kevin simler

Today we're introducing Commit Capital: a $15M fund investing in technical founders at the earliest stage of building. We invest in B2B software, with a focus on dev tools and infrastructure. The unique structure of our fund follows from a simple observation: Get engineering moving faster, get to PMF faster. - There are five of us (@kevinsimler, @aaymeloglu, @laura_yao, Brandon Burr, and Javier Lopez) , which is a staffing ratio that would make a normal fund's LP base raise an eyebrow. That gives our founders more hands-on resources per dollar invested than any other fund. - Four of us were among the earliest engineers at Palantir, where we built and led development of the commercial product for over a decade. We've shipped software at speed and at scale, managed the kind of technical debt that accumulates when a product grows faster than its architecture planned for, recruited and managed one of the best workforces in tech, and spent a long time in the rooms where the hardest engineering calls get made. - We don't want to be VCs. Okay, one of us is a normal, card-carrying VC, but the other four are spending the majority of their time embedded in our portfolio companies, working alongside the teams. Not advising (we don’t believe in advice) but building. If you raise from us, you get engineers who have done this before helping you ship sh*t faster. We've been writing checks for several months already. @hydra_db , @sazabi , and @VibiumDev are a few we can talk about; several others aren't public yet. If you're building in dev tools or infrastructure and want engineers in the (virtual) room, not just on the cap table, please reach out!

people are apparently reading this as a parable about how money won’t buy you happiness or something? this is a description of the foreshocks of the singularity. SF feels it the hardest because they’re the epicenter. the money is the concrete manifestation of a much larger eldritch hyperobject roaring into existence. the stormclouds gather. the winds whip. the world holds its breath

A lot of people give the correct (but nonsequitur) answer "mirrors don't flip text horizontally or vertically, the flip it through the plane of the mirror". But it is still the case that if you hold a book up to the mirror almost certainly you'll be reading right-to-left, but *still* top-to-bottom! That needs an explanation! And the answer is this: you broke symmetry when you decided to hold the book up to the mirror – you probably rotated the book about the vertical axis, not its horizontal axis. I first heard this from @shachaf. If you have a book in your hand and you simply tilt it forward then you'll be reading the text left-to-right bottom-to-top in the mirror, but that's a much less natural motion, and is not usually how you present text to the mirror. It's crazy to me how often folks get this one wrong. Like, they hear "mirrors actually mirror through the plane of the mirror" and nod sagely, and forget to explain the original phenomenon that almost all text I see in mirrors requires me to read right-to-left+top-to-bottom.

Theories of self organize the self as much as they describe the self