Delighted to partner with Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Google, and many others, to introduce Open Standard, a new stablecoin designed for scale: https://t.co/0cRjmmtJGU.
@whyvert Calculators were, but calculator watches didn't become cheap till the 1980s. They kept making these things till 1982, apparently, so there must still have been demand in 1975.
BREAKING: FAA officially announced the rulemaking to legalize supersonic flight, including the Boomless Cruise ("Mach cutoff") approach we demonstrated on XB-1.
This is a major step toward the supersonic renaissance.
This thing is a monster by golden age watch standards: 45.5 mm in diameter and 15.5 mm thick, and all of that solid steel judging from the weight of it. It's over 100 g. But this watch has an excuse for being so huge: the precision of a slide rule depends on its length.
Behold the amazing Heuer Calculator of 1975. The bezel is a slide rule! And it's in the process of doing an infinite number of calculations simultaneously: everything times 23. 17 times 23, for example, as you can see is 391.
Here's where you can see that 23 * 17 = 391. Actually all you can see is that it's a little over a number whose first two digits are 3 and 9. But it can't be 3.9 or 3900. And you know the last digit has to be a 1. So 391.
Today we are on the main stage of Startup School at Station F to talk about ambition for your startup with my co founder @EliotAndres , interviewed by @collinmathilde .
The reason we applied to @ycombinator is that we were both convinced it would increase our ambition and the impact of Photoroom on the world. We didn't know exactly how, but I had heard @dessaigne talk about the impact of YC: first aiming at a $100M valuation, then $100M in revenue.
The reality is you get to work with ambitious and smart people, and we all hold ourselves accountable. This ambition, with the right guidelines, actually creates unicorns. When you're in a group of 200 and 5% of them create unicorns, dozens of people have grown, and they're not necessarily smarter or more ambitious than you. It becomes obvious you have a shot. There's a part of luck, but a lot of it is drive. And the most important thing is being surrounded by ambitious people.
We were lucky to be surrounded by the YC community and other ambitious startups like Francescu, Jean from Mojo, and @julien_c from Hugging Face. I clearly remember Jean saying: "Matt, if you're the best in the world at removing backgrounds, this is already a $1B idea.". This turned out to be quite true and gave use some ambition shots.
And one thing that @gustaf 🇺🇦, our YC partner, always pushed us toward was extracting ambitious visions from all our conversations with users and our passion for helping them, while giving us shortcuts that YC alumni before us had proven to work.
You can build an ambitious startup with an HQ in Paris, but you need to surround yourself with ambitious, crazy people and always reconnect to the valley to set the bar higher.
This amazing WW II painting by Laura Knight is effectively a combination of a still life and figures in a landscape, because that huge barrage balloon works like, and is painted like, an object in a still life.
Claude was RL'd on coding sessions with humans. But the more I use Claude Code, the more I realize I'm being RL'd on Claude Code - learning the best way to give it instructions, what things it's likely to forget or misunderstand. Feels like a form of human/AI co-evolution.
Trump v. Slaughter will have major implications for the future of AI regulation. If you want a federal body that can independently assess frontier models and then impose binding consequences - free from political or partisan influence -- that just got a lot harder, if not impossible.
Avoca (W23) is building what it calls the AI workforce for the physical economy, starting with home services. In just a few years, the company has grown to eight figures in revenue and recently raised over $125 million at a $1 billion valuation.
In this fireside, co-founders @apurvas96 and @thetysonchen sit down with @garrytan to share how they found product-market fit by helping businesses turn missed calls into revenue. They explain why AI is expanding what software can do, pushing past the 1% of wallet that traditional software captures, and why they see it as one of the biggest opportunities for founders.
01:28 - Finding the Right Market
03:25 - Why AI Is Bigger Than SaaS
06:59 - The AI Job Story Nobody Talks About
11:53 - How the Founders Met
16:59 - The Pivot
21:47 - Customer Love Beats Market Size
25:31 - Building an AI Workforce
29:35 - Why Customer Obsession Wins
34:12 - Growing to Eight Figures
37:22 - The Vision Beyond Home Services
38:54 - Building a Generational Company
Right in front of our faces. Zero attempt to hide or conceal it. Absolute, total self-enrichment at a magnitude we have never really seen. And every week brings a new story just like it. They're getting richer at every opportunity.
The latest Tesla FSD version is ridiculously impressive.
In my subjective experience they keep smoothing out the rough edges. Very promising rate of improvement.