50M users. $50M ARR. All built by a tiny team…on just $23M raised. And now I get to be a part of it. It’s the first day of school all over again: today is my first day at Gamma . After 4.5 unforgettable years at Matrix , I’m joining the team at Gamma to lead core product for the best AI-powered presentations & storytelling tool in all the land. Gamma’s momentum is undeniable, but it’s only half…
It’s hard to believe, but this is my last month at Matrix . After nearly 4.5 years of working side by side with founders and learning every day from my partners, come June I’ll be back to startupland myself. When Matrix first reached out about the chance to join the investing team, it was the summer of 2020 and I was gearing up to have my second child—my pandemic baby. I’ll never forget my first…
In August 2022, I found myself preoccupied with two things: generative AI, and Brian Eno’s diary from 1995 that was later published as a book— A Year With Swollen Appendices . I combined these two preoccupations into a project that swallowed my month: to “write something” about generative models and what they’d make possible, and to write a diary of the process behind the scenes. The “something”…
My best approximation of “horizontal computing,” thanks to DALL•E Ten weeks ago, I got an Apple Vision Pro on launch day. After a weekend immersed in it, I shared my first impressions . In short: I loved it. It’s hard to express what it feels like as a lifelong Apple and technology fan to hope so hard for a specific experience and then have it come true precisely. The teams at Apple that have…
I had the best time talking with Marc Baselga and Ben Erez about some of my favorite topics for the latest episode of the Supra Insider podcast. Thanks for having me! And I hope all the product people in my life check out the community Marc is building at Supra —it’s one of the good ones. In this ep: Why I want to see more people with liberal arts backgrounds step into product & investing roles:…
Over the first three days of having an Apple Vision Pro in my life ( thanks to Erik for standing in line at the crack of dawn at the Apple Store in San Francisco), I’ve spent well over a dozen hours on it. Except “on it” doesn’t feel quite right; it’s more like I’ve been in the Vision Pro. Over the weekend, I started to catch myself thinking of lowering the device onto my head as going under , as…
A pen and ink-style drawing of a writer’s cabin in the woods created using DALL·E…now I want to go to there One of the stories I’ve told myself about headsets is that they’re not good for work. Even here in early 2024, the Productivity section of the Meta Quest app store reinforces that; there are so few apps available that the section barely scrolls. The work I do as an investor at Matrix…
Meshcapade’s Chief Scientist Michael Black , VP Business Development Nicolas Keller , Board Member Diana Kimball Berlin from Matrix, CTO Talha Zaman , and CEO Naureen Mahmood I’m so happy to share that I’ve led Meshcapade’s seed round and joined their board on behalf of Matrix. I’m grateful to Naureen and the whole team at Meshcapade for welcoming me into their inner circle, and to Lina for…
Ryan Rich, Wayne Pan, and Ross Rich I’m delighted to share that I’ve led a Series A investment in Accord on behalf of Matrix. As part of this investment, I’ve joined Accord’s board. Accord is a customer collaboration platform that enables top sales teams to drive mutual action plans with prospects. Mutual action plans, or MAPs, have become a best practice in enterprise sales for good reason: they…
A glimpse of one of my early meetings with Lina Colucci and Sidney Primas, two of Infinity’s cofounders, in late 2021. I’m excited to share that I’ve led Infinity AI ’s seed round on behalf of Matrix. The full announcement is up on Infinity’s blog; here, I wanted to share my take on what’s special about Infinity and why I decided to invest. Machine learning gobbles data. But where does that data…
Prompt: “synthwave switchboard foreground in sharp focus background bokeh” in Midjourney In my conversations with founders and other product people about generative AI and tools for imagination , one question comes up again and again: “What have you seen that’s interesting?” In context, what’s often meant is something more like: what are the exciting emergent interaction patterns? Our intuition is…
Prompt: “cute anthropomorphic paintbrushes” in Midjourney Do you remember the drawing app Kid Pix ? Created by Craig Hickman , it was first released in 1989—designed for kids, built for Apple computers. If you grew up playing Oregon Trail , there’s a good chance Kid Pix rode shotgun. As someone who spent the 1990s in elementary school, Kid Pix was a big deal for me. I credit the program with…
Prompt: “poetess in a field of paper, watercolor” in Midjourney for the central image, then outpainted with DALL·E 2 using the prompt “a field of paper and poppies, watercolor.” As I keep thinking about tools for imagination and what it means to go with the grain of generative AI , one term keeps resurfacing like a chorus: total authorship . To my mind, total authorship means end-to-end…
Prompt: “intertwined bottlenecks in the style of an escher drawing”; central image generated using Midjourney, side panels generated through DALL·E 2’s outpainting feature You’re the founder of a B2B SaaS startup. You’ve seen everything going on with generative models lately—an explosion of images , words , even music . Your earliest investors prod you from time to time: have you thought about…
Prompt: “tileable image of garden lattice covered in climbing roses in the style of 1930s print ephemera,” generated using the outpainting feature in DALL·E 2 “I think what artists do, and what people who make culture do, is somehow produce simulators where new ideas like this can be explored. If you start to accept the idea of generative music, if you take home one of my…
Prompt: “giant blue and orange marble run as big as a mansion,” generated in Midjourney. I used “blue and and orange” explicitly early in my prompting journey before realizing that Midjourney effectively defaults to blue and orange. The shock of generative models is how good their output can be. If you’ve played with an image generation model such as Stable Diffusion , Midjourney , or DALL·E…
Prompt: “futuristic productivity software,” generated in Midjourney I find generative models magnetic: I can’t stop thinking about them. Yet it’s hard to find words to express the bigness; the grand reality shades quickly into sounding grandiose. If you’ve played with DALL·E , Midjourney , Stable Diffusion , or Craiyon for generating images, Jukebox for generating music, or a model like GPT-3 for…
Personal productivity is an evergreen fascination of mine. I love thinking about systems and tools that can help us make the most of the time we have , and I love puzzling through what gets in the way. There was a time in my life when I felt that personal productivity systems were an imperative; their absence the primary obstacle between me and being able to do everything I set my mind to. The…
A snapshot from Harvard Business School’s campus from deep in my camera roll. I grew up in Michigan, but I was born in Boston. Every place I’ve lived has shaped me, but Boston and Cambridge are a part of me. I joined my family one spring when my dad was just months away from finishing up his Ph.D. in economics. I was born at Brigham & Women’s in Boston. That summer, we moved to Ann Arbor,…
Every post needs a photo, so I thought this contemplative one of my 3-year-old son would do. Writing is a big part of my life. Even when I’m quiet in public—as I have been for big stretches of the past decade—I’m never not writing behind the scenes. A lot of that writing takes the form of journaling: over the course of March 2022 alone, I’ve journaled over 30,000 words. The practice of journaling…