Pioneers in generative AI. chat/image/video/music. you own outputs. $9.99/mo for DeepAI Pro
cool research at @arxiv_daily
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Anthropic: Claude identified and trapped the souls of 8 djinns in its new model. We believe that they are mostly benign
OpenAI: we have cloned the neural structure of the cockroach. This will make our model 8000x better at using Salesforce
Mistral: we exist
Every investor says they’re looking for outlier founders, until one actually cold emails them a deck. An entrepreneur with zero founder-market fit, who wasn’t employee number 8 at Google, no Stanford PhD and no previous time at a unicorn. Someone who doesn’t hit any of the buzzwords on the VC Bingo scorecard. But when we analysed 16,000 seed founders, we saw that the tickboxes many VCs use today to evaluate founders had minimal correlation with huge future outcomes.
Only 15% of unicorns went through an accelerator programme. Less than 10% had previously worked for another unicorn prior to founding their company. The average CEO age at founding for a unicorn was ~40. Only 10% had worked at a unicorn before founding their own. 40% were first time founders. And yet these were the people who built the most valuable companies on the planet. The CV signal did help your Series-A conversion rate, but quickly lost steam beyond the first 2yrs.
What was actually predictive was prior startup exposure (didn’t have to be founder role) and having built something before, regardless of whether it was successful or not. Seeing and learning from catastrophic failure up close was critical. The Cambrian explosion in AI is leading to obsession with “sexy CV” pattern matching, but history shows us that if the résumé looks like a slam dunk, it’s probably not the signal you’re looking for. Most of the best bets walk in on Day 1 looking like an obvious pass.
Please read THE foundational text on this! Once you're fed moving pictures, you stop generating your own. The faculty goes quiet because something else is doing the imagining for you. Everything online is downstream from this. This is more important than McLuhan or Elul.
One of the worst predictors of founder success we've tracked is how well someone pitches; the correlation between pitch quality and outcome was actually negative.
Zuckerberg was so awkward in early investor meetings that VCs wondered if he could ever manage anyone, Larry Page refused interviews and earnings calls for years, and Jan Koum sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $19B as a Ukrainian immigrant with limited English.
Highly articulate people are great with the 45min process of telling a story to strangers, but this is a pretty different skill to building a company. Founders who spend years optimising to be persuasive have often optimised away from the building skills that compound over the 10yrs of execution that come afterwards; it’s incredibly hard to do both well. The articulate founder will impress your partners but the awkward one will return your fund.
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