brett goldstein Profile picture
Feb 11, 2019 6 tweets 3 min read Read on X
👇👇THREAD👇👇

Happy #GrammysTNT night! It turns out that writing hit songs isn’t so different from building great products. Here’s what I learned about product from over 10 years as an indie songwriter:
🎵 Get to the point 🎵

Great songs get to the chorus within 40-50 seconds because that’s what converts listeners into fans.

@chamath was famous for identifying Facebook’s magic moment that drove retention. Every product should get to this ASAP during on boarding.
🎵 Competition is bad 🎵

It’s hard to be the best R&B artist because there are A LOT of them. @leonbridges found his edge in 50's Soul, something no one else was doing.

Messaging apps are hard for the same reason. Unless your product is 10x better, it's best not to compete.
🎵 Meet people where they are 🎵

Innovative music is almost always a derivative of popular styles and structures. @kanyewest didn’t start with Pablo, he started with conventional HS dropout

New paradigms like AR and crypto need to be tied to existing user behaviors to succeed
🎵It’s not enough to be great🎵

There are countless talented people who didnt have the luck or put in the work to make it. @PostMalone made it because he worked for a decade

Market timing and team dynamic have an outsized impact on success regardless of how great a product is
🎵 Simplicity is key 🎵

Great songwriters like Max Martin and @rickyreed say to "remove anything that isn't absolutely crucial to the song"

Product features that don't drive core metrics and/or delight users should be carefully considered against features that do.

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More from @thatguybg

Apr 26
zuck's leaked 2015 email on facebook's VR/AR strategy is a wild read

I did an AR strategy project for the CEO of Google when I worked there and this is next level.

2500 words of pure brilliance from zuck on investing billions in VR/AR and acquiring unity.

I obv had to dig in🧵 Image
it came just a year after fb dropped $2B on the Oculus deal

which had everyone scratching their heads at the time as a random move into gaming hardware. Image
but zuck had much bigger aspirations. he saw VR/AR as the "next major computing platform" Image
Read 18 tweets
Mar 30
deepfakes are fun (like this video) but also a billion-dollar problem.

rigging elections, blackmailing, corporate scams are on the rise.

understanding how deepfakes work can give us clues about how to control them.

everything on deepfakes and how to tackle them 🧵
I mean the memes are funny but we need to figure this problem out.

how deepfakes work:

first, there are many ways of generating deepfakes but the primary types are

- face synthesis from data
- lip syncing
- face swap
- faces pasted over each other
- identity swap Image
Read 21 tweets
Mar 24
just stumbled on sequoia's 2005 investment memo for youtube

when I was on google's M&A team, we considered it the best acquisition in the history of the company

It's 41 pages of juicy details on why they invested (thanks for the lawsuit, Viacom)

I obviously had to dig in🧵 Image
it's one of the best investments in their portfolio

they made a ~44x return ($504M) on their $11.5M investment ($3.5M in Series A and $8M in Series B) Image
backdrop: this was before smartphones and before streaming video really took off.

some key trends were emerging that the youtube team recognized:

1. consumer video capture was becoming cheap and ubiquitous, with every new gadget featuring a video record button.
Read 21 tweets
Mar 17
I was reading into e/acc

and fell down a much deeper rabbit hole - the history of accelerationism

humans on the moon, the atomic bomb, and AI are all outcomes of choosing progress over fear

how humanity has benefited from these movements & why we need them:🧵 Image
ok so what's e/acc?

e/acc, effective accelerationism (a portmanteau of effective altruism and accelerationism) is a fundamentally techno-optimist movement

@GillVerd (aka @basedbeffjezos) introduced this philosophy a couple of years ago with @creatine_cycle & @bayeslord Image
e/acc emerged as a response to decelerationist movements popping up around the world

where doomers and regulators have been making major strides to shunt technological progress to create prosperity

e/accs believe this is BS - technological progress yields prosperity
Read 43 tweets
Mar 15
this room temperature superconductor stuff is absolutely insane

I dug around to find out how they work and how the world is on the verge of a complete transformation because of them

read on 🧵
look a this curve

for the last 100 years, we've been finding superconductors with higher critical temperatures -> the temp at which the electrical resistivity of a metal drops to zero i.e it shows superconducting qualities)

the race is to find one that works at room temp (300K) Image
when we get RT superconductors

1. current energy loss during transmission is 5-8%, will come to ~0%

2. quantum computing speed for phones, laptops (1000x at least)

3. ~100% energy storage efficiency

4. hovering trains (300+ miles/hour).

sci-fi movies will come to life
Read 20 tweets
Feb 20
Sora's video quality seems impossible so I dug into how it works under the hood

it uses both diffusion (starting with noise, refining towards a desired video) and transformer architectures (handling sequential video frames)

read on 🧵
here's an example:

prompt: "a stop-motion animation of a flower growing out of the windowsill of a suburban house."

Sora doesn't directly translate text to video frames. instead, it works on spacetime patches.
these patches capture a snapshot of both space (what's happening) and time (when it happens), like mini video puzzles on an atomic level. Image
Read 13 tweets

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