Excited for Paradigm to co-lead this $110M investment in SendCutSend alongside @andrew__reed, @patrickc, and @collision.
24h turnaround manufacturing that your favorite robot, defense, space, and car companies all use.
Grateful that @jimbelosic allowed us all to get involved.
Caitlin Kalinowski (@kalinowski007) helped engineer the original unibody MacBook Pro and was technical lead on the MacBook Air and Mac Pro at @Apple, was @Meta's first consumer electronics hire and went on to lead their AR glasses and VR hardware teams, and most recently was at @OpenAI helping build their robotics and hardware teams from scratch.
In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:
🔸 Why the AI frontier is shifting from digital to physical
🔸 How the technologies built for VR became the foundation of modern warfare
🔸 Why humanoid robots are still just prototypes, and what’s most gating mass deployment
🔸 The coming memory price shock and why she’s telling startups to pre-buy now
🔸 Lessons from Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman
🔸 Why she walked away from OpenAI after the DoD deal
Listen now
https://t.co/qox7Z0S5k4
72 hours after YC demo day, I moved to Shenzhen for 8 weeks 🤠
I'm headed back to SF with new hardware in hand (sharing more soon), but some takeaways documented below:
> If you have even the slightest ambition to found a hardware company, visit SZ. Pre-raise, pre-team, pre-idea, pre-job departure, it doesn't matter. Just go.
> Plan your visit according to a major conference that interests you. Use that conference as a supplier meeting springboard - that's your ticket to any factory under the sun.
> At the factories, ask about lead times, don't ask about cost (wait on this). Your iteration rate is driven by the lead time on the longest lead time item in your assembly. It pays to identify these parts early to build project timelines.
> Visit Huaqiangbei (read: this is a mini-city, not a building). Robotic subassemblies, batteries, chassis's, electronic parts. They all have buildings where vendors are tightly clustered. Plan to spend 4-6 hours walking around before you find exactly what you're interested in.
> Business relationships are valuable commodities. Treat them as such. Pay attention to people, learn about them. Bring thoughtful gifts. Wait for them to sit first. With Baiju, fill the glass but with tea leave some room. Cultural customs are fun to learn, but also convey a seriousness towards the working relationship.
> Suppliers fit cleanly into discrete buckets. Level of complexity and execution on past projects indicates what is in scope for them. Trivial, but important to level your build expectations. It is easy to design a part with 12 subsequent manufacturing processes, exceptionally hard to find a supplier to fill this order.
If you need coffeeshop recs, food recs, or hotel recs I have a few.
Move to Shenzhen! Get to building!
Jane Street just showed the inside of their AI training data center in Texas.
4,032 GPUs. 56 racks. 8,000 km of fiber. liquid cooling running through every server because air cooling can't handle the heat anymore.
but the part that got me was the origin story.
Ron Minsky, who co-heads their technology group. said their first compute cluster was literally six Dell boxes stacked on top of each other at the end of a desk row. they called it "the hive."
the trading systems sat out in the room with the traders because they wanted to be able to unplug them if something went wrong.
at one point, someone vacuuming the office unplugged a live trading system in the middle of the day.
from six Dell boxes and a vacuum cleaner incident to a liquid-cooled GPU data center processing trades in under 100 nanoseconds.
that's a 20-year arc.
Altcoins see a broad resurgence over the past month.
Sector Gainers
- Privacy (+45.04%)
- SOL DeFi (+35.12%)
- Memecoins (+33.57%)
- ETH DeFi (+24.19%)
- DePIN (+20.67%)
AI is quickly evolving and saturating the software world and its utility is becoming more and more valuable in the hardware world. The good thing(for us) about hardware world is that it takes time and it needs efficient supply chain, experience in the merge among hard/software AI
I've left OpenAI and the Codex team to build Blackstar: A new hardware company building the future of human-computer interaction.
We believe that software is solved. Building apps is now easy, but the next meaningful improvement in human-AI communication requires changing the OS & hardware. That's why we're building a new device entirely.
I'm also excited to announce our $12m seed round led by @AbstractVC, with participation from @naval, @SVAngel, @chapterone, and Timeless, among other amazing angels who've supported us from the old Alex days.
if you’re into robotics or AI, picking up Chinese is a good move. Native speakers make up ~50% of top researchers - I’ve lost count of how many times I was the only non-native speaker at a table, and being able to follow the nuance of the conversation was huge. You’ll be fine w/o, but having it lets you jump into a ton of Chinese-only dialogues you’d otherwise miss. It only has to be conversational Chinese because all the technical terms will still be in English.
Happy birthday to @VitalikButerin !
you are 00100000 today!
thank you for being you
for your bright ideas
for your silliness
for your sincerety
for your kindness
for your curiosity
for your passion
and many many other wonderful attributes people around you and far away from you got to recognize and love about you!
🥳🥳🥳♥️♥️♥️
The real challenge for all of us is evolving past the "gambling" era. A sustainable ecosystem cannot survive on speculation alone; it requires real cash-flow businesses. Until then, the industry will continue to react emotionally to the very people who built the arena.
#Binance
It’s easy to throw stones at the tallest building. Much of the noise surrounding Binance and CZ today is simply a reflection of market anxiety, not operational reality. Price volatility is a feature of the macro cycle, not a failure of infrastructure.