flâneur

Linda

77 followers · 46 following · 6167 views

on the atlas — 577

highlights — 4267

  • The house had to accommodate what was by then a library of nearly 10,000 books, as well as space for my remote-CEO office and for our three children.
    In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley (1961–2026), with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years—Stephen Wolfram Writings
  • His early success turning a few hundred million dollars into $45 billion earned him a cult following in online circles, where his firm’s routine regulatory filings were pored over like scripture.
    His Wedding Guests Were Arriving—Just as His $45 Billion Fund Was Falling Apart  - WSJ
  • Co-Founder of NGL and BAGS
    Intro - Book with Hunter Isaacson
  • Being a Jew in Wales, where every slight, though small or unintended or inconsequential and rarely delivered with real malice, nonetheless reverberated within me.
    Ausländer | Michael Moritz | Granta
  • Moritz was so much of a marker that I sometimes used to say that my family came from Switzerland since, at the time, there was only one thing worse than being Jewish in Wales, and that was being German in Wales.
    Ausländer | Michael Moritz | Granta
  • When I’m working a lot but feeling a strong sense of momentum, learning, or accomplishment, I’m rarely feeling burned out. It’s when I feel stuck, when I’m putting in time and energy without getting that sense of momentum, that I start to feel burned out.
    Becoming my own “burnout spotter” - by Ami Vora
  • I need to make sure that there’s something invigorating every day — a conversation with a peer who always has good ideas, a high-performing mentee who challenges me, a new domain I’m learning about — and make sure that I look forward to and celebrate the fire I get from those moments
    Becoming my own “burnout spotter” - by Ami Vora
  • I try to immediately make little changes to get more energy every day — even if it’s just taking 5 minutes for a simple breathing exercise twice a day.
    Becoming my own “burnout spotter” - by Ami Vora
  • All of these managers were strong advocates for me. They had my back and were genuinely trying to show me how to be more successful. And I tried it all!
    Reframing “I need to change who I am” to “I can add to who I am”
  • For reskilling a generation into purposeful work.
    Playing to Win - by Eurie Kim - The Art of Venturing
  • For proactive, personalized health.
    Playing to Win - by Eurie Kim - The Art of Venturing
  • The scarcity that matters now — the thing worth investing in and protecting — is the wisdom to know what to do with it.
    When Knowledge Is Free, Wisdom is the Precious Resource
  • Lean into the things that require time to become true.
    When Knowledge Is Free, Wisdom is the Precious Resource
  • The pattern recognition that comes from having seen thousands of founders pitch and knowing, in your body before your brain catches up, whether this person has the particular combination of conviction and adaptability that the moment requires.
    When Knowledge Is Free, Wisdom is the Precious Resource
  • The barriers that once protected expertise — years of training, expensive credentials, access to the right networks — are dissolving faster than most institutions know how to respond.
    When Knowledge Is Free, Wisdom is the Precious Resource
  • The task (the doing) is being handled. The purpose (the deciding, the wanting, the choosing among a thousand things you could build) is still entirely, stubbornly, unproductively human.
    We Can Do Anything! - by Eurie Kim - The Art of Venturing
  • And yet. Somehow this doesn’t feel like it’s made building any easier. It’s made it strangely harder.
    We Can Do Anything! - by Eurie Kim - The Art of Venturing
  • I’m inundated with the promise of AI “possibilities” every min of every day, that I realize how incredibly daunting that question really is.
    We Can Do Anything! - by Eurie Kim - The Art of Venturing
  • Even inside Conviction the mood had crept in. The question of what was left for early-stage investors, when the labs had so much money, compute, and talent, had become a debate inside the firm.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • “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 general partner in January 2025.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Not everyone bought the no-plan story. The fund she’d really wanted to build, some said, was a crypto fund, and the AI thesis was a retrofit. The evidence was not nothing. By the start of 2022, six months before she left, her Twitter avatar changed to a CryptoPunk-style zombie. Around the same time she helped a younger partner lead Greylock’s $70 million Series B into 0x Labs, and shared his board seat. In February she and two Greylock colleagues launched a crypto podcast, Fungible Times. Three days after announcing her departure she told TechCrunch the market was at the start of a new tech cy…
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • She had views on whom it should hire, where it should place its bets, how the coming era should be played, and not yet the standing to act on them.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • They had no plan for her, and there was no track to becoming a GP
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • An activist hedge fund called Starboard Value had taken a position; its founder, a man named Jeff Smith, would later replace the entire board of Darden Restaurants over the breadsticks at Olive Garden. Smith wanted Nvidia to return capital to shareholders and stop spending on a side project called CUDA, which Wall Street regarded as a distraction.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Bell Labs hired them both. Jerry could have stayed for life. Instead, as the dot-com boom crested and broke, he left for a string of startups.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • The founders were, in her words, “central casting.” She had wanted to make sure they only talked to her, and so she had spent the drive doing two things. 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.” It had been her and Grady’s wedding anniversary. “Pat is very tolerant of me,” she said. “I don’t think he was thrilled with being an Uber driver. It might have been tough.”
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • That was 2022, when the labs still seeded the companies building on top of them—OpenAI also led the seed round in Cursor. They have since decided to build on top of themselves. Both Anthropic and OpenAI now sell legal tools of their own.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Karpathy worked from these desks before he moved his family south, at which point he migrated to Conviction’s new outpost in Palo Alto.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • ts creators are no longer content to sell the model. They mean to build everything on top of it as well, the tools and the agents and the apps, filling every nook and cranny where a new company might otherwise be built. The market is paying as though they might succeed.
    Sarah Guo's Wager - Colossus
  • Guo had written seed checks into Baseten and Harvey. Each company is now valued at more than $11 billion. Her investments in them have multiplied more than a hundredfold. In Conviction’s first year, she wrote early checks into Sierra, Cognition, and Mistral; those three companies are now worth, together, $54 billion. 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
  • Some friends, communities, and employers limit your personal unfolding. Others support it.
    Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievements
  • What do you do when you find yourself in a situation like that—where the only way to cling to your status is to censor yourself? It took me a few months to accept the obvious answer, but for me, it could only be: you quit. I would turn down all offers.
    Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievements
  • And little wonder: I would venture out in a new direction, something that felt true to me, and I would immediately get a visceral reaction from the audience. “Is that ok?” “No.”
    Pick an audience that is into the illegible you of today, not your past achievements
  • But what makes Sweetgreen especially appealing to millennials and Gen Z, according to Eve Turow-Paul, author of Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning, is how the brand placates their need for control, community, and purpose.
    What Happened When I Ate Nothing but Sweetgreen for Two Weeks | Eater
  • The stores are strategically located where income is most disposable, near Lululemon stores and Equinox gyms in neighborhoods where designer salads are considered necessities not luxuries.
    What Happened When I Ate Nothing but Sweetgreen for Two Weeks | Eater
  • AI lowers the cost of building products, but raises the premium on distribution.
    Creator Rounds: A Creator Holding Company Thesis.
  • To back the “next MrBeast,” investors must see content not as marketing, but as a core R&D function of the firm
    Creator Rounds: A Creator Holding Company Thesis.
  • The MrBeast company, to me, is a data company and guided a lot of my thesis. The team takes data seriously. Algorithms shift daily, but the MrBeast team relentlessly continues because they digest data, apply learnings, evaluate results, and try again. This process-driven approach is what separates a lucky hit from a scalable company.
    Creator Rounds: A Creator Holding Company Thesis.
  • content generates distribution and cash flow, and that capital is deployed across multiple businesses, products, and investments
    Creator Rounds: A Creator Holding Company Thesis.
  • Creators who telegraph their ambitions early set the stage for their audience to know the Founder and his/her ambitions. In the wild, we don’t see this as something that angers an audience. It does give the Founder the space to build a business if they want to and to… not, if they change their mind in the future.
    Approaching Creators & Capitalism [2/2] - by Emily Herrera
  • It’s given me access to a core truth: very few software owners are Founders. Being a Founder is an expressive act.
    Approaching Creators & Capitalism [Part 1]
  • From structure, building, hiring, fundraising, etc. everything is being made up in real-time, but there are also themes from the traditional startup side that’ll set Creators up for success.
    A Prologue to Creator Capital. - by Emily Herrera
  • Beliefs about ability are costly. Beliefs about worth are existential.
    Growth Mindset Self-Worth
  • If I asked you: "Can someone become a great engineer after struggling early in their career?" I don't think you'd hesitate. You'd say yes. So your explicit theory of learning is already a growth mindset. But when you open a work ticket, your prediction isn't: "This will teach me something." It's: "If this goes badly, I'm going to spend the evening telling myself I'm a fraud." That prediction alone is enough to change your behavior.
    Growth Mindset Self-Worth
  • Challenge ↓ Possible failure ↓ Expected self-criticism ↓ Avoidance That's subtly different.
    Growth Mindset Self-Worth
  • Dweck argues that people with a fixed mindset hear "I failed" as "I'm deficient." You're suggesting that someone whose worth depends on achievement can hear exactly the same message even if they intellectually believe abilities can grow.
    Growth Mindset Self-Worth
  • Someone with: a growth mindset, highly contingent self-worth, depression, may outwardly behave almost identically to someone with a classic fixed mindset:
    Growth Mindset Self-Worth
  • If it's optimizing for: avoiding shame, you also avoid risks. Those optimization goals can produce the same outward behavior.
    Growth Mindset Self-Worth
  • We often explain behavior as if it's driven by beliefs: "I avoid because I think I can't improve." But behavior is often driven by what your brain is trying to optimize.
    Growth Mindset Self-Worth
  • how beliefs about ability, contingent self-worth, and depression interact. Dweck's framework captures one important piece of the puzzle, but it's not intended to explain every reason someone may avoid challenges.
    Growth Mindset Self-Worth