Announcing the inaugural class of @a16z Design Engineer fellows!
73 design leaders selected out of thousands of apps from talented people around the world.
Many fellows wrote the original playbooks in product design like - @joshto from Meta, @iansilber from OpenAI (prev. Instagram), and Yuliya Gorlovetsky from Stripe.
Some are currently building category defining products, zero to scale - like @diegozaks from Ramp, @ryolu_ from Cursor and Nicolas Garro at Vercel.
Others are design leaders at tech powerhouses like - @ammaar at Google, @maheen_sohail at Meta, and @davidhoang at Atlassian.
+64 more...
See the full cohort and the sign-up form to stay in touch on the next DEF fellowship below!
For 40 years the file browser hasn’t changed.
Today, we’re launching with $8 million in seed funding to rebuild the file browser into something more intelligent, searchable, and delightful.
The world is in the middle of a data explosion. We’re generating and using more files than ever, but the apps we’re using to manage our files don’t even understand them.
It’s time for file browsers to become useful. When you search for “dog”, it should show you content with dogs in it, not just files with “dog” in the name! When you want to edit, convert, summarize, or organize a file, your browser should do that, too.
Your files tell the story of your life, but when you need a specific one, you usually can’t even find it anymore. Why can’t your file browser find it for you, or cross-reference it when you have a question? Prompting can give an LLM a million tokens of context. With Poly, you can give it the next trillion.
As long as we can afford it, all new users receive 100GB of free cloud storage. We can’t wait for you to try it out!
Relentless, formless, ghostly magic. There is a wonderful comfort to be found in Samuel Beckett's great trilogy of novels — his astonishing, Dantean, record of human fortitude amid suffering. Some of the greatest prose of the twentieth century.
Reminded of Samuel Beckett:
“Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as for example the sound surface of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, (1/2)
Everyone always talks about “going through the Epstein files,” but nobody actually wants to sift through 20,000+ pages of unsearchable PDFs and text
So we turned them into a clean, fully searchable archive in Poly that you can chat with
I hope there’s nothing weird in there
A lot of talk about Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein at 18, not enough talk about Clarice Lispector writing Near to the Wild Heart at 22
What a flex to be compared to Joyce and Woolf on your debut, only to respond “nonsense, I haven’t read them yet”
New on @thelandinglove today: Poly by @polydotapp
An AI-powered file browser for intuitive search and cloud hosting. It syncs with your local system.
Live website: https://t.co/X9Yv2wxbq0
Okay, the website for @polydotapp is incredible ✨
It's such an immersive experience that really helps you understand the product and connect with its value proposition.
Kudos to everyone who worked on this for their creative efforts! 👏🏻
For context, Dave is a legend. But just correcting the record -- we didn't build this over a summer. It's been 2 years. In fact, we were the first company AI Grant invested in when they launched in 2022! Our batch included @perplexity_ai , @cursor_ai , @replicate , and @recraftai .
The file explorer always feels like something you and a couple of buddies could write over a summer.
It is not. But I wish them luck! Would be cool if they really advance the state of the art somehow!