J

I post about anything

[J @dotjesl]

"Excellence Is the Capacity To Take Pain" - Travis Kalanick, Founder of Uber.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Fei-Fei Li spent years hand-labeling 14 million images, gave the entire thing away for free, and watched it create a multi-trillion dollar industry that paid her nothing. Sixteen years later, AMD is finally paying her. $8.2 billion.

Rewind to 2007. She's a junior professor at Princeton, and the field's consensus is that progress comes from better algorithms, with data as an afterthought. Colleagues warn her that building a giant image dataset will kill her career. Money gets so tight she considers reopening her family's dry cleaning business in New Jersey, the same one she ran on weekends as a Princeton undergrad, to fund the project.

She builds ImageNet anyway and releases it free in 2009.

For three years, almost nothing happens. Then in 2012, two of Geoffrey Hinton's students train a neural net on a pair of $500 gaming GPUs and enter her competition. AlexNet drops the error rate from 26% to 15%, and that single result convinces the whole field that deep learning works.

Nvidia was a gaming chip company worth about $8 billion that day. It's worth over $5 trillion now, and the run started with two of its consumer cards winning a contest built on Fei-Fei's free dataset.

The entire industry monetized the wave except the person who started it. She stayed a professor.

Then in April 2024, at 47, she finally starts a company. Paul's math above puts the four co-founders' share at roughly $3.4 billion after just 2.5 years, call it $850 million each. And she walks into AMD as Chief Scientist reporting to Lisa Su, which puts the two most important women in AI inside the same company.

ImageNet made everybody in this business rich. It just took sixteen years to get around to her.

[Brendan (can/do) @BrendanFoody]

all successful founders i know work every waking minute

[Ryan Fox @wailord]

really pumped for alex's connect keynote after seeing rehearsals

[J @dotjesl]

‼️‼️‼️

[Brycent @brycent]

There was a kid who was in college 18-24 months ago

That is now the founder of a $3.5B unicorn, that fastest in Y Combinator history...

YOU AREN'T DELUSIONAL ENOUGH!!!

[Anna Tong @annatonger]

Another day, another 20-something making a fortune from selling data to AI labs. This time @micro1_ai and @aliansarinik have raised $100m+ at a $4b valuation, after going from $7m ARR -> $500m ARR in 1.5 years. https://t.co/0IYUKoIuZd

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

"Moats" are the most BS thing in startups.

No such thing exists when you start. Google, Apple, Meta can always "just build it".

Defensibility is built in increments.

Small, immensely focused teams outpace the biggest companies on earth.

Investors, get over the moat obsession.

[JR @Joseeeee___3]

Algún día vas a entender que no todos los que te aman van a volver después de que los rompes.

[J @dotjesl]

Good morning ☀️

[Bernardo @bebedaselva]

A partner from @ycombinator said "improving top of funnel solve all startup problems"

I think about this almost every day

[J @dotjesl]

Be kind... everyone is fighting a silent battle.

[billionaire_secrets @billionaire_key]

Never avoid a battle that must be fought

[J @dotjesl]

Tim Apple —> John Apple. Let’s go!

[John Ternus @johnternus]

hello

[Tim Denning @Tim_Denning]

You can literally reprogram your mind with affirmations.

[andrew chapello @chapello]

Instinct has had the best consumer product launch strategy since Uber. This happened in 4 parts:

1) Exclusivity: it is invite only

2) Hype: lots of folks writing on X (including by me)

3) Mystery: who is the team? Who are the founders? Have they already raised?

4) A dash of fear: is this too powerful? How do they use my data? YOLO?

[LinaHua @Linahuaa]

I agree with Peter Thiel on everything.
Many other Chinese who never heard of Peter Thiel would also agree on everything.
It's actually just common sense.

It's just that he always finds the most creepy, elitist, pompous & pretentious way to say mundane shit:

Normal person:
"Maybe it’s better to make something unique than fight 50 identical competitors."
Peter Thiel:
"Competition is the ideology of cattle. The superior founder creates a monopoly and exits the mimetic blood-pit."

Normal person:
"It would be nice if medicine helped us live longer."
Peter Thiel:
"Death is an engineering defect. Nature has issued a challenge. I intend to appeal the human expiration date."

Normal person:
"Successful people usually have a plan."
Peter Thiel:
"Indefinite optimism is spiritual surrender. The future does not arrive. It is seized by men with definite plans."

[Netflix @netflix]

Dolly Parton forever ❤️

“You are enough. And anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t worth your time.”

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Good always comes from the bad. You just need to look for it.

[Investment Wisdom @InvestingCanons]

“Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs.”

— Charlie Munger

[MATT GRAY @matt_gray_]

Set a bar so high most people think you're crazy.