Michael Jenson

2x Entrepreneur, producer for 🎥 📺 🎙 @USC Cinematic Arts Professor 🎓/ Co-founder @spkr @LabsBluebird

[Invest In Assets 📈 @InvestInAssets]

Bill Ackman is an American billionaire & hedge fund manager

Ackman instructs his new hires to read 11 books to sharpen their investing skills

Here are 11 books that will elevate your investing game (+ 1 bonus):

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

"Suffering is a moment of clarity, when you can no longer deny the truth of a situation and are forced into uncomfortable change. I’m lucky that I didn’t get everything I wanted in my life, or I’d be happy with my first good job, my college sweetheart, my college town. Being poor when young led to making money when old. Losing faith in my bosses and elders made me independent and an adult. Almost getting into the wrong marriage helped me recognize and enter the right one. Falling sick made me focus on my health. It goes on and on. Inside suffering is the seed of change."

— @naval in Tribe of Mentors (https://t.co/XQWd27YVze)

[Michael Jenson @michaeljenson]

@akasteveyyy The challenge of pushing boundaries and innovating! Keep at it!

[Michael Jenson @michaeljenson]

@chamath If I can be paid in Loro Piana, I’d love to be considered. 2x founder w/ exits including a podcast platform. Former Warner Bros, WME, Legendary Ent, Deloitte strategy. Produced 20+ films, podcasts, docs, live events. this is a dream job! @DavidSacks @friedberg @theallinpod

[Tyler Todt @tyromper]

My dads an incredibly smart man.

•Great leader
•Can fix anything
•Socially strong & networks well
•Read a book a week for 30 years

He NEVER moved up in his company.

I asked him WHY & the answer he gave me brought me to tears.

Here’s the best lesson my dad ever taught me.

[proper @ProperPrompter]

Amazing AI video has been put on display...

@runwayml just hosted the #GEN48 competition and the entries are phenomenal.

In just 48 hours, creators produced stunning short films.

Quick thread highlighting 10 of my favorites:

[Michael Jenson @michaeljenson]

Just the start of incredible new interactive storytelling, imagination, and new narrative control. Just need the interface layer to transition these use cases into great products! @sama

[Sam Altman @sama]

also, the video we made for dalle 3 is SO CUTE:

[Chase Lean @chaseleantj]

3 days ago, I shared a method to make consistent characters with Midjourney.

Haven't seen it? Check it out below.

This method can potentially be used to make a comic book for your kids.

Here's how I used it to create an entire storyline for my character in a single generation:

Steps:

1. Use a prompt that contains either...

a) A character performing an action, like surfing or playing basketball

b) Two characters, like a boy playing with a dog

2. Add "--niji" to the prompt.

3. Add "--style expressive" to the prompt.

For example, here is the prompt I used to generate the image grid below:

a boy surfing at the beach, blue waves, palm trees, 3d, unreal engine; split into 4 different images, shot from multiple angles --niji --style expressive

From the images, you can see a young boy trying out surfing.

After that, he gets hit by a big wave and falls down.

But he won't admit defeat.

He gets up, and tries again.

In the end, he succeeds at surfing.

Note that all 8 images below were made in a SINGLE generation 🤯

No image editing software was used to put them together.

One more thing:

You can further extend the images (and the storyline) by using the Midjourney zoom out feature.

I will show you how to do it in the comments.

[Michael Jenson @michaeljenson]

@BeehiveVP @LukeGundy Great, if we have already submitted, but want to make a few updates, is that possible? TY

[Chase Lean @chaseleantj]

100 hours ago, Runway dropped their image-to-video update.

I patiently waited 4 days to see what talented creators would come up with.

Finally, here are the 20 best Gen-2 creations I've found on Twitter:

[Sam Hogan 🇺🇸 @samhogan]

6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years.

With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case.

Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising.

Let’s start with the losers.

Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised >$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money.

The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy.

Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own @langchain and @trychroma infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way).

In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round.

(This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.)

This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity.

There are two causes for this:
1. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended.
2. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to @elonmusk reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen.

Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates ~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas."

These are the @levelsio's and @dannypostma's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition.

This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing.

LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing.

I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology.

The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch.

A few companies I would put in this group are:
1. https://t.co/VA35Jn2sti - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written.
2. https://t.co/DdZYB0H7Hq - AI for legal practices
3. https://t.co/ppAFpUNSHo - an AI-powered video editor

This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for.

If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious.

Lets recap:
1. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling.
2. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups.
3. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets.
4. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns.

It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see.

And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category. If you're a founder in the same boat, I'd love to talk. My DMs are open.

If you enjoyed this post, don't forget to follow me, Sam Hogan. I share one long-form post per week covering AI, startups, open-source, and more.

That's all folks! Thanks for reading. See you next week.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

What is it costing you—financially, emotionally, and physically—to postpone action?

Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction.

If you don’t pursue those things that excite you, where will you be in one year, five years, and ten years?

How will you feel having allowed circumstance to impose itself upon you and having allowed ten more years of your finite life to pass doing what you know will not fulfill you? If you telescope out 10 years and know with 100% certainty that it is a path of disappointment and regret, and if we define risk as “the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome,” inaction is the greatest risk of all.

[Michael Jenson @michaeljenson]

@elsa_jungman @lolitataub Intriguing concept and approach - curious to know more about use of AI in generating recommendations, etc

[Borriss @_Borriss_]

Like and RT, if you enjoyed it.

Follow me @_Borriss_ for more interesting AI stuff.

https://t.co/5EltmFykyJ

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

4. Google AI Ads

Google also released conversational AI for ads that can take your landing page and generate a variety of intelligent ads.

Google wants its $162B search ads business to benefit from generative AI as well.

[Rowan Cheung @rowancheung]

Here are the best ChatGPT prompts that will save you hours in a day:
https://t.co/IdrBm4EwrA

[Michael Jenson @michaeljenson]

@hashverse I want to enter the Hashverse baby!!

[Michael Jenson @michaeljenson]

Shows the failure of our gov to prioritize the people who need help the most.

[Brad Gerstner @altcap]

Lindsey is the story - thx for your courage. She deserves to have her savings / deposit protected. Not a dollar more for anybody. There are plenty of assets - the FDIC, Fed and Treasury need to speak with clarity NOW that this is over. Sell the assets - deposits 100% protected.

[Brad Gerstner @altcap]

Lindsey is the story - thx for your courage. She deserves to have her savings / deposit protected. Not a dollar more for anybody. There are plenty of assets - the FDIC, Fed and Treasury need to speak with clarity NOW that this is over. Sell the assets - deposits 100% protected.