Pedro Torres-Mackie

Founder @qventures @eldiario | Board member @UpstateFilms

[Lloyd Blankfein @lloydblankfein]

Risk management 101—every exposure should have a limit, even when you’re sure nothing could go wrong. After all, the Titanic sank and AAA mortgage bonds went to zero. I worry about the market’s (and the economy’s) unlimited appetite for exposure to the positive AI revenue story.

[joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @JoshuaSteinman]

Here’s an idea for @sama @DarioAmodei et al:

- buy the books
- scan the books
- employ the best book binders and book restorers in the world to re-bind the books
- enlist @mspringut to build a gorgeous, classical stone and glass library whose mere edifice stands as a testament to human knowledge, never mind its contents
- and its contents are all the rare books in the world, preserved for our posterity
- put them in the library
- require (free) membership to visit (now it’s non-public, members only, might get you around the legal stuff)
>> new human library of Alexandria

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@jamesoniam @drivewithchip this is so cool 🙌🏼

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@tomas_salvo22 so cool! where can I pre-order a self build kit? 🧐

[dev3pack @dev3pack]

Build4Venezuela 🇻🇪

Humanitarian hackathon to support Venezuela after the earthquake, until June 28 🙏🏼

👥 Verified directories

🗺️ Maps to report needs by area

🤖 Whatsapp bot to guide families

🛠️ Tools for coordination

📣 Translate critical information

🤝 Tracking systems

🔗 https://t.co/m6oidkmJFH

[Ada Ferrer @Adita_Ferrer]

Help Venezuela From Abroad: Cash Donations Matter Most Right Now | Caracas Chronicles https://t.co/EaMNhoGtSP

[gabriel @gabriel1]

we're hiring! for onsites we fly people to sweden until our US visas are done

you'll enjoy working with us if you always have work top of mind, enjoy rational product dicussions, and want to build/sell/market something amazing

reach out through a mutual or otherwise dms!

[a16z @a16z]

The mission statement SpaceX adopted when it absorbed xAI in February reads: "scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars."

This is, depending on how you read it, either the most ridiculous thing a serious company has ever put on its mission page or the most honest. We think it’s the latter.

If you squint at the org chart, SpaceX is a launch provider with an internet subsidiary and a recently-acquired AI lab.

If you squint at the technology roadmap, it’s the only company on Earth assembling the full prerequisite stack for the post-scarcity transition.

If you squint at the mission statement, it’s a serious attempt by one of the most operationally capable founders of our time to push humanity through the bottleneck that ends with us either as an interplanetary species sharing the cosmos with intelligent machines we built, or as a footnote on one rocky planet that didn’t make the leap.

SpaceX & the Sentient Sun, by @mikemcg0 and @pmarca: https://t.co/0CkG3Dvyi6

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

Elite level book marketing

[Axios @axios]

SCOOP: Top White House officials believe NYT reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their new book.

Such a taped leak would be a shocking breach of one of the most secure settings on Earth. https://t.co/9gglgVCO1n

[Just Another Pod Guy @TMTLongShort]

What comes next:

The govt will rollout an emergency citizenship program for any foreign-born employee working in a lab contingent on them immediately moving to the U.S.

Everyone will be heavily vetted via the same screening construct already utilized by the defense primes.

Google will have to move the entirety of DeepMind to the U.S. and fire whoever refuses to relocate.

People will gleefully assume Demis will just start his own UK lab instead before realizing the next step is the US is about to gut foreign “unmonitored” access to compute.

You can pull a LeCun but you won’t have sufficient compute to do shit.

Greencards will be given to family members too.

Foreign govts will freak out when they realize what is happening. We are gatekeeping and hoarding intelligence preemptively.

Why? Because by GPT 7 France will be like “oh you just destroyed our services sector we are going to tax the labs to pay for the necessary benefits to prevent riots” and it’s a lot easier to do that if labs have critical employees based in Paris. Ditto for every other foreign nation.

Anyone acting like this is surprising is simply incapable of thinking four steps ahead.

We are going to see industries nuked over night. There will be civil unrest. The only way to navigate that is to tax and gatekeep. The only way you can tax something is if it lives in your borders. We are repatriating exposure points preemptively.

Compute gatekeeping comes next.

🫡

[Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross @alexwg]

https://t.co/56Lcgh1nb6

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@signulll the selling point being an entirely tech-bro free dining experience?

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@tallsnail I took my daughter to see the Starship launch last week in TX. During the day we visited a sea turtle sanctuary and saw dolphins on a boat tour.

On the flight back home I asked what her favorite part was. She said it was the hotel pool.

We have a pool at home.

[Rachel Mayer @0xrachelita]

the dollar didn't win in Venezuela because they love the US

it won because they trust phones more than banks and the people in power

[Ricardo Hausmann @ricardo_hausman]

Sanctions hurt people, not dictators. Right? Wrong! This book by @miguelsantos12 @JoseMoralesA and @zp2903 carefully looks at Venezuela and tells a much more interesting story: the sanctions forced the dictator to reduce their damaging command and control destructive measures. Read this 🧵!

[Naval @naval]

Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone.

No accreditation required, SEC-registered, and a very low $500 minimum.

Includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Crusoe, Legora, and Vercel. As USVC adds more companies, investors will own a piece of that too.

Liquidity typically comes when companies exit, but we’re aiming to let investors redeem up to 5% of the fund every quarter. This isn’t guaranteed, but if we can make it work, you won’t be locked up like in a traditional venture fund.

It runs on AngelList, which already supports $125 billion of investor capital.

And I’ve joined USVC as the Chairman of its Investment Committee.
—

Go back to the 1500s, you set sail for the new world to find tons of gold - that was adventure capital.

Early-stage technology is the modern version. It says we are going to create something new, and it’s risky. It’s daring.

But ordinary people can’t invest until it’s old, until it’s no longer interesting, until everybody has access to it. By the time a stock IPOs, most of the alpha is gone. The adventure is gone. Public market investors are literally last in line.

This problem has become farcical in the last decade. Startups are reaching trillion dollar valuations in the private markets while ordinary investors have their noses up to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in.

Investing in private markets isn’t easy. You need feet on the ground. You need judgment built over years. Most people don’t have the patience to wait ten or twenty years for an investment to come to fruition.

But there is no more productive, harder-working way to deploy a dollar than in true venture capital.

USVC enables you to invest in venture capital in a broad, accessible, professionally-managed way, through a single basket of innovation, focused on high-growth startups, at all stages.

It is how you bet on the future of tech: the smartest young people in the world, working insane hours, leveraged to the max, with code, hardware, capital, media, and community. Your dollar doesn’t work harder anywhere.

There is an old line - in the future, either you are telling a computer what to do, or a computer is telling you what to do. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that transaction.

USVC lets you buy the future, but you buy it now. Then you wait, and if you are right, you get paid.

Get access here:

https://t.co/pAj1sqUsG0

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

This is awesome. A top tier VC fund anyone can invest in with as little as $500.

Congrats @AngelList @naval @ankurnagpal

[Ankur Nagpal @ankurnagpal]

Announcing my new thing:

I'm launching a new public venture fund

USVC is built by AngelList with @naval shaping our investment strategy in the technology companies building our future

And unlike traditional venture funds, everyone can invest along with just $500:

[Joshin and Jokien @joshcarlosjosh]

timeline cleanse: pediatrician with a young patient

[All The Right Movies @ATRightMovies]

In 1993, the New York Times published an article criticising Federico Fellini and some other foreign language films for being "hard work". MARTIN SCORSESE sent this incredible letter in response.