SVRGN Weekly Digest #1 ✨
Real people, compute^3, magnetic super hero's and <$50M funds outperform
It’s the end of the week again! Cosy up with a cup of coffee and reflect on your own week. Ours was incredibly intense, but we had the chance to see a bunch of interesting people, companies and ideas. We hope you enjoy this weeks digest!
Before we get into it: please everyone, don’t forget to open the imaginary doors today
🤼 People
Spencer Macdonald - Co-founder/CEO of Spearbit Labs
Spencer is an intellectually honest founder and friend who is building a cybersecurity marketplace, focused on crypto. He’s a former Army officer and DoD cybersecurity PM. We love chatting with him about network states, dual-use tech and crypto hacks. Watch his talk at The Network State conference here.
Stephen DiBartolomeo - VC at Scout ventures
Stephen is a Principal at Scout, a fund deeply rooted in national security and dual-use. They are invaluable partners when it comes to public funding and military industrial topics. We are very happy to collaborate more with him and the fund going forward, for now on 🤫 topics.
Full-stack engineer - maybe you??
Our portfolio company Arx is hiring for a senior full-stack engineer. They’re the company behind the physical-digital success of Azuki and others. If you want to reinvent how we interact with crypto, check them out. Any referrals will be rewarded in $WIF, chips or stickers. (Bonus)
🚀 Companies
Status: Started in Q4 2023
Source: Friends
Founders: Vincent Weisser and Johannes Hagemann
Why it’s cool: “Commoditizing compute and intelligence through a decentralized AI platform to advance scientific progress and human flourishing.” Sounds pretty exciting. We’re big fans of decentralized AI, hence Vincent’s new venture is something we’re looking into. His co-founder, Johannes is from the German AI giant AlephAlpha.
Status: Started in 2023, went through Activate
Source: Activate
Founders: Kaitlyn Suarez
Why it’s cool: Enabling long-range wireless power transmission using earth as a propagation medium sounds like something from Isaac Asimov. There’s a research paper on “thru-the-soil” power transmission from 2022 that achieves 1.25W transfers over 45m. Not exactly high power or long range, but maybe there’s a breakthrough waiting to happen here. Applications are most likely agricultural though, not replacing high power transmission lines.
💡 Ideas & Science
Magnon, the quantum material superhero
Henrik Rønnow and Frédéric Mila at EPFL have unveiled a new, unexpected behavior in the quantum material strontium copper borate, SrCu2(BO3)2. Magnons are tiny magnetic waves that some quantum materials have. When subjected to a massive magnetic field, these waves are acting in unexpected ways, furthering our understanding of quantum mechanics
Trail of Bits researchers found a way how an attacker can listen in on the responses of an LLM. They only need to be able to run another application on the shared machine which uses the GPU, implementation seems trivial. It’s essentially a memory leak where a full conversation can be recreated based off of leftovers (hence the name, LeftoverLocals). AMD, QualComm and Apple silicon affected.
ASML made €7.2B in net sales in Q4 ‘23, for a total of €27.6B for the year, at a GM around 51%. They shipped their first High NA EUV machine (EXE), which improves transistor density by 2.9x. Every existing customer doubled down and ordered the new system, costing ~$300M per machine. They expect 2024 to be a preparation for a massive growth year in 2025.
Access and Outliers - why allocate to <$50M funds
Using some conditional probabilities, Pattern Ventures’ Kyle Thorpe analyzes what returns a fund investor should expect when allocating to smaller funds vs. larger ones, given the probability of gaining access.
That’s it for this week! Feel free to reach out with feedback or comments anytime!