It’s a holiday week. Here’s some stuff to read. Inside Danny McBride’s Lowcountry Comedy Commune [Sam Schube/GQ] – Incredibly talented dude, operating within his comfort zone, with people he cares about, and enjoying his life. Left Los Angeles and set up a production studio back in South Carolina. This is one of the recipes for happiness. in 2017, he and a handful of his closest collaborators, who also happen to be some of his closest friends, decided to move to South Carolina, where they had filmed plenty of TV and then returned together as serial vacationers. The plan was simple, but grand ..read more

Maybe I should be more worried about Artificial General Intelligence but these days it’s the probability of Artificial General Bullshit that leaves me wondering about AI-powered everything. Given that the enshittification of the web is largely driven by economic incentives, why do we believe AI will be any different? I mean it’s largely the same people, same companies doing the building anyway. Back in 2016 when agentic consumer tech was just starting to pique interests I wrote “What Happens When Bots Learn to Lie?” Was the post about electronic disinformation? Wrong. About the massive securi ..read more

Tweet Translation “Excited for [Startup] to continue its mission at [Acquirer]” It was an acquihire and I lost money “They never gave up and I’ll miss working with them (hopefully will do so again). Congrats to [Startup] on their exit!” It was a journey but we at least got our money back. Founder, please remember me when you start the next company. “Proud to have been along since the earliest days. Thanks [founder] for letting me be a small part of your journey!” The big VCs in the deal made way more money than I did, but at least I got a little bit into the seed round. “You did it ..read more

Links to read When the growth slows, and, You and your Co-founder [Harry Glaser/Cofounder, Modelbit] – More good repeat founder wisdom from Harry. In the former he has practical advice for how to handle speedbumps post-hypergrowth period. The latter is a good articulation of true cofounders. Sometimes when we meet a startup the ‘cofounders’ are really more like a founding team – there’s clearly one lead individual and one or more team members. But the ones which feel like true partnerships are pretty close to Harry’s guidance. The first two he notes are actually the most difficult! The Rick ..read more

Darwin moves at half-speed in venture capital, allowing mediocrity and outdated ‘best practices’ to persist, much to the detriment of founders and LPs. The long time horizons, risk aversion incentives, and opaque flow of information all contribute to this stasis. What’s one possible solution? Release new hungry and competitive species into the pool. That’s Screendoor. I’ve not written much about Screendoor here – it was important to do the work first – but we’re moving quickly these days. 2021 We start Screendoor with some of our industry friends to back new VC firms with $90m+ of Institutio ..read more

“Admirer from outside of the cap table” is how I approached Kieran Snyder, Cofounder of Textio. That is to say, I DMed her on Twitter in 2016, impressed by the work she was doing but without a preexisting relationship. Thankfully the interest was mutual and we’ve had the chance to exchange thoughts here and there in the time since. When Kieran announced earlier this year she was stepping back from the CEO role at her company it seemed like a great time to (a) learn from her tenure and (b) promote her awesome weekly newsletter. Hunter Walk: Textio, the startup you founded and CEO’ed until a fe ..read more

URLs. Fresh hot URLs. Air Canada Has to Honor a Refund Policy Its Chatbot Made Up [Ashley Belanger/Wired] – Air Canada’s chatbot gave a customer incorrect information about bereavement fare policies, and a court held the airline accountable. Unclear whether the chatbot was truly LLM powered – or by whom – but it’s a fun piece of case law now (at least in Canada) for GPT hallucinations. The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days. In reality, Air Canada’s policy explicitly stated that the airline will n ..read more

The good stuff on the Internet really does occur in the comments! I shared a post by Ben Werdmuller where he details that a company he used to work for had a recent repricing/restructuring of their stock to better reflect the current state of the company and provide incentives for the team going forward. Ben’s general POV is that stock options are like lottery tickets and that in most cases it’s a losing proposition for the average employee to exercise them – in fact, he’s never bought his options at any company. He recommends just saving your salary instead. As you can guess I disagreed (sto ..read more

More stuff for you to enjoy…. AI generated image What I Learned Selling My Company [Harry Glaser/then: Periscope Data, now: Modelbit] – Harry sold Periscope Data for $130m and is back building again with Modelbit, an ML engineering platform. Here he provides actionable advice for founders who are building long-lasting companies but know M&A might be the eventual, and successful, outcome. This is about the bread-and-butter, $50M-$500M acquisitions of mid/late-stage startups who probably took the offers because they had serious doubts about whether they could go the distance.  The ent ..read more

Links! Get your red hot links here! There Are Plenty of Power Publicists. But Only One Works for Taylor Swift [Allie Jones/WSJ] – Tree Paine (as the owner of what I think is also a great name, I salute you Tree) seems incredible competent. It’s amazing how compelling that is these days. And of course, as a Swiftie myself, I remember her scenes from the Miss Americana documentary. How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution [Stephen Witt/New Yorker] – One might make the case that Nvidia is the most important company in technology right now and this classic New Yorker profile gets ..read more