interesting question: why do otherwise successful companies sometimes fail to keep up on innovation? Christensen’s...
In my Introduction to Tech Strategy post, I mentioned that one of the most important aspects of the technology industry is the importance of ecosystem linkages. There are several ways to think about ecosystem linkages. The main linkages I mentioned in my previous post was influence over technology standards.
Gawker, who seems to really hate McKinsey and other management consulting firms, recently put out a “Complete McKinsey Survival Guide” in response to McKinsey recently being retained by magazine publisher Conde Nast where they lay out a couple of interesting thoughts on how to survive a consultant’s downsizing tendencies including: > “Suck Up—Kiss ass, Kiss ass, Kiss ass.
Working on tech strategy consulting case for 18 months ingrains a thing or two in your head about strategy for tech companies, so I thought I’d lay out, in one blog post the major lessons I’ve learned about how strategy in the technology sector works. To understand that, it’s important to first understand what makes technology special? From that perspective, there are three...
I consider myself, unabashedly, a big Star Trek fan. Being a big fan means a lot of things. It means that I can quickly engage another Star Trek fan in a myriad of conversation about alien races and science fiction scenarios and debates about “which captain was the greatest”. It also means that I can recognize a Klingon Bat’leth, a traditional weapon of the Klingon race: What...
I just discovered, with much sadness, that Majel Roddenberry, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, the actress who played the ever-memorable Lwaxana Troi, and the voice of all the various incarnations of Star Trek’s “computers” has just passed away. I just spent the past couple of minutes browsing her Wikipedia page, and found some amusing anecdotes: > She first...
I’ve been on my current consulting case for about 3 months. It is a strategy case for a technology client. As a result, I’ve been able to do a great deal of work researching various technology markets and trends, ranging from the typical (Internet search) to the more esoteric (grid computing), as I help the client scope out possible expansion opportunities.