.@Scott_Wiener continues to falsely claim narrow opposition to SB 1047. When in reality there is massive public outcry across research, academic, public and private business and finance. Here is a mega roundup of recent announcements that fully debunk the Senator's claims 🧵 .@russellwald and @AndrewYNg from Stanford, @vishalmisra from Columbia, and Ion Stoica from Berkeley have also articulated the damage the bill would do to their research, the AI industry and to the state of California.

1/ We’ve submitted a letter to President Biden regarding the AI Executive Order and its potential for restricting open source AI. We believe strongly that open source is the only way to keep software safe and free from monopoly. Please help amplify.





2/The letter is undersigned by researchers, academics and founders in AI including @ylecun @ClementDelangue @arthurmensch @tobi, @garrytan, @bgurley, @amasad, @AravSrinivas, @soumithchintala, @tylercowen, @ID_AA_Carmack, @NaveenGRao, @Suhail @fenbielding @pmarca @bhorowitz

0/ Most first time founders screw up their board by optimizing for the wrong things. Having built multiple of my own (and screwed up) and having sat on dozens more, here are a few things to keep in mind 👇 1/ Boards are for governance, not advice: The purpose of a board is to keep everyone out of jail. There is a *lot* of governance related work on a board. So make sure your board members know what they're doing.

0/ Descriptions of finding product market fit, and category creation often miss the hard part of getting to $10m in ARR ...

... which is the crazy effort required to tug, pull and hammer the shit out of the product *and* the market to make them hold together 👇 1/ Navigating early markets is really hard, and softening the market (market annealing) can take years.

While there are few easy answers, here are things to keep in mind if you're in a market annealing situation ..

[New Post] The Cloud Killed Infra, Long Live Infra!

The application first moved to the cloud
Now it's outgrowing it
And vertical clouds are signaling a new era of software infra

Blog post here, key points below:👇

a16z.com/2022/06/09/the… 1/ The traditional cloud market has been so successful and grown so large that independent cloud services are now large enough markets to sustain viable independent companies.

0/ (more gardening content ... because @sriramk asked :)

🌱 Here is a thread of gardening projects you can do at home, and with very little space 🌱 1/ Worm bins (Vemicompost)

I don't like household waste compost bins. It's too hard to get the right mix of clippings, brown org material, keep it wet etc. Instead I use a worm bin which is like a garbage disposal for compost.
... (cont)

0/ I'm quarantining and bored ... so ..

🌱 Here is another list of perennials for y'all that grow well in the Bay Area 🌱 1/ Good King Henry

This is such a pain to germinate. And loves water. But it's a great shade tolerant leafy green. Also can be very high producing. And tastes yummy too!

0/ 🌱 Big thread of perennial edible plants I've had success growing in the Bay Area over the year🌱

I largely neglect plants once in the soil, so this is all low maintenance stuff.

But I've been able to produce a ton of food over the years. 1/ I don't have a special setup beyond deer fencing and gopher netting and some minor irrigation.

And many are in pots wherever I can find consistent sun.

Hope it's useful! 🪴

I just love that random Twitter responses to content I post is still more relevant than much of the feedback I’ve gotten during the academic pier review process ✊✊✊ Hehe peer review process too

0/ Here is a thread on the Cloud analysis piece @sarahdingwang and I posted recently. We love the level of response and discussion. But wanted to summarize and address some of the comments. 1/ If you haven't read the piece, it's here (hint: neither Dropbox nor repatriation are core to the analysis. Nor have much to do with the results or conclusion)

a16z.com/2021/05/27/cos…

"We only hire from top schools" is lazy practice that results in less-than-top teams. This thread is a rough attempt to explain why 🧵👇 Quickly about me: for undergrad I went to NAU, the smallest of three state universities in Az. I did my Masters and PhD at Stanford.

0/ VCs benefiting from offering bad advice to founders is such a tired canard. But it’s repeated enough that it’s worth addressing in some detail (a thread) 1/ VCs avoid investing in companies that don’t have potential for venture economics. We vet heavily for this. Founders' intentions is a huge part of the calculus. If there is early misalignment in vision and expectation, something went very wrong during the investment process.

0/ Full BOM for building a 2.5Ghz LTE cell tower for under $20k.

Can serve 150 end points at up to 6 mile range. We've (@MuralNetwork) deployed dozens of these in very remote locations and they work great.

Thread: 1/ ProLine 2.3-2.7GHz 65 Degree + 3.5-4.2GHz 65 Degree Dual Slant Dual Band 4-Port Sector Antenna (Two Sectors in One Shell

winncom.com/en/products/KP…

1/ Advice on finding “the right idea” is often a variant of the tired painkillers vs. vitamins cliche -- focus on a problem you’ve experienced or others are experiencing yada yada

Yet, many impactful ideas were more akin to aesthetics, how founders felt the world should be. 2/ Take compute virtualization. For decades, VMs were an elegant oddity. The VMware team viewed them as the right way to abstract compute but weren't quite sure the killer use case(s). And yet that led to multiple deca-billion dollar markets.

I’ll have a go - raw numbers are correlated with turnout, not relative popularity - 94% of democrats voted for Biden and there are 5% more democrats than republicans nationally - the only demographic that voted majority trump is white males (and they only make up 30% of the pop)

https://twitter.com/m2jr/status/1332764793380298752

- exit polls contradict a number of these claims including LatinX voters outside of Florida and oil-dependent Tx (both that went Trump) - absolute gains for blacks are correlated with record turn out, exits polls show overwhelming backing of Biden

[New Post] The economics of AI / ML companies are poorly understood.

In this post, @BornsteinMatt and I cover some of the core challenges and how they are being tackled by top teams in the industry.

a16z.com/2020/08/12/tam…

Highlights below 👇 1/ Unlike traditional software, margins, scalability, and defensibility for AI companies are usually a function of the problem -- not the technology. And often the problems are ugly.

0/ A very interesting trend to watch is the disappearance of pre-sales, and what it means to GTM tooling. (a thread) 1/ Pre-sales has traditionally been the function that brings a new customer to technical and financial close. Generally it involves an account rep (AE) and a sales engineer (SE) to educate a customer on the product, do technical demos, PoCs, integration etc.

0/ There is a dazzling amount of inconsistency in what GTM metrics are presented at board meetings of early stage b2b companies. Here is my hit list of the most important, and why: 1/ CARR - total contracted annual recurring revenue is the single best metric for the health of a business. It encapsulates new logo growth, expansion, and churn in a single number. If you only show one number, use this one.

0/ Is there an Enterprise Margin Crisis? It's not uncommon to see software startups with surprisingly low margins (30-40%). We believe there is a broader trend going on here, which I explore in this thread. 1/ While not all of these are new, there are a number of macro trends that have downward pressure on margins; the move to cloud, AI/ML, bottoms up GTM etc. Below I outline the most common contributors we see across the industry.

➡️margin directly drives valuation
➡️cloud spend is increasingly contributing to margin
➡️cloud stacks are *horribly* inefficient
➡️I suspect there are hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap being depressed layer of inefficient layer in the public cloud Take standard compute in the cloud ...

- Code written in high-level language
- Language libraries
- Language runtime
- Userspace OS libraries
- Guest kernel
- Hypervisor
- DMA

So many redundant memory managers and networking stacks alone ...

Snapshot of the EBS spectrum license database. It's shocking. Roughly 4/5 licenses over Federally recognized tribal lands are licensed or leased by Sprint.

Spectrum squatting sucks.

Reserved spectrum needs to go back to communities. ... the situation is pretty bad. Some tribal communities can't set up their own networks because they can't get access to spectrum. This is particularly true when close to urban areas.