Hi friends,
It's been quite a minute since I last posted! Last June, I left SF Bay Area to return to Canada, and am back again. What can I say—you can take a girl out of California, but you can't take California out of the girl. This time, it's been quite a unique trip living at the NeoGenesis House in Hillsborough and surrounding myself with fabulous people working on AI/ML startups and projects.
New surroundings have certainly brought me a recent spike of inspiration. Here's a picture of this epic estate and library. It's hard not getting work done in this environment!
Outside of NeoGenesis and being in SF Bay Area, here’s what I’ve been up to:
Write of Passage Cohort 9 came to an end last week. Cohort 8 was my introduction to the online writing world, which changed how I viewed writing. As an Editor this time round, I edited 53 essays in 5 weeks. It was a lot of work, but I got to know and learned so much from the students. I'm so glad I'll continue to keep in touch with this community through the new "Runway" portion of Write of Passage.
Newsletter name change. Write of Passage reminded me how weekly newsletters could be brief (bite-sized even) and spending no more than an hour putting it together. Renaming this newsletter to "NeildaVerse Notes" sounds less intimidating and reminds me to keep it brief.
Startup memos are officially published! This was a significant milestone for me. During my hiatus from sending out these newsletters, I've been researching and writing about pre-IPO startups as a Research Fellow with Contrary Research. I started writing back in April, but none of my memos saw the light of day until a couple of months ago. I underestimated how long it took to diligently research and write each one. I have the utmost respect for those who write deep analyses of public and private markets. You can find these pieces below under "🚀 Published work."
🖋️ Quote of the week
“As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership.”
- Amit Ray, Famous AI Scientist, Author of Compassionate Artificial Intelligence
🚀 Published work
👩🏾💻 What I learned
Some venture capitalists get 50% of their startup deal flow from Twitter!
No wonder VCs like Elizabeth Yin (Hustlefund VC), Arlan Hamilton (Backstage Capital), and Turner Novak (Banana Capital) are so great at it.
🖼️ AI-Generated Image(s) of the week
Text description: “A painting of a fox in the style of Starry Night”
AI system used: DALL·E 2 by OpenAI
🤔 My question for you
Twitter has been in chaos ever since Elon Musk took over. Late Thursday, November 17, was the deadline for the surviving half of the employees to either work "long hours at high intensity" or leave. The number of employees who left due to this ultimatum is unknown. Still, it sounds like a lot due to the rate at #RipTwitter, and #GoodByeTwitter is going viral.
Talented employees are gone, and we don't know who is left to keep the platform functioning. We know Elon won't be the one doing the coding or moderating. So in the event Twitter no longer exists:
Where do you think Tweeters will move to?
👋🏽 That's all for now
I’d love to hear from you, whether it’s feedback on what you enjoyed about this week’s newsletter, what needs work, and what you want to hear more about. Just hit reply.
Till next time!
Cheers,
Neilda