Paul Graham

I talked to a startup today that had been forced to take so much from investors and whose expenses were so low that they could put the money in bonds and fund their operations off the interest. I told them they should.

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I met with a startup in the current batch who seemed demoralized because fundraising was going badly. Later I learned they'd already raised a million dollars. Fundraising going badly is not what it used to be.

That could be a useful heuristic for picking domains to attack with AI. If the work being done in some domain is already slop when done by humans, then presumably current AI can do it well enough.

I was talking recently to a startup using AI to take over a certain kind of work. Apparently investors are skeptical that AI could do it. I told them they should point out that most of this work already seems as if it's done by AI.

If you want me to ignore your email, put the word "opportunity" in the subject line. If you want to make doubly sure, put "exclusive" in there too.

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VCs always seemed such stiffs to us, and I think that too was not unrelated to why they couldn't compete at the earliest stage of investing. Seed investing is a comedy of errors. You have to embrace this to do it well.

Jessica and I went out to lunch with Trevor Blackwell and we laughed the whole time. It reminded me of how much we used to laugh in the early years of YC. We tried to hide it, because it didn't seem very professional, but I now think it was not unrelated to how well YC did.

I dreamt there was a new fashion for plaid lambda expressions. I didn't like them, so when McCarthy came to convince me to use them, I snuck out the back to avoid him.

I talked to a startup yesterday that had been forced to compress certain information to fit it into an LLM context window. But compression is understanding, and in the compressed form the information could be used for other, new things.

I met a startup today whose founders had previously worked at Coinbase and Scale. And Brian Armstrong of Coinbase had himself worked at Airbnb. I bet 3 "generations" is not the record though. Anyone know of a longer chain?

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I talked to a startup that's not a software company but uses AI quite a lot. They currently have 6 employees. I asked how many more people they'd need to hire if they didn't use AI, and they said about 10. So AI is increasing their productivity about 2.7x.

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Scottish portraitists didn't flatter their sitters. Here are Raeburn (left) and Ramsay (right). Ramsay tended to paint everyone with a underbite, which was particularly hard on the female sitters.

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A still life by James Stroudley (1906 – 1985).

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If this doesn't hold the record for highest ratio of frame to art, it must be close.

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What was once science fiction is now science fact, as over 100 labs work to crack the code that triggers human ageing.

When—not if—they do, some will celebrate, while others warn it poses a greater risk to humankind than AI.

My article about this was published in The European

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It might not be a bad policy to ask every couple months "what is the most community noted account remaining?" and ban it.