flâneur

Dheera Vuppala

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on the atlas — 128

highlights — 998

  • But when that risk is considered catastrophic, potentially affecting many thousands of clients, as with Floridian storms and Californian fires, it is the reinsurers who are the first to retreat because they will ultimately bear most of the cost.
    How do we deal with the catastrophe of uninsurability? | Aeon Essays
  • Insurance protects investments against loss and is therefore a pillar of the economic system. If it goes, economies are destabilised.
    How do we deal with the catastrophe of uninsurability? | Aeon Essays
  • But when you come down to it, countries are large groups of people. And the most important thing for the success of those groups is simply who’s in them: this is as true for countries as it is for companies, music bands, and sports teams. Human capital is what really matters.
    Why China got rich and India didn't - David Oks
  • (India’s low rate of female labor force participation, in fact, means that India’s labor force remains significantly smaller than China’s, despite India having a larger population: in 2019, in fact, China’s labor force was 45 percent larger than India’s.)
    Why China got rich and India didn't - David Oks
  • And that was the general pattern of attempts at social modernization in India in the twentieth century: highly publicized reforms, followed by little change on the ground. In 1961, the Indian government made dowries—payments made by a bride’s family to the groom’s family at marriage—illegal, since the practice entrenched the subordination of women and encouraged domestic abuse. But the law went entirely unenforced; dowries remained as popular as ever, and all the abuses linked to dowries still flourished.
    Why China got rich and India didn't - David Oks
  • Even with all the horrors of Maoist rule—including, it should be remembered, the largest famine in history—between 1949 and 1976 China recorded one of the largest sustained increases in life expectancy of any country in history, rising from about 41 years in 1949 to 61 by 1976. And for the first time in history, Chinese women were meaningfully included in public life: by the late 1970s, China had a female labor force participation rate exceeding that of many rich countries.
    Why China got rich and India didn't - David Oks
  • Unlike admitted carriers, E&S carriers don’t follow strict rate filings and policy forms. This flexibility means the underwriting process is often more detailed and manual to assess risks accurately and tailor the policy.
    Why does obtaining a quote from excess and surplus lines take so long?
  • As you move your way up through the different levels of product-market fit, what you’re really unlocking is repeatability — across demand generation, product development, customer satisfaction and unit economics.
    Levels of PMF | First Round
  • From Senegal to Harlem and beyond, we created something real. And while this chapter is ending, my work isn’t done. I still believe in beauty — at every level — and I’m looking forward to discovering what comes next.
    Why I Am Closing Ami Colé, My Beauty Brand
  • After nearly four beautiful soul-stretching years, Ami Colé will close this September. This decision was so hard for me — the business bears my mother’s name and, as I built it, my daughter’s name, too. But after looking at every option, it became clear that continuing in this current market wasn’t sustainable.
    Why I Am Closing Ami Colé, My Beauty Brand
  • Ami Colé launched in May 2021 to a devoted, excited audience of Black and brown women who felt seen and celebrated by what we offered. At first, the brand offered skin tints in shades they couldn’t find elsewhere and started a lip-oil craze that still carries through to this day. As I built my business, I stayed true to what I knew: community and quality. I looked most at how to lend real expertise to the formulas I wanted to
    Why I Am Closing Ami Colé, My Beauty Brand
  • When Vernal introduced Ziegler to the Embed class, he told them OpenEvidence was one example of a $100 million run-rate business that venture had previously given up on. Harvey and Sierra were two others. “I think health tech still sucks, man,” Guo told me. “OpenEvidence is a very specific type of company started by a really special person.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • The company is barely five years old, founded in late 2021 by Ziegler and Daniel Nadler. Nadler had founded an AI business called Kensho previously. In 2018, he sold it to S&P Global for $550 million. At the time, it was the largest sale of an AI company there had ever been.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Yet, it is the fastest-growing application for physicians in history. In April the company said about 65% of American doctors were using it. Aside from the iPhone, nothing in the history of medicine had reached them faster. More than 100 million Americans were treated last year by a doctor who had consulted OpenEvidence.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Guo knew him a little, socially, from Sequoia events she went to with Grady. A month or two into the idyll she took him for coffee. “Very kindly and very generously,” Vernal said, “Sarah was like, ‘Okay, when are you joining?'” Over the next year and a half she drew him in. First: “I’ll give you keycard access to the office. You should just come work out of here when you’re in SF.” Then: “Do you want to come look at this company with me? I’d really value your opinion.” He came in a day a week, then mentored a class of Embed, then led a deal, all before he’d signed any paperwork. He became a ge…
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Guo’s first hire came two weeks after she launched Conviction. Reddy had gone to Penn, like Guo, and like Guo had grown up in the room while an immigrant father built a networking company that ran into the dot-com crash and was sold. He had been the best high-school debater in the country. After college he went to Neeva, the search startup, and was running a third of its engineering when his college roommate, Hunter Lightman, who worked at OpenAI, tried to recruit him over. Reddy said no. OpenAI had 130 people, and a company that size was more than he could imagine working at. It was valued, t…
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • “I’m still very grateful to Asheem,” she said. “I know he’s not pleased I left. I wish I could fix it.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • “Every now and then she’d tell me what she was hearing from them,” he said. “The main LP thing was, ‘What’s your strategy? How are you going to win?’ There’s the Patton quote, right? ‘A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.’ And that was her answer. ‘I don’t have a strategy, I’m just going to go win.’ If you’re an LP, that’s not a good pitch. But the reality is there are only so many people in our business who can just go execute, and she’s one of those.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Huang stayed five hours, talking about the future, giving advice, and never looked at his phone once. Guo remembers looking at hers three or four times. “Jensen has this wisdom,” she told me, “that if you know what your priorities are and you’re working on the right one, you have all the time in the world. That’s something I aspire to.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • n March 2023, Jerry stepped down as chief executive of the company he had founded 20 years earlier. That August the headquarters in Andover, where Guo had done her homework, sold for $6.4 million. A year later, it was over. Casa filed for Chapter 11.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Greylock had been good to her, and she credits her partners with “treating me like a partner long before I had the title or experience for it.” She was recruiting GPs before she was one, and once, very young, vetoed a senior hire. But in her latter years she had reached the edge of what she could do from inside someone else’s firm.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • But she had no intention of being at Greylock for long either. They had no plan for her, and there was no track to becoming a GP, but most importantly: “I idolized entrepreneurs,” she said. “I wanted to go and start a company. I just needed a better idea.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • She went to their all-hands, met the leaders, and concluded that a company that had just gone public was the wrong stage for someone who wanted “zero to one.” Bhusri, who was also a partner at Greylock Partners, made his second pitch. Stop thinking about joining Stripe or some random company, he told her. She should come to Greylock where she could understand great businesses zero to one, because that’s what Greylock had been doing for some 50 years.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Goldman’s job was to explain the options to Jensen Huang. He was not interested in giving up CUDA. The buybacks he agreed to. Nvidia announced them in November, and Starboard sold its position the following spring. It was, Guo thought at the time, not an important client. She is fairly sure Huang was wearing a leather jacket.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • In an Instagram exchange in 2022 she said her largest insecurity was that she wasn’t smart enough, which may explain her academic record. She went to Phillips Academy, whose alumni include the Bush presidents and five Nobel laureates, and then to the University of Pennsylvania, where she enrolled in a program called submatriculation, which permits undergraduates to begin graduate work, and then she doubled it. She emerged with four degrees: a BA and MA in Chinese history and literature, a BS in economics, and an MBA. “Very anti-Silicon Valley,” she said. “I did a lot of school.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • He was 24 with $50 and a transcript from Tsinghua, having scored first on the gaokao, the exam by which Chinese society sorts its 18-year-olds. Her mother, Lucy Xie, an engineer, followed a year later. Bell Labs hired them both.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • By the time she was a teenager her father had a company of his own, a maker of broadband equipment called Casa Systems, out of Andover, Massachusetts, that would in time power large fractions of the internet in cities like New York. Guo grew up inside it. At 14 she built Casa’s first website under the supervision of Doug Rosich, the company’s head of hardware engineering, whom she remembers as terrifying. The website made heavy use of gradients, which were just then coming into fashion on the internet. She did her homework in an office cubicle. She slept over for bug bashes. With her godfather…
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • The first was finding people who could vouch for her. The second was simpler. “If you’re just talking to me the entire weekend,” she said, “you can’t talk to anybody else. So that’s helpful. It’s like filibustering.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Weinberg, Harvey’s co-founder, has both Grady and Guo as investors. He told me he had not believed them about their wall. “I am one of the least trusting people ever,” he said. “They have proven me otherwise.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • For a fund Conviction’s size they have not lost many deals they wanted. It’s because, Reddy said, they outwork everyone. “There’s just always more to be done.” The word people use about Guo is “intense.” They clarify they mean it as a compliment, and then they tell some version of the same story. The canonical version is the one Grady shared on Twitter a few years ago.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Revenue has grown 20-fold in the past 12 months. Inference volume has grown 40-fold. In January, Baseten raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation. Five months later, it raised another $1.5 billion, this time at a $13 billion price tag. It was the fourth raise in 18 months. Four years ago, Tuhin Srivastava, its founder, was building for a market that did not yet exist.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Behind Harvey, at every turn, is Guo. It was she who won the firm its first client, the global law firm A&O Shearman. She had spoken about the company at Stanford’s business school, and a lawyer in the audience was moved to join Harvey and sell it to his old firm. When Harvey needed a chief business officer, she found John Haddock, a trained lawyer with a decade at Stripe.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • onviction’s first check, before it even had a fund, went to two men in their pajamas: Gabe Pereyra, a worker ant out of Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, and Winston Weinberg, a USC-trained litigator at a white-shoe firm. They appeared over a crappy Zoom from a shared apartment in Los Angeles with no slides and no prototype, proposing to sell artificial intelligence to lawyers. “No one thought legal AI was interesting in any way, shape or form,” Weinberg recalls. “Zero.” Guo told them in the meeting that Conviction would be in. She was still raising the fund, so she wrote the seed check person…
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Someone began calling the neighborhood the arena, and the name stuck.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • On the far wall, near the kitchen, a black flag reads, WE DO THIS NOT BECAUSE IT IS EASY, BUT BECAUSE WE THOUGHT IT WOULD BE EASY. To the right, past a 90-inch television, a robot dog lies folded onto its joints beneath a whiteboard that reads NO SMALL IDEAS. Two neon signs glow all day, one spelling out CONVICTION, the other tracing the firm’s logo.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Working alone in his Vienna apartment, he had built OpenClaw, an open-source tool that put an agent in your phone that you could WhatsApp like a friend. Within two weeks of release, the project had crossed 100,000 stars on GitHub. By spring, it was the most popular open-source project the site had ever seen. The agent that had ordered Friedman to drink a bottle of water and rerouted his Tesla to Whole Foods was a claw. In the thick of the frenzy, in February, OpenAI had hired its maker.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • “If you’re going to do something else,” Guo told her, “just make it the most aggressive thing that you could possibly be doing. I’m happy to call Kevin and we’ll find you a better job. But that [job] is not aggressive enough for you.” Kevin Weil was then OpenAI’s chief product officer.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Her wager is that the labs cannot build everything. But the companies she is betting against are worth close to a trillion dollars apiece, employ several close friends, and are working around the clock toward the machine that improves itself, after which, by their own admission, nobody knows what.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Of the $300 billion in venture capital deployed in the first quarter of the year, the biggest quarter in the history of the trade, 65 cents of every dollar went to four companies that already exist: Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Waymo.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • “The future I want,” Guo told me, “is not a single company with an all-powerful model that consumes society faster than we know what to do with.” It is a feeling increasingly shared. The labs raised the price of tokens this year, in some cases a hundredfold, and their customers have begun to revolt. They do not want to build on another company’s model—paying it, feeding it their data, training it, in effect, to one day build the thing they have built. Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, went on CNBC and described his enterprise clients as livid. “The jig is up,” he said. A founder in G…
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Her partner at Conviction is Mike Vernal, a former Facebook executive and partner at Sequoia; his wife is chief product officer at Anthropic.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Of the 21 AI-native companies that have so far crossed $10 billion in valuation on revenue run rates above $100 million, Conviction has backed six.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Before ChatGPT came out, before the world had reason to believe that artificial intelligence was about to become anything in particular, Guo had written seed checks into Baseten and Harvey.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Anthropic, which earned its first dollar of revenue in March 2023, began the year on pace to make $9 billion. Five months later, the figure was $47 billion. Venture capitalists, in the first three months of 2026, flung $300 billion into startups, more than double the previous record. SpaceX went public in June at $1.75 trillion. Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to follow in what will likely be the three largest stock offerings ever. The market is already close to record highs. Everyone is getting rich.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Good, a British mathematician who had helped break German codes during the war, imagined a machine clever enough to design machines better than itself. Such a machine, he observed, would be “the last invention that man need ever make.” Decades later, the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge gave the prophecy a name: the Singularity. It described the moment machines no longer needed humans to keep getting smarter, after which the course of human history would become, to humans, unknowable.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Much of their own work will be automated within 18. “There’s just a manic energy in Silicon Valley right now,” Elad Gil, one of the Valley’s most prominent investors, told me. “It’s been a really big shift in the last six months.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • He also, like Friedman, has an agent in charge of his house. It’s called Dobby.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • A few days later he was riding home in his self-driving Tesla, trading voice messages with the agent about his sleep, when it recommended a magnesium supplement. He said he had none. The car turned. “There’s a Whole Foods nearby,” the agent said. “I’ve redirected your navigation.” He went in and bought the magnesium.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • It’s no wonder that everyone struggles to figure what to do with their lives: we have not developed the cultural technology to deal with this problem because we never had to. We didn’t exactly evolve in an ancestral environment with a lot of career opportunities. And then, once we invented agriculture, almost everyone was a farmer the next 10,000 years. “What should I do with my life?” is really a post-1850 problem, which means, in the big scheme of things, we haven’t had any time to work on it.
    Face it: you're a crazy person - by Adam Mastroianni
  • ut you’re not just unpacking the job; you’re also unpacking yourself. Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?
    Face it: you're a crazy person - by Adam Mastroianni