Martin Camacho

Ever since we launched SHAKTI, every quarter we write a letter to our LPs = Each letter includes an update on the portfolios, the GP's (our) view on the zeitgeist, an interview with a portfolio CEO and an interview with a TITAN = So far, we have 16 such letters = it's been on our "to do" list to share these publicly (i am lazy) = then Google comes along to save lazy people like me (thank you NotebookLLM) = here's a 10 min podcast summarizing our journey since Dec/2020 with the 16 LP letters as source = if you wanted to know what we are about, this is a pretty good place to start = https://lnkd.in/db7K2TrT cc SHAKTI

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I often feel like I'm missing out, seeing the high density of startups in NY and SF while being in Boston. But a direct consequence of these networks is the creation of echo chambers. I understand that certain technologies are exciting, but I don’t see much differentiation between the ideas. In particular, I’ve heard a mind-numbing number of startups working on agents, and they all sound essentially the same, with only minor variations. What separates the signal from the noise for me are founders who chose their idea because they have a truly unique angle, driven by their experience or a deep passion for that space. This is what distinguishes founders who are jumping on the bandwagon to pass time and cash in from those who actually have a chance at creating something with staying power. Venture capital needs to incentivize greater exploration of ideas. If you’re building for a problem that already has solutions, then you’re building for the past, not the future. Some may disagree with that sentiment, but my point is, if there are already solutions on the market, you need to be significantly better to gain adoption. And so if you're building to compete, you're not focused on defining the future of your technology. Your focus is shaped by what your competitors are doing. The issue with this scenario is that, right from the start, you're giving up one of the biggest advantages a startup has: the ability to execute on bold risks for great rewards for your vision of your startup. You're playing their game, not yours. I find it hard to digest incrementalism and strongly believe early stage venture needs to move away from convergences of ideas. Instead, it should incentivize expanding the surface area of exploration over idea space, which would maximize technological progress and is the best way to uncover outsized value. #startup #venture #investing #machinelearning #musing

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As someone who played competitive tennis growing up, Roger Federer’s message at Dartmouth's commencement resonated with me and should inspire startup founders everywhere. As one of the greatest tennis players of all time, Federer pointed out that, despite his huge success in matches, he actually only won 54% of all the points he ever played. He went on to share: "When you’re playing a point, it is the most important thing in the world. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you... This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point… and the next one after that… with intensity, clarity and focus. The truth is, whatever game you play in life... sometimes you’re going to lose. A point, a match, a season, a job... it’s a roller coaster, with many ups and downs. And it’s natural, when you’re down, to doubt yourself. To feel sorry for yourself. And by the way, your opponents have self-doubt, too. Don’t ever forget that. But negative energy is wasted energy. You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments. That to me is the sign of a champion." When you're a founder, you're in a fierce battle every day - sometimes against competitors, sometimes against markets, and sometimes against yourself. The most successful founders accept that they'll get a lot wrong but have a mindset to adapt and bounce back from setbacks as quickly as possible. It's not about winning every point. It's about winning the most important points. Because often the victory comes down to a slim margin. https://lnkd.in/g6JRcSee

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Batch processing for LLM inference activity: "One sign of that is the rise of batch processing. Today, popular consumer AI products like ChatGPT and Perplexity provide users with near instantaneous responses, otherwise known as real-time inference. However, businesses don't always need immediate responses and are often willing to wait hours, days, or even weeks for responses, as long as they don't have to shell out as much money. Founders of cloud and inference providers have told me there's growing pressure from business customers for this kind of flexibility, otherwise known as batch processing." -- Nathaniel Whittemore on "The AI Daily Brief" (with much deserved shout-out to his inspo from Stephanie Palazzolo at The Information) I fall into this bucket as we have a lot of backfilling to do as we're building out the underlying data in our service, and some of that could just as well be done in the wee hours of the night. The new stuff flowing in I want processed ASAFP, but these backfills—I'd mos def take more cost-efficient delayed batch processing. There's also use cases like needing (near) real-time inference for the first inference pass for timeliness / contemporaneousness value, but then a second pass slow-time inference for wider classification exercises over an ever-growing data corpus. I could see us mixing Sonnet & Haiku models in both cases. Just a heads up to Anthropic Mike Krieger as you contemplate this, along with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jeff Barr Mark Roy Swami Sivasubramanian on the Bedrock side of things...and I don't mean the "batch" mode that doesn't seem to have any real value other than helping AWS manage its own rate limit challenges. (DeepCast is using Bedrock.)

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DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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