Tippets #188
Jensen Huang, Reddit, moon landing, and more. Enjoy!
A warm welcome to new readers getting this for the first time, and thank you for letting me be a small part of your week! As a reminder, I’m Rishi Taparia, Co-founder and General Partner at Garuda Ventures, a pre-seed focused fund partnering with founders to pull the future into the present. Tippets is a curated set of tidbits and snippets (get it…tippets…) from my reading around the web.
New From Me:
What VCs Talk About Behind Closed Doors | EP 062 Rishi Taparia
I sat down with my friend
from VSC Ventures and talked about all things venture: raising a fund, what we look for when we invest at, where founders need to focus, and whether it’s harder to build a company or build a fund (TL;DR - a company, except for in one area!)Tippets from Around the Web:
Nvidia Hardware Is Eating the World
Nvidia is on top of the world, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom thanks to their chips being the ones everyone wants needs. The company surpassed a $2 trillion (with a T) market cap this week after announcing what was probably one of the most watched earnings calls of all time. And CEO Jensen Huang is getting the recognition he deserves. This interview with Wired is an excellent read as he shares, among other things, his thoughts on the future of computing, Nvidia, and leadership.
Who keeps you up at night?
Lauren, they all do…Everybody’s building chips…That shouldn’t keep me up at night—because I should make sure that I’m sufficiently exhausted from working that no one can keep me up at night. That’s really the only thing I can control.
(17-minute read - Wired)
Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google
We know that access to chips and compute power is a big bottleneck in the AI craze. The other? Access to training data. And this week, a meaningful “data access deal” was properly announced.
Social media platform Reddit has struck a deal with Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab to make its content available for training the search engine giant's artificial intelligence models, three people familiar with the matter said. The contract with Alphabet-owned Google is worth about $60 million per year, according to one of the sources.
Having access to proprietary data that might be able to train AI models is going to be big business, particularly as more software solutions become increasingly vertical-specific. Data access has long been discussed as a startup differentiator. Now it might be the biggest one.
(2-minute read - Reuters)
Odysseus Spacecraft Lands on Moon, First Time for U.S. Since 1972
America has landed a vehicle on the moon for the first time in 50 years. I personally was surprised to learn that it had been that long. Pretty amazing!
The robotic lander was the first U.S. vehicle on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, the closing chapter in humanity’s astonishing achievement of sending people to the moon and bringing them all back alive. That is a feat that has not been repeated or even tried since.The lander, named Odysseus and a bit bigger than a telephone booth, arrived in the south polar region of the moon at 6:23 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.
(4-minute read - NYT)
The Mayor Helping to Boost Birth Rates in Japan
Japan’s fertility rate is on the decline. One Tokyo suburb is bucking the trend. How? A whole bunch of child-care initiatives hwere implemented by town Mayor Yoshiharu Izaki.
Our goal was to create a town that sells well, so we thought of measures we should take to attract our main target, which was working families raising children. That’s why we quickly made a ton of new nursery schools, and of course the pick-up and drop-off stations…We are seeing more and more welfare facilities such as nursery schools and hospitals opening. Since population growth is declining in Japan, but increasing in Nagareyama, many doctors and dentists come here to work. Nagareyama also just completed Japan’s largest logistics project. I think we are changing from a commuter town, or just a place to sleep, to a city where people can live and work.
(9-minute read - Bloomberg)
Warren Buffett’s 2023 Letter
The Berkshire Hathaway annual letter is a must-read for millions. This year’s letter was the first since 1978 that was written without Charlie Munger, who passed away 3 months ago at 99 years old. The first page of the letter is Warren’s tribute to his dear friend and partner, which I’ve included below in full.
Sell The Product Before It Exists
A thoughtful read on why startup founders should commit to sales before committing to the product.
Sales is about finding and alleviating pain. Somewhere, there is someone with money who has something they want solved. As a startup, the only reason a buyer would be interested in buying from a brand new company with no to few references is because you are solving something that is super painful for them today…Customers aren’t going to tell you what you need to build. You need to know this already. Customers are going to tell you, through the sales process, how important that problem is and what it is worth to them.
(7-minute read - Clint Sharp)
Quote I'm thinking about: “Beauty is powerful, and the moments that make a project, and capture peoples’ hearts, can be quite small.” - Austin Tunnell
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