Page 52 - Patrick Collison News Today

Shifting the impossible to the inevitable A Private ARPA user manual Stay in the Loop How can we enable more science fiction to become reality? Looking to successful outliers from history is a good place to start. After digging into why DARPA works, I asked the follow-up question: how could you follow DARPAs narrow path in a world very different from the one that created it? This piece is my answer. It both describes and provides a roadmap to actualize a hybrid for...

Explain your job to a five-year-old I help people do a bunch of everyday activities (like moving around their cities) more effectively using technology. What’s the first career you dreamed of having as a kid? I remember dreaming about being a physicist early on. I was really captivated by cosmology and the universe growing up, and in many ways, I still am. Whats something you wish you knew earlier in career/life? Be the river, not the boat. Whats the best advice youve ever received in your ca...

Paystack expands to South Africa seven months after Stripe acquisition Nigerian fintech startup Paystack has been relatively quiet since it was bought by fintech giant Stripe last October. The deal, worth more than $200 million, caused shockwaves to the African tech ecosystem and offered some form of validation to work done by founders, startups and investors alike. Today, the payments company, which powers businesses with its payment API and is actively present in Nigeria and Ghana, is announc...

Staff numbers jumped at international subsdiary, which now employs 365 people

.github Orbit Orbit is an experimental platform for publishing and engaging with small tasks repeatedly over time. In the short term, its focused on supporting the "mnemonic medium", a way of augmenting texts so that readers can easily remember all the key details. For an example, see Quantum Country, a textbook on quantum computation. More abstractly, Orbit aspires to offer a more general form of spaced repetition systems like Anki, as part of a connected cloud service. Learn more on the home ...

The 7 Powers Known to Tesla, Pixar, Netflix, Apple & Twilio The universe of fundraising and vanity metrics may fool you into believing that your current performance is indicative of future success. But therein lies a logical fallacy: Performance is a trailing indicator. Power is a leading one. “Power” in this context is the underlying mechanism that makes your company defensible. Look at today’s great CEOs running highly defensible companies — Jeff Lawson at Twilio ($67B market cap), Da...

Turner Novak is monetizing memes with venture capital Banana Capital is an early-stage VC firm managing ~$10m. A key part of the funds investing strategy: creating memes to get mindshare and win over both founders and other investors. By: Trung T. Phan | @TrungTPhan April 29, 2021 *** If you’ve been anywhere near tech Twitter over the past year, you’ve seen a viral tweet from Turner Novak.  The 30-year old investor pumps out investment memes and conjures up hysterical parodies of tech...

Details 26 April 2021 Just last week, Facebook said it plans to roll out Live Audio Rooms on Facebook and Messenger, in what seems like a move to rival Clubhouse. In a blog post, the tech giant said that Live Audio Rooms will be made available to public figures to host conversations with other public figures, creating a forum for discussion without the pressure of being on camera. This feature will also be made available on Messenger so users can hang out with...

After almost five years of having to be described as the Stripe of Africa, Paystack finally became a part of Stripe in a major acquisition which caused ripples of excitement across the fintech industry. The reality that two young Nigerian men, who did not school abroad, could start and grow a company that would be acquired by a Silicon Valley Company is more than a little exciting. The acquisition is valued at over $200 million, Stripe’s biggest acquisition to date and the biggest startup acq...

Limerick’s cutting edge lies in its STEM city status Image: © Evgeni/Stock.adobe.com A recent article sparked massive backlash for its description of Limerick, but it also presented a perfect opportunity to remind the world what the city truly has to offer, writes Jenny Darmody. There’s something unique about watching a fallout happen on Twitter. I have often come to such incidents via something akin to the backdoor, where a mixture of subtweets referencing some sort of gaffe leads me the ...