We like to think we have the most best job in the world. Every week we get to dig deep into exciting and important topics ranging science, philosophy, technology, society and the occasional meme. Now you get to share parts of our experience as we link to some of the content and companies we’ve immersed ourselves in in the last week.
It should give you some insight into what we think is important right now and how we think.
Let’s go for the inaugural edition!
People
This section covers people we’ve enjoyed engaging with or who deserve recognition.
Siranush Babakhanova and Corey Nobile - GPs at Fundomo
We made new friends in these emerging fund managers who share our values. Based out of NYC, focusing on deep tech for sovereignty. Check out their portfolio (e.g., atomic semi and Rollup)! Looking forward to seeing them succeed in the future.
Joshua Yang - CEO of Glyphic Bio, ex Stanford MBA, PhD
Jonatan had an amazing conversation with Josh about the future of proteomics and how Glyphic might become the next Illumina, for the proteome instead of the genome. Purely educational from inflection’s perspective, but if you’re investing in biotech or life sciences, these guys are worth checking out.
Companies
Here we highlight a few companies that crossed our desk in the last week, not investment advice.
Lufta - autonomous airships for freight and defence
Status: Started in Dec 2023
Source: CAVI
Founder: William Hilder - aerospace grad who built a PoW messaging app before
Why it’s cool: Using wire-arc-additive-manufacturing to build massive airships to reclaim the air! The combination of catalyzing developments in technology that enables old (lindy-d) ideas with a pressing need to innovate in logistics and hardware manufacturing.
Stealth - autonomous transoceanic cargo ships
Status: Stealth
Source: CAVI
Founder: Serial founder in Austin, TX - Mech eng. with background in additive manufacturing
Why it’s cool: Imagine massive fixed-wing airplanes operating at flight speeds but only 50ft (15m) above the water, at double the fuel efficiency and twice the cargo capacity. It’s possible because of an aerodynamic effect called the ground effect, improved weather forecasting (waves could hit the plane) and regulation - it’s technically a boat, not an airplane. The Hawaii-West coast air cargo route is a $3B business alone.
Lita - Trustless computing infrastructure
Status: Raising (Pre-)seed
Source: Angel network
Founders: Morgan Thomas, Marty Stumpf, Hadas Zeilberger, Violet Vienhage, Chewy Shaw, Ventali Tan, Maya Krasovsky
Why it’s cool: Combine amazing cryptographers with a strong understanding for building products in the budding zk-proving ecosystem and you get Lita. They’re building on the next generation of
Ideas & Science
Ideas and research that crossed our minds and desks.
Wake up babe, new Web3 Developer Report hit
Our friends over at Electric keeping up the good work of compiling stats on how many developers are active in the web3 ecosystem. As of Dec 31 2023 there were about 21,000 monthly active developers with Ethereum being the largest ecosystem by about 3-3.7x from the 2nd and 3rd largest ecosystems (polkadot and polygon).
Protein engineering is an ideal candidate for automation. The combination of theoretical insight, computational simulation, physical lab work and testing make things complicated. Researchers at Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory made use of cloud labs to do in 6 months for around $5k what would take a human a year or work. Ties into our grander thesis investing into LabDAO
Capital and enclosure in software commons: Linux & Ethereum
Comparison of digital commons in Linux and Ethereum. Many parallels and learnings, using Red Hat as an example of a company starting non-profit then turning for-profit and being acquired by IBM. A path forward for some Ethereum entities? Highly relevant for how to think about our portfolio company Flashbots.
A survey paper on the different types of attacks on machine learning models (incl. LLMs of course). They classify attacks into three categories: Availability, Integrity, and Privacy. Many of these attacks are impossible or very hard to mitigate (esp. poisoning attacks). This is one of the topics explored by Modulus (+SVRGN article)
AMIE - AI system for diagnostic medical reasoning and conversations
Google research have trained an AI system to converse with patients and/or clinicians for diagnostic purposes. Clinician involvement turned out to lead to worse results on case studies, and the AI scored higher in a number of areas, including empathy (!) in tests.
Space Solar Power Demonstrator Project Success
One step closer to feasibility of power beaming from space - i.e., also closer to being able to microwave popcorn from space. Think Starlink, but for energy instead of connectivity.
DeepMind solves IMO Geometry problems
We’re now one step closer to the unlocking of exponential progress of humanity, as Google Deepmind have developed an AI that can do very abstract reasoning and problem solving. This may seem gimmicky, solving geometry problems at IMO-level, but it is exciting because of the methods - neuro-symbolic reasoning (fast & slow thinking) - and the implication that we can build machines with an internal representation and understanding of space, geometry, relative positions. This could lead to accelerated discovery in mathematics and sciences, propelling humanity into a new era.
NASA unveils new supersonic airplane - X-59
Why: for decades super sonic flights were prohibited in the US and elsewhere letting commercial air travel stagnate. Finally a promising new avenue is being explored to unlock novel means of transport. Through computer modeling efforts they’ve been able to reduce the “boom” to a “whoosh”. Plus it looks somewhat like an X-wing Starfighter.
And to end on a positive note: it turns out Good vibes are contagious !
The star coach and counter-weight to all pseudo-scientific health-influencers Brad Stulberg reminds us of how humans are interconnected. For another great piece by him, check out his words on Resilience.
Hope you enjoyed this edition of the SVRGN Digest! See you soon!