justin

Then it’s somewhat intellectually dishonest to single out Burning Man vs any other kind of vacation travel.

He is part of a camp called Playground (alongside other people). The camp collectively brings the speakers, AV, fire effects, generators and structures, sets all of it up, and Carl and other artists perform. He’s probably not setting up the gear himself but he is part of the collective that puts the show on. I do know that he plays Playground fundraisers during the year to raise the money to pay for the costs of the camp, which is a forum of contribution / volunteering.

What I love about Burning Man is that it is an event where all the programming is created by the attendees. All the art, sound stages, art cars, experiences.. if you want something to exist in Black Rock City, then it is up to you to just go figure out how to bring it, solely for the benefit and joy of those who get to experience it. It is a tremendous amount of work, but the rewarding feeling of seeing your creation manifested into reality is worth it.

So much of our daily lives in society is consuming experiences that other people create: the jobs we work are defined by other people, we buy products created by other people, we eat food made by other people. For me, Burning Man is a reminder for the rest of the year to be the creator of my own experience in the world.

https://archive.is/JuCCC

Who hurt you?

Prediction markets serve as a hedge against real world events, which enables risk taking.

Why don’t they deserve to see the light of day? Maybe the market gets to decide what “sucks” or doesn’t. More ideas in the marketplace gives users more choice.

CRISPR, Yamanaka factors, computational biology, brain computer interfaces, Starship, LLMs... we are nowhere near the top of the tech S curve.

Guide to add end-to-end shopping experience to any social platform you're building

Guide to order any Amazon products from your terminal with 3 API requests

https://archive.ph/YZfvw

1) Games will move from closed economies to open economies, just as they transitioned to free-to-play 15 years ago. Blockchain is just the technology through which this will happen.

2) This transition will take 10 years - we are building for that timeline

3) We raised a ton of money and have a lean team, and can exist for >5 years without revenue. We are keeping our team lean to maintain that level of runway.

4) For whatever reason, people are still buying gaming NFTs right now (as of this week). Of course, that may change quickly.

We are still hiring at Fractal (NFT marketplace for gaming assets). We're a revenue generating company with fewer than 15 team members that just raised $35m in new funding. Founded by experienced founders. https://jobs.lever.co/fractal-is/

Even startups not aiming to be the next FAANG company have trouble estimating revenue, product development time, etc. It's just extremely hard to know all the unknowns when you are starting a new business, especially since it is likely that you are only an expert in one of the required fields (eng, product, marketing, sales) to bring your product to market and will have to learn everything else on the fly. Most business plans for startups are useless.

Fractal | Many Eng Roles | Remote | Fulltime

I'm Justin, cofounder of Twitch, former YC partner, and founder of many more startups. I am cofounder of a new company, Fractal, an NFT marketplace for gamers to discover, buy and sell gaming NFTs. We just closed a $35M seed round from Paradigm and Multicoin today. The company is fully remote and we are having a lot of fun building in the crypto space. Culturally, we optimize to reduce the time between talking to customers, coming up with product ideas, and execution. This is a product and engineering-led, customer-focused company.

We are hiring many eng roles. No previous crypto experience required. The team is mostly from Google and Stripe.

Fundraising post: https://fractal.medium.com/fractal-raises-35-million-dollar-... Job roles: https://jobs.lever.co/fractal-is

Operator | Fully Remote | Full Stack & Backend Engineer | Full-time

Operator Protocol is an open and decentralized protocol for e-commerce. Anyone can participate as a buyer or seller, and the network will be governed by the marketplace participants. Instead of a giant, monopolistic rent-seeker owning the customer and taking a large toll on every transaction, OP is an alternative for buyers and sellers to diversify off Amazon and other centralized marketplaces.

Our founding team consists of veteran founders: Justin Kan co-founded Twitch and Fractal, has been investing in crypto since 2013, and has been an advisor to decentralized projects like Theta and Audius; Jamie Quint comes from an e-commerce background but has also led Growth @Notion and monetization @Reddit; Robin Chan co-founded Fractal and Operator v1, founded and sold a mobile gaming company, XPD Media, to Zynga, and was previously head of Zynga Asia; and Tikhon Bernstam founded and sold the cloud application platform, Parse, to Facebook, and also founded Scribd. Our CEO, Arjun Bhargava, led Growth Engineering at Reddit and was previously at Goldman Sachs.

We’re looking for strong, motivated, and talented full stack and backend engineers to build out the future of e-commerce with us. Previous experience in web 3.0/crypto tech is not required but is a plus.

If interested, apply on our job board:

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/operator/f4c81ed8-2169-480c-a276-1b...

See our Medium article introducing Operator:

https://medium.com/@Operator/introducing-operator-3e66cba9a1...

Visit us at https://www.operator.com

I made a video of these toys, which were hilarious to play with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhJye7Xfmys

Great feedback. Definitely hoping to bring more people from outside of tech into the pod.

I've cancelled my NY Times subscription and encourage everyone here to do the same.

I've noticed that all CEOs think their problems are unique, but when, in fact, there are five core problems that every company and founder encounters. I've written about how to overcome those problems in this blog. I hope it's helpful.

Actually housing could be a good investment and affordable. It just can’t be both in the same place. If we continued to make new cities with tons of housing and accepted that all the people who couldn’t afford housing should move there, we could accomplish both goals.

For the record I think this is a terrible idea.

Atrium | Full Stack Engineers, Integrations Engineer, Security Engineer, Engineering Manager | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full Time | React, Typescript, GraphQL, Ruby on Rails, Postgres

https://www.atrium.co/careers#current-openings

Atrium is the most client-centric platform providing legal services and applications to fast-growing companies. We’re an integrated team of engineers, product managers, designers, attorneys, and paralegals working to dramatically improve legal services for high-growth companies.

Our initial focuses are on products that help startups from the start to finish of venture financings and assist with their repeatable corporate legal needs. With these products, Atrium’s 200+ clients have raised over $500M in venture capital. Thanks to Atrium’s technology, legal processes are highly efficient and user-friendly, guided by web-based tools that often result in closing deals and completing legal work significantly faster and with greater accuracy than traditional law firms.

We’re based in San Francisco and have $75.5M in funding from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Greylock, and more. Atrium aims to disrupt Big Law and the $160 billion corporate legal services market.

Easy for Terence McKenna to say when he isn’t the one living the life of a nomad, or any other culture where those in it want to transition to a modern lifestyle. “The sorts of people who want to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse” are largely the entire planet.

Atrium LTS | San Francisco | DevOps Engineer, Full Stack Engineers | on-site, full time | https://www.atrium.co/careers#current-openings

Atrium is the most data-driven platform providing legal services and applications to fast-growing companies. Atrium has helped hundreds of companies with everything from drafting and reviewing commercial contracts to raising over $500M in new capital. We’re based in San Francisco and have $75.5M in funding from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Greylock, and more. Atrium aims to disrupt Big Law and the $160 billion corporate legal services market.

DevOps: As the first DevOps Engineer at Atrium, you will have a rare opportunity to shape Atrium’s systems, infrastructure, development, and deployment practices while evangelizing a DevOps culture across all teams. Your work will have a huge impact on software and systems used by lawyers, our customers, and our engineering teams.

Full Stack Engineer: Develop web applications and (in the future, mobile apps) in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript or TypeScript using Vue, React and Node

Write clean and scalable APIs and the backend that our products depend on

Collaborate with our cross-functional team including lawyers to define features and build powerful and easy-to-use products and customer-facing workflow tools

Integrate with existing legal technology products that we and others have developed

Help develop effective processes for ensuring our products have quality code and minimal defects

Starting a startup with the engagement of TouTiao is not easy.

It is definitely a risk. I think the first six months of the company we grew headcount probably too aggressively, and then the second six months of the company we did a lot of things to go back and fix some of the resulting cultural tensions (things like create company values collaboratively, figure out job roles better, etc). I'm pleased to say that we have made amazing progress there though (mostly due to the team, not me!).

Unlikely we grow beyond 2x headcount in the upcoming year.

Well, this is largely speculative, but I think Atrium can be a multi-tens of billions of dollars in value company, mostly based on the industry / market-need and the potential adjacent expansions. But obviously that depends a lot on actually executing well!

When we started Atrium, we thought the main tools would be web software applied to the legal business: CRM, project management, workflow tools, document generation.

What we've learned is that there is a more interesting/difficult technical challenge to what we want to build. I think of Atrium's technology as a platform comprised of several layers: a document storage system (stores legal docs -- think PDFs and Word documents), an ML layer that parses those legal docs and turns them into structured data, an API / web platform layer that exposes that data to applications, and then a bundle of applications that sit on top of that data.

That may be a little complex, so I'll give you one example of this in action, which we currently use in production:

When a startup does a Series A financing, the first step is a VC hands the founder a term sheet. The founder then gives this term sheet to their attorney, who will take it and read all the company's previous SAFEs and convertible notes line by line. They then will create a pro forma cap table (basically, an excel model that shows who gets what at the end of the financing). This process can take a lot of human effort (i.e. the lawyer will spend hours reading the notes and creating the model), and it can often be error prone (because someone is doing it manually).

Of course, any programmer who looks at this process is going to realize it can largely be automated. We ingest those documents into our platform before the founder gets the term sheet. Our models then turn those SAFEs and convertible notes into structured data by mapping them to a schema of what we expect to be in those documents (this is verified after the fact by humans). Then another application just renders the pro forma cap table, taking a process that took hours and reducing it to a matter of minutes. This spits out an XLS, so the attorney can take it and use it to advise the founders (or send to the VC's counsel) just like they would a cap table they built themselves (i.e. we aren't prescriptive on how they advise).

My goal is that eventually we understand every kind of corporate legal document, and make that data accessible to a universe of client / lawyer applications that can streamline workflows and the delivery of service.

Correct. We are targeted towards full service law firms and the clients that support them (i.e. big enterprises). No plans to do the same for individuals / SMBs (but I think that could be a good business opportunity for someone else!).

Thank you; have sent along to our events team.