Z Fellows / The Cannon Project | interviewing people I’m curious about...
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Someone stopped me on the street earlier to say how much they liked this episode.
I didn’t catch your name, but thank you & glad you enjoyed !
Here's my conversation with @JTLonsdale
We explore:
- immigrant roots, philosophy, and warfare
- chess & investing billions with Peter Thiel
- founding stories behind Palantir and 8VC
Plus, US & Japanese bond markets, what drives him, the University of Austin, and much more.
YouTube link below and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:24 Poor Irish Immigrants and Holocaust Survivors
6:44 A 20-Year Chess Dynasty
9:37 Why Great Men Quit Chess
13:15 Stanford Nerds, Protests & Palantir Recruiting
14:25 Rejected from PayPal and Arguing with Max Levchin
23:23 Investing Billions With Peter Thiel
30:25 A Year of Loss and Failure
33:54 The Painful Beginnings of Palantir
39:15 The Palantir CIA Conspiracy Theory
41:18 Losing a $300M Military Contest
46:44 Raising the Largest VC Fund Since 2000
55:57 Most People are Cowards
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Sonith retweeted
Argus: an open-source robotics data annotation and quality pipeline.
With new frontier VLMs like GPT-6 Astra, we can generate rich, high-quality annotations for robotics data for both training and dataset analysis. Argus delivers detailed, timestamp-level annotations while catching issues like mislabeled instructions, sped-up recordings, swapped camera streams, and unflagged operator mistakes.
To support better data quality for the robotics community, we’re open-sourcing Argus for anyone to use 🧵
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congrats to Alfred, Florian and the entire Listen team!!
honored to have been their first check and first believer back in 2022!
Listen Labs is joining @Salesforce!
A year and a half ago we launched Listen, an AI platform for understanding customers, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since.
Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
What started as an AI interviewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave.
Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met @Benioff.
Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and watched him framemog every AI CEO on the planet. We're honored to get framemogged next.
With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster.
To our customers, our mission remains the same.I stay CEO, @Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early.
To our team, families, and everyone who believed in us before there was much to believe in, thank you.
These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen.
Now back to work. 🚀
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Today we're announcing $75M to build Solcoa One, our 500-tonne rare earth metallization plant in Nevada.
At Solcoa, we believe rare earths are the foundation of America's next great industrial era. An era we intend to win on the merits, with superior American technology.
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Sonith retweeted
Every single result on this search is a @wander powered unit, either the direct booking site, or the marketplace.
The AI moment for travel is here, and we are powering it.
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Sonith retweeted
We (@PantheonInc) have been working on a robotics data quality pipeline that uncovered a series of major problems in public robotics datasets, especially for world modeling.
To improve the quality of data available to open-source robotics, we're publishing annotations for four of the most popular datasets. Some examples of issues, and our report 🧵
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Sonith retweeted
We started @column with the insane idea to rebuild every component of the financial system from scratch. Today, I think we've finally completed that build.
We're releasing four new products, so any technology company can build at the frontier of financial services.
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Sonith retweeted
"everything around that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you" - Steve Jobs
new z fellows cohort starting soon. interviewing now for it.
zfellows.com
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Sonith retweeted
One of the most important things to know about this AI cycle is that no one knows what they're talking and even very smart and plugged in people are continually reversing their opinions and then re-reversing them three months later.
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Sonith retweeted
I knew when I first met @adamguild that he and @deanbloembergen and the Owner team were building something special
🚀🚀
Owner has raised $240M, reached a $2.3B valuation, and crossed $100M ARR.
Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round, joined by Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, & Jack Altman.
The world is racing to build AI to replace people’s jobs. Owner is building AI to do the opposite:
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Sonith retweeted
Owner has raised $240M, reached a $2.3B valuation, and crossed $100M ARR.
Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round, joined by Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, & Jack Altman.
The world is racing to build AI to replace people’s jobs. Owner is building AI to do the opposite:
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