Can you still say HNY? Anyway, I feel like 2025 is basically planned out with events, travel, elections, societal collapse, AGI, battle for Greenland and other good things already.
š¤¼ People
Daniel Schulte-Hillen - Investor at SDAC
Daniel ran product at N26 and Taxfix, before starting investing (and co-investing with Inflection). We talked about defense and other common interests (to be announced ;) )
š¼ Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
š Companies
Mater-AI - AI to find thermoelectric materials
Status: Pre-Seed
Source: Accelerator
Founders: Nicolaas, Chelsea and Gatleen
Why itās cool:
Thermoelectric materials are like piezoelectric materials in the sense that one form of energy comes in and electricity comes out. In thermoelectric ones itās (you guessed it) heat that comes in! Itās usually very small voltages generated (microV per K difference) and the highest efficiency materials are prohibitively expensive at the moment. Hence, why we need to discover new ones!
Aedil - Solving problems underwater
Status: NATO DIANA cohort
Source: NATO DIANA
Why itās cool:
Founders worked with submarines for 15 years before. Thereās not much more to say, beyond them having two public products: an acoustic visualization tool and a data/knowledge management tool.
Oris Space - Powerbeaming in space
Status: Seed
Source: CAVI
Founders:
Why itās cool:
Power transmission in space is absolutely cooler than transmission from space to earth! And there will be energy needs in orbit, even when thereās no sun. The question is how good (Wh/kg/$) batteries will getā¦
š” Ideas & Science
The underlying factors behind the wildfire
The wildfires in LA are set to become the costliest in human history. Someone put together an amazing overview of the reasons that all build up to why there are these catastrophic fires in LA. Itās down to meteorological conditions and fuel. The meteorology is high temperatures before the fire, drying out the fuel, high winds during the fire, spreading the fire. Tl;dr, itās not climate change btw. The fuel situation is bad because thereās a lot of it and itās dry. They didnāt do the controlled burns in time, even though they knew it was a big riskā¦
Venkatesh Rao writes about contraption factor - a way to measure system complexity in relation to design integrity. Theyāre technologies like helicopters, nothing designed or inspired by nature, very complex. Fun fact: European-designed helicopters have rotors going clockwise and American ones counter-clockwise, typically. The design integrity refers to how well designed, how tight or how aestethic the design is of the object. Helicopters feel magical in a different way than what Arthus C. Clarke meant by āAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magicā.
The unbearable slowness of being via Alex F
Why are we only processing at roughly 10 bits/s when our senses are taking in information at 100,000,000x that?