Category Archives: Technology

Jeremy Kranz and Sentinel

Automattic, Friends, Technology
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I’d like to introduce you to Jeremy Kranz. With his career as an investor at Intel Capital, then GIC, which is the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore rumored to manage over $700B, to now running his own fund Sentinel Global, he has had a front-row seat to investments in industry changing companies such as ByteDance (which became TikTok), Alibaba, Uber, DoorDash, Zoom, DJI (which changed the drone industry and argubly modern warfare), and many more I’m probably not even aware of.

When I first met Jeremy in 2014, I was amazed that a late-stage financial investor could understand Open Source so well, and he immediately grokked what Automattic was doing in a way that I think has little parallel in the world. (Today, it reminds me of Joseph Jacks at OSS Capital.) Deven Perekh of Insight Partners led Automattic’s 1.16B valuation Series C round, making us one of only forty “unicorns” (private companies valued over a billion dollars) at the time, and one of the reasons they beat out others as the lead of the round was that GIC/Jeremy was a LP of Insight so they could directly co-invest. GIC is so intensely private I couldn’t even mention them in the announcement at the time even though they were the catalyst for the round. Since then, Jeremy has become a close friend and advisor, and he even took me to my first Grateful Dead concert.

Eleven years later, this is his first podcast! Jeremy shares incredible alpha around China, AI and its adoption in the enterprise, how asset allocation is evolving, and at the end, a beautiful tie together of the Grateful Dead and Open Source.

Battery Scan

Technology

One of the cooler companies I’ve seen in a while is LumaField, which does industrial CT scanning, as they describe it.

Industrial X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) works on the same basic principle as medical CT, taking hundreds of X-ray images from different angles to capture the internal and external structure of objects in three dimensions.

In addition to providing amazing graphics of these scans, they also gather some valuable data. Their Lumafield Battery Quality Report does a deep dive into lithium ion battery manufacturing, showing the wild differences between different brands.

I love this stuff, whether you call it QA, evals, testing, or whatever, it reminds me of Ray Dalio’s Principle to embrace reality and deal with it.

Telegram and Weird Al

Music, Technology

I have two interesting interviews to share with you today, the first is Lex Fridman interviewing Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. I started using and advocating for Telegram back in 2015, and Audrey Capital was part of their aborted fundraise in 2018. As a software craftsperson, I’ve always had tremendous respect for the team and the rate at which they shipped truly novel design and UI. I’m amazed by the speed at which they ship major features across multiple platforms. The network also has incredibly resiliency, which they get into on the podcast. As I’m often in poor connectivity situations in planes or remote locations, Telegram has been one of the networks that works most reliably.

I’ve met Pavel only briefly about a decade ago, but have followed his story as he’s a unique character with an ascetic lifestyle, target of many intelligence agencies, sperm donor father of 100+ children, and many other unique characteristics. I use Telegram like I use X/Twitter, I put things I consider semi-public on it and I think of it like a social network and development platform, and since 2022 I’ve cross-posted my blog to a Telegram channel using a Jetpack bot. It’s probably my favorite community platform. The four hour interview between Lex and Pavel covers a lot of ground, but product builders will probably appreciate most the middle part around the 2-hour mark where they go into their engineering and design philosophies. (BTW I usually watch/listen to these at 2x speed.)

If you’re looking for something a little lighter on a Sunday I recommend this heart-warming conversation between John Mayer and Weird Al Yankovic.

I know this seems like an unusual pairing, but both Pavel and Weird Al are hackers in the sense that they examined the rules of the system and decided to create a new game.

There are two great Cloudflare-related stories published this weekend.

The first is Steven Levy’s incredible story about Tim Jenkin, who created a secure communication protocol for the African National Congress to overthrow the apartheid regime in South Africa. Cloudflare’s CTO, John Graham-Cumming, later helped break past the cryptography system’s lost password, which he blogged about with some technical detail here.

Second, my dear friend Om Malik published a great conversation with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in his new newsletter Crazy Stupid Tech. Matthew and Om are influential thinkers to listen to, and their discussion contains a lot of interesting nuance about networks, censorship, and sovereignty.