CTO / venture builder / founder
Florida, USA
Joined April 2008
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Marvin Scaff retweeted
Physicists have long argued that quantum coherence can't survive inside a living protein: too warm, too wet, too noisy.
I put that to a direct test on one tiny pair of rings inside tubulin, the protein microtubules are built from. New preprint 🧵
doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23858…
1/14
Marvin Scaff retweeted
My paper is out in Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences ...
frontiersin.org/articles/10.…
Marvin Scaff retweeted
This is spot on.
People with ADHD have a stronger preference for generating ideas and real-world creative achievement.
AI happens to be very good at implementing these.
Marvin Scaff retweeted
Momentum … let’s do the experiments!
Some researchers, like physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, propose that consciousness arises from quantum processes within the brain. Their "Orchestrated Objective Reduction" (Orch-OR) theory suggests that quantum computations in microtubules within neurons contribute to conscious experience.
Marvin Scaff retweeted
this is insane. i genuinely don't understand why ambitious people aren't shown this lecture before their careers start consuming their entire lives.
clayton christensen spent his career studying why successful companies collapse. in his final class, he asked students to apply the theory to themselves: if you keep allocating your time the same way, what life are you actually building?
he had already seen the answer in his own harvard mba class. everyone looked successful at the fifth reunion; by the 10th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, many were unhappy, divorced, and living far from their children.
work shows you the score immediately. close a sale, ship a product, finish a presentation, earn a promotion, get paid.
an hour with your child may produce nothing you can measure today; it may take 20 years to understand what that hour built. so the next free hour goes back to work, one rational decision at a time.
this is how people build lives they never planned: through hundreds of right decisions that lead in the wrong direction, day after day.
money, titles, and headcount are easy to count. christensen believed a life should be measured by the people who became better because you were there.
he died in 2020.
one question remains: if someone saw only where your time, energy, and attention went this year, what would they think actually mattered to you?
the full 19-minute lecture is in the video below.
Marvin Scaff retweeted
Introducing Cognee v1.0: a major breakthrough in agentic intelligence.
It is 145% better than Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 at long context memory retrieval.
Cognee allows a 100 BILLION token context window 100,000x more than Claude. It's:
- 6.9x cheaper than GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8
- Cold starts in 350ms & searches in 260ms
Why this matters:
Today agents forget important context, redo tasks, waste tokens, and slow down as workflows get more complex.
Cognee solves this.
It’s not a place to build agents. It connects to the agents you’ve already built, across any platform, and makes them significantly cheaper, faster, and more accurate.
Here's how it works:
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Cognee's website and GitHub do not provide benchmarks or evidence supporting claims of 145% better long-context memory retrieval than GPT-5.5/Opus 4.8, a 100 billion token context window, or 6.9x cheaper costs. cognee.ai github.com/topoteretes/co…
Marvin Scaff retweeted
This is a fantastic post about why jobs aren’t going away in the way some predict. We are constantly making the mistake of confusing task completion with AI with being able to eliminate the whole job.
Even as we can automate one or many tasks within a job, the definition of the job almost inevitably just expands to do vastly more of those tasks, do them at a higher quality, or move on to the type of task that hasn’t been automated yet.
And as a result of being able to do more of the tasks or at a higher quality level, the job becomes valuable in a new way. And in many cases for now an entirely new audience as well.
This will be true for coding, legal work, sales, or marketing. The small business or non-tech company that wants to now take on larger software projects finally can, and they’ll hire to do so. The small business that couldn’t afford a full marketing agency can hire or contract out to a marketer that can do as much as an agency did before now with agents. And so on.
Don’t fall into the trap of confusing tasks with jobs.
We’ve automated every single thing we can @every with AI agents.
And yet there’s way more human work to do than ever. We’ve gone from 4 -> 30 human employees since GPT-3.
I wrote a report on the structural reasons: how AI makes expert competence cheap, why that drives up demand for experts, and why the dynamic only intensifies as we approach AGI.
After Automation: every.to/p/after-automation
Marvin Scaff retweeted
I had a chance to interview @jack on Long Strange Trip and then sit in on his Q&A with a bunch of Sequoia founders yesterday. Here's my take followed by my takeaways.
Almost all of us are running a derivative of the playbook laid out in Andy Grove's "High Output Management" book that has been lightly edited down through the generations. Jack's set of ideas is a stark departure from that playbook. It reminds me of the shift I went through at the start of my career (pre web - yes, I'm that old!) to "digital transformation," but this is a much bigger, harder shift.
Some of my CEO friends have pushed back on these ideas saying something to the effect that Jack isn't a great CEO so we shouldn't listen to him. First, I'm not sure if that is true, but even if it is true, he is an undeniable innovator and first principles thinker applying that thinking here to org design, not just product design. Second, @brian_armstrong, a consensus great CEO is running something that sounds VERY similar to this playbook as well as almost every startup created in the last 18 months. Third, the first quarter Jack printed after putting this in place was a banger. ...To that end, I think we should all call this new playbook, "Dorsey Mode" after the guy who stuck his neck out.
If you want to run Dorsey Mode, a lot of things fall out of it that fall out of it:
1. Strategy - Planning cycles are out the window because the speed increases too much. All those 1 way doors you were procrastinating now look like 2 way doors.
2. Distribution - Given how much easier it is going to get to build products, competition and customer confusion will reign. In this new world, distribution is king. Companies with truly creative distribution strategies (rare!) will gain advantage. Also, long live ye olde enterprise sales.
3. Interviewing - All of the startups I work with have changed their interviewing process. Many have a case with a hard ai problem to solve embedded in it or at least have the prospective employee open their laptop and show them something interesting they built with ai. 4. Profile - There was a split in my group of CEOs at the Q&A -- some were learning hard into pilled jr engineers and some were leaning hard into very senior engineers. It roughly seems like the older companies with more code like Meta and HubSpot, are leaning harder into the very senior engineering types. ...Everyone seems keen to hire "curious" types not afraid to go very deep down rabbit holes.
5. Org shape - Triangle shaped org charts are like democracy, its the least bad system we've got. The biggest problem with triangles is that they get worse with size. The new org chart, in theory, is circular with the world model in the middle and very small teams surrounding it. Very few pure managers in the middle anymore. This seems "early," but directionally right to me.
6. Compensation - The difference between a middling employee and a top one is getting much wider which will necessitate a net new pay scale with a much higher standard deviation.
7. Titles - Jack got rid of them and is trying to focus everyone on the work as opposed to the level. As someone who tried this earlier in my career at HubSpot, I'm a little skeptical of this one, but the meta point of trying to focus people on what they "lead" versus who they "manage" is a good one that I hope sticks.
8 Decisions - Almost all decisions these days are made by carbon based life forms. Dorsey Mode turns an increasing amount of decisions over to the system.
9. IT - This is will totally change as their primary function will be to building the scaffolding for the world model and enable the company to keep feeding it the context and taste it will need to improve. EVERYTHING needs to be "legible" (I hate that I'm using that overused word, but it works) ...Btw, an early sign that a company is in Dorsey Mode is when they record every meeting, including the one on one's, cleverly stripping out some HR bits and centralizing them for use by the model. Btw, Ray Dalio had it right, but was just too early.
10. Slop - As more non-technical people build more things, there will be more slop. I didn't grok Jack's answer to this and I'm not sure the answer myself, but Dorsey Mode companies will need to figure out a system to reign in the badly designed systems.
11. Agency - This another word I cringe at using b/c it is so overused, but hiring folks with high agency that are self motivated will be key. The tricky part is that the beef with the current generation is that they are less like this than their predecessors.
12. CEO - This isn't something that will bubble up. The CEO needs to run hard at it and push it down hard and expect to get pushback from laggards. Jack spends 3 hours every morning building hard things with the new tools. ...AI isn't something that lends itself well to learning by reading or watching a video, so CEOs are running hackathons, show & tell's, building days, office hours, and token leader boards. ...Btw, lots of companies are doing the leader board thing (including mine) -- I think this works until it doesn't!
13. Budgets - Budgets in a lot of software orgs are basically enumerated in headcount. The denomination goes back to dollars.
As Jack (and my cofounder @Dharmesh) likes to say, in some cases, it is a lot riskier not to take a risk and this is one of those cases.
Marvin Scaff retweeted
Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.
@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)
Marvin Scaff retweeted
Great for visualizing even the most abstract concepts.
Latent space was one of the first things I tried.
Made with ChatGPT Images 2.0
🤖 Made with AI
ALT A dark blue educational infographic about latent space in large language models. It walks through how words are tokenized, converted into embeddings, and transformed through model layers into contextual representations. It also shows how related concepts cluster in a geometric space, how the same word shifts meaning depending on context, and how latent space helps explain prediction without being a literal map of thought.
