nellie levchin retweeted
UCSF’s Kevan Shokat, PhD, just won the $1M Stephenson Global Prize for research in pancreatic cancer. He cracked KRAS, a cancer driver long considered “undruggable.” Drugs built on his work now treat lung and pancreatic cancer. ow.ly/xVlw50ZRSXh
ALT Middle-aged man in a blue lab coat smiling while seated in a scientific laboratory setting.
ALT Hand wearing black glove holding five small glass vials with various colored liquids, including pink and orange hues.
nellie levchin retweeted
When I look at this famous photo of the most accomplished scientists of the time I think of how difficult life would become for them in the coming years.
The worse was for Jews. Of the 29 scientists in the iconic 1927 Solvay Conference photo, five were Jewish or of partial Jewish descent: Albert Einstein, Max Born, Paul Ehrenfest, Wolfgang Pauli, and Niels Bohr (whose mother was Jewish) and the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, and World War II upended their lives: Einstein, Born, and Pauli fled Germany and occupied Europe for the safety of the United States or Britain after 1933; Bohr escaped Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943 just ahead of arrest and later advised the Allies; while the deeply depressed Jewish physicist Ehrenfest, took his own life and that of his disabled son in September 1933 amid the early wave of Nazi anti-Jewish laws and the growing climate of persecution he explicitly decried.
Among the non-Jews, Erwin Schrödinger left Germany in principled opposition to the regime, Paul Langevin was arrested by the Gestapo in occupied France for his outspoken anti-fascism and held under house arrest, and Max Planck quietly resisted where he could (his son was later executed for the 1944 plot against Hitler); by contrast, Werner Heisenberg remained in Germany and directed the Nazi state’s nuclear research program.
Back row: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, Jules-Émile Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Fowler, Léon Brillouin.
Middle row: Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr.
Front row: Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson.
The Fifth Solvay Conference, Brussels, October 1927, on electrons and photons. Photographed by Benjamin Couprie for the Institut International de Physique Solvay. Seventeen of the twenty-nine people in the frame were or would become Nobel laureates. This is the meeting where Einstein and Bohr argued over whether quantum mechanics was complete, and where Marie Curie sat as the only woman present, already holding two prizes in two different sciences.
nellie levchin retweeted
While many of you are preparing for Outside Lands, so are we. City departments including the SFPD officers, SFRPD Park Rangers, DEM staff, and SFMTA staff will be out across the park and the city to ensure that everyone can enjoy the festival safely.
With large crowds expected tonight, please plan ahead, take safety precautions, stay alert, and look out for one another. Neighbors and concertgoers can text or call the community hotline if you have any questions or concerns at (415) 965-8001.
Thank you to all of the workers for helping out this weekend. Let’s have a fun and safe Outside Lands!
Excited to see @googrish and the @castformai team opening up their beta and making it easy for developers to build custom models, creating a natural expansion of opportunities
“don’t train your own model” is common ai advice. it's wrong. your token bill's the proof.
today, we’re excited to launch castform into open preview. castform is the easiest way for you to train your own model, on your own data.
open-weights models are performant and much cheaper. when trained on your task & proprietary data, they beat closed models. the thing standing between you and that was weeks of plumbing & years of ml expertise.
with castform, model training is as simple as prompt engineering. @castformai
bring your agent traces or raw corpora. castform turns it into training data, picks the right algorithmic recipes, manages gpus, and gives you an ide to watch and chat with your model as it learns.
see what you can build with castform👇
nellie levchin retweeted
Robert Reich forgot the 6th and most common way:
6) Build something millions of people actually want
There are basically 5 ways to accumulate a billion dollars:
1) Profiting from a monopoly
2) Insider-trading
3) Political payoffs
4) Fraud
5) Inheritance
Don’t believe the self-made myth.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Research shows most billionaires accumulated wealth by founding and building successful companies. A University of Chicago study found 69% of the 2011 Forbes 400 started their own businesses.
chicagobooth.edu/review/billion… heritage.org/taxes/report/t…
nellie levchin retweeted
The #1 factor that determines whether you succeed in life is you. It isn’t “the patriarchy.” It isn’t the Jews. It isn’t the Muslims. It isn’t the billionaires. It isn’t the foreigners. It isn’t white people. It isn’t black people. It's time for us to move on from victimhood culture in America.
nellie levchin retweeted
The Iranian regime executed a 19 year old for demanding democracy.
I stand with his memory and the thousands of other young Iranians.
Those who grieve the elimination of Iranian leaders over murdered protesters is telling.
Today, in Iran, in the middle of a war, the regime executed a 19-year-old national wrestling champion for the crime of joining January protests. 💔
After signaling to the world, including President @realDonaldTrump, that they would halt executions of protesters, the regime has done the exact opposite.
Three young protesters, Saleh Mohammadi, Mehdi Ghasemi, and Saeed Davoudi, were hanged in Qom after a sham trial.
Reports indicate torture. Forced confessions. No access to chosen lawyers. Closed-door proceedings. No right to appeal.
I call on @GlobalAthleteHQ to stand with Iranian athletes who are being silenced, imprisoned, and executed simply for raising their voices.
This is not just about sports. This is about human dignity.
nellie levchin retweeted
Nikesh bought my company, Expanse
I can confirm, the man is an acquisition genius
Also, he gets discounts because founders believe in him
Legend 🫡 @nikesharora
"I don't think many tech companies execute M&A well."
Palo Alto Networks CEO @nikesharora breaks down his strategy for successful M&A:
"Purchase price is an irrelevant artifact. If it's going to work, it's going to work phenomenally well, or you're going to screw it up. It's not what you paid, it's what you're able to do with it."
"You could say that Instagram was expensive, or YouTube was expensive, or DoubleClick was expensive. They all worked perfectly. AOL Time Warner is a different story. So it boils down to how you execute past the price you pay for it."
"In tech, when you buy a company, you buy a team, you buy an existing product, and you buy a roadmap for the future. The question is: can you deliver on that roadmap? Can you accelerate that roadmap? Does it work?"
"We sign a term sheet, and we ask the founders to sit with our team and redesign the product roadmap so we like it and they like it. And if they don't agree with our expectations and we don't agree with theirs, we don't buy the company."
"We make them in charge. My teams have to work for them, which makes them really unhappy. And not many of them like it. But I'm like, look, these guys went out there, raised money, kicked your ass in your category, and you want them to work for you? That makes no sense to me. You're going to work for them. Learn from them."
"So our job is to enable these people. We look at them and say, whatever your business plan was when you were a small private company, find me a business plan that's twice as assertive and bold as the one you had then."
"We've built a phenomenal system to take them to market. I have 3,000 people in the field... 3,000 people go out there and see 10,000 customers. So that's where the secret sauce kicks in."
"We've bought 34 companies so far. I think our hit rate on things that have worked is over 70%."
nellie levchin retweeted
Shocking: “As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone, two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health told TIME….The only parallel offered by online databases occurred in the Holocaust.” time.com/nextgen-preview/722…
nellie levchin retweeted
🚨NEW: Utah Governor Spencer's Cox's powerful statement on the assassination of Charlie Kirk:
"This is a dark day for our state. It's a tragic day for our nation."
"I want to be very clear that this is a political assassination..."
"I want to make it crystal clear right now to whoever did this — we will find you. We will try you, and we will hold you accountable to the furthest extent of the law."
"And I just want to remind people that we still have the death penalty here in the state of Utah."
nellie levchin retweeted
i’d argue you’re too easily moved by the choice words. “privilege” and “equality” are selected because they confuse the notion of fairness. another way to frame his statement “if you’re accustomed to succeeding due to hard work, ingenuity, risk/sacrifice, and, sure, some amount of luck, having the outcomes reset so that everyone is rewarded more equally feels unfair.”
is succeeding after making good choices, sacrificing personally, and working hard really “privilege”?
is it oppressive that everyone doesn’t get to the same place?
perhaps the real oppression is the loss of individual liberties when naively egalitarian philosophies mutate into marxism, denying opportunities for individual sacrifice, effort, and achievement to be rewarded.
framed as privilege v equality misses the mark.. equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are v different things. silicon valley’s most successful are the immigrants who found america as one of the only places on earth where an individual with zero baseline privilege can struggle and sacrifice and effortfully succeed. calling them privileged after the fact seems hardly the point. but an easy one to make.
nellie levchin retweeted
Few truly understand what communism was. Previously functional civilizations were wrecked by what amounted to a fundamentalist takeover.
nellie levchin retweeted
There’s a special place in hell for the editors & journalists who took Hamas’ photos of children with congenital conditions (and parents with double chins) and broadcast them to their already radicalized audience with the message, ‘Look what the Jews did.’
Remember their names.
nellie levchin retweeted
This man is a Hero
His children should be proud
The community should take care of his family
May his memory be a blessing
Don’t miss this! Lauren Gross is an absolute GOAT!
PART II:
A prophet without disciples is a madman.
FF would not have achieved a fraction of its success had Peter Thiel not succeeded in winning others to his cause.
None have been more important than two largely unheralded figures: Napoleon Ta and Lauren Gross.
Ta is the investor behind FF’s best-performing growth investments. He keeps such a low profile he asks his team *not* to submit his returns to the Midas List.
Gross is FF’s COO and head of IR, responsible for scaling AUM into the billions and building its team.
nellie levchin retweeted
For the sake of a free Iran, a stable region and a world at peace—as we urge restraint and adherence to international law—we must also ensure the sovereignty of the Iranian people, not their oppressors.
My essay for @TIME
"Iran’s fate will, and should, be written by Iranians—not in foreign capitals or closed rooms," writes Nazanin Boniadi time.com/7294819/the-future-…
Bari - unfailingly, in the darkest hour, you find the right words for truth. Thank you for moral clarity, always.
I wrote about what it means to globalize the intifada—and those who have created the permission structure for violence against Jews:
thefp.com/p/welcome-to-the-g…
