Johan Jessen

Invests in elite founders who make sci-fi real. Past founder of ionlace and rebel at Google X, Lyft L5, Apple, research at Stanford.

[Johan Jessen @johanjessen]

🥳

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

FSD approved in Denmark

[Bilawal Sidhu @bilawalsidhu]

holy crap! apple just beat google to the punch -- 3d gaussian splatting is coming to apple maps.

these 3d scenes are made from oblique aerial imagery. but unlike blobby photogrammetry -- no more broccoli trees, no more melted powerlines -- ground level detail that actually holds up.

here's hoping google maps/earth follows suite soon -- they have a significantly larger corpus of sensor data to work with. time to splat the world!

[Blake Byers @byersblake]

Im sorry you were traumatized by Vinod falling asleep in your meeting. But he founded one of the pioneering companies of the modern computer industry (Eric Schmidt worked for him there), has the highest ever multiple and IRR at exit in Kleiner Perkins history ($7B return on $3M invested in only 3 years) and while everyone was investing in SaaS throughout the 2010s, Vinod was funding the first round of companies building battery tech, rocket launch, fusion, genomics, carbon tech and a little AI research lab called OpenAI. And he did this while hitting grand slams and raising multi billion dollar funds. He is one of the truest VCs to ever do it.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@NUnl ASML should be treasured and supported. It is arguably the greatest company in Europe.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Starlink launches now substantially outnumber all other satellite launch sources.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@brivael Edison was brilliant too.

AC was the right choice back then, but DC is the right choice today, as solar, batteries, electric cars and computers all use DC.

Many years from now, there will not be much AC left.

[Rohit Mittal @rohitdotmittal]

If an Anthropic employee got $500k/year in equity over 4 years in 2024, they are now worth $125M.

At $1M/year equity for 4 years, they are worth about $250M.

The scale and speed of wealth creation are incomprehensible.

$500k/year equity is not a lot for an early-stage startup. I don't think the Bay Area has seen this type of wealth creation in history.

Dot com boom probably feels like a speck of dust.

[Samswara @samswoora]

Starting to mourn all the people who died before the singularity.

[Rory Sutherland @rorysutherland]

I want someone to fund my idea of a Davos-style event where every speaker has recently retired.

You would then immediately hear the unvarnished truth about absolutely everything.

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

Compelling essay by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on why LLMs are nowhere near consciousness, but why it serves the interests of LLM companies to constantly suggest that they might be.

I've pulled one quote below, but the whole article is worth reading.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

Honestly this is genius.

Gives insane FOMO to founders to want to be in the Founder's Fund family.

10/10 soft power signalling while being cool / entertaining

[Drice @driceroland]

built the entire https://t.co/dAPkvAxFpu website with claude code.

layout, animations, the 5% off email flow. didn't touch a single other tool.

kinda insane how far this thing has come.

[Johan Jessen @johanjessen]

There's a bit of fear marketing here. But also a real threat / opportunity for startups. We considered this @ionlace back in 2023. But still very easy to side track in practice.

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis and many others have signed a letter urging Congress to increase security on orders of synthetic nucleic acids - and the equipment needed to make them - as models continue to become increasingly bio-capable.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

This vindicates a subtle prediction made by the anthropologist (and a founder of evolutionary psychology) Donald Symons 47 years ago in his masterpiece The Evolution of Human Sexuality: The mean difference between the sexes interacts with individual desirability.

[Mert Deveci @gm_mertd]

Next time a VC tells you your company is not VC-scale, send them this

[Veronica, Collagen Scientist @celestialbe1ng]

The anti-alcohol, anti-pleasure, live-off-grid rhetoric is anti-Western culture actually. We shouldn’t aspire to live like the Amish. We should aspire to enjoy the splendour of our civilisation: beautiful architecture, candlelit dinners, intellectual conversation, cocktails with beautiful friends under chandeliers. We didn’t build all this just to retreat back into huts and eat ground meat off wooden chopping boards

[Nostos @NostosLit]

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

[Andrew Ziperski @andrewziperski]

The Silicon Valley I came to in 2016 -- once a low-status refuge for weirdos, naive tinkerers, and missionaries -- has been overrun by input-maxxing Kumon striver types.

Company-building for this class of “entrepreneurs” is an exercise in performative escalations between startups touting their inputs: who can burn the most tokens, who can work the most hours, who can get the most views on an over-produced launch video.

This is why even “ARR,” which should be (and once was) an output of an excellent product and sales engine, has become a noisy, somewhat fake input -- into a machine designed to capture the zeitgeist for 15 minutes, dupe VCs, and maximize fundamentals-agnostic capital flows into a business. Actual company-building is a sideshow for the “cracked” YC-backed founder-striver.

When you talk to many of these people, they have no idea why they’re building what they’re building in the same way that a 16 year old doesn’t really know why he joined 12 clubs or took 15 AP classes -- only that they desperately want to maximize their visible, measurable inputs, tell you about it, and collect their gold star.

It’s easy to place the blame on YC, and they surely deserve plenty of it, but YC’s turn towards performative, low-stakes, incrementalist entrepreneurship is really just another symptom of the broader problems plaguing Silicon Valley: the inevitability of industry maturation and the playbook-ization of startups, demographic change, financial nihilism downstream of bad policy and psychopathic rhetoric coming from some leaders, etc.

The real progress being made amidst all of this is astounding, but the increasingly absurd shenanigans won’t stop until the culture punishes bad behavior and we prosecute, literally, some of the criminals running these companies.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

The problem w/ tokenmaxxing and grindmaxxing is they’re both commoditized, undifferentiated inputs

The right thing to focus on are scarce inputs

For all the jokes about how tech people are obsessed with taste but have none, the core idea there is right:

Differentiated inputs are what actually matter