Silicon Valley Outsider returns!
Back from my honeymoon, with a new ring and plenty to say
It’s been a while, friends, but I have a great excuse: I got married!
Planning a camp-style wedding – in which you plan the lodging, food, and activities for 100 guests – requires quite a bit of time. (Greatest time investment I’ve ever made!)
But now, I’m back! And Silicon Valley Outsider is entering a new era. (Complete with a new look; did you notice?)
Over the past two months, I started writing posts on five different topics:
How I hire people at Astranis
Why knowing too little or too much about startup founding can hurt your odds of success
What I learned from business school
How to do things that scale at a startup
Whether startup optimism is irrational (answer: yes, but irrationality is adaptive)
But each time, I stopped. One week wasn’t enough time for any of these topics; writing an essay each week was preventing me from tackling bigger writing projects. And it’s time for that to change.
Over the next few months, I’m going to dive deeper into bigger topics, for example:
The evolution of my “Startup Operator Skill Tree,” which has morphed into a VC/Startup 101 course that summarizes many different themes that I cover week-to-week in this newsletter.
A very long piece (a book?) about the political culture we find ourselves in, and how to find out what you believe in such a heightened environment (so basically a politics version of Agnostic-ish)
Why you need to move to Silicon Valley (now!), no matter what remote work defenders ask you to believe
tl;dr: you should expect to see fewer, bigger essays from me moving forward.
I’ll still post weekly. In weeks where I don’t share bigger essays, I’ll share a few links that will make you smarter and give you a glimpse into the Silicon Valley zeitgeist. The following post is a good example; if you find this stuff as interesting as I do, you’re in good hands.
It’s great to be back in your inbox!
When machines invent their own languages
If you haven’t seen it yet, DALL-E is an AI that turns plain text inputs into image outputs. It can paint in any style you ask, create photorealistic images… it’s pretty magical.
But it totally sucks at rendering text. Or does it?
What to do when good times go bad
Sequoia is one of the best Venture Capital firms in the world. In 2008, a presentation they gave to their portfolio companies, “RIP Good Times,” became legendary when the extended recession it predicted came to pass.
And now, Sequoia has created a new doomsday deck: “Adapting to Endure.” Bummer that it’s needed, but I figured you’d like the glimpse into how Silicon Valley startups are preparing for a potential recession.
How startups move warp speed
When Alexandr Wang, the 25-year-old founder of an $8.7 billon startup, releases new essays, stop and read them immediately. His latest is as insightful as ever – this time, he covers what it takes for a company to continue to move “warp speed” even as organizational gravity starts to slow everything down.
