Why don’t they deserve to see the light of day? Maybe the market gets to decide what “sucks” or doesn’t. More ideas in the marketplace gives users more choice.
Most of those are still in the lab, Starship is an incremental improvement that was largely a matter of funding, LLMs are at best a threat to telemarketers and customer service reps, perhaps paralegals.
I'm really sick of breathless, Disney-fied tomorrowland fantasies of what technology might theoretically be able to do, and pronouncements of "breakthroughs" that dissolve into nothing once any real-world application is attempted. I understand it's necessary to drum up dumb money for startups, and it makes for a good amusement park ride, but I'll believe the AI "revolution" is here when a car drives itself coast-to-coast through all weather conditions without incident.
I'm still waiting on graphene super-capacitors to make batteries obsolete.
I don't know how old you are, but regardless, can you not see how technological change has occurred within your own single human lifespan? This wasn't true in a meaningful way to an individual's life trajectory until the last century or so. The changes are coming so continuously and with such significant future implications, it's impossible for me not to just stand in awe.
Whether the specific proof of radical change you're waiting for happens in the next 24 months or over the next 100 years, it's still instantaneous in comparison to everything that came before it.
Then iPhone 4 came out in 2010. Google SDC prototype drove for 140k miles by then. It's 2024, and iPhone 4 is still sort of usable. Might run 0.25B LLM? Waymo is serving just couple small areas in US. There's no categorical successor to phones. No one other than Waymo achieved SDC.
Oculus DK1 shipped in 2012. VR is still a niche anime/gamer/anime-gamer product. AI bubble is correcting fast. Boom Overture supersonic jetliner isn't flying. Starship just landed for the first time, and it did land but appeared to have gone full banana soon after. Insane but it's not going into service for a little while. Brain-computer interfaces... meh. They were always stuck at immune response problem and that's why no one is doing invasive BCI, not because it wasn't invented back in 80s or whenever it was.
GP's claim is that things are slowing down and none of inventions are life changing big. Things are definitely slowing down and none of recent inventions are intercontinental teleportation certified for commercial services big.
TBH the last 10 years of my life I've noticed technilogical stagnation, enshitification, marginal improvments. The 20 years before that was an amazing wild ride.
We are still hiring at Fractal (NFT marketplace for gaming assets). We're a revenue generating company with fewer than 15 team members that just raised $35m in new funding. Founded by experienced founders. https://jobs.lever.co/fractal-is/
1) Games will move from closed economies to open economies, just as they transitioned to free-to-play 15 years ago. Blockchain is just the technology through which this will happen.
2) This transition will take 10 years - we are building for that timeline
3) We raised a ton of money and have a lean team, and can exist for >5 years without revenue. We are keeping our team lean to maintain that level of runway.
4) For whatever reason, people are still buying gaming NFTs right now (as of this week). Of course, that may change quickly.
Even startups not aiming to be the next FAANG company have trouble estimating revenue, product development time, etc. It's just extremely hard to know all the unknowns when you are starting a new business, especially since it is likely that you are only an expert in one of the required fields (eng, product, marketing, sales) to bring your product to market and will have to learn everything else on the fly. Most business plans for startups are useless.
I'm Justin, cofounder of Twitch, former YC partner, and founder of many more startups. I am cofounder of a new company, Fractal, an NFT marketplace for gamers to discover, buy and sell gaming NFTs. We just closed a $35M seed round from Paradigm and Multicoin today. The company is fully remote and we are having a lot of fun building in the crypto space. Culturally, we optimize to reduce the time between talking to customers, coming up with product ideas, and execution. This is a product and engineering-led, customer-focused company.
We are hiring many eng roles. No previous crypto experience required. The team is mostly from Google and Stripe.
Operator Protocol is an open and decentralized protocol for e-commerce. Anyone can participate as a buyer or seller, and the network will be governed by the marketplace participants. Instead of a giant, monopolistic rent-seeker owning the customer and taking a large toll on every transaction, OP is an alternative for buyers and sellers to diversify off Amazon and other centralized marketplaces.
Our founding team consists of veteran founders: Justin Kan co-founded Twitch and Fractal, has been investing in crypto since 2013, and has been an advisor to decentralized projects like Theta and Audius; Jamie Quint comes from an e-commerce background but has also led Growth @Notion and monetization @Reddit; Robin Chan co-founded Fractal and Operator v1, founded and sold a mobile gaming company, XPD Media, to Zynga, and was previously head of Zynga Asia; and Tikhon Bernstam founded and sold the cloud application platform, Parse, to Facebook, and also founded Scribd. Our CEO, Arjun Bhargava, led Growth Engineering at Reddit and was previously at Goldman Sachs.
We’re looking for strong, motivated, and talented full stack and backend engineers to build out the future of e-commerce with us. Previous experience in web 3.0/crypto tech is not required but is a plus.
