Alvin's Newsletter: No. 20
Weekly newsletter on what I saw interesting in tech, venture capital and business.
📰 News
Coinbase’s (a)political nature loses 5-10% of its staff: Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, did something interesting over the last couple of weeks. He told his employees and the world that Coinbase would not tolerate any political views or discussion within the company - and if anyone was not ok with it, they were happy to give them a nice severance package. Subsequently, 5-10% of employees took up the offer.
Super controversial. Paul Graham from Y-Combinator even came out and supported the stance. And subsequently got panned.
Firstly, an apolitical stance is not a neutral stance - similar to how not voting is not a neutral stance. It amplifies any leanings by giving a greater share of the voice to the ones who shout the loudest.
Secondly, at some point at the company, you will need to take a stance. And you will need to take some sides. It is complete nonsense to think you can avoid it. You can try to avoid it for as long as possible - but leaving it late can have dire consequences. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg.
Whist purely on capitalistic terms, this might be the most efficient path to success (I suspect this is Paul G’s point). And somewhat in-line with the ethos of the crypto movement. This in-itself is flawed. There are reasons why we have regulation and oversight in the financial system. Remove things like AML, fraud detection, credit obligations, fighting terrorism financing etc. - and you get to anarchy. In other words - not too far from where crypto is today. Link
In short, I want Coinbase to be laser focused on achieving its mission, because I believe that this is the way that we can have the biggest impact on the world. We will do this by playing as a championship team, focus on building, and being transparent about what our mission is and isn’t.
John McAfee indicted and his saga: During the crypto pump-and-dump of late 2018, John McAfee was one of the loudest proponents of ICOs (IPOs for crypto). Using his considerable reach amongst nerds and conspiracy theorists - he was able to make considerable sums. And he probably needed it after losing most his fortune from the sale of his McAfee software over a decade ago. Well it’s finally caught up to him with the US indicting him on non-disclosure and tax-evasion. Not smart to poke the beast. Link
GPT-3 and the coming AI: If you haven’t heard of GPT-3, you may be living under a rock. It made waves when it was released in June with its seemingly astounding capability to write like a human. Here is an example of an article written by the program. Incredible. It really does hard to distinguish, imagine what this technology will be able to do given a couple of years and a few billion dollars (Microsoft invested $1bn in June).
It does bring up some interesting ethical and technological problems. How do you tell if something is written by a human? Or a computer? Or does it even matter? Which one is better and/or truer? These are some of the questions that OpenAI, the creator of GPT-3, is working its way through. Even this idea - that a private company is allowed to choose - is a question. E.g. what if OpenAI purposely makes GPT-3 left or right leaning?
Something to keep an eye-on. In the meantime - a GPT-3 bot went undetected on Reddit for a week. See what happened. Link
The most interesting thing to me is some small snippets of the bot's answers don't just imitate human writing, they contain original insights and ideas, even one very good joke. Suppose we run bots like this on Amazon or Google's clouds, spewing out mountains of content twenty-four hours a day?
📚 Reading
Ben Evans waxes lyrical on ‘the end of the American internet’. The epic-centre of the internet and technology in general is shifting east. More so, the pace at which it is occurring is increasing. TikTok being a classic case in-point and only the first of many to come that becomes a global phenomenon that will originate in the east. Ben goes into what the future may look like. Link
Deep-dive into Substack and Substack economics. Substack will need to figure out how it may avoid becoming the next Medium and how to keep the creators on its platform. Hint - you need to do more than just make it easy to create. At a certain size, the creator becomes more powerful than the platform they are on and it makes economical sense for the creator to take control of the full-stack - creation + distribution. At least for low-fidelity platforms like writing and podcasting this is the case. In the podcasting however this has been the case historically - at least until someone with the deep pockets like Spotify shows up and pays you hundreds of millions to jump ship (see Bill Simmons and Joe Rogan). Link Link2 Link3
Nikhil Trivedi is a beast of a guy (in the most complimentary sense). His writing is always on point and I always enjoy his reads. The legend, Bill Gurley, wrote an article on the 10 factors that make marketplaces work 8 years ago. Here, Nikhil goes into the 10 factors that make consumer subscription business works. He follows it up by applying this thinking to one of his investments. Great. Link Link1 Link2
🦖 Entertaining & Interesting things
I have only heard the idea of vertical farming on the fringes. Here is a look into what it looks like. In Compton. Lots of activity in the replacement-meat space - only logical that there is some action happening in the growing of real plants and how we make that process more efficient. You have to eat the greens as well right! As an aside, despite the name, the farms don’t need to be vertical per-se, e.g. they can be stacked - the name vertical still applies as you creating floor/growing space by going up. Link
I grew up collecting rugby league and NBA cards. I hazard a guess that 10 y/o’s these days don’t collect cards anymore (Pokemon?). An AVC company, Dapper, is trying to take these cards digital. There is some magic to collecting real cards - whether its the fact you created a real album, would flick through them, re-arrange them, trade them and talk about them. That’s the type of magic one would need to create - and new magic of course. Link
The Raspberry Pi kicked off a whole movement of hacking and creation. Eight years on, Nvidia is trying to do the same with the introduction of a $59USD computer called the Jetson Nano. It can run AI/machine learning algo’s via its onboard GPU, something the Raspberry Pi is missing. Here is someone who built a facial recognition system with it. It’s a new age of tinkering. Link
The surge in user-created content over a decade ago also created ‘creation houses’ - in the literal sense. The earliest I can remember were the gaming houses in South Korea at the start of the millenia. ‘Clan’ members would reside in a physical house together and practice team-gaming all day. Subsequently entering competitions for prize-money. They would be paid a salary or percentage of winnings which would be shared with the gaming-house. This is where the pro-gaming phenomenon started.
Fast forward to now - we have similar ‘houses’ for video creation - think Insta, Youtube and the newest kid to the block, TikTok. Here’s a look at how these houses work. Link
This industry is still fledgling, unstandardized, and oversaturated. Behind its stars is a network of managers and newly formed talent companies ready to make money off them, and much like the TikTok celebrities they manage, the job duties are often nebulous.
🎧 Podcasts
The best podcast episodes last week according to Bosco Tan:
Vaccine diplomacy (Please Explain) - 11 mins: China is making some strategic moves to use its vaccine work to hold sway with developing nations. These moves could shift the geopolitical landscape even further. This episode gives and overview of Xi’s plans and reflects on its implications. Link
Meat grown in a lab (Science Vs) - 32 mins: On the “bleeding” edge on the future of food, there are a handful of companies in the world working on growing meat in the lab. With the environmental benefits compelling and the science within grasp, this episode teaches us that these products could reach us sooner than we think. Link
Obama on 2020 (Pod Save America) - 57 mins: Lots of US election content this week I didn’t want to include. But here’s an episode that’s worthwhile. Spending an hour listening to a much revered ex-president is usually pretty rare. But here Obama covers his thoughts on the election, his case for Biden, as well as do some reflection on his own presidency. Link
Nintendo and their console-driven business cycle (The Readback) - 19 mins: Remember the Pokemon Go craze? When the mobile games was able to move teens like zombies, Nintendo seemed like they were on the cusp of something big - especially on the mobile platform. However, this success was never repeated and Switch has become a huge commercial success. This has made Analysts nervous that the company is about to repeat some past mistakes. Link
📹 TikToks
Top 5 Chamath IPO SPACs. Link
Fishing for your food at the restaurant. Link
Face-hugger from aliens. On the beach. Link
The biggest golf fan in the world. Link