Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

https://reactionwheel.net/2024/09/resignation-letter.html

by vedang • 2 years ago

124 59 2 years ago

snapcaster• 2 years ago

I have no idea who this person is, but I found their investment philosophy interesting food for thought. I wonder how much of their disillusionment with tech industry is due to just getting older and jaded versus an actual drop in quality/boldness/etc.

Pet_Ant3• 2 years ago

First, I’ve felt for a few years now that the startups I’m seeing don’t seem so much like progress as just shopkeeping. ... it’s just not that interesting. The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understand everything there was to know about computers, because this was something that could radically improve people’s lives, ... it’s just maintaining the current status quo. It just feels, I don’t know, done.

This definitely felt true to me. All the potential of technology seems spent in computers. It seems like it's just a matter of making the existing commerce 5% faster. If I had to restart as a teenager I'd perhaps be looking into 3D printing. That seems like something that can actually make a difference. It's actually exciting. LLVMs are actually exciting, Docker/K8S, but beyond that don't know that anything really excites me.

archero• 2 years ago

I’m guessing you meant LLMs, but I choose to imagine that you’re just really excited about LLVM

drzzhan• 2 years ago

Maybe they really meant LLVM? Large language vision model.

dullcrisp• 2 years ago

Like CAD designs? Or 3D printer manufacturing? Is 3D printing creating any work?

mikepurvis• 2 years ago

A lot still needs to be done to make the design pipeline accessible to normal people. Any clown can set up a bambu and print objects they find/buy online, but it's a huge learning curve to get from that point to being able to actually create your own parts, especially stuff that integrates with the complex shapes of some existing object.

Recent examples from my life include wanting mounts for flashlights, a thing to attach to bike handlebars, a shelf bracket, a battery cover for a tool, a piece of a bird feeder, etc. Where is the interface that lets me scan the existing objects I need to integrate with and then quickly assemble prefab subcomponents into a printable design and seamlessly iterate on that?

kiba• 2 years ago

Don't get me wrong. I love 3D printing. Unfortunately, the tech I am working with, FDM, is just the most boring technology you could think of. Really, it's just a hot glue gun guided by a computer. Apparently, it's only until after 3D printers become widespread that they invented a hand tool version of 3D printing.

Anyway, a lot of it, the majority of the coolness in 3D printing are the designs. On its own, 3D printing is mildly useful. Learn CAD. That's something really useful there. Then there's other skills such as electronics that would make 3D printing way cooler.

It's a cool hobby, but one that won't replace something like woodworking. It's just different and have their own pro and con. Same thing for manufacturing. It won't displace entirely general subtractive manufacturing. It has its own niches and pro and con.

On LLVM and LLM, they are indeed impressive, much more so than the boring technology of 3D printing. But after the tech demo? I am ambivalent about it.

Cool. Whatever. I prefer creating things and learning technology and science that help me improve my skills at learning things. If using LLM is a skill that isn't just prompt engineering, I might be more open to it.

nis0s2• 2 years ago

The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understand everything there was to know about computers, because this was something that could radically improve people’s lives, ... it’s just maintaining the current status quo. It just feels, I don’t know, done.

How can anyone say this when there’s so much amazing research happening in most universities, especially in computer science and engineering. It could be that the sample of prospective startups Nuemann gets exposure to is the same few people from the same few places? There’s such a disconnect between what’s possible, what hasn’t been done, and what’s funded.

stonogo• 2 years ago

Your argument would benefit from some examples of amazing research. Most of what I see is better implementations of the status quo. While I am excited about CHERI and similar efforts, they're hardly revolutionary.

Pet_Ant3• 2 years ago

I assume you mean: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/ “Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI)”

nis0s2• 2 years ago

I am excited about human augmentation, and I don’t see much work, research or funding in this space outside of work in genetics. If I get the time some day, I may do a blog post on the topic.

tigerstop10• 2 years ago

If the PC is dead, it's because of SaaS VC's investing in paywalled and members-only web apps, instead of creative tools that push the boundaries of personal computing.

Baeocystin• 2 years ago

Fully agreed. The rentiers have squeezed all the juice they can, and never understood what was amazing about personal computing in the first place.

(nb. I am casting no aspersions at the author of the letter; I know nothing about him. Just sharing frustration at what has happened to the industry over the years.)

bsder• 2 years ago

It just feels, I don’t know, done.

If you can't find something that excites you right now in the technology space, that tells me more about how boring you are than anything else.

Real Translation of VC: Wahhhh! With interest rates above zero I have to do actual work!

patrickhogan1• 2 years ago

This is one of the coolest times to be building technology. Haven’t felt this excited since I got my first PC.

gwern• 2 years ago

So why quit? Three reasons. First, I’ve felt for a few years now that the startups I’m seeing don’t seem so much like progress as just shopkeeping. This isn’t a dig: there’s money to be made razoring a thin slice off a huge market, and there’s certainly less risk in that than there is building a market from scratch. But it’s just not that interesting. The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understand everything there was to know about computers, because this was something that could radically improve people’s lives, I just don’t get anymore. And not because people’s lives, the people who have access to the tech, aren’t better, I think they are (although this, of course, has not been as unalloyed as I imagined as a 14-year old.) But because I think the tech is no longer improving lives, it’s just maintaining the current status quo. It just feels, I don’t know, done.

This is remarkable to me because I would say that right now is one of the most exciting times to invest ever. We are in one of the new platforms: VC hasn't been so interesting to me since ~2013, when cryptocurrency offered a whole new greenfield, or 2008, when the iPhone changed everything for mobile, or ~1998, when the WWW began to mature enough to allow greenfield everything. (With an honorable mention to VR - still the new platform of the future...) Just think about LLMs and programming! Programming hasn't been about to change this much, this fundamentally, since the invention of networks or timesharing, perhaps. How can you look at this and write it all off as 'shopkeeping' with no 'building a market from scratch' and 'just not that interesting'?

I think maybe the real reason is the next one: they're just older, and no longer have the gumption and energy to try to dive into the Shiny New Thing, and it's time to hang up their hat and call it a day, leaving it to the next generation.

colejhudson• 2 years ago

Suspect that a core reason for Jerry's PoV is that the dynamics of the (zeitgeist-related) software industry do not currently favor small teams. That's counter to the ethos of Silicon Valley and it's guy-in-a-garage mythology.

Jerry would've been 14 around 1980, plus or minus a couple of years, which would've been in the heyday of personal computing. TRS-80s, Apple IIs, the IBM PC, its clones, etc.

Then, and for the next 40-odd years, software was king (read: capital-light). And anybody could write software.

LLMs are much less egalitarian.

Can anyone write an LLM? Yes.

Can anyone train an LLM that customers will want? A few. But most will need a few Ms, maybe even some Bs.

Hence the AppAmaGooSoft benefactors and Jerry's complaint about the status-quo.

Software-like economic dynamics will return, but it'll take a while, and until they do, it'll be much less morally satisfying to be a VC (in software) than it has over the last 40 years.

dangus2• 2 years ago

Nah, you and the parent comment to you are not quite there.

It really isn’t exciting because the technological shifts have already happened. The “Industrial Revolution” has ended.

There’s no remaining industry that isn’t served by plenty of software and hardware solutions.

The Internet is done, it exists. Smartphones are done, computers are done, cloud computing is done, and that’s about as good as it gets.

AI is just the next tech industry house of cards that followed previous farces that were meant to stir up investment. When gathering data wasn’t profitable enough, big data came along. When big data didn’t lead to enough profitable insights, AI came along. Each new technology promises the moon but they really onmy prodiundly benefit the companies making digital pickaxes.

Now you have every company under sun releasing AI products where they have so little clue what problem they’re supposed to solve that they just call it “[Company Name] AI.”

That’s because the problems are solved. There’s a CRUD app for everything. It’s the end.

This video sums it up pretty well if you ask me: https://youtu.be/pOuBCk8XMC8

programjames2• 2 years ago

I feel like with building computers, the hardest part was building the technology. When it comes to AI, the hardest part seems to be building the surrounding infrastructure: getting hardware to run it, data to train it on, and hardware to store the data. There are some startups working on data collection and compute markets, but until those are polished there's a barrier keeping smaller teams from moving fast and making things.

Earw0rm3• 2 years ago

It's become less capital-light over time - look at the games industry for example, AAA titles cost as much as a Hollywood movie. It's about a eightfold increase in real dollars per decade - and that's despite having a lot of ready-made game engine tech to build on.

Yes, there's still little in the way of overhead/operating costs or cost of goods sold - once you get a product to market, if you can acquire customers it scales perfectly up to market saturation. But the capital barrier has slowly become huge, and that suppresses innovation.

(Interesting counterpoint - when a new market opens up with low capital requirements, iPhone App Store being a case in point, it saturates rapidly and then becomes a race to zero - much potential innovation gets lost in the noise, or the market deflates so quickly that indie innovators struggle to sustain themselves financially).

bbor3• 2 years ago

I would argue what has changed is structural, not technological.

As our age continues to gild itself to further extremes everyday, I just don’t think there’s space to use small groups of optimistic hackers to bring bright new things to humanity through risk-prone startups. There’s too much on the line, too much accumulated power and inertia. LLM-powered cognitive systems are not going to be an iPhone moment that changes some social practices and brings some daily utility, but rather.. idk, a railroad moment, I guess. A fundamental interruption to our society and economy. A new era, for better or for worse. I really don’t think the Silicon Valley playbook will see much effective use in this new context.

I applaud him for looking for a way to keep that dream alive in changing times! Hopefully he updates the rest of his when he finds some answers ;)

Earw0rm3• 2 years ago

There's something in this.

Startup hackers in the 80s through to mid aughts were, on the one hand, playing _for real_, but on stakes that weren't absurdly high.

They were all-in, but while on the one hand they didn't have an enormous amount to lose, they weren't that screwed if they lost it.

What I'm seeing increasingly the last 15 years or so is hyper-privileged rich kids playing at start-ups, without the same total level of commitment - but then, I can hardly blame them, they've more to lose, and you're a lot more screwed if you lose it all in 2024. The sort of people that would have started companies 30 years ago either can't afford to take the risk at all, or stay at indie/hobby business level and make no attempt to scale.

justanotherjoe• 2 years ago

Even if programming could be changed drastically by LLM, that still doesn't address the fact that all sectors have reached this 'software optimum' that he suggested.

programjames2• 2 years ago

But most of the AI startups are just razoring a thin slice off a huge market. They're making robo-receptionists for the doctor's office, or integrating LLMs into your IDE. Very few are building new markets from scratch, like photonic neural networks or brain-computer interfaces.

twoodfin• 2 years ago

This is obviously survivor bias in the extreme, but Amazon started out by razoring a slice of the (relatively, at the time) huge market for paper books.

Earw0rm3• 2 years ago

I'll give you 1998 (although it really started to pick up momentum a couple of years earlier - that was just the point on the exponential curve where it began to get noticed).

And I'll give you 2008, although while it's partly about the hardware, it's also about the pervasive and universal internet, the end of online as a separate "place" and just becoming part of the fabric of day-to-day life.

2013 and crypto, though? Sure, it's made a few (or maybe not so few) people very rich. In terms of day-to-day functionality though, NFTs were empty hype, and the only vaguely useful activity I've seen it used for was probably illegal (circumventing blocks in the global financial system) even if not necessarily immoral.

pdimitar3• 2 years ago

This is remarkable to me because I would say that right now is one of the most exciting times to invest ever.

You sidestepped their points and jumped straight to investment opportunities and iPhones and VR and LLMs. He actually said tech is not used to improve people's lives and that I have observed to be true during my 22+ years in the tech area.

What he said resonates strongly with many programmers who are working on the ground: the tech is not used for absolutely anything at all that tangibly and positively changes the world, companies just want to build strong moat and keep corporate customers with binding contracts -- and there's almost zero actual technical progress, too.

(Also, "older" in this case does not do what you think it does: it means they finally got a realistic view of the situation and are no longer looking through rose-tinted glasses. This is a good thing and shouldn't be a condemning factor, and your comment kind of makes it sound like you use it that way.)

---

Let me demonstrate my point.

Here's an investment idea: smartphone app that photographs your fridge (could use LIDAR as well, why not) and catalogues everything in it, and uses magic sauce to remind you when to stock back on items X or Y. Difficult, right? Who cares! I'd buy it, hell, I'd even subscribe for such a service. Let's go. Invest in it. Stick to it until it's perfect, no matter how long it takes and no matter how much financial losses it incurs until it's done.

Will you do it?

greesil2• 2 years ago

Arguably this is easier to do now with multimodal LLMs. I say this as someone who is skeptical of the hype around the utility of LLMs. But it can probably catalog your fridge. Was that worth boiling the oceans?

alexpetralia• 2 years ago

Get involved in local politics, Jerry! It's a satisfying way to impact your local community, and they almost always can use some help.

cortesoft• 2 years ago

If it were true that financiers on the whole make profits slowly for years and then, every once in a while, lose them all and more in sudden “black swan” events, then there should be some way to lose money slowly for years and then suddenly make it all back and more. Black swans are awful in traditional finance, but they’re the winning lottery ticket in venture capital.

Isn't this what every VC is doing? This is why VCs invest in a bunch of startups and expect most of them to fail.

Matt Levine writes about this a lot; he talks about how the real risk for VCs isn't losing 100% on a failed startup, the risk is missing out on the one that hits it big.

I am not sure why the writer thinks this strategy is novel.

chrisdirkis2• 2 years ago

Specifically, he's not just investing in startups, but investing in ones that have a factor that is either unknown or unknowable. That's a different strategy from YC's "Invest in promising founders" or the typical VC "Invest in early stage startups with good metrics".

mizzao• 2 years ago

It must have been "promising founders working on an idea with an unknown or unknowable factor", right?

I can't imagine it working out so well without that qualifier.

tinyhouse• 2 years ago

I like this style of writing. Honest and open. Good luck my friend.

timcobb• 2 years ago

then there should be some way to lose money slowly for years and then suddenly make it all back and more.

This is how I always pictured domain name investing.

merinid• 2 years ago

Jerry Neumann is a cornerstone of the New York scene. He was helpful to anyone and everyone, with or without investment. He taught a class at Columbia that was the only practical technology entrepreneurship course in NYC for the longest time. His kindness and generosity were matched by his immense curiosity and pioneering spirit. His fund also had the best website in the game (for the longest time, a terminal emulator). Congrats Jerry on one of the best careers in VC. Thanks for showing so many that you can just do things your way and put integrity over hype every step of the way.

bbor3• 2 years ago

Fantastically written article by someone who doesn’t realize (or articulate?) that they were part of a terribly unique, terribly exploitative movement that is reaching its natural conclusion.

  And, of course, I was lucky. Two of the fifty companies I backed are now among the 30 largest software companies in the world. And my IRR from inception has been consistently above 50% per year…for fifteen years. Of course, my sample size is too small to prove anything, but every venture firm’s sample size is too small to prove anything. I don’t know, really, if it was luck or thinking differently that made a difference. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. You can decide.

It’s both, of course! But entertaining the notion that it might be all skill seems dishonest to yourself, IMHO. Investing makes money because that’s how literally everything is setup in our world, and this person was in a unique position to personally assess their investment targets along financial lines in a context where that mattered more than it ever has.

This person just seems more self-aware than most about their strategy (“unicorns!!1!”), while paradoxically being very unaware about their own position within the world (they’re very much an economist, even if they lack the training) and history (the reason computers seem to be “supporting the status quo” instead of disrupting socioeconomic systems is very much something that everyone should have seen coming).

  Right now I have enough money to do what I want. I don’t have enough money that other people do what I want. To me that sounds like the perfect place to be.

Beautifully said, really profound thought. This is really the distillation of what socialism promises to strive towards, in my eyes; prosperity enough for personal liberty, without the goal of hierarchy.

  On dark days I think of what Jung said in his memoirs: “Only if we know that the thing that truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities…” My view of the infinite is probably different than Jung’s, but I think he’s right: the only way to avoid feeling like your work is pointless is to contribute to something much larger than yourself.

Another beautifully worded thought, and I wish them Godspeed on this journey. This is the only path that doesn’t end in futility, as far as I can see. I will say, if this is your mindset, be careful not to fall prey to what Hegel would call “a bad infinity” — a single technology, project, or social mechanism that you invest your entire vision of the future in, kinda like thinking of infinity as some specific really big number (a common practice!). True (“good”) infinity is not an object: it is a process, a practice, a dialectical structure that you employ in the limit. It is perpetually approaching the ethos of planting trees whose shade you will never know, not finding the perfect tree to plant.

In the context of pro-social technical contributions in 2024, I think this simply means that you need to buckle down, swallow your pride for a second/month/year, and identify others who are (trying to be-) living the way you think is necessary so that you can learn their motivations and methods, and of course what they need that you can help with. We have been incredibly lucky to be the puzzle-solving class at a time when that was uniquely profitable, but I think humility is necessary when considering these broader questions. I’m a fan of philosophy and cooperative syndicalism, but I’m sure there’s optimistic prosocial groups out there for everybody, if you look deeply enough.

Jeez that was long, whoops — and I’m just some kid so probably wasted breath. Thanks for sharing OP, will be thinking about this fella for a while… again, Godspeed. I’ll leave anyone bored enough to read this far with a better writer than I:

  To consider some Being-there as it is in the absolute just consists in saying of it: of course we have spoken of it just now as if it were something, but in the absolute, the A=A, there is nothing of the sort; in the absolute everything is one. To pit this single insight, that in the absolute everything is the same, against discriminating and fulfilled cognition, or cognition seeking and demanding fulfilment—or to pass off its absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black—this is the naiveté of emptiness of cognition.

- Hegel, On Scientific Cognition (the preface to The Phenomenology of Geist)

fragmede2• 2 years ago

Earlier in the letter, he writes:

Two of the fifty companies I backed are now among the 30 largest software companies in the world. And my IRR from inception has been consistently above 50% per year…for fifteen years.

But then he also writes:

Right now I have enough money to do what I want. I don’t have enough money that other people do what I want.

I don't know Jerry Neumann's financial situation better than he does, but the man's been doing VC early-stage investing since the 2000s so I find it hard to believe he doesn't have enough money to get other people to do what he wants. Maybe not self-fund a competitor to OpenAI in this environment, but that seems like a failure of his imagination on all the possible companies he could fund. $50k would be enough to get the right someone to do what he wants for a couple of months.

simoncion• 2 years ago

$50k would be enough to get the right someone to do what he wants for a couple of months.

It's entirely possible that whatever he wants done can't be done by a single someone in a couple of months. I expect that many things worth doing in the tech space are like that.

It's also possible that by "other people do what I want" he means "I'm able to buy politicians" and similar such things.

bbor3• 2 years ago

I naturally interpreted that comment in terms of servants, drivers, cleaners, etc., but on second reading, I think you’re right that it’s about companies.

It sounds like he wants to be somewhat safe/financially secure without needing to work more, so I took that to mean “I have $2-6M USD in the bank”, which is the rough FIRE target (last I checked?). You could start a company with that of course, but it would be risking your nest egg to a serious degree, especially at a time where any serious person should be planning for—if not expecting per se-a stock market recession in the next few years.

Compare that to someone with, say, $100M. That’s enough money to build a team of $200-$400K/year engineers, open an office (or a zoom subscription!), and really take an honest swing at some product or other. $50k could hire you a contractor for a bit, but that’s just an addendum.

gklitz• 2 years ago

This isn’t a resignation letter, it’s a job application for a job he hasn’t been offered yet.

Nevermark• 2 years ago

Yes. A graduation announcement.

His unusual experiences and wisdom gained must surely be highly valuable somewhere.

bjornsing• 2 years ago

LPs can turn you down even if you show them a 15 year track record with 50% IRR per year? What could be better than that?

eps• 2 years ago

If, like me, you've never heard of him -

My day job was investing in early stage companies through Neu Venture Capital. I’ve also written a book with my friend Liz Zalman: Founder vs. Investor. And I teach entrepreneurship at Columbia University. I was a co-founder of venture-backed startup Root Markets, ran Omnicom Group’s venture capital division in the 1990s, and was once, long ago, a hardware design engineer on IBM’s S/390 series of mainframes where I designed a very small part of the central processor’s microcode execution engine, which is like the computer in the computer in the computer.

https://reactionwheel.net/about

DavidPiper• 2 years ago

The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understand everything there was to know about computers, because this was something that could radically improve people’s lives, I just don’t get anymore.

Confirmation bias on my part: this feels like the core point.

Maybe I just grew up at the right time: the Internet was becoming ubiquitous; the iPhone hit right in my teens; social media - for better or worse - slightly earlier.

Technology was radically radically changing and improving peoples' lives and that was inspiring.

I don't see it doing that anymore. And so goes the inspiration too.

chipdart• 2 years ago

I don't see it doing that anymore. And so goes the inspiration too.

I believe our collective technological progress still has a lot of low-hanging fruits to be picked that radically improve people's lives. I just think that the feedback loop for those in the technology field is not as immediate as it was a few years ago.

It was not so long ago that a determined kid with a cursory knowledge of HTML was able to single-handedly deliver the web presence of a whole company.

Things have progressed a bit since then and the barrier is now set much higher, but the potential to serve user and customer needs on mere cents per user per month is still there.

Every time you help a person achieve their goals (buy something, access a service, deal with a complaint, fill out a bureaucratic requirement, etc) with a mere click of a button, you are making the world a better place.

For example, life changed radically for the whole world once people were able to call a cab or order food with a press of a button in their smartphone. We even have services helping to reduce waste by connecting shops with soon-to-be-expired goods with potential customers who love a good deal. That is a small gesture that serves everyone.

The potential is still there. Just don't expect to get a medal for it.

wslh• 2 years ago

I don't get why this was flagged.

Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter

Related Stories