Month: August 2023

• Sama on AI

  I’ve been reading the archives of other blogs in preparation for writing this one. As I was digging around Sam Altman’s old posts (which I will admit felt weirdly invasive), I found a record of his thoughts on AI from about two years before he founded OpenAI. In the post,…

  August 31, 2023
• VC Mythology and Branding

  Sebastian Mallaby on the origins of venture capital: Rock and Coyle met Kleiner and his comrades at a San Francisco restaurant for dinner. The visitors from Wall Street understood that the rebels wanted to operate as a team, without Shockley’s suffocating oversight. They further understood that the engineers wanted to…

  August 30, 2023
• *Le Mage du Kremlin*

  I recently finished reading Le Mage du Kremlin. It was the runner-up in the big French book contest last year and received acclaim for its literary analysis of Putin in particular and power and politics in Russia more generally. Given the discourse around the book, I was pretty surprised by…

  August 29, 2023
• New Blog

  Writing, especially online, is powerful. Ideas languishing in the notes app on my phone are far less valuable than ones that I share and get feedback on. I’ve written a bit on Substack over the last couple of years, but that format doesn’t feel exactly right for what I want…

  August 28, 2023