Ben Silbermann

/ Founder @Pinterest, @HowWeFeel / Making Something New / San Francisco

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

@glerpie @johnnyrodgersis I would like to try it!

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

Amazing.

[Keller Cliffton @Keller]

Today, Zipline raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation.

When we started Zipline, flying autonomously in the US was illegal. Which made it really hard to convince investors to give us money! But we were too naive to think that meant we shouldn’t try.

We started the company on a cow farm. We worked out of run-down construction trailers so that we could keep engineering, manufacturing, and flight test all unified and in one place. Hiring people from normal companies like Google was hard because we didn’t have a cafe or laundry service. But enough risk takers and rebels wanted to go on an insane adventure with us. They became the early team.

We decided to launch in smaller countries and focus on life-saving use cases. We hired incredible entrepreneurs and operators in Rwanda, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, and other countries. For eight years, Zipline expanded our service across Africa, serving thousands of hospitals and health facilities and reducing maternal mortality by 51%. Today, the network saves over 14k lives every year and is cash flow positive.

Last year, Zipline launched at scale in the US and the service exploded. We grew flight volumes about 100x over the last 18 months, and now make more than a million deliveries a year per metro. We’re now expanding with our partners to millions of deliveries per day. Normal families love having access to anything they need in 10-20 minutes, no matter where they live. Spend more time with loved ones and less time worrying about errands.

Zipline builds drone delivery that is silent and safe. No one wants to hear an extremely loud “swarm of bees” delivering to their backyard or their neighbor’s. Automated delivery needs to be insanely quiet, which guided the overall architecture of our technology delivering from 330 ft in the air. We are 6 times quieter than the closest competitor during delivery. Zipline also now has over 150m commercial autonomous miles (10x the rest of the industry combined) and no safety incidents. Neighborhoods should demand silent and safe delivery!

Today, Zipline is announcing two things. First, we just signed the largest autonomous vehicle contract in human history to expand automated delivery nationally with Walmart, our first and biggest partner in the US. We’re starting by scaling to 300 supercenters throughout the country. Second, we’ve raised $1.5b at a $21.5b valuation from existing and new investors, led by Paradigm, WCM, and Layer.

Zipline was a hard company to believe in for the first ten years of our history. Investors didn’t think the company was “investable”. Most people didn’t even think Zipline was an economic venture. Thanks to those who have rooted for us along the way. To all of the tens of millions of customers and families who rely on Zipline day in and day out: thank you for helping us build the future. Zipline has grown more than @ryanzip, @keenanwyrobek, I, and all others at the company could have imagined.

There is a big opportunity to build a new layer of infrastructure for humanity over the coming years. We want to approximate teleportation. We can build a logistics network that connects and serves all people on earth. We can free human flourishing from the choking constraint of traffic and roads. There are no roads where we’re going. 🚀🌎

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

@benbarry @boztank @dana_tanamachi @gorociao @DressCodeNY wow!

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

VC's hyping startups should disclose whether they've invested, the same way YouTubers disclose sponsorships.

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

@bryan_johnson I'm surprised there are so many people hating. I think it's so cool that you're setting ambitious goals and sharing your learnings along the way. I imagine this is what Roger Bannister would have done if he had social media. Thank you!

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

@benhylak You should try https://t.co/flvlLQJJA7.

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

@villi I’m very sorry to hear this Villi. Sounds like Tobi was a wonderful family member. 💔

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

X design team is doing a great job.

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

Two interesting tv shows about scientific and industrial achievements in India:

"Rocket Boys" - India's space and nuclear programs

"Made in India" - India's first watch brand

[Karan Goel @krandiash]

We released Sonic-3.5 and Ink-2, the #1 streaming models for text to speech and speech to text you can use in your voice agents today.

New architectures enable new frontiers for speed and quality.

We're now the only provider to have #1 models for both speaking and listening.

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

@l2k 🤣you'll get there!

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

Congratulations @suekhim! As a parent, I'm thrilled that whole generation of kids will have access to intelligent, personalized tutoring.

[Sue @suekhim]

AI is making kids dumber.

It should be making them geniuses.

Introducing Koji, the first AI tutor that gets kids to actually think. 👇

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

I'm a big fan of the mission at @convectivecap. I'm confident that @billclerico and team will fund incredible entrepreneurs who will make things better for all of us.

[Bill Clerico @billclerico]

The world is getting warmer while our infrastructure gets older: a recipe for disasters.

We’re excited to announce Fund II: $85M for early stage investments in disaster resilience.

[Bill Clerico @billclerico]

The world is getting warmer while our infrastructure gets older: a recipe for disasters.

We’re excited to announce Fund II: $85M for early stage investments in disaster resilience.

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

@shishirmehrotra @Superhuman looks cool! my favorite feature of kindle is highlight to define a word. having an ai explanation in context would be very helpful for me.

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

@paulg @bilalfarooqui 💯

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

The brain has multiple types of circuits; not just neurons, but also astrocytes. Little pores, called gap junctions, physically bridge the cytoplasms of neighboring astrocytes, connecting the cells together into networks that span the entire brain. Some of these astrocyte networks even run across brain hemispheres, through the corpus callosum.

Astrocytes are a support cell, of sorts. They supply neurons with nutrients (and help them remove waste), form the blood-brain barrier, and help form synapses between neurons. But astrocytes also share nutrients with *other* astrocytes through those gap junctions I mentioned, including glutathione, phosphocreatine, and neurotransmitters.

Gap junctions are formed by a protein called connexin 43. When six copies of this protein come together, they form a ring, called a connexon, that punches a hole into the cell membrane. When a connexon on one astrocyte touches the tip of a connexon on a neighboring cell, the two come together to form a gap junction through which nutrients get exchanged.

Scientists have known about these gap junctions for a long time. But they didn’t understand how far astrocyte networks actually extend; are the connections mostly local, in little clusters? Or do astrocytes somehow build networks that span across the brain, much like neurons?

Historically, there were few ways to get at this question. You could kill a mouse, for example, and then extract its brain and slice it into thin pieces. Then, you might stick a thin electrode into one of the astrocytes, pump it with an electrical current, and see whether nearby cells respond. If they do, the cells might be connected! But this approach is obviously 2-dimensional; it destroys connections in the z-axis. So you get decent *local* information, but it’s hard to then reconstruct the full network.

Another option is to take an intact brain, inject the astrocytes with a dye, wait for the dye to diffuse through the tissue, and then study the slices to see where the dye went. This is better, but diffusion is slow and the dye will not necessarily reach astrocytes located far away from the injection point.

A new paper solves both of these problems.

It is a beautiful study, in my eyes, because it hinges around a single clever idea. Namely, what if we just genetically-modified animals such that, when a molecule passes through a connexon, the astrocyte makes a physical record of it? In this way, animals can be engineered to “tag” or “trace” their own astrocyte networks.

The authors took the connexin 43 protein (the one that forms the gap junctions) and fused it to another protein, called TurboID. The beauty of TurboID is that it takes a nearby molecule -- whatever is floating on by -- and sticks a biotin tag onto it. That’s all it does. The fusion protein was designed so that TurboID sits inside the gap junction. Whenever a neurotransmitter or glutathione moves through the pore — SPLAT! — the TurboID tags it with a biotin.

The researchers next injected mice with an adeno-associated virus (AAV5) carrying a gene encoding this fusion protein. The fusion gene was placed near a promoter sequence, called GfaABC1D, that is “only” active in astrocytes. And then, since the brain does not *naturally* make biotin, the researchers fed the mice with biotin-laced water for about one week.

Finally, they killed the mice, made their brains transparent (search for “tissue clearing” if you want to learn more), and then incubated them with a protein, called streptavadin, that tightly grabs onto biotin. The streptavidin is fused to a fluorescent dye, which can then be seen with a microscope.

And that’s the gist! What they found is that about 10 percent of astrocytes picked up and actually made the engineered gap junctions, but 80 percent of nearby astrocytes were connected to those astrocytes.

Some astrocyte networks were isolated, whereas other networks talked to each other. There is an astrocyte network that runs through the motor cortex, for example, and it seems quite isolated; but the astrocyte networks in the frontal cortex and hypothalamus communicate with each other.

Some astrocyte networks ran through both brain hemispheres, as I said, directly through the corpus callosum. These networks change over time, and they differ spatially from neural networks. In some cases, they even link brain regions that are not connected by neurons.

Biology gets deeper, and life becomes more resolved, every day.

Image below: Astrocyte networks in the brain. All the purple stuff is streptavidin, which is a marker for biotin (and, therefore, astrocyte connections.)

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

Congratulations to the super talented team from @extradotemail on today's launch. It's so rare to see any company launch such a polished and thoughtfully designed product on day 1. Give it a try! https://t.co/SiPkD6Is7d.

[Ben Silbermann @8en]

@patrickc Are there any interventions or treatments you’ve tried as a result of your investigations?