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Hi friends 👋 ,

Happy Monday!

The world keeps getting crazier. This is an attempt to make sense of it all. There’s plenty of snark and skepticism out there; if you’ve been reading Not Boring, you know that’s not what you’re going to get here. I’ll take the other side: what if this is just the beginning? 

If things keep getting crazier faster, like they always have, it’s going to help to be prepared.

Let’s get to it.

Compounding Crazy

Things seem pretty nuts out there right now, huh? Money is flying around the planet, billionaires are flying off of it. 

Here are just a few of the crazy things that happened in July, in rough ascending craziness order:

• Tiger Global just deployed a $6.7 billion venture fund in three months. 

• Gary Vaynerchuk bought a CryptoPunk for $3.7 million. That was the second-highest price that day.

• Axie Infinity closed out July at over $190 million in revenue, a 16x MoM increase. 

• Mark Zuckerberg & Co mentioned the “Metaverse” 20 times on Facebook’s earnings call. 

• Three-year-old crypto exchange FTX raised funding at an $18 billion valuation.

• Richard Branson traveled to space on July 11th. Jeff Bezos traveled to space on July 20th.

• LVMH Chairman & CEO Bernard Arnault passed Bezos to become the world’s richest person.

• Last week, physicists used Google’s quantum computer to create a Time Crystal and demonstrate a new phase of matter. 

• In the same week, scientists engineered mirror image DNA polymerase, opening up the possibility of “mirror life.” 

Awesome People’s Julia Lipton captured it well: 

Julia Lipton @JuliaLipton

The world is starting to look like Ready Player One faster than I thought it would…

August 1st 2021

65 Likes

A decade ago, July’s happenings would have made for a crazy year. Now, it feels like a pretty normal month. The pace is picking up. It feels like sci-fi.

Packy McCormick @packyM

The only way to not be totally flummoxed by everything that’s going on right now is to have read a lot of sci-fi.

July 21st 2021

98 Retweets552 Likes

Craziness and high valuations invite snark. It’s how people respond to unfamiliar things, and it’s exceedingly easy to dismiss everything as a bubble, or as temporary froth, or as COVID-boredom-induced-adventure-seeking, or as a ponzi waiting to collapse. Being skeptical makes you look smart and responsible. A surefire way to get grown-up bonus points is to make fun of people who believe “this time is different.”

But this time is always different. Zooming out, and ignoring cycles and fluctuations, history looks like one big exponential curve. 

When you zoom out, a different perspective emerges. If you read all of the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written in Not Boring and can only take away one concept, it’s this: 

The world will continue to get exponentially crazier.

Things that seem anomalous and futuristic today will seem quaint and antiquated in a decade. Today’s newsworthy events will become common occurrences. The things that 2031’s naysayers naysay will be practically unimaginable from today’s perspective. We evolved to look to our past experiences in order to anticipate (and survive) future events. But as the pace of progress increases, our past experiences have a shorter shelf-life of usefulness. 

This essay is the latest in a series of attempts to try to understand what’s happening in a curious, non-dismissive way. I’m unflaggingly optimistic, but I want to try to put a bit more of a framework and justification around that optimism. 

It’s also, along with Dreams All the Way Up, one of the pieces that I expect to get flamed for if valuations come down in the short run. That’s fine. This isn’t a short-term prediction. I have no crystal ball. Things always feel bumpy in the moment. We might very well be at a local peak right now. 

Optimists often seem intellectually lazier than pessimists, but increasingly, optimists are right. 

Patrick Collison @patrickc

"Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money." —@natfriedman

May 21st 2020

2,867 Retweets13,845 Likes

I don’t think it’s just the bull market talking. It’s never been more important to look forward rather than back. So open your mind and let’s get prepared. We’ll cover: 

• Die Progress Units and the Law of Accelerating Returns

• The Venture Funding Rorschach and $320T Global Equity Markets

• The Compounding Colossus

• How to Play the Crazy 

Wait, but why… 

Die Progress Units and the Law of Accelerating Returns 

In 2015, Tim Urban wrote a two-part series on artificial intelligence (AI) in his deservingly wildly popular blog, Wait But Why. Because the piece covered some pretty wild ideas, Urban kicked it off with a 2,000 word preamble (a man after my own heart) to explain to his readers why they shouldn’t dismiss what he was about to write as too sci-fi or futuristic. 

Urban’s big idea here is that human progress is exponential. In the present moment, though, it’s hard to recognize or comprehend that the graph is about to go vertical. 

As Urban explains it, “You have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right.” It’s possible to look backwards with relative certainty; it’s impossible to look forward with any certainty, particularly when progress itself is increasing at an increasing pace. 

To illustrate the point, Urban wrote up a thought experiment: 

Imagine that you got in a time machine back to 1750, grabbed someone alive then, and then brought them back to the present to show him around and watch his reactions. Everything we take for granted -- cars, tall buildings, iPhones, live sports broadcasts, recorded music, Google Maps -- would blow his mind in such a major way that he wouldn’t just be shocked, he might actually die. 

If that guy wanted to pay it forward and kill someone with shock by bringing them to 1750, he couldn’t just go back ~250 years and grab someone from 1500. 1750 and 1500 are too similar. There would be some new things, but nothing that would kill the 1500s guy. To get the same effect, Urban guesses that he would have to pick someone up who lived around ~12,000 BC, before the First Agricultural Revolution. That guy, in turn, couldn’t just go back 12,000 years to 24,000 BC, “he’d have to go back over 100,000 years and get someone he could show fire and language to for the first time.”

He called the amount of time you’d have to go ahead to be shocked enough at the world to die a Die Progress Unit (DPU). The DPU is a colorful illustration of an idea from futurist Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity is Near: the Law of Accelerating Returns. 

The Law of Accelerating Returns states that the rate of change of progress accelerates because humans can use the technology at their disposal to progress faster than previous generations could without the technology. 

This is demonstrably true, using DPUs or actual numbers, but according to Urban, there are three reasons we can’t grok the impact of exponential progress: 

1. When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. It’s really hard to grasp how much crazier the future is going to get, because most people extrapolate based on the past growth rate, and even the more optimistic and adventurous ones will extrapolate from the present growth rate. 

If you accept that the rate of progress is accelerating, then it follows that using past or even present rates undershoots. 

2. The trajectory of very recent history often tells a distorted story. Making this even harder, in the short-term, assuming an accelerating growth rate might make you look silly or lose money. The progression isn’t smooth. A period of rapid growth might give way to a period of slower growth. Progress happens in S-Curves -- similar to the Gartner Hype Cycle that we so often talk about here -- and it might even look like we’re regressing in certain areas at points. But over time, if you zoom out, those are just squiggles on an exponential curve arcing up and to the right.

3. Our own experience makes us stubborn old men about the future. We have lived through past growth rates. We’ve never lived through future growth. Therefore, it’s a lot easier for us to intuit what the future will be like by extrapolating linearly based on what we’ve actually experienced. Yes, things will be different, we all know that, but they’ll be different in predictable ways. We expect that anything that deviates too far from our past experience, or historical averages, will revert to the mean. 

So we’re making progress, and progress keeps getting faster, but how does that happen? 

Two years later, in a 2017 post called Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future, Urban introduced another useful analogy: the Human Colossus. We evolved from blobs of cells that did nothing to humans who learned to communicate with language to people who could mass produce books and share them across the world, at which point humanity became the Human Colossus, essentially one large organism with shared knowledge. Computers and then the internet turbocharged that knowledge (and tool) sharing to the point that, today, you can go online, connect with anyone, download practically any information, and even fork full codebases or download designs for physical things. 

By connecting to the internet, any individual human can access all human knowledge. Things that took thousands of people millennia, centuries, or years to develop can be used and remixed by one person in one second. We have more building blocks than ever before, and we can use those building blocks to make new building blocks more quickly. 

The takeaway is that human knowledge compounds, we build new things on the shoulders of giants at a faster and faster pace, and our brains are not good at understanding all of that in the moment. 

If you pause, though, you can feel it happening all around us, right now. 

The Venture Funding Rorschach and $320T Global Markets

There’s a lot of new and hard-to-understand things happening all at once right now. To simplify, let’s start somewhere familiar and quantifiable: venture funding. 

This chart captured the attention of the venture and startup community over the past couple of weeks. It shows the total US venture capital activity over the past decade. 

US venture capitalists invested more money in 2020 than in any previous year: $164 billion. In 2021, they’ve already invested 91% of that amount, $150 billion, split evenly at $75 billion in Q1 and $75 billion in Q2. That’s for only half the year. If they keep it up, VCs will invest $300 billion into startups in 2021, 83% more than they have in any other year. 

The funding chart is a Rohrschach Test. 

To learn how venture funding might hit $2 trillion per year in a decade, why global public equities could be worth $320 trillion, how innovation is compounding in fintech, crypto, healthcare, AI, space and beyond, and what to do about it…

Continue Reading Online

Not Boring Jobs

On Thursday, I launched Not Boring Jobs, the best place to find jobs at some of the fastest growing, least boring startups out there.

Today, I’m psyched to bring you a gem: Software Engineer at Cohere. The friend who told me about Cohere said, “Cohere is software that will change software forever.”

Thanks to Dan, Puja, and Henry for editing!

Disclosure: some companies discussed are Not Boring Capital portfolio companies.

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Thanks for reading and see you on Monday!

Packy

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