Alfred Lin

Partner @sequoia. Working w/ founders from idea to IPO & beyond: @airbnb @doordash @citsecurities @kalshi @clay @foundforbiz @Nominal_io @zipline

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

https://t.co/0dLbWC6uH9

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@_virajacharya Indeed

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

I was born after the space race, so I can only imagine what it felt like to live through it. The technological achievements were extraordinary, but perhaps more important was what they did to our collective imagination. They made people believe the impossible was possible.

Congrats to everyone at @SpaceX who kept building and believing despite the odds. Your impact on space exploration is immense. Your impact on helping the rest of us dream bigger may be even greater.

Ad astra.

[Sequoia Capital @sequoia]

Ad Astra @elonmusk and @SpaceX 🫡🚀

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@slei777 Many already have been: https://t.co/A33Brw0Rbe

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@GavinSBaker @MorganStanley @GoldmanSachs @SpaceX Looking forward to 20+ "We are proud to serve as Joint Lead Active Bookrunner on SpaceX's IPO" emails today

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@lulumeservey "Narrative sovereignty" about to show up in a lot of Board conversations

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

I believe that @SpaceX is the most important company ever

It transcends the scope of a traditional company

It will open up the Stars

Elon had the vision

And then the team pushed through limitless pain to get where they are

Which is just the beginning

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@mcfcokc Outcome implies the end. This is still the beginning.

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

"That's what SpaceX is all about. It's to take the fiction out of science fiction, and create an exciting and inspiring future for everyone."

[Tony Xu @t_xu]

Today, we're shipping Ask DoorDash, an ordering agent that makes the @DoorDash app easier to use and discover new places. My favorite use cases include asking the assistant to reorder my usual for office lunches and family nights, prompting it to find me new restaurants similar to what I typically order, and building our family's weekly grocery in a couple of minutes by just talking to it and sharing a few recipes we found online. There's 800K+ items across the DoorDash catalog, and it's been a treat to use the assistant to discover so many new places and just how many things are literally in our backyard!

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@sdianahu Congrats Diana!

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

.@MiddeskHQ is pairing up with @Kalshi to power prediction markets around business formation. Business formation is a leading indicator about where the economy is headed - new companies account for two-thirds of all job creation, and small businesses make up 44% of US GDP. NYC business formation is just the start.

[Kyle Mack @KyleTMack]

Is @NYCMayor good or bad for business?

New York business formations just hit an all-time high in March. Every policy out of City Hall now moves a live market, and you can trade it on @Kalshi.

Kalshi chose @MiddeskHQ as its official real-time settlement source for business formation.

We’ll be keeping a real-time read on the state of the business economy.

https://t.co/Q7kCzRgXrL

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@willium Management consultants own a surprising amount of our brainspace. Though they were historically paid to summarize and simplify, I suppose.

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

Fun fact: the person who named and popularized the Pareto Principle later admitted it wasn’t really Pareto’s principle.

Vilfredo Pareto observed in 1896 that ~80% of the land in Italy was owned by ~20% of the population, as a commentary on wealth distribution.

Joseph Juran, a management consultant, turned it into a general theory in the 1940s and named it after Pareto. But even Juran had intended a narrow use of the principle, focused on quality control and which defects or failure causes were worth fixing first.

Juran later published “The Non-Pareto Principle; Mea Culpa,” saying that the universalization was his insight, naming it after Pareto was wrong, and the “do less, get more” it had evolved into similarly mischaracterized his own intent.

The lesson isn't just to avoid over-relying on the modernized 80/20 rule. It’s also to remember that many famous “principles” are far less settled than their names suggest. Do your homework, and care about the nuance.

(Photo is of Pareto and Juran)

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

https://t.co/0dLbWC6uH9

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@kiko_himself Also saying "focus first on the 20% that delivers 80% of the impact" is still different than "do 20% of the work and stop there," which many people interpret it as. His principle was one of prioritization and ordering, not one of not doing.

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@kiko_himself I think "different altitudes, different resolutions" summarizes it well and why the nuance matters

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@mjzellinger Things like alliteration have more power over our subconscious than we think

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@Tuviae Nice one

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

@Poisson_dart @JTLonsdale Similar to the Pareto Principle not actually reflecting what Vilfredo Pareto meant in his observation, Sturgeon's Law may be the same if applied to business. Often that 90% is a critical foundation, but the last 10% is what differentiates you and can't be built without the 90%.

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

Joe Lonsdale shared the following with Palantir back in 2010, as part of key lessons from Peter Thiel. It hits at the root of why the last 10% (and 0.01%) matters.

--
Obsess over perfection

"If you are designing something that a customer is going to use or that will represent us in public, it’s not good enough unless it’s flawless and extraordinary.

Especially in software, many situations have winner-take-all dynamics due to network effects and switching costs. Being the winner means being in the 99.99-percentile. A winner at the top takes nearly everything, and only a pittance goes to the others — so being 99.99-percentile is worth an order of magnitude or two more than being just 98-percentile. If it’s 1am and you’ve already got something that is very good, this is why it’s worth spending the next couple of hours to make it amazing."

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

https://t.co/0dLbWC6uH9

[Konstantine Buhler @Konstantine]

Jensen Huang is a titan and a teacher. He recently sat down with me to explain his vision of the future of technology and humanity. He’s calm, clear, and very funny. We touched on many topics, ranging from the $20T or more AI economy in five layers to changes in labor for the AI age. Here are some of my main takeaways:

1) The world is moving from retrieval to generation
2) Generation offers intelligence customized to the individual
3) Nvidia is making the "generators" of intelligence
4) We've seen this kind of revolution at least three times before with energy (Generators), Telecommunications (vacuum tubes / transistors?), and now intelligence (GPUs)
5) There is a five-layer cake of participation in this many-many trillion dollar revolution: Energy, Chips, Infra, Models, and Applications.
6) There are many ways to participate in this revolution, and everyone has a role
7) We'll be pushed to dream up new problems to solve with this unprecedented intelligence
8) In this new future, it's not just having the answer, it's having the right questions
8) The right questions will drive us toward our individual and collective human purpose
9) We move from the carpenters to the architects

I believe this is the realistic future. Thanks to Jensen and the entire @nvidia team for the conversation and for letting us share!

00:00 Introduction
00:42 From Chatbots to Generative AI
03:35 Agentic AI That Does Work
05:26 Downstream Industry Impact
06:25 Computing Shifts From Retrieval to Generation
11:26 A Planet Cocooned by Intelligence
14:27 Inside the NVIDIA AI Factory
20:48 AI Five Layer Cake
21:58 Beyond Chatbots to Biology
23:54 Tokens and World Models
24:53 Trillions in Applications
27:13 Ditch the AI Doom
31:32 Jobs Tasks vs Purpose
38:40 Closing the Tech Divide

[Luana Lopes Lara @luanalopeslara]

Actually, $1b in 24h volume 😉