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18 September
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
The social scene around AI and AI safety is more unpleasant than I realized. I'm sure there are other sides to it. But when you get a lot of men with too much money who think they're saving the world, surrounded by groupies, what do you expect? Read the long Bluesky thread about this, collected on one page: https://skywriter.blue/@segyges.bsky.social/3mvom4b4dn22q I can't confirm this stuff - I stay far away from this scene. And the sentence "AI Safety is Mostly a Sex Cult" is a massive exaggeration. But... (1/n) AI alignment Related
16 September
Founder and chief executive of Replit. Previously an engineer at Facebook and Codecademy. Writes essays on programming, philosophy and entrepreneurship at amasad.me.
If you’re curious about Effective Altruism, the origins of the cult, their tactics, and their influence network — check out my conversation with Tucker from two years ago: Quoting @TuckerCarlson Tech CEO Amjad Masad on the cults of Silicon Valley. This is the deepest and most interesting explanation of AI you’ll ever see. (0:00) Artificial Intelligence (10:01) Bitcoin (22:30) The Extropians Cult (29:15) Transhumanism (34:04) Longtermism (40:24) Are Machines Capable of Thinking? (43:11) The… Related
10 September
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.
Their words
I'm sorry for employees who got equity issued at the $17B or $11B valuation - the dangers of too high valuations!
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@GergelyOrosz on X x.com
5 September
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
The early money paid $75 billion for stakes in MuskWorld now marked at $1.57 trillion: 20x. But the cash flows to justify that do not exist. They are not on any horizon. So why? This is just plain weird. This is not NVIDIA, or TSMC, or Samsung, or ASML, or Apple, or any of the hyperscalers wth real cash flows: **Looking Askance Yet Again at MuskWorld: WEIRDNESS OF THE DAY** Musk torched one of his two profitable businesses and Starlink can’t carry anything like a $3 trillion valuation... 1/ Related
Co-founder and CEO of Linear; previously principal designer at Airbnb, where he led the Design Language System, and founding designer at Coinbase.
Important for employees to ask some of these questions about equity before joining. Sometimes founders just don’t have their own experience these things so they don’t prioritize the employee equity. At Linear we tried to make it friendly as possible since the beginning: early exercise, 10y exercise window, reminding people about their 83b election, pushing back on 409a valuations, keeping company valuation in check and increasing over time, informing people about qsbs, and now running employee liquidity programs for all past and current employees. Quoting @deedydas Many startup employees do not recognize the sheer litany of ways that a founder can screw you over without you even knowing. Founder trust is one of the most important things to look at when you’re joining a startup. From cutting you out of M&A, screwing your retention pool, overdiluting your equit… startups Related
21 August
Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
China
Their words
Frontier Labs are incented to be fearful as it provides a moral justification for staying closed.
Chinese Labs take the consistent position of doing what’s good for all and being open.
So the little guys find themselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the Chinese…
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@naval on X x.com
19 August
Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.
Their words
now that it is very easy for anyone to use an agent to create a body of text, I think it's more important than ever for us to make sure that the ideas we're putting out in the world are actually worth people reading.
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youtube.com
18 August
Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.
. @yurimilner was that world class investor. After one meeting he said he wanted to invest and asked me for a valuation. I threw out a number 10 pct below what i figured our next round would be. He said he would wire the money next week. I think it was $150m. Never asked for board seat or any terms. He ttly got what the founder of a high growth company cared about. No meetings. No terms. Dont bother us. Let us cook! Quoting @kevinleeme Whenever other founders ask me who my best investors are and who I’d recommend they work with, I name the handful of VCs who rarely bother us and trust us to operate. It’s funny how simply doing nothing as an investor can put you in the top 1% of a founder’s book. Related
15 July
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
My annual country risk update, which includes everything I know and have learned about country risk in my corporate finance analysis and valuation is now available to download: papers.ssrn.com
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11 July
Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.
AI 2040 and the Cult of Intelligence I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware produ…
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18 June
Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.
4 June
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
I valued SpaceX for its IPO a few weeks ago, with minimal information and a promise to revisit the valuation, when the prospectus was made public. The prospectus is public, the offering price has been set and my update is up and running. bit.ly
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2 June
Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.
From one piece
FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Products
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
know your goal or suffer a death by a thousand compromises. Because what I had done my whole career and most of us do is compromise to get that next engineer, CTO, investor. You put a jerk on your board because you impressed with their firm name and the valuation and all your friends are going to be impressed and it's going to be so much easier. We make all these compromises and contort ourselves and eventually we wake up and it's company we don't want to work at.
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youtube.com
Their words
you've gone through so much to be here. You owe it to yourself to bet on your instinct. You owe it to yourself to lose because of yourself. It's your right to be wrong. You, as a founder, owe it to yourself to control your own destiny and take half the valuation if it's all of the control. And it means you have the right to do it your way.
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youtube.com
26 May
Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.
19 March
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Their words
if you've always stuck to two programming languages because of the overhead of learning a third, go and learn a third right now. And don't learn it, just start writing code in it.
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youtube.com
16 March
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
The equity risk premium (ERP) is an essential ingredient in hurdle rates in corporate finance, discount rates in valuation and expected returns in financial planning. In 2009, I pulled together everything I know about the ERP, in a paper that I have updated every year since. My 2026 update is now available to download and it is written for practitioners. papers.ssrn.com
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14 January
Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.
7 January
Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.
Their words
Soon after this book was published Allen attracted an almost cult-like following. The fundamental ideas remain sound. Product managers juggle hundreds of priorities, and this book will help you balance your time.
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bringthedonuts.com
18 August 2025
Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.
8 June 2025
Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.
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