No intro this week. Happy Sunday folks! Go out and touch some grass. Unless you’re allergic. Then stay inside and look at pictures of the new F-47.
🤼 People
Max Samuel - General Partner at Snö
Max moved from managing legal and investments at Thiel Capital in LA to a town in Norway with about 100k inhabitants and is now investing with the generalist, early-stage fund Snö (meaning snow in most Scandinavian languages). Norway saw a massive exodus of founders last year, so it’s mostly Sweden, Denmark and Finland where entrepreneurial endeavors happen.
Cyrus Yari - GP at Rational VC
Cyrus moved to Munich! He left the big city of London to enjoy the deep tech, Weißwurst and outdoors scene in Europe’s sixth largest GDP, Bavaria. He immediately set up a Founders running group, together with Elika, which I joined this week. A good mix of ex-Lilium engineers, AI founders and a few VCs.
🚀 Companies
Portia - predictable, controllable and authenticated agents
Status: ?
Source: CAVI
Founders: Emma Burrows, Mounir Mouawad
Why it’s cool:
Not very counter-consensus I guess, but very likely to be useful. Agents will lead to an exponential compute explosion. Pre: human triggers program; Post: human triggers agent who triggers programs. We should ideally know how and what they do, on whose behalf.
Clairvoyant - Securing software supply chain
Status: 3rd year
Source: CAVI
Founders: Douglas Schultz, Gautam Altekar
Why it’s cool:
Zero trust is a great model! But cumbersome to implement. Clairvoyant helps you gain visibility into your IoC, faster.
Integral - implanted brain modulation devices for treating disorders
Status: ?
Source: CAVI
Founders: Philip Sabes (Neuralink cofounder), Milan Cvitkovic
Why it’s cool:
If we want to really make compute efficient, then we need to get closer to our own hardware - aka wetware, aka grey matter. If we can’t enhance our own brains it’ll be very hard to increase bandwidth enough to keep up with compute ex vivo. Humans will be outpaced rapidly.
💡 Ideas & Science
If you ever wondered why it looked like certain russian trawlers were going back and forth over the location where a subsea cable carrying vital internet infrastructure hundreds of times, it’s not because the fishing is so good there. It’s because they don’t have the Cable Cutter Pro (CCP), Xi’s newest gadget. More reasons to have redundant infrastructure, surveillance and counter-measures at sea of these assets.
Noah Smith reviews Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book: Abundance. Still in the mail, so haven’t read yet, but based on the review, there might be many explanations for why we’re not getting things that we want, or at least the policy isn’t being made to enable that.
M42 is Abu Dhabi’s biggest healthcare company, and they have one of the largest DNA collections in the world. They’ve sequenced data from over 800k people, 700k of which are Emiratis. Now they’re looking to monetize it.
Space-Based Solar Power And Its Current Bottleneck
We’ve covered a few SBSP companies here in the weekly digest, EMF Space and Reflect Orbital to name two, as well as some research on it (see the first edition ever). Space Ambition published a good overview of the basic concepts you need to understand to accurately judge viability. SBSP is all about economics, grid dynamics, EM, and orbital dynamics. Easy-peasy.