Flying
w.233 | Situational Awareness, State of VC, How to Pitch VCs, Making Waves
Dear Friends,
This week flew by. While changing the pace with a quiet Saturday night watching the Texas sunset, I wanted to share a few highlights of news and notes from this week. Summer is starting, but we have not hit a quiet period with PTO for everyone yet.
Today's Contents:
Good Reads: Sensible Investing
Song of the Week: Flying
Good Reads: Sensible Investing
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead by Leopold Aschenbrenner. A long set of essays on AI by an OpenAI engineer. Summarized in this Twitter Thread.
“We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word.”
Data Driven Thread on the State of VC Today, which we characterize as a "Tale of Two Cities" By Samir Kaji. Those who can raise large sums are, while we wait to see how the returns from their recent vintages play out. Importantly, as several firms have taken an approach to limit their LP capital to maximize rate of return, we should remember that not everyone is playing the same game.
Pitch the Way VCs Think: Presenting with Emotion - Vinod Khosla from 2019. 73 pages of excellent advice.
Song of the Week: Flying
Video of Album on YouTube.
“Flying” by Garth Stevenson.
I greatly enjoyed listening to this relaxing album during deep work sessions this week. It’s all instrumental music inspired by a Bass player who played in Antarctica in 2011. It’s impossible to not feel more tranquil after listening to this.
As Garth writes, Flying is a 75-minute soundtrack to life or whatever you want it to be. The music is inspired by my experiences in nature, particularly from a life-changing trip to Antarctica last year. The 14 tracks range from solo bass and minimalist piano to fully produced pieces with layers of bowed melodies, percussion, organ, and voice.
Instrumental Selfie of the Week
This week, I attended the launch event for Making Waves, a part business book and part memoir that my friend Helaine Knapp wrote about her experience building CITYROW. The launch event was a massive success and had an incredible turnout and Austin energy.
I met Helaine a few months after moving to Austin. She had also recently relocated, and we quickly became friends. She had an idea to reconstitute a founder-operator Mastermind event here in Austin and asked if I’d co-host with her, and it’s been fun ever since.
Helaine has an infectious energy, tells it how it is, and is profoundly generous in her desire to give back and help other founders.
This book does not hold back on the ups and downs of being a founder.
My copy arrives on Tuesday.
Thanks for reading, friends. Please always be in touch.
As always,
Katelyn