How to Survive the Next Tech Revolution (w/ Brett Gibson)
Summary
TLDR本视频探讨了技术,特别是人工智能(AI)如何改变世界,以及创新者如何塑造未来。通过与Brett Gibson的对话,展示了从创立Posterous到Initialized的旅程,以及他们如何应对技术进步和市场需求的变化。讨论了初创公司需要的工程思维,包括选择正确的工具,关注用户价值,以及适应开源和API的重要性。还介绍了Brett Gibson的新播客《高比特》和Initialized正在招聘投资合伙人的信息。整体上,这段内容强调了在快速发展的技术世界中,创新、适应性和对用户需求的专注是成功的关键。
Takeaways
- 👨💻 工程师需要从用户体验的角度出发,确定合适的工具和技术来解决问题,即使这意味着采用非传统的方式。
- 🔁 随着时间的推移,工具和开源技术会不断改进和成熟,工程师需要能够重构代码以利用新的技术。
- 🎯 专注于为用户创造价值,而不是过于执着于特定的工具或技术。
- 🧑🔬 对于非确定性系统(如大语言模型),需要进行实验并采用创新的方法来实现所需的用户体验。
- 🌱 投资者需要具有远见,能够看到一个领域的潜在机会,即使这个领域目前还没有被充分开发。
- 🔎 评估一个创业公司时,需要权衡市场风险和技术风险,并深入研究是否具备实现创新的技术可能性。
- 🧭 面对前沿的工程难题时,需要自己开创先例,制定解决方案的方法论。
- ⚠️ 即使在高压环境下,也要保持头脑清晰,彻底分析并验证所有潜在的失败点。
- 🌐 区分通用技能和专门技能的重要性,在早期阶段聘请通才,后期再引入专家级人才。
- ✅ 测试对于确保软件质量和可靠性至关重要,尤其是对于涉及资金等高风险领域。
Q & A
对话中提到的Posterous和Post Haven是做什么的?
-Posterous和Post Haven是两款博客产品,允许用户通过发送电子邮件来发布博文,并采用了一种新颖的基于电子邮件头部验证的身份认证方式。
对话强调了工程师在产品开发中应具备哪些重要素质?
-对话强调了工程师需要具备很强的解决问题能力、敏锐把握用户需求的洞察力,并善于利用现有工具、开源项目和API,而不是重复造轮子。要专注于为用户创造价值,而不是过于沉溺于技术细节。
对话中提到了哪些公司在人工智能领域的创新案例?
-对话提到了Bison Trails利用代理验证在区块链领域的创新,以及Astroforge在小行星矿产开采领域采用创新方法的案例。
Bison Trails公司在招聘方面采取了什么做法?
-Bison Trails公司在早期倾向于招聘通才型人员,能同时掌握诸如JavaScript和Terraform等不同技能,避免了过于专一化的弊端。
对话中提到哪些有助于保证软件质量的做法?
-对话强调了测试的重要性,尤其是在加密货币等高风险领域,应投入大量精力进行软件测试,涵盖核心功能和常见测试用例。此外,详细分析和验证每一个可能的故障点也是关键所在。
为什么Brett对Astroforge公司的前景充满信心?
-如果Astroforge能够成功实现开采小行星上的稀有金属并运送回地球的计划,其市场价值将是巨大的。尽管技术风险很高,但市场前景无疑是巨大的。
对话最后介绍了什么新内容?
-对话最后介绍了Brett的新播客"High Bit",以及他所在的风险投资公司Initialized Capital正在招聘新的投资合伙人。
Initialized Capital在寻找什么样的投资合伙人人选?
-他们希望找到有过创业经验、曾领导公司完成B轮融资,并具备一定投资经验的人才,这些人能够为初创公司提供深入的指导。
对话最后传达了什么核心观点?
-对话最后强调,技术正在重塑世界,而真正推动这一变革的是工程师、产品经理、设计师和建造者自身。他们是创造从未有过的新事物的力量源泉。
整个对话的主旨是什么?
-整个对话主旨是探讨技术创新在打造新产品和解决困难问题中的重要性,以及工程师在这一过程中的关键作用。对话分享了许多实际案例,强调了解决问题的能力、把握用户需求以及利用现有资源的重要性。
Outlines
🤝 技术创新与持续改进的重要性
这段内容探讨了技术创新的重要性,以及持续改进产品和利用新工具的必要性。作者谈到了他和朋友Brett Gibson在Posterous和Post Haven这两个项目中的经历,他们如何在第二次重写项目时利用了现成的工具和API,避免了重复造轮子的低效做法。作者指出,尽管每隔几年技术都会有飞跃式进步,但能够从用户需求出发,并权衡通过构建新工具还是利用现有工具所带来的价值,是至关重要的。
🚀 人工智能时代工程挑战新境界
这一段讲述了当前人工智能,特别是大型语言模型给工程带来的新挑战。由于这些模型的非确定性特质,开发者需要探索新的黑客级方法来发挥它们的价值。作者将这种情况与几年前的加密货币领域有着相似之处,都需要从头开发基础设施。要解决这一问题,开发者需要从用户体验出发,适时采用新的开源工具和API,同时保持对核心需求的关注。文中还分享了其投资公司Bison Trails的例子,说明了广泛技能的普通开发人员如何解决全新的工程难题。
✨ 具有远见卓识的创投实践
这最后一段分享了作者投资公司Astro Forge的例子,阐释了成功的创投实践需要对未来有独特见解。Astro Forge正在从事前所未有的小行星开采工程,面临巨大技术和工程挑战。投资方需要判断这种极端困难的任务是否在可预见的未来能够实现,从而产生巨大的商业价值。作者分享了该公司联合创始人的经验,强调了在面临未知难题时,务实细致地分析和测试每一个可能的故障点是非常重要的。这种具有前瞻性并耐心执行的投资实践,正是帮助创新型公司取得成功的关键。
Mindmap
Keywords
💡人工智能(AI)
💡重写(Rewrite)
💡开源
💡API
💡非确定性系统
💡工程思维
💡矢量数据库和嵌入
💡创新
💡域专家
💡客户需求
Highlights
Brett et Paul ont co-fondé Posterous et ont dû écrire leur propre logiciel d'authentification par email pour une fonctionnalité nouvelle à l'époque.
Quand ils ont réécrit l'application sous le nom de PostHaven quelques années plus tard, cette fonctionnalité était devenue une API open source existante.
Les outils, l'open source et les APIs s'améliorent rapidement, parfois en quelques mois ou semaines pour l'IA aujourd'hui.
L'IA générative comme les grands modèles de langage sont des systèmes non déterministes, ce qui les rend à la fois puissants et complexes à utiliser.
De la même manière que pour la crypto, une nouvelle vague d'outils et d'infrastructures émerge pour l'IA.
Le conseil clé est de toujours garder à l'esprit l'expérience utilisateur plutôt que la technologie.
Au début, il faut souvent construire quelque chose qui n'existe pas encore, puis adopter les nouveaux outils à mesure qu'ils émergent.
Brett a investi dans Bison Trails, une start-up de blockchain devenue l'activité cloud de Coinbase, quand la preuve d'enjeu n'était qu'une idée.
Bison Trails a réussi en embauchant des généralistes capables de travailler sur tout le stack et en investissant massivement dans les tests logiciels.
AstroForge, autre start-up financée par Brett, vise à extraire des matériaux rares des astéroïdes, un défi technologique extrême.
AstroForge a dû résoudre des problèmes d'ingénierie à la limite des capacités humaines, en écrivant eux-mêmes les manuels.
Le co-fondateur d'AstroForge insiste sur la validation approfondie des solutions pour des problèmes complexes.
Le nouveau podcast de Brett, High Bit, explore l'ingénierie et la résolution de problèmes auprès de fondateurs techniques.
Brett recrute un nouveau partenaire investisseur chez Initialized Capital, idéalement avec une expérience de fondateur et d'investisseur.
Les ingénieurs, PMs, designers et développeurs sont ceux qui façonnent réellement le monde avec la technologie.
Transcripts
technology it's changing the world and
it's the people who can build something
from scratch something that never
existed before
who will go on to change that world
but then what happens for v2 the
rewrites always better who wins in that
world it's a question playing out in AI
today so that's why we're sitting down
with my multi-time co-founder and friend
Brett Gibson he runs initialized now
alongside Jen Wolfe now that I'm back at
YC what's the future gonna look like it
won't be the same as the past but it
will rhyme let's get started
[Applause]
all right
[Music]
Brett and I worked on a startup named
posterous together with our other
co-founder Sachin Agarwal
one of the new things we did was a new
kind of authentication by email header
you could post your blog where we would
use your email to figure out who you
were so then you could just send email
to postpostress.com and we'd figure it
out that was the thing that had not
really been done before in a consumer
product and to do it it required a
different kind of engineering mindset a
big part of an engineer's day-to-day
problem is figuring out the right tools
for the job figuring out what they
should be using and figuring out how it
ties back to user value because you know
I think that I come from this you know
this default engineering mentality where
I really want things to be precise and
deterministic and you know oftentimes
the engineering challenges you face to
get to get the product working the way
you want it for your users are much more
probabilistic because it hadn't been
done before we had to do some pretty
unusual things to get it right you know
we ended up writing our own uh parts of
our own SMTP client which I don't I
don't really recommend doing a lot of
analysis on the routing that email went
through so that we could you know have
some probabilistic score about How
likely it was to actually be from you
and then the postaven experience was
night and day Preposterous later sold to
Twitter for 20 million dollars but a few
years later they decided to shut it down
since the real reason why they bought it
was for the team
when it shut down Brett and I got back
together to write it again this was
called post Haven and this time when we
wrote it again this post by email
authentication that we had to write for
the first time had been commodified
there was a product it was mail gun it
was ready it worked off the shelf for 90
of what we needed had we been too
grounded in fighting the last battle we
would have missed that we would have
wasted a lot of time we would have built
a lot of software that we didn't need to
build what we're seeing today in 2023 is
similar to what we found rewriting
posturous again as post-haven even just
four years later first it's a lot easier
to rewrite once you've written it once
but second tooling an open source and
freely available apis gets so much
better in just the course of a few years
for AI now that set of years sometimes
is months or weeks
but know that this isn't a new thing
what is new is how much more powerful
these capabilities in ml and large
language models have become now everyone
has this new primitive of generative Ai
and especially large language models and
they're trying to figure out exactly how
to use them and the moment is actually
very strange because there's a lot of
interesting Tech on how to do it you
know there's a lot of best practices
around stuff like vector databases and
embeddings so that you can get your
prompts correct but it's it's
exacerbated because large language
modules are fundamentally
non-deterministic systems
um that's you know the the lack of
determinism is is in part what makes
them work so well and seems so magic and
so the the class of I guess you know
first generation hacks to get them
working in ways that deliver value to
users is is perhaps more interesting
than some of the things we've seen in
the past along the same lines this alien
intelligence we have access to now it's
a strange one and we're just in the
first Innings of the tooling the
foundational models and especially the
open source it's interesting because I
see a lot of parallels in what's
happening in AI right now and what
happened in crypto over the last few
years because there was a moment you
know there's so much infrastructure
around wallets and building up
you know ability to be consumer facing
in crypto that if you were building in
2018 you just had to build from scratch
and the underlying ecosystem has come a
long way and you're probably having to
throw away some of that custom code and
in AI it's it's the same thing but
perhaps even moving faster because not
only do you have the day-to-day building
out of of the of the types of tooling
that would make your life easier you we
have these step function improvements in
the underlying foundational models the
change the requirements I think that the
North Star is always backing it out from
what what experience you want to give to
the user because if you make sure you
get that right then you can change your
technology behind the scenes
um but you know trying to try to have
the trade-off of uh how long it takes to
deliver that versus competitors that is
the lesson from software engineering and
it's the same one Brett and I learned in
2008 2013 and we're learning again today
in 2023 whether it was just some new
capability in the early days of social
to what's happening today in AI first
you have to be willing to build
something that doesn't exist yet and do
some pretty unusual things to do it but
then later you need to be able to do
rewrites and stay current with open
source and new Stacks capabilities and
apis all while being connected to the
needs of your customers and users make
stuff people want and that is what makes
products sticky and what makes a durable
business being a domain expert in
tooling
really helps gives you a lot of Leverage
toward that goal but it's not the goal
in its own right
thank you Brett's one of the best
Engineers I've ever had a chance to work
with across our Year's writing code for
Preposterous y combinator post Haven and
initialized and he's always been super
pragmatic and I've learned something new
from him regularly he's got a new
podcast called the high bit where he
sits down with some of the best
technical Founders to talk Tech
engineering and the idea maze kind of
what we just did in this episode one of
those companies was bison Trails which
was acquired by coinbase and post IPO
the notional value of that acquisition
was nearly a billion dollars that's
because it became coinbase Cloud one of
the key SAS Revenue generators for
coinbase
Brett invested in bison Trails when it
was just a few people very early when
proof of stake was little more than an
idea something that did not actively run
the world's largest blockchains like it
does now but that's precisely how you
should invest when you want to create
the future when I met bison Trails there
was there were little or no major
networks running proof of stake and and
I still had doubts in my mind as to the
viability of widespread shift to proof
of stake networks especially for already
running networks like ethereum now it's
very clear that it's it's demodually
possible if not optimal in many contexts
with the Bryson Trails Founders
recognized was that relative to the
current proof of work mining that was
happening running validators on proof of
stake networks was a novel and Rel and
difficult problem they were able to
build something that had never been
built before because of two things first
they were generalist focusing on a wide
skill set here's Aaron Henshaw
co-founder of Bison Trails on how hiring
was a big piece of their success the
best thing that we did was we've
actually brought on like generalists at
the beginning more people who could both
like right JavaScript and do terraform
that's a really wide band between those
two things but that's what we needed at
the beginning because we had JavaScript
right we actually had like a front end
we had an API to build so we had a
middle and then we had this whole back
end you're lucky if you go far enough to
be able to hire the people that you need
to fix your problems that you've created
for yourself and those people you know
they come in wide open but they like
they're so good at it they're so they're
so good at these specific problem
solving and like you're just like in awe
that they can come in and just like
change it all and make it work like 10x
better second you've really got to
invest into software testing so that
when the chips are on the line and they
always are in crypto custody and staking
you have the right engineering infra
some of the things that we did well
early was like we did not try to over
engineer things there was probably some
opportunities to use like slightly more
off-the-shelf CI CD and bake in a little
bit more testing early on that I think
like might have slightly slowed us down
but actually sped us up this may be like
one of the biggest takeaways from the
whole thing was
you should invest heavily in tests
especially even early like don't go
crazy right like you can't be writing
tests for ever but you should have core
tests that cover base cases and that
like help your whatever it is that
you're deploying Founders and investors
both make money and impact the world
when they believe something nobody else
believes yet but are right another
company Brett's invested in is a very
ambitious one called astroforge they're
literally doing mining for high value or
on asteroids at no point was anyone
really worried about the market
opportunity you know we're always
balancing Market risk with technical
risk in in the startups we fund and
there's just no question that if astral
Forge can go to asteroids and mine Rare
Earth elements and bring them back you
know the the only real risk in the
market is that they do it so
successfully that those metals are worth
a lot less and so really all we spent
our time was in was validating is this
possible and I think specifically if it
is in fact possible why is it possible
now suddenly why why did why are we
seeing this company today because on
some timeline it seems like something
that's well within the ability of humans
to produce but you need to have a view
that it's going to be it's going to
happen in time for this company to make
money off it Hosea Kane co-founder of
Aster Forge is trying to solve
engineering problems on literally the
edge of human capability and the thing
is you don't have a manual for that
you've got to write the manual yourself
the gut reaction was asteroid mining is
difficult the refinery is difficult it
couldn't be awkward it couldn't be a
chord it couldn't be it couldn't be the
simple pass through the length that we
went through to solve this problem
baffles me to this day you're focusing
on this problem that's difficult glaze
using over something so simple and and I
talked about this fishbone diagram
because these are things that you should
really actually check you should write
out great the graphs before agreement do
we check everything in there and not
just say like yeah I checked the voltage
which is just one part of it
um and we just checked it off like okay
cool power supply works hard this works
great even if you are under heavy time
pressure take a minute and pause slow
down it's okay to do that and really
assess the situation and really validate
all these potential failures to get to
that Solution that's just a taste of
what you'll find in Brett's new podcast
I'm subscribing and I recommend that you
do too you know the intent is less a
technical Deep dive and more about this
this the the story about the art of
problem solving and what goes into
day-to-day Engineering in these
technical domains and how it can be you
know just interesting in its own right
you can find high bit by Brett Gibson on
anywhere you listen to podcasts or
initialize
Link in the description below
initialized is also hiring a new
investment partner you can't apply to
jobs you don't know about so that's why
they're running an open hiring process
for this role initialize is currently
hiring a partner role and you know we we
really prize uh backgrounds in founding
and working in startups and ability to
advise startups in in some area of deep
domain expertise so uh you know high
level I think we're looking for someone
who's who's been a Founder before you
know hopefully gotten a company uh
through perhaps a series B round and and
but also it's very helpful if they have
some investing experience whether that's
as an angel or within or as part of a a
venture firm
um you know a big a big part of the
applied knowledge of going from founder
to investor is just getting reps and and
seeing pitches being an investor to me
is just an absolute blessing and if you
ever wanted to join a team doing it
right and you have some investment
experience already this is a big
opportunity
that's it for this week Brett's an old
friend of mine and I'm so excited to see
where he takes initialized Capital links
in the description to apply to be an
investor at initialize and to subscribe
to Brett's new podcast hi bit technology
is truly reshaping the world and its
technologists the engineers the PMS the
designers and the builders themselves
they're the ones doing it it if you
watched to the end you must believe this
too and I'm here to tell you you're on
the right track see you next time
[Music]
thank you
[Music]
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