June 30 2023
- Friedberg moderating
- Wagner group rebellion in Russia
- Maybe it was genuine - if true that his department was being merged into military and would have lost revenue
- Was a mutiny and could have become a coup - 8000 people, about a quarter of Wagner and sent 3000 men to Moscow
- Was looking to see who might support him
- On the way to Moscow - nobody supported him - generals, governors, Duma folk, etc
- So he took a deal brokered by Lukashenko - exiled in Belarus in return for being allowed to live
- How do we know replacing Putin is a good outcome - it could actually be much worse for the West
- The war is existential for Putin - so if the Ukraine counter offensive is successful, then Putin will escalate the war
- Sun Tzu - the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting
- Scotus strikes down affirmative action
- Data shows admissions were harder for Asian Americans
- Lots of potential downstream effects - might hit sports quotas, legacy quotas
- Need to focus earlier in the education pipeline - instead of so late in the stage in higher education
- Jason claims he was told in AOL that he can’t be made EVP while he was SVP because he was white
- Equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome
- Maybe make donations and prices of legacy admissions transparent - colleges can publish a rate card
- Its fair for these universities to admit based on what they want - but maybe give up their federal funding
- These institutions take so much federal funding that they are quasi-public institutions
- One way to get into these schools is to move to some remote place like Kentucky etc
- Another angle was to get into squash
- Abysmal quality of US public schools is because of teachers’ unions who only care about their own benefits and not the students
- In CA we each pay $16000 into the educational system
- Everyone has right to form unions but there is no competition for their services
- Profit motives of universities is to be shadow organizations for their endowments
- Biggest real estate portfolio in SF is Academy of Art University
- AI
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Databricks buys $1.3B MosaicML - cash and stocks - value of stocks was off last round from databricks’s raise
- Rumors that MML ARR went from $1M to $20M, others say its $6M
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AI infrastructure for enterprises is the hottest space
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MML had a term sheet to raise $50M at $400M post - 30-35 times ARR, so ~$10M
- Sacks was going to invest in the next round
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Another investor had come in at ~$700M valuation
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Enterprise companies are going to build end to end toolchain
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Snowflake acquired Neeva
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Need to level up if you’re in the data infrastructure business
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Models and tooling to build these models are going to be huge
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Inflection.ai started by Mustafa Suleyman and Reid Hoffman
- DeepMind, LinkedI
- Closed $1.3B funding round from Bill Gates, etc
- They probably need $1B for the H100 cluster
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Market framing slide from Craft and Sacks
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All the action is right now in enterprise ChatGPT
- CoPilot for CEO, Customer Support, etc
- No one wants to share data with OpenAI
- HuggingFace is doing great - people start there, then customize their models
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- IRL shuts down after raising $200M due to CEO/diligence issues
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SoftBank gave IRL money in record time apparently
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(same time Byju’s also dropped a lot)
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VC is a hard business
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Jason and Chamath are early investors in brilliant.org
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Check size should be determined by fund size also
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Best diligence is following up with off-sheet references
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Fund raising for late stage funds has died a lot recently
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- AIS speaker list looking great
- Gravity “Hum”
- 15 years’ worth of Nanograv data
- Space time is being warped by gravity
- Supports General theory of relativity
- Recent black hole discovered that’s 30 billion times the mass of our Sun
- This discovery might be monumentous
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