Real Tech Notes From The Startup Life, Fake Tech Confessions From Guru Graham
Real Tech Notes From The Startup Life, Fake Tech Confessions From Guru Graham
The difference between real tech and money laundering...
We’re having a bit of a moment but it’s all a bit much. Musn’t get rattled or frazzled, old boy. If my man FDR, who was a relation, or my grandfather, confined to a wheelchair with arthritis after his naval career— could get it done we can soldier on long after our sinews have gone.
Meetings with journalists, meetings with State Departments officials, meetings with entrepreneurs, meetings with approved foreigners, meetings with unapproved foreigners. So many meetings. And meetings like rabbits produce still more meetings if you don’t keep them separate from one another.
These things can happen in our Imperial City. I have to return to California where flakes, fruits and nuts like myself are in our natural habitat. Soon, soon. If I’m a good boy they’ll let me go home and eat burritos and drink boba milk tea. Oh, California, how I miss you.
To effectuate my escape I done been burning the candle at both ends — with a blow torch. I treat my body like a stolen car. I am quite frankly spent but a man is defined as much by His Will as anything else. We keep on keeping on.
Naturally all matter of spies and other some such are reaching out in light of recent events. Good. Happy to have them as readers and subscribers. No, but seriously.
In the professional world I have three investments I’m doing: Traitwell.com, LAND Moto, and Censys Tech. Put simply that’s DNA, e-bikes, and drones. If you’re an accredited investor — or even a curious soul — please reach out to discuss.
But be advised: Yours truly only invests in things which spread hope.
I’ll have more to say about the genomics lab we’re building in Minneapolis as the time nears. Suffice it to say we’re going to be building it up. We need to make sure the food and the ecosystem and all the DNA of the living things is loved and cherished.
A lot of people talk about countering bad Chinese behavior but I believe in actually doing it. So on the e-bikes my friends at LAND Moto are off in the Philippines to discuss America’s efforts in the Luzon Corridor — an economic initiative that could funnel a staggering US$100 billion into the Philippine economy within ten years and make them less China-dependent. More on all that soon. Uncle Chuck has been cooking and he’s calling in the Filipinas so you know it’s going to be good eating. There might even be some dancing.
In my fever dreams I imagine a LAND Moto solar-powered e-bike à la Aptera’s solar powered cars making America less dependent on a not so reliant grid, itself deeply hacked by Our Greatest Ally and Russia (but I repeat myself).
You can see them now, too, my dear reader. If you close your eyes all those Citibank bikes turned into mobile energy generators, powered by the sun and your pedaling. Let’s face it. You and I both need the exercise and we will pedal so hard when we know we’re pedaling for America.
When you drive your SUV you ride with Hitler Putin the car. Small wonder then that National Highway Traffic Safety Administration isn’t keen on these giant gas guzzlers offing pedestrians. NHTSA said pedestrian deaths increased 57% from 2013 to 2022, from 4,779 to 7,522. The agency says the rule would save 67 lives per year.
You can see it if you focus: “Oh you want to hack us, Russia? How’s about we bike over some mobile power so that nothing can stay down for long.”
LAND’s CEO Scott Colosimo is great-grandson of the great “Big Jim” Colosimo. As legend has it Colosimo had gone soft after he married a choir singer and refused to engage in bootlegging and was shortly after the honey moon — whacked.
“Big Jim” preferred nice food and prostitution as a good Italian man frankly should and he lived a life if not worth emulating certainly contemplating. Like all good WASPs I wish to be Italian but having met all Italians I know that they wish to look like WASPs whilst still being Italian. Big Jim teaches us another lesson. Careful with second marriages friends — the triumph of hope over experience as Dr. Johnson would have it. Alas, hope is no substitute for avoiding the assassin’s bullet. Musicians will always get you.
Censys Tech — America’s answer to DJI — is already flying around patrolling the skies in the service of our wondrous country. As a company they have but one defect — they are based in Florida. Nobody is perfect. I am seeing on fixing that because I am tired of pretending that Florida is in the Union. I have had a few great times in Miami but I never got so messed up that I forgot that’s part of the Caribbean or mistook it for America.
Fortunately its founder — Trevor Perrott — is from Carbondale, Illinois. He’s of the Perrott/Parrott gun family — a gun which sold so well both sides used it with abandon and murderous intent. This is, after all, how Americans like to come together — by gunning each other down.
It’s a tradition mostly though I’m happy to see it’s a tradition that Mr. Perrott has not continued. His drones are not armed. Every son gets a chance to put down the family sin. Each of us has a gift or two and mine is to take the baddies and put them on a better path — a path in the national interest.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has already given Censys authority to operate over people and moving vehicles without the need for visual observers. Trevor Perrott will visit me in the Imperial City this week. He will have dinner with me and Alex Tolstoy who is a descendant of the great writer and the son of the great (and late) Vladimir Tolstoy who taught for 29 years at the Naval Academy and was a sort of go between betwixt Nixon and Kruschev. When I say I can imagine a world in which the sons of Russians and Americans can sit down and have a cocktail while I whip them in chess…
If you squint you can imagine Trevor’s drones flying over Russia or Indonesia or Canada mapping the land and looking for the resources we need to keep the world moving without polluting our air.
What are these businesses about? Traitwell is about DNA and harvest its insights to keep the world safe. LAND Moto is about electric mobility and power generation to keep us going sans pollution. Censys Tech is about getting valuable insights from the sky in the service of us on the ground. It’ll be invaluable for assessing damage after natural disasters which will, sad to report, become more common in our warming world.
Every good business can be summed up in a sentence. As can every naughty business.
Companies that harvest people’s sensitive data invariably ends up in the flesh trade. Google leads to Backpage, which is why it defended it up to the moment its founders were jailed. Facebook and Instagram leads to teen girl suicide. This is the cost, paid for by the young, for the enrichment of the Gen X.
These information hoarders have no where to go but the commodification of everything and everyone. Ghastly, ghoulish stuff.
Sam Lessin, of Facebook fame, is what we might call a digital pimp. Just what the ladies at The Information — he bought his journalist wife Jessica a new business — think about this sort of thing isn’t immediately clear.
But I, for one, would imagine that the good working journalistic ladies of the Information might find this tweet a bit, well, a bit gross actually. But then again, Lessin, who backs Netanyhu’s murderous plans to massacre the Palestinians, wouldn’t have any real problem turning us all into prostitutes, would he?
Naturally OnlyFans is based in the United Kingdom. What does it say about our "special relationship" when His Majesty's government is encouraging digital pimping of American youth? And what does it say that Keir Starmer — a big law and order proponent — can’t seem to rouse himself enough to shut it down?
So yes, work is a bit much. It’s a lot. Let’s continue anyway, dear friend.
****
Now a startup is worth what someone else will pay for it. Things are always worth what others will pay. No more, no less. This is also true of art, this is true of keep sakes, this is true of territory, and of course, this is true of technology.
Someone who lacks taste and a flair for negotiations — say, someone British — will, of course, combine bad art and tech startups. They’ll pretend, like their countrymen, that they like good food (they don’t) or that they have a culture other than drunken shivering in the rain ever since FDR took their empire from them. Every so often they pretend London is a global city and indeed it is, a global city run for and by criminals and so naturally they feel at home there even if they can increasingly not afford it.
Which brings me to Paul Graham, mentor to Sam Altman (who wants to drive up energy prices) and Brian Chesky (who is driving up housing prices). Graham is a propagandist par excellence for the very Chinese Y Combinator and the Tories.
The truth is that the British are slavers. They expect everyone to work for free — for the Empire, old boy! — and they get more than a little cross when you say, “please sir, may I have some monies?”
To effectively get people to work for free you have to be really good at propaganda and so they are. You have to make the countries that those people reside in so miserable that they have no choice but to look up to King and Country. This the British call their “foreign policy.”
You can think of the whole island as the sort of place where they send their clever boys to do the homework while the toffs do the drinking socializing and laying about. If you’re a good boy you’ll get some pocket money. If you’re a bad boy you go to America which is how my family found itself here so many years ago. It hits more than a bit different when your family came over by sail.
There are, of course, some Brits who came after the party got going and after the blood was shed and the tea dumped. Why some of them even showed up in the 20th century to see what the American empire was busy doing without their yoke.
That’s Paul Graham’s family.
If you’re like me you wonder a lot about how people really got their start.
You listen to the podcasts, you read the books, you ask in the comment sections, you look closely at the memes. If you get a spare moment you do phone calls or dinner parties and yes, you track down the archives.
But sometimes — despite themselves — they’ll just tell you if you listen closely. Beneath the mythologizing, beneath the self-aggrandizement, there’s usually something interesting. We all tell on ourselves even we think we’re being oh so clever.
I recently read an exchange between Paul Graham and his wife Jessica Livingston about Artix — the first startup that Graham started up. Supposedly Graham was a “starving artist” living in Manhattan. Uh huh.
A starving artist whose father John Graham was profiled in Nuclear News when he was American Nuclear Society president in 1995. Sure, Paul.
Say why did we have a Brit run the American Nuclear Society friends? Probably because we knew that we were moving on to better ways of electrifying the world than nuclear energy.
In that lengthy profile there’s this key detail:
“[The Grahams’] son Paul, now age 30, has a doctorate in computer science, but is currently working as an artist and as CEO of ARTIX, a World Wide Web company.”
What’s that? Here comes the legend! Behold the wannabe money launderer in action, friends!
Jessica Livingston: And actually, Viaweb started out as Artix, I know that.
Paul Graham: Yeah. No, actually no, that's not true. Artix was a separate company that we started with the stupidest idea. This is how I learned about bad startup ideas. Because this was how we learned like that this was where the idea of make something people want came from, because that's what we learned from making Artix. Artix was something people didn't want.
Jessica Livingston: What was it?
Paul Graham: Artix was basically software to put art galleries online. Like some gallery online so they could sell their stuff. But that is not how galleries sell stuff. It's not like people look through all images of all the paintings costing $50,000 and then click on add to basket then check out with their credit card. That is not how art is bought and sold, even now. And we thought like, the internet's obviously the future, we were right about that part. And we would go into all these galleries. You know, you ought to be online, and they'd be like, "What's online?" When we demoed them Artix, it was also usually the first time they had ever seen the web.
Jessica Livingston: Oh, my god, wow, no way.
Paul Graham: Can you imagine?
Carolynn Levy: No, what were you thinking?
Paul Graham: We had a hard time convincing people to let us make websites for them for free.
Jessica Livingston: The good news, though, is that a lot of this underlying software could be translated to building online stores, which is what Viaweb did, right?
Paul Graham: Do you remember when I was explaining how we thought of the idea of the web app? It was because we had it half built already? Like we built a generator for websites that ran on the server. So the only conceptual leap we had to have is, oh, could we control the generator by clicking on links, which is not a huge leap. So it was the same with Artix and Viaweb. With Artix, we would make a page for a gallery, and it had all these different artists, and then you'd click on the artist's name, and it had works by that artist. And you could click on one of those, and it would have the individual work with a big picture and text describing it. So it was exactly the same as an online store. So people were just starting to make online stores at this point. This is like, early 1995. And they're all made by hand, by web consultants. But we'd see these online stores and we're like, wait, exactly like the websites we're generating for galleries. And online stores are hot. And websites for galleries are very not hot. So we already know how to build this. The only thing we're missing is the shopping cart. So I basically said, "Robert, ride a shopping cart."
Jessica Livingston: How did you lure Robert into this idea in the first place?
Paul Graham: It was the summer. If it hadn't been the summer, he never would have done it. But it was a combination of arm twisting, him being bored, thinking it might be an interesting idea. This whole web thing was new, it'd be interesting to do some hacking related to the web, and like, I said, "Robert, do me a favor. Help me out with this thing."
Jessica Livingston: Did you say I'll cook you beans and rice the whole time?
Paul Graham: I did used to! I used to make him dinner every night.
Carolynn Levy: That's a good--that's a fair trade.
Paul Graham: Yeah.
Jessica Livingston: So you lure him in, you're working on it with him on the summer, and does it--by the end of the summer, when he has to go back to be in school--because he's getting his PhD at Harvard at this point, right?
Paul Graham: Yes. After he got kicked out at Cornell, he went back to Harvard, and sort of got back into the grad program there, because everybody there knew how great he was and knew he wasn't actually this wicked criminal.
I read this a lot differently than Graham is implying here. You’ll notice he first lies about how Artix became Viaweb and then corrects himself. That’s a bit much, even for him.
You’ll notice how he’s cultivating a relationship with the disgraced son of the American deep state — Robert Morris Jr. and Sr. — very early on and how important Harvard is to the mythology of American startups. Hey didn’t Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg go there? I hear Harvard’s a great school. Our digital pimp fan Sam Lessin went there too!
This fixation with Harvard is why Y Combinator started in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But before long it went to that other great British-owned American city — San Francisco.
Is it too crass to think of Y Combinator as a Chinese-British game to prop up real estate values in San Francisco? I wonder….
In any event, once ensconced in San Francisco, Graham began money laundering tech investing.
His companies soon got into trouble. He tweeted: “What do you suppose is the ratio of trouble caused for the innocent to trouble caused for the guilty by KYC regulations? A hundred thousand to one? A million to one?”
But then Paul favors money laundering into the United States. After all, he backs NFTs.
This isn’t technology and we all know it, don’t we?
It’s not doing more with less but taking from those who have not enough and selling them a dream they can never achieve.
Paul Graham is the Tory who promises to be radical but is anything but.
Americans have taste? Lol have you not seen what you guys wear in restaurants on vacation? Maybe analyse your food eating habits?
"Someone who lacks taste and..." - This whole paragraph was GOLD.