Max Olson

Product @Mashgin. Seed & public market investing. Software/design for fun and profit. Book publisher. Blog: / Buffett book:

[Max Olson @maxolson]

SpaceX has been succeeding in public for 15+ years. Now they're the most valuable private company on Earth & the competition isn't close.

Is any of this repeatable? Why hasn't the model been copied?

Wrote an essay on why + what anyone building hard things can learn:

[Max Olson @maxolson]

Need a remake of the movie "in time" now but with tokens

[Lori Garver @Lori_Garver]

I was berated by most @NASA leaders, congress, astronauts, industry & much of the space community for advancing innovative risk-sharing govt policies. Being a visionary didn't translate into promotions or spaceflights or IPO shares, so shout outs like this are much appreciated!

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

We should manufacture drugs and vaccines using duckweed.

A few reasons:
- They're the fastest-growing flowering plants.
- Duckweed is up to 45% protein by biomass.
- They grow in wastewater.
- Duckweed can be transformed by "dipping" them into a liquid with plasmids and carbon nanotubes; very simple.
- Both monoclonal antibodies and edible vaccines have been made with duckweeds at small scales for ~two decades.

But there are lots of duckweed strains. We should sequence all of them, pick a strain, and start building better biotechnology tools. There is room for a focused philanthropy effort here (and companies), too.

[David Perell @david_perell]

I’m making a TV show!

Here’s why: When I was moving to New York, I told my leasing agent that I wanted a place with charm and character. She told me that if that’s what I want, I need to look for apartments built before World War II.

“So you’re saying we’ve basically built nothing with charm and character in the past 80 years?”

“That’s right.”

This is happening all over the world. The same boring and generic style has spread to the entire world. 150 years ago, new buildings in Shanghai looked nothing like the ones in Rome or Tokyo or San Francisco or Buenos Aires. The architecture of each place was as varied as the landscape itself.

And it’s not just the sameness of the modern world that has me scratching my head, but also the carelessness behind so much of what’s built these days. We boast about the triumphs of technology and how advanced we are as a civilization, but why has our built environment regressed so much? Shouldn’t we use our wealth to make our streets more charming and delightful?

There’s lots of talk about how we’ve polluted the natural world, but what about how we’ve polluted the man-made world? We’ve filled our streets with ugly railings, benches, lampposts, and clutter.

We assume these things have to be boring, but they don’t. Good design can make everything, even bins and bus stops, charming. New things can be prettier than old things. The first step is believing it’s possible.

Something has changed. We’ve taken a dramatic turn, and the majority of people prefer what we used to build to what we build today. Just look at where people take photos. In New York it’s the steps of brownstones in the West Village; in San Francisco it’s the old Victorian homes; in London there’s tourists galore in front of those iconic red phone booths which remain on the streets, even though they don’t work anymore, because they’re so nicely designed that people like having them there.

All this is what inspired me to make a TV show.

First: a pilot episode which now has 5.4 million views, 23,000 comments, and 379,000 likes. It also has 241,000 YouTube subscribers from that one video, which is just about unheard of for a new channel.

And now: a full-on, six-episode series.

But when I pitched Hollywood on the idea, they said cultural series of this sort don’t work: “The only kinds of documentaries that get funded are about sports, music, nature, or true crime.” Huh? How can that be?

People are interested in culture. The problem is most culture documentaries are terrible. They fail in one of two ways: (1) people dumb down the ideas in patronizing ways, or (2) people use so much jargon and high-falutin language that it becomes boring and inaccessible.

This is why I’m producing this work. It’ll be called The Modern World, and it’ll be a tour of art & architecture through the eyes of Sheehan Quirke, who goes by @culturaltutor.

It’s our ambition to do for the man-made world what Planet Earth did for the natural world. To use cinematic imagery and simple language in a way that everybody can understand. And to be rigorous, but not in a way that feels like school or your know-it-all friend who never stops talking.

The potential here is huge. Architecture impacts literally every person on earth. What we build shapes the moods of people and the spirit of our culture.

We’ll film in six countries (the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States) to produce six 30-minute episodes which we hope to publish on a major streaming service. We’re currently in the fundraising stage, and production begins once we’ve raised the money.

It’s our mission to help people see the world more clearly, and in turn, make the world a more charming and delightful place to live in.

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The new White House policy requiring green card applicants to apply from outside the US is a capricious attack on legal immigration. It will hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.

[Tom @tombombadeel]

Imagine asking a human from any time in history prior to the 20th century if they wanted 3 almonds, to travel 20 miles, or to ask an oracle any question no matter how complex

[Max Olson @maxolson]

Glad there are also people directly combating misinfo and this shitty form of fearmongering

[Quick Thoughts @lthlnkso]

Why are so many people afraid of data centers?

[Rahul Sidhu @rahul]

Last year, the city of Austin turned off their Flock cameras as the result of a targeted misinformation campaign.

This weekend, for nearly 24 hours, three suspects drove around Austin in stolen vehicles, undetected, conducting a shooting spree at 12 separate locations. They shot multiple people, houses, apartment buildings, businesses, and fire stations. They committed multiple robberies and car thefts during the spree. Despite a full manhunt involving 200 officers, with helicopter and K9 support, they weren't able to locate the suspects, and the spree continued.

Luckily, the suspects drove into the Flock-supported city of Manor, TX. Manor is a small city with ~20k residents, and a fraction of Austin's budget. What they do have is modern technology and the ability not to fall victim to misinformation campaigns.

After the suspects drove into Manor to continue their shooting spree, Manor PD located them almost immediately. The residents of Manor stayed safe.

This is a tale of two cities.

I love Austin. I have plenty of friends who live there. I myself almost moved there years ago. I'm glad that the shooting spree is over, but I just wish it never happened.

[Max Olson @maxolson]

hold on, updating HR policies now...

[∿ @somewheresy]

DEI stands for Datacenter, Electricity and Infrastructure now

[Patrick Finley @PatrickFinley_]

We just partnered with the Musk Foundation to give out $175k in grants to advance the frontier of collegiate rocketry.

This is in addition to the $390k we’re already giving out to collegiate teams building propulsive self-landing rockets.

When we first started, people laughed and told us what we were attempting would be impossible.

2 years later, several student teams have achieved both TVC and throttled hotfire with liquid engines, and they are making fast progress on their hoppers. We’re already seeing hover attempts at a collegiate level!

These kids are doing this on 0.001% of a typical rocket budget, dedicating 80 hour weeks without any pay to build some of the most capable rockets outside of industry.

The reason why so many people fall in love with space and rocketry is because it is proof that humanity is capable of the impossible.

We want to continue to advance that mission.

Back to work.

[Max Olson @maxolson]

Awesome, although way way too much $$$ is going to drug design, not nearly enough in actual lab experimentation and scaling

1. design groundbreaking drugs/therapies
2. ???
3. save lives!

[Max Jaderberg @maxjaderberg]

Huge news today at Isomorphic Labs!

We have secured $2.1 Billion investment to advance the most important mission that AI can unlock: to change the way we can improve human health and create new medicines for patients around the world.

This funding milestone was built on the strength of our AI drug design engine (IsoDDE), which has already proven its worth (aside from smashing benchmarks) by designing breakthrough new molecules and creating new scientific breakthroughs across our drug discovery programs.

Our IsoDDE is giving us a repeatable way to design new medicines for a wide range of diseases, building a future of medicine that we couldn’t unlock until now.

A massive thank you to our incredible team across London, Boston and Lausanne, whose relentless work made this possible, and to our partners who share our ultimate vision.

Now we have so much more to build together!

[Max Olson @maxolson]

dominance

[Christian Keil @pronounced_kyle]

SpaceX is only ~200 satellites away from having launched as many satellites as the rest of the world combined

(despite giving the rest of the world a 61-year head start)

[Max Olson @maxolson]

What a single person can do now with AI: https://t.co/WUeUcZeNFQ

what could Disney do if they actually embraced the technology in the right way?

[Ashlee Vance @ashleevance]

May we present to you 5,000 words on Casey Handmer and Terraform Industries reported over several months.

If you would like to read about a team trying to make fuel from water, air and sunlight while working inside of a castle, we have what you need right here https://t.co/HaOPIFf7Bo

[Max Olson @maxolson]

This most certainly could be fully automated but it’s too fun so we choose not to.

[MachinePix @MachinePix]

Mixing and coloring silicone.

[Max Olson @maxolson]

I noticed the "Only the Paranoid Survive" bit in the latest Starship episode.

In early SpaceX years, @elonmusk signed off with this Andy Grove'ism in a letter he wrote in January 2007.

Seem like it's paid off.

[Gwynne Shotwell @Gwynne_Shotwell]

Thanks to the incredible grit and determination of the SpaceX Starship team, our space future is soooooo close!

[Max Olson @maxolson]

@pronounced_kyle I fully expected my 2yo daughter to get bored after 5 minutes but she was captivated the whole time

[Max Olson @maxolson]

@The_Book_Beater @goodinvestingc @BRK_Student https://t.co/twdhC1HOoi

[Jon Edwards @edwards345]

Yes I do! We built it mostly out of spare Falcon parts and off the shelf components (“scrappy not crappy” was our motto). The propellant tank was an old qual tank that had been lying around in a field, open and exposed to the elements (and the crickets) for a couple of years. I did not expect it to survive proof testing, but it did and ultimately survived the entire test campaign. In fact, Grasshopper is still standing proud at our test site in McGregor, TX.