sam carter | 현준

vc investing in data center infra & cool stuff | past: cs & english @harvard, data @dibbs_io | I write about my life — | 🇺🇸🇰🇷

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

the greatest compliment ever: someone comparing my recent newsletter post to @paulg’s writing

https://t.co/1E4w1AFoyn for more :)

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@jukan05 look at their hires from a year+ ago

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

new Poke (@interaction) is really good at bulk deleting junk emails

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

crypto bro pattern recognition actually maps decently well to the current semis market

most of them have negative engineering skill but have seen hype cycles and have a nose for bullshit

and now some know when they lose their edge

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

the (good) VCs who have operated before are the first to admit their knowledge is probably out-of-date

the founder always sees more facts on the field

[mark pincus @markpinc]

A junior partner at a top vc told me he was worried i wasnt coachable. I said, i dont see what you can teach me given youve never founded or run a successful company.

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

my freshman fall, Matt gave an incredible talk to @thecrimson business board comp that shaped the trajectory of my entire college career

since then, I’ve heard anecdotes from his classmates and mentees that speak volumes

don’t know him personally, but few better opportunities

[Matt MacInnis @stanine]

We have an uzi of AI output coming from @rippling this year. If you wanna work for me (directly) to tell that story, please DM me. Needs a solid technical foundation, coupled with the X savviness of @HunterBiden.

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@unusual_whales This is pretty common for semis

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@ladsgeog @KaloneMarl That’s a 56 win pace

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

Silicon will run higher for longer. What people think will happen in 2027 won’t happen until at least 2028.

Individual companies will bust in the meantime, but I’m net long semis for foreseeable future.

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

Big if true

[Ayar Labs @AyarLabs]

Today, @AyarLabs announced it has joined the @nvidia NVLink Fusion ecosystem, introducing co-packaged optics as a foundational building block for hyperscalers and system innovators deploying heterogeneous compute in NVIDIA AI factories.

Press Release:
https://t.co/vNhVcHzLIA

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

I wrote this to our team today:

“I think this is exactly the area where VC investment is worthwhile: The frontier, where the most informed minds vehemently disagree, and there is already $1bn+ of demonstrated customer spend up for grabs in a company's narrow (and expanding) category.”

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

Asian nerd and jock (40s) catching up next to me at a restaurant

nerd spent a year in his 30s reaching out to *everyone he has ever known*

first “not close friend from high school” he reached out to after 10+ years of no contact is now his wife

you can just do things

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@saranormous @audrlo good for work and relationships

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

.@Voxel51, powered by @Miris_spatial at CVPR this week.

STREAMING at full fidelity on a workstation-class GPU.

Theatre talks at booth 309 on Friday, June 6 and Saturday, June 7 @ 11am and 3pm

& demo on your phone @ https://t.co/SyX7DBVtzm

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

“Like the tyrant, the tragic hero is an extreme version of a person who needs to overly regulate the complexity of their own mind.”

- Adam Phillips, “On Giving Up”

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@_s0han 1) @paulg wrote a great essay about this (linked below).

2) you will see your network compound over time & likely attribute more to physical proximity than you do now.

3) the main assertion of your post is a good one.

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@theamberyang There’s a great @paulg essay about this.

The main thesis is that the trade-offs people make to live in a city are inextricably linked to the personality and values/value props of that city.

“Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge.”

https://t.co/YHRycsQevM

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@suchenzang and honestly? that’s brave

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@martin_casado Question 1 is: Will more value capture from the AI OS come from hardware or software.

Question 2 is: Which incremental features will induce marginal spend at scale? We aren’t at scale yet, despite huge #’s.

Latency as key feature suggests consumer hardware as power broker.

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@Romy_Holland a lot of that in Seoul is hidden and pretty inaccessible to foreigners without a friendly citizen as a guide.

I thought the same until my third trip there, when I had made several friends who’ve spent many years there.

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

Mostly due to networking protocols. TLDR it’s graph theory, hardware/software limitations, and Amdahl’s Law.

To send data between connected (racks of) GPUs, some things need to happen in parallel, and some things need to happen sequentially. Some operations take all the memory on a package but don’t use full compute. Some operations (have to) happen standalone but don’t max out the memory or the compute.

Some operations are redundant (being done by multiple chips or racks simultaneously) in case a chip/rack fails. But you need to wait for the last chip or cluster doing the calculation to “arrive” wherever the next operation is.

There’s a whole host of other reasons: packets drop randomly over Ethernet, flow control has not been super optimized historically, variable packet sizes and every-changing best of breed AI algorithms make optimizations hard and short-lived.

Tons more.

[sam carter | 현준 @samhcarter]

@NTmoney Wemby and Maye/Daniels are particularly difficult for this because of the Fanatics/Panini license handoff.

This is the only Wemby I got (/25) despite being a huge early believer.

Didn’t buy any Maye because I only knew the Contenders Rookie Ticket market.