"Age of Miracles"

LINK TO ESSAY: Google isn’t facing the Innovator’s Dilemma; it’s just so deeply Positioned in search that it’s been a sitting duck for the first superior technology or business model strong enough to take it on.  Positioning is the flip side of one of Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, counter-positioning: “​​A newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business.” As Helmer points out in the book, counter-positioning is distinct from disruptive innovation.  Similarly, Positioning is distinct from the Innovator’s Dilemma. We can define Positioning as: “An incumbent is susceptible to a new, superior business model due to anticipated damage to their existing business.” The goal of this essay is to provide a framework – Positioning – that we can all lazily reach for any time an impressive new technology or business model threatens an established incumbent (and many more situations, from the personal to the national, besides) without tripping any technical definitions.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

LINK TO ESSAY Will AI steal our jobs, let us work less, or force us to do more, better?  Induced demand, Jevons Paradox, the Marchetti constant, and consumer psychology 101 suggest that the increased supply of intelligence will create more demand for tasks that require intelligence, that we’ll turn gains in intelligence efficiency into ways of doing new things that weren’t previously feasible.  Instead of a zero sum competition with the bots, we might be on the cusp of intelligence superabundance. We may the same amount of time working, we’ll just achieve much more in those hours than we currently do.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Trevor Bacon, Kellan Grenier and Jason Lewris are the founders of Parcl. Parcl bridges traditional real estate investments with cutting-edge blockchain technology to provide data-driven solutions for modern investors. Parcl was built to revolutionize how users approach real estate as an investment towards generational-wealth. By giving everyone the tools they need to access one of the world's most desired investment classes, Parcl aims to deliver real estate to everyone. Parcl is a Not Boring Capital portfolio company and is taking on the exact types of hard problems that we like. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Andrew Herr is the founder and CEO of Fount. Fount is crafting the operating system for the human body.  To start, it provides extremely high-touch personal health services to clients: blood tests, fitness plans, meal prep, supplements, and much more to meet its clients personalized health needs. But Fount is running a series of experiments that will allow it to develop software that scales its luxury health services to millions of customers.   Andrew Herr knows more about health & fitness than perhaps anyone on the planet. Prior to his current positions, Andrew led studies on the future of human performance and biotechnology for the Department of Defense, taught courses on optimizing performance to U.S. Government personnel preparing for deployment to Afghanistan and Iraq, and worked with the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy on emerging technology strategy, nuclear weapons detection, and radiation dosimetry.  Andrew has been selected as a Mad Scientist by the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, a Fellow by the Synthetic Biology Leadership Excellence Accelerator Program, a Leader of Tomorrow by Global Biotech Revolution, a Next Generation Fellow by the Center for a New American Security, a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow by the U.S. Department of Education, and a Science & Technology Fellow by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He also regularly judges at iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Ryan Glasgow is the founder and CEO of Sprig. Sprig is the easiest way to collect product feedback, inform product decisions, and increase your speed of innovation. The world’s best product teams including the teams at Notion, Loom, and Robinhood use Sprig’s in-app surveys and concept and usability tests to capture insights from their customers and build better products. Every week, at the bottom of this newsletter, I use a Sprig survey to get your feedback -- you click a button to tell me whether you loved or hated the newsletter and write a comment, and Sprig categorizes responses with machine learning so that I can get a quick pulse check. Here’s what I love about Sprig: The UX is clean and simple, consumer-grade, and they have 75 templates which makes getting started so easy It’s incredibly fast to source participants and launch a survey or concept test As a dashboard junkie, I love watching the results and AI-driven insights roll in in real-time, even, and especially, when the feedback is harsh! We actually almost stopped publishing this newsletter after edition #11 until we ran a Sprig Survey and discovered that 95% of you enjoyed reading it…so you can thank Sprig for the Weekly Dose of Optimism! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Packy an Anton discuss Chroma's (Anton's company) launch of Stable Attribution.  Stable Attribution is a tool that let's anyone find the humans behind AI generated images. Given any image generated by Stable Diffusion, Stable Attribution is able to identify the images in the model's training set which most contributed to the generated image.   Packy and Anton discuss the development of Stable Attribution, how to understand the data underlying these sophisticated AI models, and the implications of attribution for creators and artists. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Sam Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Melonfrost. Melonfrost is using the power of evolution and machine learning to launch the next generation of microbes that will revolutionize the fields of therapeutics, biomaterials, food, and agriculture. You'll learn more about what exactly that means in this conversation between Packy and Sam.   Melonfrost, a Not Boring Capital portfolio company, recently announced its latest round of fundraising -- a $7M seed round led by  Refactor Capital and Alexandria Venture Investments. Forbes did an awesome write up on the company and the round here. The company is one of the most ambitious and complex in the entire Not Boring portfolio, and is the exact type of company we are proud to back. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Andy Chatham is the CEO and co-founder of Dimo. Dimo's mission is to be the driving force behind the future of mobility: a future where data shapes infrastructure, emissions are lower, roads are safer, and life behind the wheel is—well, better.  DIMO helps you get more from driving. Save money. Learn how to better take care of your car. And, contribute to a future where driving apps work for vehicle owners, not the companies that build them—just by sharing your data.  DIMO is the people-powered movement behind the next generation of mobility services. By connecting drivers and their data with developers and manufacturers, we’re building the largest, most useful IoT network of user-owned devices—starting with cars.  LINKS:   Not Boring Dimo Discount: code NOTBORING on https://shop.dimo.zone/   "Every car has been hacked":  https://samcurry.net/web-hackers-vs-the-auto-industry/   The Soking Tires Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5jGw9uGNXSKMQzSIDTSh6t?si=d077ce27c6474e15 SPONSORED BY CAUSAL: Many of us rely on Excel, and we couldn’t imagine a world without it. Excel lets us quickly crunch numbers, build financial forecasts and model out scenarios to make better decisions.  But modelling in Excel and G-Sheets comes with its challenges: manual data dumps, #REFs, untraceable errors, and a lack of data protection create a constant stream of manual work, stress and a lack of confidence in the work you just did — **and that’s where Causal comes in.**   Causal is a better way for working with numbers. It's like Excel minus the arcane formulas (no more Sheet1!$E$4 or VLOOKUPs), plus effortless modelling, live data integrations (accounting systems, CRMs, etc.), and beautiful interactive dashboards.  And given current market conditions, every startup needs a solid financial model to steer the ship. I've worked with the Causal team to create the Startup Suite — a set of 4 template models for early stage companies. It includes your revenue model, hiring plan, P&L and runway projection: the basics for any startup to keep an eye on the finances and plan for the future.  If you’re a startup founder, early-stage employee or just a lover of all things data, you’ll love Causal. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Michael Kelly is the co-founder of Open Forest Protocol.    Open Forest Protocol (OFP) is a scalable open platform that allows forest projects of any size, from around world, to Measure, Report, and Verify (MRV) their forestation data.  Through OFP, individuals, communities, NGOs, entrepreneurs, and governments are able to create transparent, immutable, proof-of-impact data that is comprehensively verified by a network of independent experts.  OFP is creating the foundation for more inclusive, scalable, and data-backed financing mechanisms for nature-based climate solutions.   SPONSORED BY CAUSAL: Many of us rely on Excel, and we couldn’t imagine a world without it. Excel lets us quickly crunch numbers, build financial forecasts and model out scenarios to make better decisions.  But modelling in Excel and G-Sheets comes with its challenges: manual data dumps, #REFs, untraceable errors, and a lack of data protection create a constant stream of manual work, stress and a lack of confidence in the work you just did — and that’s where Causal comes in. Causal is a better way for working with numbers. It's like Excel minus the arcane formulas (no more Sheet1!$E$4 or VLOOKUPs), plus effortless modelling, live data integrations (accounting systems, CRMs, etc.), and beautiful interactive dashboards.  And given current market conditions, every startup needs a solid financial model to steer the ship. I've worked with the Causal team to create the Startup Suite — a set of 4 template models for early stage companies. It includes your revenue model, hiring plan, P&L and runway projection: the basics for any startup to keep an eye on the finances and plan for the future.  If you’re a startup founder, early-stage employee or just a lover of all things data, you’ll love Causal. Try Causal for free at the special Not Boring link. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Nicholas Chadwick is the founder and CEO of Mission Zero Technologies. MZT is developing direct air capture (DAC) technology that will recover high-purity CO2 from the air while incurring only a fraction of the costs and energy it takes to do so today.  Frontier is a recipient of an advanced market commitment grant from Frontier, the effort from companies like Stripe, Shopify, Meta, and Microsoft to ensure there is a market for carbon removal credits. This podcast is sponsored by Causal: Many of us rely on Excel, and we couldn’t imagine a world without it. Excel lets us quickly crunch numbers, build financial forecasts and model out scenarios to make better decisions. But modelling in Excel and G-Sheets comes with its challenges: manual data dumps, #REFs, untraceable errors, and a lack of data protection create a constant stream of manual work, stress and a lack of confidence in the work you just did — and that’s where Causal comes in. Causal is a better way for working with numbers. It's like Excel minus the arcane formulas (no more Sheet1!$E$4 or VLOOKUPs), plus effortless modelling, live data integrations (accounting systems, CRMs, etc.), and beautiful interactive dashboards. And given current market conditions, every startup needs a solid financial model to steer the ship. I've worked with the Causal team to create the Startup Suite — a set of 4 template models for early stage companies. It includes your revenue model, hiring plan, P&L and runway projection: the basics for any startup to keep an eye on the finances and plan for the future. If you’re a startup founder, early-stage employee or just a lover of all things data, you’ll love Causal.  Use the Startup Suite as a starting point, or sign up for the product for free. The links are in the description! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message