Andrew McCormack

Partner at Valar

[Ferdinand Dabitz @FerdiDabitz]

1/ There is so much to be said about the bank charter, the approval and how we’re re-thinking clearing for the AI era. But first, I wanted to take 2 minutes to talk about why “Augustus”.

[LiveFlow @LiveFlow_com]

It's about time finance got a platform that actually works the way teams do.

Today, we're launching Flow: an AI-native ERP for multi-entity finance that brings Accounting and FP&A together in one place.

No more choosing between outdated legacy systems or months-long implementations. No more stitching together tools just to keep up.

Flow is built for lean finance teams managing complex, multi-entity operations, so they can spend more time driving the business forward.

From @Wendys to @crumbl, Flow is built for teams ready to scale.

[Andrew McCormack @andrewjmack]

10/10

[Colin Mackey @colinmackey_07]

Had a great time this weekend at Hammer Kicking Academy’s End of Summer Showcase. I learned a lot and ended up charting perfect in long snaps on Saturday. Thank you to Coach @HKA_Tanalski for the feedback and great coaching.

@BobDecker49 @CoachMurphGCDS

[Cole Rotman @ColeRotman]

16 investors have led 2 Series A rounds that became $5B+ companies since 2012…

You can see a pattern:

• @Alfred_Lin → consumer marketplaces

• @andrewjmack → fintech

• @mamoonha → b2b work tools

• @mickymalka → fintech

• @mitchlasky → consumer social

[Andrew McCormack @andrewjmack]

Word salad

[AJAC @AJA_Cortes]

@bob_denley It would be better to assess your total weekly volume for major muscle groups, and then train in a rep range that is appropriate to the exercise and your programming set up

[AJAC @AJA_Cortes]

@bob_denley It would be better to assess your total weekly volume for major muscle groups, and then train in a rep range that is appropriate to the exercise and your programming set up

[Yishan @yishan]

I think the Deepseek moment is not really the Sputnik moment, but more like the Google moment.

If anyone was around in ~2004, you'll know what I mean, but more on that later.

I think everyone is over-rotated on this because Deepseek came out of China. Let me try to un-rotate you.

Deepseek could have come out of some lab in the US Midwest. Like say some CS lab couldn't afford the latest nVidia chips and had to use older hardware, but they had a great algo and systems department, and they found a bunch of optimizations and trained a model for a few million dollars and lo, the model is roughly on par with o1. Look everyone, we found a new training method and we optimized a bunch of algorithms!

Everyone is like OH WOW and starts trying the same thing. Great week for AI advancement! No need for US markets to lose a trillion in market cap.

The tech world (and apparently Wall Street) is massively over-rotated on this because it came out of CHINA.

I get it. After everyone has been sensitized over the H1BLM uproar, we are conditioned to think of OMG Immigrants China as some kind of Alien Other. As though the Alien-Other Chinese Researchers are doing something special that's out of reach and now China The Empire is somehow uniquely in possession of Super Efficient AI Power and the US companies can't compete. The subtext of "A New Fearsome Power Now Under The Command of the CCP" is what's driving the current sentiment, and it's not really valid.

Like, no. These are guys basically working on the same problems we are in the US, and not only that, they wrote a paper about it and open-sourced their model! It is not actually some sort of tectonic geopolitical shift, it is just Some Nerds Over There saying "Hey we figured out some cool shit, here's how we did it, maybe you would like to check it out?"

Sputnik showed that the Soviets could do something the US couldn't ("a new fearsome power"). They didn't subsequently publish all the technical details and half the blueprints. They only showed that it could be done.

With Deepseek, if I recall correctly, a lab in Berkeley read their paper and duplicated the claimed results on a small scale within a day.

That's why I say it's like the Google moment in 2004. Google filed its S-1 in 2004, and revealed to the world that they had built the largest supercomputer cluster by using distributed algorithms to network together commodity computers at the best performance-per-dollar point on the cost curve.

This was in contrast to every other tech company, who at that time just bought what were essentially larger and larger mainframes, always at the most expensive leading edge of the cost curve. (To the young people reading this, this will sound incredible to you)

I worked at PayPal at the time, and in order to keep pace with the rising transaction volume, the company was forced to buy bigger and bigger database servers from Oracle. We were totally Oracle's bitch. At one point when we ran into scalability issues, the Oracle reps told us we were their biggest installation so they had no other reference point on how to help us overcome our scalability issues. We literally resorted to flipping random config switches and rebooting it.

(This heavily influenced me when I was a young manager later at Facebook. I deliberately torpedoed an Oracle salesman's pitch to try and get us to switch from open source MySQL databases to an Oracle contract: of course we had scalability problems, but at least when we had them, we could open up the hood and figure out how to fix it ... assuming we had good enough engineers, and we did. When it's closed-source infra, you're at the mercy of the vendor's support engineers)

Back to Google - in their S-1, they described how they were able to leapfrog the scalability limits of mainframes and had been (for years!) running a far more massive networked supercomputer comprised of thousands of commodity machines at the optimal performance-per-dollar price point - i.e. not the more expensive leading edge - all knit together by fault-tolerant distributed algorithms written in-house.

Some time later, Google published their MapReduce and BigTable papers, describing the algorithms they'd used to manage and control this massively more cost-effective and powerful supercomputer.

Deepseek is MUCH more like the Google moment, because Google essentially described what it did and told everyone else how they could do it too. In Google's case, a fair bit of time elapsed between when they revealed to the world what they were doing and when they published a papers showing everyone how to do it. Deepseek, in contrast, published their paper alongside the model release.

Now, I've also written about how I think this is also a demonstration of Deepseek's trajectory, but that's also no different from Google in ~2004 revealing what it was capable of. Competitors will still need to gear up and DO the thing, but they've moved the field forward. But it's not like Sputnik where the Soviets have developed technology unreachable to the US, it's more like Google saying, "Hey, we did this cool thing, here's how we did it."

There is no reason to think nVidia and OAI and Meta and Microsoft and Google et al are dead. Sure, Deepseek is a new and formidable upstart, but doesn't that happen every week in the world of AI? I am sure that Sam and Zuck, backed by the power of Satya, can figure something out. Everyone is going to duplicate this feat in a few months and everything just got cheaper. The only real consequence is that AI utopia/doom is now closer than ever.

====

Bonus: This is also a little similar the Ethereum PoS moment, when AI finally has a counterpoint to the environmentalists who say AI uses so much electricity. We just brought down the cost of inference by 97%!

[Eric Demuth @eric_demuth]

November 6, 2024: A Turning Point for the World

I’ve waited to share a political comment because what’s happening in Germany is almost beyond words for me as a German living abroad. I’m no fan of turning Germany into the U.S., especially when it comes to social issues. But the constant complaining about how terrible @realDonaldTrump, @elonmusk, and the like are gets on my nerves. In Europe, we’re long past the point of dictating to the U.S. or China. We first need to get our own house in order and work our way up before we can hope to sit at the table with the world’s powers as equals again. I’m also frustrated with big German CEOs who complain behind closed doors, but few have the courage to speak out publicly. The fact that things have reached this point is also due to boardrooms lacking enough backbone.

Germany in Crisis

The former industrial powerhouse is in a dismal state regarding infrastructure and competitiveness. The U.S., meanwhile, is set to boost its economy and innovation like never before, deregulating so radically that jaws in Brussels will drop. The U.S. is preparing for an innovation and technology battle with China, with no regard for collateral damage. Under 16 years of Merkel, crucial reforms that could have secured the future of this industrial giant were missed. But instead of taking the necessary steps now, we’re seeing economic policies that belong in children’s books.

The idea of creating a sustainable energy foundation is sound. But cutting off the existing industrial foundation before we can stand on the new one is absurd. All we’ve done is weaken ourselves while making the U.S. and Asia even stronger. Wishful thinking and reality are worlds apart here. This government is the most expensive Germany has ever had and a trailblazer of its own deindustrialization. We’re resting on the prosperity of the past and forgetting that we’re no longer global leaders. Our “Kodak/Nokia moment”—the decline of a former market leader—has begun. We lack the willingness to face reality. This attitude resembles impoverished nobility clinging to a lost reality.

What We Can Learn from the U.S.

The most agile player wins—in evolution, business, and politics. This shift is an opportunity for us to catch up on our homework in Europe. Germany and the EU need courage: no small reforms, but radical restructuring and innovation. Enough with the fear of data and modern nuclear power! We need an Agenda 2030 that’s bipartisan.

The world is changing—we decide whether it changes with us or without us.

[Andrew McCormack @andrewjmack]

Kills the IPO market

[Pierre Chapuis @pchapuis]

@peterrhague @MarkFriedenbach Sure, and I agree with your post, but taxation would happen when companies IPO, not when founders are raising private rounds and "eating ramen".

If anything it favors keeping companies private even longer...

[Pierre Chapuis @pchapuis]

@peterrhague @MarkFriedenbach Sure, and I agree with your post, but taxation would happen when companies IPO, not when founders are raising private rounds and "eating ramen".

If anything it favors keeping companies private even longer...

[Andrew McCormack @andrewjmack]

Trenything is possible

[Siim Land @siimland]

The man who defies aging

Chuando Tan is a 58-year-old man from Singapore who looks like he's in his 20s or 30s

Here's a breakdown of his diet, exercise, and other routines⬇️⬇️

[Andrew McCormack @andrewjmack]

Win some, lose some.

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

@proales Yes - I don't expect that Petal investors got much from this acquisition

[Steve Abraham @SAbraham84]

1/ I’m so excited to finally share what @dcojuangco and I have been working on: Zed!

Zed is a fully licensed neobank that’s focused on serving young professionals in Asia.

[Zed Credit Card @zedphilippines]

Introducing Zed, the most powerful credit card you’ve ever seen. Be the first to get the card that’s about to change everything. Join the waitlist at https://t.co/UtGrrWRGc4.

#superchargewithzed

[BHC @brianhc]

@Biohazard3737 Questions for @matt_levine

[Afeef Zaman @Afeef_Zaman]

2023 was a year of many wins for us at @HelloShopUp 🙏

🔥 10 Lakh / 1 Million metric tonnes of food and essentials ordered on our platform and delivered by us

🚀 These food & essentials reached 3.1 Crore / 31 Million people throughout the nation

🍏 All our businesses are now ebitda profitable while our monthly revenue doubled in the last 12 months.

👊 7000+ people directly/indirectly helping propel this rocketship throughout the nation

But the real win? Knowing why the retailers love us!

Some may miss the old ways, but retailers & consumers deserve better 💪

We are aiming to cover half of Bangladesh by 2026. That’s 8 Crore people getting quality food and essentials from the friendly neighborhood shopkeepers.

With Great p̶o̶w̶e̶r̶ Distribution Network, Comes Great Responsibility.

#2023 #ShopUpShowedUp

[Andrew McCormack @andrewjmack]

That’s how you’d explain it to a five year old?

[mass @Memetic_Theory]

That's not right. E/acc are trying to answer the fundamental question of why does life exist and what fundamental force is evolution pushed by.

E/accs believe that life increasing searches for the ability to capture the most "free energy" a fundamental physics term meaning usable energy there is some uncapturable energy due to entropy from heat.

Another way to think about this is minimizing local entropy or creating the most "complex" organized systems possible. Currently that's the human brain, but we may surpass that.

Does that help?

[Andrew McCormack @andrewjmack]

@threadreaderapp unroll

[Ram Ahluwalia CFA, Lumida @ramahluwalia]

@csuitecounsel Agreed. Credit cards have convenience value. Personal loans do not. They will default first.

[harshsinha @harshsinha]

@GergelyOrosz @Wise - We’ve built a profitable, fast growth business. Rare in fintech.
- We have scaled our EU engineering team well over the last decade.
- Would love to hire more seniors in EU but some markets we just tap out on talent.
- We are hiring. https://t.co/woCbXtW700

[Eric Demuth @eric_demuth]

From today @Bitpanda_global and @Coinbase are going to be partners. This deal was based around our shared vision for the future of digital assets, and our shared values of trust, transparency, and security. Exactly the type of collaboration our industry needs more of.
@brian_armstrong 🤝

https://t.co/g0Iv3jbfqA