flâneur

Sahil Patel

23 followers · 252 following · 1326 views

on the atlas — 130

highlights — 208

  • Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you.
    A Fundraising Survival Guide
  • Japanese companies keep developing technology even when demand is not yet obvious, and rarely abandon it. That lets them deepen their knowledge over decades. When the opportunity finally appears, they are ready, armed with better technology and more credibility than newer rivals. Ajinomoto began work on abf in the 1970s, as it looked for ways to apply the chemistry behind msg elsewhere. Only in 1999 was the material first adopted by a major chipmaker.
    The strange Japanese companies minting money from AI
  • In the 1980s Japan was a semiconductor superpower, accounting for more than half of global chip production. Six of the world’s ten biggest chip firms in 1989 were Japanese. Those champions created demand for local suppliers of all sorts. The country’s firms still dominate several niches in the supply chain, particularly for materials and tools.
    The strange Japanese companies minting money from AI
  • On the ten-year timeline I’m at 90%, which is about as certain as you can be. I think it’s crazy to say that this won’t happen by 2035.
    Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
  • I think we may get to the point in a year or two where the models can just do SWE end-to-end
    Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
  • I could buy $1 trillion of compute that starts at the end of 2027. If my revenue is not $1 trillion dollars, if it’s even $800 billion, there’s no force on earth, there’s no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I buy that much compute.
    Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
  • We know it’s coming, but with the way you buy these data centers, if you’re off by a couple years, that can be ruinous.
    Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
  • Points on Product Hunt are not solely determined by upvotes. Instead, the system considers various forms of engagement, including interactions and participation by community members.
    What are points? | Product Hunt Help Center
  • These points are calculated based on genuine engagement, including upvotes and other signals, such as comments.
    What are points? | Product Hunt Help Center
  • Many of these platforms use affiliate programs — for example, craveu.ai pays users $120–180 for creating high-engagement characters.
    Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends
  • On one side are community-oriented platforms like Fam AI, where users create and share AI companions, such as customizable “girlfriends” in anime or photorealistic styles. These platforms thrive on user-generated content, offering adjustable body types, personalities, and voice/video modes to deepen connections.
    Why America Builds AI Girlfriends and China Makes AI Boyfriends
  • DeepSeek stands out for its market-driven innovation model: rather than depending on state research institutes or tech giants, local firms like DeepSeek have succeeded by identifying unmet market needs and responding swiftly.
    How Hangzhou Spawned Deepseek and Unitree
  • Moreover, Hangzhou’s flexible governance is closely aligned with market principles, making the city especially attractive to a wide range of domestic private enterprises beyond just technology companies.
    How Hangzhou Spawned Deepseek and Unitree
  • Rejecting the traditional image of government as a top-down authority, Hangzhou officials have openly embraced a “waiter” (店小二) and “nanny” (保姆) mentality that positions them as facilitators, not enforcers, in the city’s innovation ecosystem
    How Hangzhou Spawned Deepseek and Unitree
  • Hangzhou fosters a policy environment that actively supports small and micro enterprises, enabled by what Liang Chunxiao of the Pangoal Institute (盘古智库) calls “flexible governance (柔性治理).” In contrast to Silicon Valley’s boom-and-bust cycles that favor survival of the fittest
    How Hangzhou Spawned Deepseek and Unitree
  • Liang Wenfeng founded High-Flyer, the hedge fund behind DeepSeek, eight years after graduating from ZJU. Alibaba founder Jack Ma applied and got rejected from 30 different jobs after graduating from Hangzhou Normal University. BrainCo was a spinout from Harvard’s Innovation Lab during the CEO’s postgraduate studies at Harvard, although he completed his undergraduate degree at ZJU. After graduating from Zhejiang Science and Technology University, Wang Xingxing, the founder of Unitree, went to Shanghai for master studies and joined DJI, China’s leading drone company. The distance between these e…
    How Hangzhou Spawned Deepseek and Unitree
  • Hangzhou’s higher education is not even competitive among other top cities in China. Zhejiang University (ZJU) is the only elite university included in the national 211 project in the whole of Zhejiang province.
    How Hangzhou Spawned Deepseek and Unitree
  • Silicon Valley has many essential ingredients that Hangzhou lacks. Researchers argue that Silicon Valley's model has six interconnected elements: (1) venture capital, (2) human capital, (3) university-industry ties, (4) direct and indirect government support, (5) industrial structure, and (6) support ecosystem. Compared to Silicon Valley, and even to most tier 1 cities in China, Hangzhou lacks at least four of these elements, with no clear advantages in venture capital, human capital, university-industry ties, or industrial structure.
    How Hangzhou Spawned Deepseek and Unitree
  • We’re building ghosts or spirits or whatever people want to call it, because we’re not doing training by evolution. We’re doing training by imitation of humans and the data that they’ve put on the Internet
    Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
  • The reason you don’t do it today is because they just don’t work. They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t do computer use and all this stuff.
    Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
  • I’m not actually sure who said this
    Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
  • We have some very early agents that are extremely impressive and that I use daily—Claude and Codex and so on—but I still feel there’s so much work to be done. My reaction is we’ll be working with these things for a decade. They’re going to get better, and it’s going to be wonderful. I was just reacting to the timelines of the implication.
    Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
  • So don’t write blog posts, don’t do slides, don’t do any of that. Build the code, arrange it, get it to work. It’s the only way to go. Otherwise, you’re missing knowledge.
    Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
  • Until now there wasn't a similar subscription for open-source models, so it was harder to justify using them for coding agents. So: today we're launching one
    A flat monthly subscription to open-source LLMs | Synthetic
  • May 1st of this year, Anthropic launched a flat, monthly subscription to use Claude models inside Claude Code
    A flat monthly subscription to open-source LLMs | Synthetic
  • In the first deck for Greenoaks there’s a slide called ‘Finding Value in Unusual Places’, which at the time meant the internet. The idea was that these internet companies, these unbelievably cheap businesses, were going to replace a large percentage of the S&P 500. In 2012, he bets 40% of his first fund on Coupang, an ecommerce retailer in South Korea, led by a founder, Bom Kim, whom Mehta’s fallen head-over-heels in love with. Greenoaks soon owns upwards of 15% of the company, and eventually returns about $8 billion from that one investment.
    The Visions of Neil Mehta - Colossus
  • Our job is to figure out how and why they’re painting their painting. That’s it.”
    The Visions of Neil Mehta - Colossus
  • “We outsourced that work.
    The Visions of Neil Mehta - Colossus
  • Before any meetings, they set about preparing. “I don’t mean go on the website and use the product a little bit,” Mehta said. “We’ll talk to their customers, examine exactly what competitors are doing, understand the product in a granular way, study the underlying technology and how it’s evolving. There’s a series of things we’re testing for, depending on the company. We can understand from the outside-in better than almost anybody else on Earth. There’s no need to explain the 101 or go through remedial background. For a founder, that makes a first meeting with us feel like a fourth or fifth.”
    The Visions of Neil Mehta - Colossus
  • Some significant durable competitive moats a company can have: Network effects (Mastercard/Visa, social networks) Economies of scale and scope (Amazon, Walmart, D-Mart, Big Cloud) Switching costs (Microsoft, Big Cloud) Last mile coverage (Asian Paints, Hindustan Lever) Platform (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux) Intellectual Property until they expire
    Annual Report FY23-24: Nirah Webhooks
  • The best B2B product gets the buyer, user, or both promoted at their organization for adopting/buying your product. The core reason is that the product they purchase should help them with the business metrics for which they are responsible. So when they buy the product and their business metrics improve, they look like a genius at their org.
    Annual Report FY23-24: Nirah Webhooks
  • the organized dairy sector in India is benefiting from multiple tailwinds: rising per-capita dairy consumption, shift to branded dairy products (for safety and quality), and consumers’ increasing protein and health food intake
    Parag Milk -FMCG company in making - ValuePickr Forum
  • Its Gowardhan brand commands 22% share of the organized cow ghee market (No.1 position) and “Go” is a dominant player in cheese with 35% share (No.2 overall in Indian cheese, and a leader in the institutional cheese segment).
    Parag Milk -FMCG company in making - ValuePickr Forum
  • You will have 100 different audiences. You might be running 200 campaigns. Your hook would be slightly different for different audiences across different campaigns. This is okay, but for a specific campaign, define it very clearly that what is the objective and what do you want to offer.
    PMF First, Paid Marketing Later - Blume Ventures
  • Initial marketing must be much broader because the challenges at that stage are very different. You are still learning what your customers want, and how to communicate with them.
    PMF First, Paid Marketing Later - Blume Ventures
  • If you are getting paid in terms of attention or money, then you have a product and a company. Otherwise, you don’t have a company. So please only invest in paid marketing after you even have a company.
    PMF First, Paid Marketing Later - Blume Ventures
  • Until you reach this point, please don’t do any growth or marketing, don’t listen to anybody, and don’t spend money on Facebook and Google Ads. They are useless.
    PMF First, Paid Marketing Later - Blume Ventures
  • PMF means organic growth. People can’t stop talking about you, and they use you frequently.
    PMF First, Paid Marketing Later - Blume Ventures
  • What you can say to your customer after which the they have to say ​“I must take this offer. I’d be a fool not to.”
    Defining the Who, What, Why of Paid Marketing - Blume Ventures
  • You're a startup and have limited resources. You will only be able to serve a limited number of segments. Usually just one. It's critical that you pick the one and even more critical that you understand the unique insight of that customer segment. What is the customer wanting from life that is not solved today and that your product or your company will solve?
    Defining the Who, What, Why of Paid Marketing - Blume Ventures
  • OpenAI is incredibly bottoms-up, especially in research. When I first showed up, I started asking questions about the roadmap for the next quarter. The answer I got was: "this doesn't exist" (though now it does). Good ideas can come from anywhere, and it's often not really clear which ideas will prove most fruitful ahead of time. Rather than a grand 'master plan', progress is iterative and uncovered as new research bears fruit.
    Reflections on OpenAI
  • I can boil it down to exactly two reasons that happened to resonate with each other at the perfect frequency. GitHub started at the right time GitHub had good taste
    Why GitHub Actually Won
  • The best spokesperson for any endeavor is not the one who has the most polish, the longest tenure, or the “right” credentials. It’s the person who holds the secret knowledge upon which the enterprise is built, the person who can not only describe the idea but, in the face of inevitable opposition, fight for it and win.
    GO DIRECT: THE MANIFESTO - by Lulu Cheng Meservey - Flack
  • “Usually, a very long list of securities is not a sign of the brilliant investor, but of one who is unsure of himself….. An investor should realize that some mistakes are going to be made and he should have sufficient diversification so that an occasional mistake will not prove crippling. However, beyond this point, he should take extreme care to own not the ost, but the best. In the field of common stocks, a little bit of a great many can never be more than a poor substitute for a few of the outstanding.”
    Concentration | Diversification | Portfolio Management
  • Error of Commission (Type I Error): Occurs when an investor makes a bad investment, mistakenly believing it to be good. Error of Omission (Type II Error): Happens when an investor overlooks a good investment, erroneously thinking it's bad.
    Concentration | Diversification | Portfolio Management
  • There’s no point doing this to be small. We should go big, if only because there are a lot of people in the world who deserve Slack. Going big also means that it will have to be really, really good. But that’s convenient, since there’s also no point doing it if it is not really, really good. Life is too short to do mediocre work and it is definitely too short to build shitty things.
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave.
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • Doing a better and better job of providing what people want (whether they know it or not) Communicating the above more and more effectively (so that they know they want it)
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • Therefore, “understanding what people think they want and then translating the value of Slack into their terms” is something we all work on.
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • It’s hard for individual investors to successfully pick stocks or time the market. The best investment you can make is in your own abilities. Anything you can do to develop your own abilities or business is likely to be more productive than investing in foreign currencies.
    Buffett FAQ