Initialized Fund One was a $7 million fund that returned more than 55x DPI. Most of that return came from Coinbase and Instacart.

The fund backed a hundred companies. The DPI on 98 of them added up to about 1x. Instacart was another 1x, and the fund could not take any pro rata because Sequoia did. On Coinbase, the fund took the pro rata in multiple rounds and ended up turning the fund 53x.

The power law is astonishing and unbelievable. Reading about a return like that and hearing about it still leaves it hard to believe until one company does nearly all the work.

In the face of the crisis, it was important that Airbnb as a company was going to survive. Although it was so painful for Brian to let go of the people, there were many more employees and customer that depended on Airbnb's future success.

No one knew how long the crisis was going to last, and the new round of funding was simply a bandaid meant to help in transition. It alone was not going help without serious cost-cutting.

Sundar Pichai says Gemini 4 Argon drew almost 25 trillion tokens in the first 72 hours after launch, about 3 times what Gemini 3.0 saw in that same window. The launch is capacity constrained. Customer feedback has been really good, and he still wants the model to get better at coding. Google's engineers have loved using it internally, and the team keeps shipping refinements from that use.

Alex Heath asked how Google gates a model this large and expensive to serve. Sundar Pichai says Google distilled the Gemini 3.0 models into versions that are nearly as capable and much more efficient, and that work is underway for Gemini 4 so more people can use it. At launch, Google opened Argon to all Ul

Downtown Los Angeles failed to revive after 15 to 20 years of effort with Soho House and Ace Hotel because Los Angeles is not really a fundamentally walkable city. People live in Calabasas or Malibu and never have to see Skid Row unlike in San Francisco.

Evan Baehr says an experience of Texas made of Sweet Greens and La La Land is not the way of Texas. People moving from the coast into Austin still have to come to know the place itself. Time on the land, including an overnight as close as 30 minutes into Hill Country, is a really important part of that.

The official historian of the state of Texas for the governor describes Texas as a history of fusion. Immigrants bring technologies, trades, recipes, and languages, then come to know the way of Texas. The hard part is the people arriving from the coast. Evan Baehr wants a ranch beside two other pieces that should happen: a downtown core, and Lake Austin, which is the absolute crown jewel. Tr

Soon everyone would be able to invest in private companies before IPO, enabling your everyday normal people to benefit from the crazy growth potential of companies like Uber and Airbnb.

Because people open up only after you go first. On Disrupting Japan, Tim Romero says guests froze when he rented a studio and put a microphone in their faces. He got no usable tape from three tries. He switched to lapel mics in their offices, brought beer, and accepted worse audio. Dropping the polish for a personal conversation was one of the best decisions he made. He later found the same rule in the conversation itself. If he stayed a detached observer, guests would not be honest. Only when he shared his own hopes, fears, and insecurities were they willing to share theirs.

India. It is the second largest country in the world that speaks English, which means it is millions and millions of people that can consume already available content, and their consumptions is growing incredibly fast.

Kevin Roose says Machine Gods, the show he and Casey Newton started after Hard Fork, is meant to be video first. They are going to care how it looks, and give people reasons to watch as well as listen. Some listeners do not want a video podcast, so the audio still has to be worth hearing on its own. His view is that you cannot make a podcast now without video on top of it, and they want a version as good as two middle-aged journalists can manage on YouTube.

Nilay Patel notes that the show is a partnership with NPR. The other reason Roose gives for the leap is the AI story itself: a platform shift, with new companies, new characters, and new ideas to talk about. Media formats usually change

On Hanselminutes, DNSimple has always been funded by bootstrapping and has never taken outside funds. A company funded that way has the opportunity to stay the course, focus on one thing, and do that one thing well.

DNSimple tried to get into a sweet spot in the middle and keep innovating without spreading out into lots of different things and running out of resources for domains and DNS. The bootstrap path is what made staying on that course possible. A company that is VC funded and then grows, or that goes to public trading, faces an expectation of continued growth. Continued growth can only happen by adding on more products.

The separation between one focus and a wider product list foll

Adam Robinson started posting on LinkedIn to spread awareness for a Shopify app. People follow people, not companies, so a personal profile was the quickest way to reach buyers who, at the time, would purchase in one second after he explained the product.

He wrote about the founder journey because store owners were on a similar entrepreneurial path and strong built-in-public writing from someone at his stage was scarce. Through 2023, when outbound sales operations stopped working and many software companies downsized, honest posts drew a hundred times the engagement of posts aimed at ecommerce stores. Over Labor Day weekend that year, a post about business development shrinking, the team be