Amber Ghaddar

PhD | Banker turned Founder turned Investor | Breakthrough Founders | The 200Bn Club

[Jim Fan @DrJimFan]

We scaled a robot model natively to 8,000 timesteps of context, 5 minutes worth of muscle memory, with constant inference cost. Robot policies used to live their lives a few frames at a time (< 0.1 sec), instantly forgetting what just happened. We pushed to 3 orders of magnitude beyond SOTA.

Introducing RoboTTT. Test-Time Training (“TTT”) carries a tiny model *inside* the model. Every incoming sensor reading triggers one gradient step on that tiny core, so the history keeps getting compressed into its weights. The hidden state has a fixed size (literally a small neural net), so the robot can “grok” arbitrarily long experience with little overhead. Learning continues indefinitely after deployment.

We can then put an entire video in context as prompt! RoboTTT enables one-shot in-context learning from human video: in circuit board assembly, a human demonstrates a never-seen configuration once, and the robot imitates it faithfully.

Humans drop things all the time, but we pick them up so fast that we don’t even notice. That reflex to fix is half of our physical competence. RoboTTT shows self-improvement on the fly: the robot is skilled at recovering from its own errors mid-episode, and each fix enters its context to inform the next move. The TTT core distills a general-purpose, failure-to-correction mapping from the training data.

One more thing. What excites me the most is a new Context Scaling Curve: from 128 to 8K timesteps, closed-loop performance hill-climbs steadily with no sign of saturation. 8K-context pretraining beats 1K by 62%. What LLM enjoys, robotics should too. Soon, even 1M context is not a fantasy.

Deep dive in thread:

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

The end of forklift🧐

These are Filics Units by Filics, a Munich-based German robotics startup. They're autonomous mobile robots that slide under pallets, lift loads up to 1 ton, and move omnidirectionally with lights for navigation.

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

#Things_That_Happened_While_Doing_Deals •Episode 1•
•The One Where He Asked Me to Join Him in His Hotel Room•

A few years ago, I was speaking to a potential investor in Davos.
Well “potential investor” may be generous.

He had money.
He had opinions.
He had a fund name that sounded like it was generated by combining a Greek god, a mountain and the word Capital.
So close enough.

The 1st call was normal.
He liked saying:
“I’m not a passive investor. I’m very hands-on”

This is one of those sentences that can mean many things.

Sometimes it means: “I help founders”
Sometimes it means: “I will send voice notes at midnight”
& Often: “My therapist has not yet been informed I exist”
Still, we continued.

He then suggested we meet in person in London.
We agreed to meet at the hotel lobby.

That morning, he messaged.
“Actually lobby is too noisy. Come up to my suite.”

I stared at the message.

There are moments in business where you have to ask yourself a difficult question:

Is this man stupid?
Or does he think I am?

I replied:
“No, Lobby is fine.”
He said:
“It’s a business suite.”

Ah.
Wonderful.
A business suite.
The magical category of hotel room where gravity, HR, & basic judgment stop.

I said:
“I don’t take business meetings in hotel rooms.”

He sent a 😂 .
Never trust a 😂 in a negotiation.

Then he wrote:
“U r very formal.”
Formal.
Apparently not wanting to discuss cap tables beside a bed makes u Downton Abbey.
I said:
“I m very alive.”

He ignored that.
Then came the explanation.
He said the best conversations happen in private.
He said founders need to be “flexible.”

Flexible.
A word that has done more damage to calendars than Outlook.
I said:
“I dont take meetings in bedrooms”
He said:
“It's not a bedroom. It has a desk.”
A desk.
Of course.
My mistake.
A desk changes everything.

By that logic, my dentist office is a nightclub cause there s music playing.

He then suggested a compromise.
I come upstairs for “just 20 min” & if I felt uncomfortable we could move downstairs.

I said no again.
He got annoyed.
“You’re making this weird.”

This is a classic.
A man asks you to come to his hotel room.
You decline.
He says you’re making it weird.
It’s like someone setting fire to a napkin & accusing you of bringing smoke into the restaurant.

I told him:
“It became weird when you relocated a business meeting to your suite”
He said:
“You know in my world, people don’t think like this”
I said:
“In my world, people who want to invest can find the lobby”
Silence.
Then, after all of that, he sent a sentence.
A sentence that still lives rent-free in my head.
“Fine. But I hope you don’t expect me to invest in someone who doesn’t trust me.”

Apparently, trust was not built on diligence, references, terms or traction.
Trust was built by walking into a strange man’s hotel room because he said there was a desk!

I did not go upstairs.
He did not invest.
The fund survived.

The desk, I assume, continued doing important institutional work.

NB: Things That Happen While Doing Deals is a series of the weirdest encounters I’ve had throughout my 15 years career: as a banker, a founder, an investor. I read @LeslieFeinzaig ‘s #BusinessInsider article on what female founders experience while fundraising back in October, and it gave me the idea to show how prevalent this is.
So here we go. I recalled #19 stories.
Some stories are funny.
Some are dark.
Some are so absurd they sound fictional, except sadly, they’re not.
I’m starting with a funny one.
Because apparently, private markets are not just an asset class.
They’re a theatre genre. Like the posts, follow me and let’s shed some light on what women experience too often in their career.

#fundraising #VC #foundermode #femalefounders #femaleinvestors

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

I watched #DevilWearsPrada2 👠 and hated it.

I live in power suits. Finance taught me what you wore got read before you spoke.

So I sat through Devil Wears Prada 2 with skin in the game.

Here is what the film teaches women.

Your ambition will haunt you. Your old boss will live rent-free in your head for twenty years. You will rise, cry, and apologise and then cry some more. The price of building something is regret. The lesson of working for someone powerful is that you never get free of her.

Andy. Twenty years a journalist. Still flinches.
Emily. Twenty years out of Runway. Still trauma-bonded to Miranda.
Miranda. Still terrorising. Now whining about choices she made.

Every woman cries. The men do not. Nobody has grown.

The writing was whiny. The fashion was whiny. Even Miranda's suits looked apologetic.

The fashion confessed it before the script did. A-lines where there should be pencil. Tassels where there should be lines. Streep in a Dries Van Noten jacket I cannot unsee. @Pat_Field built a visual grammar of female authority. Molly Rogers replaced her with apology.

When the costume designer loses faith in the woman, the script already has.

Miranda doesn't miss meetings now. She misses school plays. Her power gets reframed as neglect. Her authority earns a redemption arc it never asked for.

Same beat business writing pulls on senior women. First half the rise. Second half the cost. Rarely the empire she still runs.

The film hands women two endings: be Miranda and miss schools plays, or be Andy and never get free.

It never asks a better question.

The only moment that landed. Lucy Liu walks in. Sharp. No tears. Saves the day. Two competent women recognising each other's weight, and acting on it.

That was the film they should have made.

That is the lesson women deserve.

#DevilWearsPrada

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

@zerohedge FAKE. This was not posted on an official account…. Pls verify your sources instead of copy/pasting

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

@FirstSquawk This looks fake, @PressTV posted it 10min ago and @officialrnintel 44min ago… it doesn’t make sense that a 46k followers account to be the 1st to know. Verify your sources pls.

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

@FirstSquawk Are you sure cause the first account that posted this looked fake.

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

@officialrnintel This looks fake

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

-your land becomes the launchpad
- your country becomes the target
-your rulers absorb the public anger
- your economy takes the hit
-and your air defense missiles, which you paid billions for, are now being used to protect the foreign base that was sold to you as protection

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

Iran 🇮🇷 builds drones for $20k.
The west builds systems to shoot them down for billions.
That’s not asymmetric warfare.
That’s asymmetric accounting.

#dubaiattack #IranWar #Israel

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

Female founders: Have you lived this? Female investors: Been there? Share below - I want the real stories. 👇 #VentureCapital #QueenBeeSyndrome
Let's flip the script. More support, less gatekeeping. Who's with me? RT if this resonates. #WomenInTech #FemaleFounders #VC

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

She supports women in tech... unless they're younger, smarter, or raising a bigger round. (And yep, she's headlining your next "Women in Tech" panel.) We blame men for not backing women, but some of the fiercest gatekeeping in VC comes from OTHER WOMEN. 😤 #WomenInTech

[Amber Ghaddar @amber_ghaddar]

🧗‍♀️I’ve seen women lift as they climb.
I’ve also seen women climb and then kick.🤾‍♀️