Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸

writing @wordsssdotcom

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

introducing: use your words [https://t.co/Ry1yFYeJ5z]

a storytelling studio focused on helping founders, creators, designers and inventors tell more compelling and coherent tales of their work
https://t.co/Ry1yFYeJ5z

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

Shinkei increases the GDP of the sea.

Wordsss did the positioning.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

we have a winner for the most absurd AI startup ever

this Peter Thiel backed company uses AI robots to stab fish in the brain so they taste better and last up to 3x longer

it's called Shinkei and it modernizes a centuries-old Japanese technique

dozens of Michelin-star restaurants are already lining up to buy the fish

here's how it works:

> the problem is when a fish gets caught, it usually just suffocates on the boat

> that stress floods the meat with hormones and lactic acid, which hurts the flavor and texture

> the old Japanese fix for this was spiking the fish through the brain right after the catch, which stops all that

> but doing it by hand is impractical for most American fishing crews

> so Shinkei built a fridge-sized robot that sits right on the boat's deck

> the crew feeds in a fish and AI identifies the exact species, so it knows exactly where the brain and gills are

> the robot then drives the spike through the brain and cuts near the gills in about 7 seconds

> the fish goes into an ice slurry so the blood drains out

> so the fish doesn't sit there stressing out, and that tasty flavor and texture is preserved

example number 5,392,417 of how AI can be applied to literally anything

[Kevin Wimer @kevinace]

I have stage 4 cancer. I thought I'd fight it alone.

I was wrong.

Since mid October, ~20 strangers on X have stepped up to help me. All for free so far:
- An NYU Langone lab offered to run my tumor data through their system to sharpen my vaccine targets
- A U Michigan lab offered to test drugs on my actual tumor cells
- A biotech ran AI analysis on my tumor RNA
- A vaccine company offered to design a second vaccine to check the first one

Scientists. Engineers. People I've never met.

Cancer has been picking us off one at a time for all of human history. It counts on us fighting it alone, scared and quiet.

Not anymore.

We have AI. We have the internet. We have each other.

Cancer, we're coming for you, bitch. Buckle up!

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@Sujoun987 @lennysan @aiunderwriting @runlayer got u

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

Proud to see three Wordsss clients on @lennysan’s list of the 50 hottest early-stage companies.

@aiunderwriting is a frontier AI standards & insurance company.

@runlayer makes enterprise AI safe and simple.

[REDACTED] builds evolutionary programs for complex businesses. ← new work coming soon

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

congrats to my friends @venice_inc on three years of design excellence 🤌

@jeffinvenice is a prolific pixel pusher AND piano player !!

100% of the people I've referred to Venice have been blown away by Jeff's quality of work and professionalism

(and he's single, btw)

[Jeff @jeffinvenice]

@venice_inc turned three this week.

A new reel and website to celebrate three years of building brands, products, and websites with people pushing the world forward.

Grateful to our team, our clients, and everyone who’s been part of it. We're just getting started.

Sound on ↓

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@jeffinvenice @venice_inc 🗣️ who tf is Venice !!

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@fkpxls @daytonaio good bet

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@ivanburazin @daytonaio @FirstMarkCap congrats Ivan, just getting started 📈

[Gaby Goldberg @gaby_goldberg]

Today marks three years since October 7th, when the largest number of Jews were murdered in one day since the Holocaust.

It is difficult to describe the magnitude of devastation, sadness, and grief that now fills this day. I spent much of today reflecting on how it impacted me and so many other young Jews in America. For many of us, October 7th forced us to confront the fragility of our people. We deepened our Jewish identity in an effort to rebuild ourselves; we returned to tradition to reclaim our agency at a time when everything else was falling apart.

Now, it seems that in the wake of one of the darkest days in our history, the decades-long freefall in Jewish identity has begun to turn the corner. I would like to offer my own story.

Many of the most meaningful experiences of my life have taken place in the three years since October 7th. Notably, I had the privilege of volunteering in the south of Israel in early 2024, an experience that forever changed my relationship with the country and my identity as a Jew.

During this volunteering trip, we spent time with the then-newly drafted Kfir unit, the largest infantry brigade in the IDF, and helped cook them a BBQ dinner. We sat side-by-side with these boys, Jews with roots from all over the world—Iraqi, Ethiopian, Syrian, Russian… I even met a lone soldier from my hometown—and heard their stories. Most were 18 or 19 years old, barely out of high school. I remember how excited they were to sit and eat with us, how positive they were, and how excited they were about the opportunity to serve their country. I remember finding it funny that they were thanking us for cooking them dinner, when they were the ones preparing to defend us on the front lines. I remember feeling both pride and grief at how young they were.

Especially as young people, it can often be hard to comprehend how much of our lives are, in fact, up to us. So much of who we are is simply who we decide to be. As for my background, my mom is Israeli, and half my family lives in Israel. I’ve always felt a deep connection to the country and its people. I took my first steps there and, growing up, we visited our cousins as often as we could. But this trip (and the subsequent trips I’ve taken since) served as a dramatic recalibration for me in terms of what it meant for me to be Jewish. I came to more deeply understand my responsibility in maintaining the Jewish future. This understanding and appreciation has changed the way I’ve lived my life. It has had a profound impact on who I have decided to be.

Today, we are reminded of the immense suffering facing our people and the world. And yet, it is central to the Jewish experience that sorrow and joy can exist side by side. We praise God’s goodness while reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish; we smash a wine glass into pieces at a Jewish wedding.

On that same volunteering trip, I visited the site of the Nova Music Festival. It was springtime, and I remember the fields were covered in red Anemone flowers in what is referred to as Darom Adom (“Red South”). These dramatic flowers were blossoming among the charred remains of trees. Life was returning to a place once covered in blood.

In the Torah, when Moses nears the end of his life, he speaks to the Israelites: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life…”

We choose life.

Am Yisrael Chai

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

Vori has to be one of the most underrated private companies. And Brandon one of the most underrated founders. With perfect founder-market fit.

[Brandon Hill • Vori.com @IamBrandonHill]

Everyone is racing to build personal AIs that can shop for us.

But agents can only buy what they can see. https://t.co/l62DYEFuqG

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@barsisyphus @freialobo the other Ogilvy books are just as good:
"Ogilvy on Advertising" and "Unpublished David Ogilvy"

and there's a great biography "The King of Madison Avenue"

h/t @FoundersPodcast for putting me onto the goat

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@RuneKvist so proud of y'all (although it always felt inevitable)

[Rune Kvist @RuneKvist]

The Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company has raised $55M to audit and insure frontier AI models.

Insurance produces audits the public can trust and understand. The mechanism is simple: insurers need audits to price the risk. They pick auditors they believe will help them price the risk most accurately. Insurers then turn the audits into a price signal that cuts through political debates. Insurers are aligned with the public: if they get the audits wrong, they go out of business. That’s different from today, where labs pick their own auditors, creating public distrust.

Insurance only works if we scale up auditing, and we are building the infrastructure to do that. Millions of agents are being deployed; they leave terabytes of traces and will create thousands of incidents across dozens of risk categories. To scale auditing, we need reliable agents to surface evidence traces for human review.

History guides us. Take cars: auto insurers funded crash tests to price risks; crash tests led us to airbags, lowering the risk. Take electricity: home insurers funded lightbulb tests to price fire risks; today, every lightbulb carries a safety mark. Nuclear safety works similarly.

We’ve been learning by doing.. In the last 6 months, we’ve audited and insured frontier agent builders like Cursor, ElevenLabs, Lovable and Harvey. For ElevenLabs to get the world’s first agent insurance coverage, a Lloyd’s of London insurer required quarterly technical audits by an auditor of the insurer’s choice. We’ve built infrastructure for quarterly technical audits of any agent, working alongside firms like Gray Swan (technical evaluations) and Schellman (audit).

In the coming weeks, we’ll share our vision for how an insurance ecosystem can work for the frontier, and open source the world’s first actuarial model for frontier AI catastrophic risk.

We’re hiring across all roles in San Francisco. Come do your life’s work with us.

Rune & Rajiv

[jackie luo @jackiehluo]

everyone’s book picks, btw:

@iscoe, splitting an order by ted kooser
@ettinger, confessions of an advertising man by david ogilvy
@anuatluru, animal farm by george orwell
@arakharazian, john & paul by ian leslie
@kneelingbus, understanding media by marshall mcluhan
@freialobo, close to the machine by ellen ullman
@left_pad, tools for conviviality by ivan illich
@jackiehluo, games: agency as art by c. thi nguyen
@jacksondahl, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees by lawrence weschler
@Jhovde2121, dataclysm by christian rudder
@barsisyphus, seeing like a state by james scott
@kasrak, creativity, inc. by ed catmull
@katiewav, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees by lawrence weschler (2x!)
@thesephist, diaspora by greg egan
@m1shti, the journalist and the murderer by janet malcolm
@sebkrier, a canticle for leibowitz by walter miller
@kickingkeys, spacesuit: fashioning apollo by nicholas de monchaux

we had a lot of fun with this one, excited for the next

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@rlostrevino miss you baba

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

Recently completed the 50th project in Wordsss history 🙏

Hadn’t thought about this business in terms of project quantity, but it’s a number worth celebrating (currently doing so in the lakes and mountains around Zurich).

Grateful to have found something that I love doing, that some people (most importantly: our clients and my parents) seem to think I’m good at.

Here are some highlights from the monthly-ish update I sent to colleagues, collaborators, and one person who has since asked to be removed from the list:

I started my career by NOT starting my career at @AngelList (didn't get an offer for the Analyst program after a final round interview ... that I absolutely crushed btw!!)

I’m mostly over it now, but that made it particularly special to help this underrated beast of a business retell their story:

✌️ AngelList is the financial system for private markets: a portfolio of businesses that move capital between funds, investors, and companies. Each business handles a different layer of private market participation: how funds form and operate , how individuals find investment opportunities, how startups raise capital, and how payments are processed. Now with over $200B in assets on the platform.

Some recently wrapped work that's launching soon:

-Reindustrializing American biology with closed-loop clinical trials.

-Beating the market is a research problem. Active ETFs built on semi-autonomous, long-term fundamental equity research.

-Make your most complex business decisions safe to hand to an AI agent. Every agent is a brilliant new hire. Make it a seasoned veteran.

-Engineering intelligence, built from the session. Reopen any session, in any tool — and see what the spend built.

—————————

Wordsss is a storytelling studio for high-growth teams. We help innovative companies describe what they do, why it matters, and how it's different.

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@SpencerMarell thanks in part to you!

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@jonwu_ couldn't have done it without you !

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@myles_snider thanks family 🤌

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@alexadelman 50 of em

[Andrew Ettinger 🇺🇸 @ettinger]

@thegriffinwells 👑