The real impact of bitcoin 🌱- A new kind of venture fund 🔥- Remember the Feynman technique 🧠- Everything you wanna know from Marc Andreessen 🔭
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Episode #17. Dear reader of The Timestamp, we are disclosing a new selection of the best curators of the past 2 weeks. Curators are industry experts and creators who enjoy sharing their favorite content for you to save time.
This week, you are getting an impressive selection of curators who posted their key takeaways in the app Clind 📲.
The selection job is getting more difficult as we now have many more curators publishing their takeaways on the app Clind every day 📝
This week, we share with our subscribers (paid and free) 28 key insights covering the latest viewpoints about Bitcoin x Environment x Inclusion x Financing and many more topics. Do not miss an insightful summary of a long interview with Marc Andreessen. Curators that have been verified by Clind now unlocked a cool feature with unlimited takeaways on one piece they loved and summarized for you. 2 features are in French, but they are short and great 🙏
Let’s get started and pls share The Timestamp to help us get even more readers.
#1 Bitcoin vs Environment 🇫🇷
Quel est l’impact écologique réel de Bitcoin? published on May 27th 2021 in Usbek & Rica and curated by Aurore Lanchart.
Marc Bevand, développeur informatique, ancien spécialiste de la sécurité informatique chez Google, qui produit sa propre analyse du coût énergétique de Bitcoin et affirme vertement, dès 2017, que « les chiffres de Digiconomist sont sortis d’un chapeau et issus d’une erreur de calcul, provenant d’une incompréhension de la part de leur auteur ».
L’université de Cambridge précisait en juillet 2019 que « l’électricité utilisée par Bitcoin pourrait fournir l’électricité de toute l’université de Cambridge pendant plus de trois siècles », mais aussi que « l’électricité gaspillée aux États-Unis par les seuls appareils non allumés mais restant en veille en permanence (les téléviseurs notamment) suffirait à alimenter quatre réseaux comme Bitcoin ».
« 75 % du minage Bitcoin utilise des énergies renouvelables »
Aurore Lanchart, Head of Care at Clind, part of the startup ecosystem for 13 years, Aurore has been passionate about customer service and learning. In her spare time, she teaches classes at Lion (the school for Startup employees) and Iconoclass.
#2 Inclusion x venture fund
Andreessen Horowitz’s Naithan Jones on Finding the next P.Diddy published on April 16th 2021 in the a16z blog and curated by Christian Riedi.
🕵️♀️ TxO, which Nait leads, is designed to invest in underrepresented and underserved founders by identifying cultural geniuses and helping them build enduring and scalable businesses. 💸 🤝 For starters, TxO isn’t a typical venture fund. It’s structured as a donor-advised fund, with about $9 million under management supplied from financial gifts by over a hundred contributors
🔄 The fund is directly attached to an accelerator, called TxO University, with each company in the program receiving a $100,000 investment. That’s delivered through a SAFE note converting into a 7% stake on the company’s next financing. TxO doesn’t pocket returns from investments; it all goes back into the fund. The goal is that five or six years from now TxO won’t need donor money, with successful founders feeding returns back into the program.
🧵 TxO’s curriculum is different from other accelerators, said Nait, focusing on operations and product alongside a customized approach to raising capital for each company. 🚫 Applicants are disqualified if they’ve worked at a Google or Facebook, or attended a Stanford or MIT. That’s because Jones sees a filtering effect happening in Silicon Valley, centered on class and class mobility.
🥲 Nait points to formerly redlined communities, areas that are over-policed and lack access to resources like healthcare and nutritious food. These communities still produce talented self-selectors who want to bet on themselves, including entrepreneurs building businesses off the strength of cultural optimization.
🤑 This is not a charitable thing, these are elite entrepreneurs. 💪 We don’t screen for lack of weakness, we screen for strengths 👁 👬 Instead of asking what their loan-to-value ratio or customer acquisition cost is, they ask how they formulated their ideas. “What you ultimately hear is this deep, deep empathy for the user being applied,”
Christian Riedi, Business Angel & Writer at his newsletter Le Wrap Up 🇫🇷. x-Directeur Développement @TF1 with 15 year experience in media. You should check his newsletter as well if you like curation.
#3 Remember the Feynman technique 🇫🇷
The Feynman technique can help you remember everything you read published on October 21st 202O in the famous Medium newsletter of Eva Keiffenheim and curated by Fabien Raynaud.
Le meilleur moyen de se perfectionner dans un domaine est de l'enseigner.
Imaginez expliquer ce que vous avez appris à un enfant de 12 ans. Allez à l'essentiel, simplifiez.
#4 Andreessen about everything
Interview: Marc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneer published on June 22nd 2021 in the Noahpinion newsletter of Noah Smith and curated by Patrick Kervern.
“Lots of people will tell you the future holds amazing possibilities; Marc will tell you exactly what those possibilities are, and why they’re possible.” In an in depth interview with Noah Smith, Marc Andreessen co-founder of A16Z and creator of Netscape share his vision of the future
3 priorities for the future : Housing, education, and health care are each ferociously complex, but what they have in common is skyrocketing prices in a world where technology is driving down prices.
On techno optimism and software : “Software is a lever on the real world”...”Software is our modern alchemy. Isaac Newton spent much of his life trying and failing to transmute a base element -- lead -- into a valuable material -- gold. Software is alchemy that turns bytes into actions by and on atoms. It’s the closest thing we have to magic.”
On next wave of social media : “communication forms the backbone of virtually all progress in the world. And so improving our ability to communicate is fundamental.” Clubhouse is the Athenian agora come to life, “Substack is the business model for intellectual creativity that’s been missing on the Internet for 30 years….”raising the level of idea formation and discourse in a world that badly needs it”
On How software eats the world : A product is transformed from non-software to (entirely or mainly) software. (Music) ->The producers of these products are transformed from manufacturing or media or financial services companies to (entirely or mainly) software companies. ->As software redefines the product, and assuming a competitive market not protected by a monopoly position or regulatory capture, the nature of competition in the industry changes until the best software wins.
On Incumbents : “ I am increasingly skeptical that most incumbents can adapt. The culture shift is just too hard. Great software people tend to not want to work at an incumbent where the culture is not optimized to them, where they are not in charge. It is proving easier in many cases to just start a new company than try to retrofit an incumbent.”
On how seriously you take software :” A good test for how seriously an incumbent is taking software is the percent of the top 100 executives and managers with computer science degrees. For a typical tech startup, the answer might be 50-70%. For a typical incumbent, the answer may be more like 5-7%.”
On Augmented Intelligence: AI should be called augmented intelligence as advised by Doug Endelbart. “Augmented Intelligence makes machines better-thought partners for people. “
On Remote Work: “Remote work isn’t perfect, there are problems, but virtually every CEO I’ve talked to over the last year marvels at how well it works...It will work even better out of COVID….it’s possible that we’ll see a huge surge in productivity growth over the next 5 years. This productivity growth is, in my view, the key to a strong “roaring 20’s” thesis
On how individuals live and work. “For anyone who does his/her job mainly with other people and/or through a screen -- an increasing percent of the workforce every year, and most people with college degrees -- this is an opportunity to rethink everything from what career to pursue, to what employer to work for, to where to live, to how to live.
On Intentional communities: “The biggest change is the uncoupling of where you live from where you work, but even beyond that, I think a lot of people may choose to live very different lives coming out of this -- forming new kinds of intentional communities, for example.”
On Crypto: “crypto represents an architectural shift in how technology works and therefore how the world works. That architectural shift is called distributed consensus -- the ability for many untrusted participants in a network to establish consistency and trust.”
On new Incentive systems enabled by crypto : “you can now create thousands of new kinds of incentive systems for collaborative work online, since participants in a crypto project can get paid directly without a real-world company even needing to exist”
On AI between left wing & Crypto right wing : “Peter Thiel has made the characteristically sweeping observation that AI is in some sense a left wing idea -- centralized machines making top-down decisions -- but crypto is a right wing idea -- many distributed agents, humans and bots, making bottom-up decisions. “
On VC becoming service firms for portfolio companies : Maybe it’s time for Silicon Valley -- as a geographic location, as a network of people, as a state of mind -- to take on a bigger role in the economy, scaling our companies all the way to huge without ever handing them off to professionals on the other literal and metaphorical coast who may not understand and value them the way we do.
On Tech central place in the world : “we went from being pirates to being the Navy. People may love pirates when they’re young and small and scrappy, but nobody likes a Navy that acts like a pirate”. We reflect and look back at founders principles and lessons from Da Vinci to John Perry Barlow “we should view the unrealized -- or imperfectly realized -- ideas from all those eras as not lost but not yet found.”
On China: “China has a strategic agenda to achieve economic, military, and political hegemony by dominating dozens of critical technology sectors”. “They clearly plan to apply the same playbook into artificial intelligence, drones, self-driving cars, biotech, quantum computing, digital money, etc.
On advice to a 23 year old : “Don’t follow your passion. Your passion is likely more dumb and useless than anything else. Your passion should be your hobby, not your work”...”seek to contribute. Find the hottest, most vibrant part of the economy you can and figure out how you can contribute best and most”
Patrick Kervern, Founder at UMANZ. Sense-Maker & Curiosity expert.
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