John Rhodes

Real Estate • Insurance • Tech • Aviation • Film Producer

[Jake Stevens @stake_jevens]

I'm giving a talk at YC @startupschool later this month.

We'll go deep on what it takes to optimize LLMs for latency and throughput.

If you're cracked, or just interested, come say hi! We're scaling @luminal_ai's engineering team rapidly (min 10 hires by the end of the year)

[PandaGuarantee @PandaGuarantee]

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[John Rhodes @john_rhodes]

@romanbuildsaas Connector

[John Rhodes @john_rhodes]

“Confidence is a style, not a signal. Verify anything that matters.”

[John Rhodes @john_rhodes]

“sometimes the breakthrough is not adding cleverness, it is removing the thing that was quietly killing you”

[Raghav Dixit @_raghavdixit_]

https://t.co/RVnYCtg2wO

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life advice: When you're feeling overwhelmed, there are only two things you should do... get organized and get to work. The rest is just noise. Peace is found in progress.

[Jake Stevens @stake_jevens]

Real winning comes from knowing the hard work and sacrifice you put in resulted in your success.

Most people want to win without the work part, which is a child’s idea of winning.

[John Rhodes @john_rhodes]

@asmartbear Very sad. He was a great connector in Austin!

[John Rhodes @john_rhodes]

@Electrarythm “Modern man finally drags a huge crowd of indigestible rocks of knowledge around inside him…”

— Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1874 essay, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life"

[PandaGuarantee @PandaGuarantee]

On top of the world with our summer interns in NYC at @OneWTC

[PandaGuarantee @PandaGuarantee]

The legacy rent guarantor companies built their businesses for a world where landlords and renters had no other options.

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Legacy guarantors have cumbersome applications, slow processes and expensive pricing.

Better, Faster, Cheaper is here! 🐼

[John Rhodes @john_rhodes]

No idea if this will get any reach to help someone but…

things I’m learning as a second-time founder:

1. Don’t try to avoid all mistakes… instead, make faster mistakes. I learned the most growth comes from just trying more things with low expectations and being surprised and curious about what’s working. Stay open to being surprised.

2. Be opportunistic. I’ve had the most success when I simply embrace clear opportunity signals and then fall in love with what a market really wants. Everything becomes infinitely interesting if you stay curious: the most banal-seeming business reveals beauty once you dive into its history, industry nuance, colorful characters, and the real human needs it touches. Genuine fascination compounds into persistence which is the best unfair advantage.

3. Past success can distort your signal.
After you’ve had one win, people are more likely to nod along. That feels nice, but it’s dangerous. Overly deferential people don’t make the company better — they make the founder less sharp. You need people who will push back, ask better questions, and show you what the market wants, not just what they think you want to hear.

4. Optimize ruthlessly for people you genuinely like and who love the creative process of experimenting and diligently building a company. Working with people you really enjoy gets you through the brutal slow-growth product-market-fit exploration stage. Even frustratingly slow progress is fun and stimulating when you’re with people who enjoy working together, not just those chasing startup excitement or stock options and salary. This is the real cheat code for endurance in the hard early days.

5. Despite some founders saying that starting a new company doesn’t get easier, the second startup has felt easier for me. Not because the work is easier or the path is clearer but because I have more conviction this time around. I trust the process more, I trust myself more, I trust others more, and I have a stronger sense of what’s important in the early days. I’m not discouraged by the inertia and awkward, choppy early days of 0 to 1.

6. Culture is freedom + responsibility + context. Give people the full picture of the culture you want them to co-create, real ownership, and leeway to move and exercise their own judgement. The right people usually thrive in that environment. The wrong people become obvious pretty quickly. Over time, it creates leaders who think and act like owners instead of employees.

7. Reputation compounds before revenue does, and it’s a leading indicator of future success. So staying close to customers and partners to really know their experience of the product or service is vital intelligence. Fall in love with building a systematic repeatable process for improving the customer experience. Continually revisit the customer experience. Early on, people are mostly betting on whether you’ll actually do what you say… everyone is quietly asking the same thing: can I trust this company and these founders to follow through consistently?

[PandaGuarantee @PandaGuarantee]

What Is an Apartment *Rent Guarantor* and Do You Actually Need One? https://t.co/s68g5M2qLp article by PandaGuarantee on @LinkedIn

[Luminal @luminal_ai]

Come join Luminal's compiler team. We're actively building out new hardware backends. Exciting times in heterogeneous compute! (link below and in bio)

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Exactly right. The bottleneck has never been compute or capital. Its taste and judgment about what humans actually want. Infinite compute just makes the great founders faster and the confused ones more confused. https://t.co/AmPmal8NYF

[John Rhodes @john_rhodes]

@pmarca Timing is everything!

[Jake Stevens @stake_jevens]

We're making non-Nvidia chips actually useful. If that's interesting to you, come work with us!

[PandaGuarantee @PandaGuarantee]

Lowest priced guarantor insurance: https://t.co/ADVFpV01my

[Joe Fioti @joefioti]

We built Luminal to be an extremely simple, powerful, and general-purpose compiler so accelerators of the future can consume models straight from PyTorch and specialize down to their exact hardware.

[Joe Fioti @joefioti]

Chips are only as good as the software that runs them. Only one company has built a robust software stack to date: Nvidia. They've been rewarded with a $4T market cap.