potato🥔| upcoming #1 web3 operator | angel investor
Dubai/Digital Nomad
Joined November 2021
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@web3_lord retweeted
"Most hardware engineering is actually software engineering in disguise."
12 years ago I founded Boom, as a software engineer doing hardware for the first time. I’m probably the least handy founder in hard tech. My 12 y/o son does my soldering and 3D printing for home projects, and I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome the whole way through. What business does a software guy have building supersonic jets and turbines?
More than a decade in, the most insane realization is that software is the key to reaccelerating hardware engineering. But in a way that I don’t think is widely understood or implemented, even in the burgeoning hard tech community.
Most hardware engineering is actually software engineering in disguise. It’s spreadsheet “code,” engineering calculations done as one-offs. Eg wing structural loads in, spar sizing design out. Thermal loads in, air conditioning system sizing out.
Everything is a calculation, and calculation is software. But these calculations are done essentially by hand, as if we are doing arithmetic but have not yet discovered algebra.
Hardware engineers have baby software, built in spreadsheets, the kind of crappy software I wrote as a kid before I understood architecture, unit tests, APIs, version control, and everything else that makes modern software good.
Our airplanes and engines are built with the software sophistication of a script kiddie.
So what we tell our engineers: don’t design the hardware, design the *algorithm* for designing the hardware. And take the algorithm seriously—as an algorithm and as a first-class engineered software system.
Never design a piece of hardware, such that you couldn’t redesign it tomorrow with a different set of assumptions.
This all sounds obvious, yet our experience at Boom is that it changes everything.
Ten years ago we couldn’t afford to build much software. We had a small team—and there were few software engineers with the curiosity, brilliance, and vision required to learn hardware engineering.
But now AI changes the equation. Now everyone can code. The software engineers define the architecture. The hardware people bring the physics and engineering know-how.
We have a turbomachinery design tool that lets one engineer do in realtime what previously took 100 engineers six months. Another tool auto-generates 65% of entire aircraft structure. I’m sure we’ll figure out the other 35% too. Eventually these should not be multiple tools, but one integrated physics model of a complete vehicle, airframe and powertrain.
The results speak for themselves. A boomless supersonic airplane built by 50. A full scale supersonic turbine made by 150. And with this approach, I don’t think we’ll need that many more people to build and certify a supersonic airliner.
You don’t need a big team to build big things—not when everyone on the team is a software engineer.
funniest incident on cybersecurity twitter today:
>Railway [cloud provider @ $1B valuation] employee caught trying to breach a competitor's infra
> used a fake protonmail but accidentally used personal credit card details for signup
> Railway employee blames it on "AI agent"
Hey @Railway, is there a reason employee's of yours are trying to breach my infrastructure?
Your employee Jake Runzer, just attempted to tonight.
in less than 2 years, we'll discover who was behind Anubis DAO rug. 🥳
OH: There are a lot of P = NP doomers out there.. but personally, I am more comfortable about not fully understanding why transformers work if P = NP
e.g. Transformers learn poly-time reductions on the fly — makes more sense than the Kolmogorov complexity slop I've seen lately
@web3_lord retweeted
I used to be the person companies called after they got hacked.
And I noticed something early on.
The hack almost never sank them. The cover-up did.
Every time, the team’s instinct was the same: wait until we know more, wait until we're sure, wait until we have the perfect statement, etc.
And some of the biggest companies in the world have learned what that waiting costs.
In 2016, Uber got hacked. Instead of telling anyone, it paid the hackers $100K to delete the data and stay quiet, and labeled it a bug bounty. The truth came out a year later. Uber paid $148M to settle with all 50 states, and its former security chief was criminally convicted.
That same year, Yahoo revealed that a 2014 breach had exposed 500M accounts. The news landed in the middle of Verizon buying the company. Verizon cut $350M off the price.
And in 2017, Equifax discovered a breach affecting over 140M Americans, then waited 40 days to tell the public. During that window, an executive who'd figured out what happened sold nearly $1M in stock. He went to prison for insider trading.
Meanwhile, hackers don't wait. They post your data. They email your customers directly. And when customers hear it from a stranger first, that trust is gone for good.
Telling customers early doesn't mean admitting fault. It can be as simple as: "We found suspicious activity. We're investigating. Here's what you should do right now. We'll update you as we learn more."
On Tuesday, I'm sharing the exact framework I'd use to write that email if I were in your shoes. Follow and turn on notifications so it's there when you need it.
Customers will forgive you for getting hacked. Most of them expect it by now.
What they won't forgive is finding out you knew and said nothing.
potato was forced to buy Yubikey to access OpenAI’s Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) program, lol.
potato is very bullish on Yubico AB from first principle, which has a market cap of just $1 billion USD. [listed on Nasdaq Stockholm]
^good coherent investment thesis:
teapawt.net/mert/status/2114328697…
@web3_lord retweeted
“markets contain multiple equilibria” is the most timeless insight in finance
yet thinkbois insist their strategy is the one true strategy, to shill their book or cope
soros wrote the alchemy of finance in 1987, yet his philosophy remains contrarian nearly 40 years later
Duquesne and PointState alumnus on the biggest lesson he learned:
"The biggest lesson I have learned is there are a million ways to make money in the market. Our careers are going to be 40 or 50-year periods. Munger once said, 'you only need to get rich once.'
Just pick a thing – it could be a style of investing, it could be a market, it could be a sector, it could be anything. And just more or less devote your life to it.
And I will promise you that in that 50-year career, there's going to be multiple moments where the market and the thing you have become an expert in align."
Beeneet Kothari, Founder, Tekne Capital Management
To learn the story of the Soros / Duquesne coaching tree: newsletter.richardtoad.com/t…
@web3_lord retweeted
look the foundational problem with ethereum protocol design is that most of the people designing the protocol don't actually use ethereum themselves. you can't fix the right things if you don't use your own fucking product. you don't have enough skin in the game if you don't personally depend on the system you're designing & stand to lose money when it breaks. i understand, everything looks great from an ivory tower lol. things look very different when you're actually on the ground dealing with the consequences. if you don't use ethereum yourself but still think you're qualified to design its protocol, you're playing god with a system you don't have to live with and whose consequences you don't have to suffer.
@web3_lord retweeted
most people are too overwhelmed with information to actually build something
