Liquidity Is Back On the Menu, Boys

Happy Sunday! Reddit and a semiconductor company went public. These will inject much-needed capital into the industry, allowing for more startups to be funded. Yay, money! For a newsletter that can hopefully make you money, please see below. 

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Our stories

“Startup Lessons From Y Combinator’s Most Sought-after Executive Coach” by Alice Lemee and Gena Gorlin: Amy Buechler was the first executive coach for YC founders—she gave elite founders the emotional skills necessary to build billion-dollar companies. This piece is about all that she learned from that experience. Read along to see the wisdom that comes from mentoring thousands of founders.

“How We Built the Internet” by Anna-Sofia Lesiv: The internet is a Rube Goldberg machine of servers, wires, and cables. It is a miracle of human ingenuity and government funding that is slowly being taken over by private interests. In this piece, Anna-Sofia Lesiv tells the story of the internet, from its humble start sharing space with the telephone dial to the heroes who willed its infrastructure into existence. Read this to appreciate how arguably the most impactful technology of our lifetimes came to be—and to understand where it is going.

🎧 “Prozac and ChatGPT: How Technology Is Changing the Way We See Ourselves” by Dan Shipper/Chain of Thought: We know this is weird, but stick with us: There is a relationship between Prozac and ChatGPT. Both are tools that allow us to examine questions around the role of intelligence and self-examination in regards to our emotions. What is intelligence? What is the self if robots can mimic our thoughts exactly? Listen to Dan’s interview with psychiatrist and author Peter D. Kramer about how both technologies change what it means to be and feel human. 🔏 Paid subscribers have access to the episode transcript. 

“Why Polarity Pays” by Evan Armstrong/Napkin Math: It’s not about techno-euphoric media versus anti-tech media. It’s about incentives. All media either sells ads or subscriptions with scale or tries to gain power with sway. Read this to work through your own tribalism and better understand the incentives of every tech writer you are reading (including us!).