⚠️Newsletter #15 Show Me How You Work: Week of September 16, 2024

Summer is clearly over. JD Vance doubles down on the cats in Springfield. OpenAI can finally count the numbers of 'r's in the word 'strawberry'.

Author

Joshua Schoen
September 17, 2024

A tech person writing a blog at a modern desk, surrounded by technology such as a laptop, smartphone, and coding monitors. The scene is set in a clean, minimalist office environment with natural lighting coming through a large window. The person is deeply focused, typing on the keyboard, with coffee cup nearby. The desk has a few papers and gadgets like a smartwatch. The atmosphere is creative and productive.

Table of Contents

  • The Rundown

  • Events

  • News and Research

  • Podcast Episodes, Deep Dives, and Projects

  • Thoughts

  • Final

The Rundown

We’ve entered fall and are heading the year's final months. While the Trump and Harris debate was a highlight for everyone, including the cats of Springfield, we still have over six weeks before things are decided. OpenAI released it o1-preview model, which is certainly better. The model introduces chain-of-thought reasoning existing in Claude and negates the need for extensive prompt engineering.

From my perspective, this is probably the future of LLMs’ marginal improvements and training so that models can better infer user desires inside a context window. So far, we are a long way from our robot overlords taking over.

I can’t say much else has happened. Most focus on the interest rate decision and then proceed from there.

I will be SF the week of 8-11th so please reach out if you want to meet up while I am there.

Events

Tuesday 9/17:

Wednesday 9/18:

Thursday 9/19:

Tuesday 9/24:

Wednesday 9/25:

Friday 9/27:

Monday 9/30:

News and Research

  • EvenUp aims for a $1 billion valuation to assist personal injury lawyers with AI software. This is particularly interesting. While the Information highlights its lower-than-typical ARR margins and high revenue multiple, I think this clearly indicates that AI is creating businesses that are eating into traditional law. EvenUp's success is that it is offering a clear workflow-added service to augment and drive value where they can drive revenue for their clients. Others will point to Harvey, but this one is a clear value driver. Read in The Information.

  • Equal Ventures discusses the advantages of being a unique investor in the venture capital landscape. It's a great read from a top emerging VC. Read it in Equal Ventures.

  • OpenAI releases o1, its first model with reasoning abilities for more effective query handling. If you haven’t tried it you should. Read in The Verge.

  • Venture capitalists explore novel methods to return cash to backers amidst a two-year-old IPO drought. This is probably one of the most concerning things in VC to date. Overall, I am worried that we cannot be paying these valuation prices without hurting overall fund performance. Read in The Information.

  • Joe Lonsdale explains the increasing influence of MAGA in Silicon Valley. How the gap left by Peter Theil let Joe Lonsdale take the lead Read in The Information.

  • OpenAI considers altering its corporate structure to remove the profit cap for investors, possibly transitioning to a for-profit model. Now its finally just another company. Read in TechCrunch.

Research

Podcast Episodes, Deep Dives and Projects

  • Please see my new Podcast on Eidolon AI a Kubernetes like open-source platform for AI agents.

  • I started my series on founder thoughts. I have found that I keep saying the same things to many early stage founders, so I thought it would be good to have something on hand.

Final Thoughts

Please contact my email, [email protected], since I have more time to speak with people and help where I can. I am still actively angel investing.