Alessio Fanelli

The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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The Stoke Space team in Seattle has built a rocket company faster than many people can build software. Morgan Beller breaks down how this is helping them capture a huge opportunity: https://lnkd.in/gc5jv2-c 

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"United Independents, the group behind the Independent National Convention set for Denver in September, has launched a new software platform for indie candidates called Electify.us, which came out of a partnership with incubator Wolfram Labs — the first tool to emerge from its program." I am so proud to share that Chief Product Officer Dana Cichon has launched the first political tech platform to come out of our accelerator program. What are you waiting for? We have the formula for breaking into the digital campaign space. Are you are the next success story? Read more in Campaigns & Elections -->> https://lnkd.in/eHhqa-Xr #techaccelerator #startups #incubator #VC #SaaS #software #political #campaigns

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Unpacking AI Reseach Product Manager role so you don't have to. 🥅 The goal of AI Research Product Manager is to make sure that researchers work on something that will ultimately drive business outcomes. 🥅 Researchers want to research, a PM wants to create impact. 📜 AI Research Product Manager should be comfortable to read and understand scientific papers and should have a good idea on what might come next. 🗿 The challenge of the role is often to find the intersection of user and customer needs and the things where the research space is pushing towards. 🧪 It is also extremely challenging for a PM to build credibility and interact effectively with scientists. After all, you are not a scientist. 👩‍🔬 To be efficient in this role you should be comfortable building prototypes by yourself. These notes are from my recent podcast with Guillaume (Synthesia / Google Search). Subscribe to my substack to get more product management insights: https://lnkd.in/eF76ZQqD

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Attention founders or founders in the making. Michael Ho always has great insight on a lot of topics. Check out this one on navigating from Seed to Series A.

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💯 agree with this viewpoint Today there are hundreds of products in every vertical that should really be features not products 🤯 Who actually enjoys having 20+ software applications to run a business? I’ve yet to meet a degenerate who does 😂 Building a compound startup or true system of record is not for the faint hearted. Everything is harder. Navigating through the complexity and the breadth vs depth conundrum is agonising 🛣️ 🧟‍♂️ But if you can stick the course and execute on this strategy successfully to build the ‘one stop shop for X’ both the customer and the software provider get incredible rewards 🏆🏆 #compound #startup

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Over the past two years, Integral Labs had the privilege of contributing to the creation of the Polkadot Community Foundation. Polkadot has already pioneered one of the most active and robust DAO governance systems to date, including tokenholder management of a nine-figure treasury. As the DAO continues to mature, the need to represent and serve tokenholders’ interests off-chain has become increasingly apparent. That’s where the Polkadot Community Foundation comes in. Designing the corporate structure, governance, and operating model, Integral Labs joined a working group led by our friends at Actum Node with a mission to extend the reach of Polkadot's onchain governance into the offchain world. This project was a first in the industry, with a novel design that stands apart from traditional DAO "wrapper" structures. Unlike foundations that subsume treasury assets and delegate limited powers back to the DAO, the Polkadot Community Foundation works as an optional, unopinionated side-car entity that any DAO member may utilize in their proposals. This ensures the DAO retains full autonomy and control of its treasury while enabling offchain activities such as holding real world assets, entering commercial agreements, making fiat payments, owning IP, and more—all for the benefit of, and under the explicit direction of, the tokenholders. The governing documents and bylaws are open source and available for future use by Polkadot or other DAOs. We hope is that this modular design becomes a blueprint for a future constellation of real-world businesses to permissionlessly cooperate and compete to serve DAOs by extending their existing onchain governance systems. The Polakdot community voted with over 98% support to establish the Polkadot Community Foundation. Now incorporated, community members have begun to publish treasury proposals that utilize the foundation, including the creation of what will be the first mobile app owned by an open community, and increasing accountability for vendors and service providers in the ecosystem. You can read more here: https://lnkd.in/ebCJKsjD Integral Labs is proud to have contributed to this project alongside Michael D'Alto of Actum Node, James Hutchings, ACA, CFA, Theo Louw, Michael Preston, and Kevin Foster-Archibald CA(SA) of Autonomous, Edward Noyons of Marfire, Matthew Shaw and Gregory Peacock of Webslinger Advisors, Glenn Kennedy of Leeward Management Limited, Jonathan Bain of Bridgestream, Ignatius N., Jonathan Hernandez, and David Manadom (formerly) of Fenwick & West, Melissa Lim and Justin Wretham of Walkers, Björn Wagner, Raul Ignacio Romanutti, Dieter Fishbein, and the Polkadot community.

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Setting a vision is just the start. Think about the bold moves needed to make it happen. Sundar, Google's CEO, set a daring vision to tackle climate change. That's where the real work begins. Executing a vision requires bold and tough decisions. Google is buying nuclear energy to feed its AI data centers. Other big tech companies are following this lead. This is a big kudos to Sundar and his leadership team. They are executing on a sustainability vision. Leadership is about taking action. And Sundar is showing the way.

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5 hours long Lex and Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, a company behind Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus LLMs, speak about how AI is shaping the future and how it could impact the way we live and work. They discuss how far AI can go. Amodei thinks AI can match human intelligence and even surpass it in areas like biology, where complexity overwhelms humans. But in other areas, like speech recognition or conflict resolution, AI might hit limits close to ours. One of the challenges is the fact of running out of quality data and the cost of scaling compute power. Enjoy the entire talk! https://lnkd.in/dRhpafzU

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🎙️ Excited to share a recent convo I had with Justin Wolz on #FounderWellness and #Burnout. Reflecting on my last ten years in tech and especially these four intense years as a founder, I’ve learned a lot about what keeps us going in high-pressure roles. At Ambient, we're focused on Chiefs of Staff, Heads of Ops, and Founders—people who thrive in ambiguity and uncertainty. Through my conversations with many of you, it's clear we share many of the same challenges and strengths. ✨ These roles demand courage, as they often involve stepping into the unknown and solving complex problems before they're fully defined. Ambiguity is where you SHINE! ✨ 🔥 Building #RESILIENCE is key, and it's something we talked about a lot on the podcast. I think there are valuable takeaways for anyone who’s navigating high-stakes environments. 🥂 Cheers to all #ChiefsofStaff #CoS #Founders #BizOps #COO

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Everyone's been hand-wringing about the end of scaling laws, but does it matter? Better models aren't necessary for adoption, and better models aren't going to create adoption. Joseph Gonzalez and I on what the real priorities are: https://lnkd.in/emsRNJi4

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I got a preview of this talk. It's going to be good. If you think we've reached the end of the gen AI opportunity, then you should listen to what Roman Shaposhnik and Tanya Dadasheva have to share about the future of transformer architecture for AI.

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Was chatting with another investor today on a call, and mentioned Tim Urban's Wait But Why Blog post, "The AI Revolution" and how prescient it was. Given that it was written in 2015, decided to flex AI's latest muscles to give it a new venue: a podcast. Podcast here: https://lnkd.in/gW8Dh89U Pretty easy to do: Step 1: Save the posts as PDFs. Step 2: Upload to NotebookLM, have it create a podcast. Step 3: Upload to Descript, give it captions. Step 4: Export, publish to Youtube. Total time to create the podcast: ~25 minutes. To generate this podcast and publish it even a few years ago would have taken >8 hours. Love the future (Original posts: https://lnkd.in/gW-PQXE7, https://lnkd.in/gg-nRvxz) #AIRevolution #GenerativeAI #WaitButWhy #TimUrban #NotebookLM #AIContentCreation #Podcasting #Descript #ArtificialIntelligence #ContentFlex #ProductivityHacks #FutureOfAI #AIinMinutes #TechEfficiency #AIandCreativity #YouTubePodcast #InnovationInContent #vibecap #vibecapital

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🤔 How do you make product decisions when you have lots of ideas, some traction, but aren't sure what to build next? Over the past few months, I've spoken to several founders of early-stage climate startups who have all been grappling with this exact challenge. ⚠ They know that focusing on the wrong feature or use case can not only set back their journey toward product-market fit. It could also risk their next round of funding or demotivate their team. Founders at this juncture can get stuck inside the big vision for their business, becoming interested in the many ways they can solve a constellation of problems. If they’re not careful, these leaders will spread their teams too thin by trying five or more different paths simultaneously. How to navigate this? ▶ At Kakuy, our approach is to do one thing at a time, testing and iterating in short cycles until we find the path to product-market fit. 1. [People] Start with the customer. Find a finite group of individuals you’re looking to serve in this next iteration. Narrower is better at the start, because you’re looking for commonalities in their experience that mean many of them will have the same problem to solve. 2. [Problem] Make sure you know what problem you’re solving for your target group. Combine evidence from user interviews, sales calls, product usage analytics, and market research to target the specific problem and what it would mean to your customers if you solved it. 3. [Product] Quickly build a minimum valuable product (or feature) that solves the problem well enough that a customer will pay you something for it. By starting with the customer and quickly validating each of these three aspects of fit, it’s possible to mitigate the risk of wasting time building the wrong thing. 📈 When done right, you can kick off a positive flywheel that generates revenue, which you can then raise against. If you want to find out more, please comment or reach out. #productleadership #productstrategy #MVP

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Chat with Miles Clements about building Linear For me companies are like design problems: you have context, constraints & goals unique to you. Then you look for a solution that has a good fit to your unique problems. The company problem also evolve over times the solution Directly applying what others have done doesn’t work that well, yet there is lot emphasis on playbooks, pattern matching and playing copying what other companies are doing in industry. https://lnkd.in/ghxjJwYU

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A cautionary tale for any entrepreneur including warrants in their fundraising efforts. Techcrunch ran a story yesterday on the collapse of Newchip and how warrants flowed through the bankruptcy proceedings. I am guessing in this situation, there were NO clauses protecting the startups from the insolvency of Newchip. If true, my heart aches for these startups now fighting to protect their equity pool/CAP tables from unknown outside investors coming into their company at likely ridiculous valuations via bankruptcy actions. It's a cautionary reminder to get solid advice from legal counsel—or, failing the ability to afford outside counsel, seek advice from experienced entrepreneurs who know their way around term sheets and investment terms. Best of luck to those companies mentioned in this article. And for anyone reading this who is a startup founder or entrepreneur, worth a read! #startup #entrepreneur #fundraising https://lnkd.in/gsvzQ_wT

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Great AI agent-based conversations at Neon's dinner yesterday. Paving the way for a world full of agents means re-thinking some core infrastructure layers: - Neon is actively exploring new use cases to better support agents. Database per tenant to spin up a DB in milliseconds opens up new possibilities. - We're pushing hard on knowledge graphs to better constrain where and what we should investigate in production systems. - Daniel Mason @ Anon is solving identity for agents. - Agent-to-agent communication will be a thing, like we have APIs today. Can our SRE agent co-ordinate with your PM agent to get things done?

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Solve for information asymmetries! Architecture & Civil Engineering - Layout interpretation ~other industries: Healthcare - <Prescription> interpretation Financial Products - <Subject to market risks documentation> interpretation Loans - <Fine print> interpretation There’s going to be a slew of startups commercialising this year with a value prop of simplification using AI

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🚀 I’m feeling a bit anxious about progress, so on a whim, I decided to start building initial versions of Asbu AI to give our contractors and future team members a clear vision of what we’re creating. (👀 Interested in joining #TeamAsbu? Check out our informational site at https://asbu.app—roles open in January-February!) I couldn’t help but get excited looking at our initial mockups, and I want to see some of our planned key features in action. Some of this functionality will be rolled out for preview within the coming weeks, while other elements will stay private until release. 💡 As a bonus, having something tangible will make it easier for #VentureCapital firms—and more importantly, our future users—to understand what we’re building. With a $150,000 pre-seed round in the works (which may even close higher), #TeamAsbu is gearing up to operate at blistering speed. Building now ensures we hit the ground running with a head start. We’ll be working through the night—and the next few days—to get this out. Stay tuned for more updates. 🙌 Happy holidays, and remember: Watch your spending… or you may need Asbu next year 😉.

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