@pgillian____i
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Now: Investment Partner @VillageGlobal Then: Airbnb, Replit, Iggy, Georgetown Govt PhD, Fulbright Otherwise: Building, biking + my kid and wife
Joined February 2025
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watching your kid learn language is amazing. my daughter was trying to describe water as deep and called it "heavy". she was trying to say her water bottle was out of reach on a table and she said "it's too high".
Lindsay retweeted
If you’re wondering how Jev is scaling to meet insane demand they could not possibly have predicted, the answer appears to be @modal — one of only 4 subprocessors listed on trust.typesafe.ai
Jev was adopted faster than any other model in AI Gateway history.
In the first day, @typesafeai reached ~13% of teams, 2x the GPT-5.6 family and 6x Fable 5.1.
We've partnered with Anthropic to contribute up to $250K in Modal credits for researchers pushing protein design forward in the open 🧬
Replying to @AnthropicAI
To show what these optimizations make possible, we’re partnering with Adaptyv Bio on a protein design competition. Together, we’ll be experimentally validating over 5,000 designs.
We're providing up to $1 million in Claude credits plus funding alongside Adaptyv for experimental validation. Modal is contributing up to $250,000 in compute and Twist Bioscience is providing DNA.
Learn more on Adaptyv’s Proteinbase: proteinbase.com/competitions…
And sign up for the competition here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F…
Lindsay retweeted
Some of the best VCs ever came from non-traditional backgrounds:
- Michael Moritz: journalist, history
- Peter Thiel: lawyer, philosophy
- Keith Rabois (@rabois) lawyer, political science
- Chris Sacca (@sacca) lawyer
- Ron Conway (@RonConway) sales
- John Doerr: sales
- Don Valentine: sales / marketing, chemistry
Lindsay retweeted
GPT-6 Astra deciphered a 1918 German radio transmission that, to my knowledge, has never been deciphered before.
The message below translates to:
"EIN ENGLISCHER KREUZER EINLIEG X SEWASTOPOL X S4STEN X EIN GESCHWADER DER X ALLIIERTEN FOLGT 26STEN X"
or, in English:
"AN ENGLISH CRUISER ARRIVED AT SEVASTOPOL ON THE ?4TH AN ALLIED SQUADRON FOLLOWS ON THE 26TH"
Astra even double-checked its work by determining that an English cruiser, HMS Canterbury, reported its arrival in Sevastopol on November 24, 1918 and the arrival of an allied squadron on November 26, 1918.
This message is one of the ~20 WWI German radio messages that appear as one of the entries in the scienceblogs.de list of top 50 unsolved ciphers (scienceblogs.de/klausis-kryp…).
A minor, but really cool result!
a fun update: the 'morris' from the 1910 census is actually 'louis' but was transcribed incorrectly, and thus indexed incorrectly in that census. (!)
and i've been able to trace his wife back to a tiny village in lithuania via some kosher tax rolls. what a journey!
geneology is not for the weak: my great-great-grandfather is 'louis' on his headstone, 'morris' in the 1910 census, 'lewis' on his death certificate. his 'real' name is 'lipman' (!) which is on no documents afaict, but shows up on his kids' gravestones.
his wife yena was born in 1874 (per her headstone), but 1879 (per death certificate) or 1870 (per the 1910 census), in russia, poland or lithuania. maiden name yospy ... or yudelowitz?
and their kids: 'isaac' in 1910 became 'michael' in 1920, 'louis' in 1910 became 'abraham' in 1920. 'rosie' in 1910 was 'mary' in 1920, there was a 'helen' in 1940 with 'mary' on her grave. sarah was 'sarah' on every census but 'shirley' on her grave.
these videos are so much fun. go team avec!
Liked The Odyssey? Here’s another Greek epic for you.
It Could Have Been An Email Part I: Pheidippides and the Battle of Marathon
Directed by Grace Hanna & Derek Manansala
Avec is a free iOS app that lets you stay on top of your inbox in just a minute a day. It’s the best way to write an email, whether you just won a war or are running late for your next meeting.
Download Avec for free on the App Store. And follow us so you don't miss Part II!
i really want to see the sleeping beauty spinoff where we get the details on what happened within the kingdom after they burned all the spindles
Lindsay retweeted
The best sign of real growth is when your own targets keep getting left behind.
@bernhardsson expected @modal to grow to half a billion this year, and it's already blowing past $1B.
It's rare to see a founder this excited about being wrong.
Lindsay retweeted
One reason the value of high-quality data will continue to grow is compute scarcity:
Many are struggling to obtain their desired amounts of compute - if you can't throw dollars into bigger training runs, your dollars will flow to getting more out of each run
Good time to be working on compute-efficiency
a beautiful lesson from none other than terence tao:
there is much lost when the outcome becomes the goal.
the brief piece is well worth reading!
Lindsay retweeted
Today, Convective Capital is launching our first Request for Startups.
Here’s what that means and who we want to meet.
convective.substack.com/p/re…
We're so, so early. Buckle up!
every possible direction in ML has multiple OOMs of algorithmic gains coming in the next year or two:
- transformers aren't the final architecture
- gradient descent/backprop isn't the final learning algorithm
- sample efficiency will go past humans
- none of pre/mid/post training is anywhere close to saturated
it's about as wild as research gets
Lindsay retweeted
personally i am not really impressed when a computer is good at math — since a computer is math . i am a lot more intrigued by things like , for example , a rat being an exceptional cook — since that’s not really expected
Lindsay retweeted
Steve Kerr says Roger Federer taught his Warriors team the secret to sustained success wasn’t outworking everyone, it was building a life around your craft you never want to escape from
“I’ll tell you a great story about Roger Federer. We were playing in China with the Warriors in 2017. Roger was in Shanghai for the Masters tournament, so we invited him to come speak to the team.”
“Draymond Green asked him, ‘How do you sustain success? How have you managed to win majors 20 years after you first won one?’ Everyone was expecting him to say, ‘I work harder than everybody,’ the will, all the clichés.”
“Roger Federer says, ‘I get up every morning and I make breakfast for my kids. Then I take them to school and drop them off. Then I go practice tennis for about two hours, and I’ve figured out a really good routine where I don’t destroy my body, but I can get all the work in I need.”
“‘Then I go have lunch with my wife. In the evening, we cook dinner together. The kids are all home from school. We ask them about school. There’s so much joy in the house. We put them to bed, and then I put my head on the pillow and go, “Man, that was just a great day.” And I’ve been doing that for 20 years.’”
“And it was like, yes. That’s it. That’s the formula. That’s what leads to sustained success. He loves tennis. He loves his family. He loves life. It’s not outworking everybody and banging your head against the wall, ‘I’m going to be better than everybody.’ It’s allowing your natural talent to shine through with a work ethic, with a great family life, with perspective, with peace, with mindfulness.”
“It’s perspective. It’s joy. It’s passion. It’s mindfulness. It’s an awareness that we are truly lucky. To get the most out of ourselves, it’s our daily rituals and experiences and love and joy.”
geneology is not for the weak: my great-great-grandfather is 'louis' on his headstone, 'morris' in the 1910 census, 'lewis' on his death certificate. his 'real' name is 'lipman' (!) which is on no documents afaict, but shows up on his kids' gravestones.
his wife yena was born in 1874 (per her headstone), but 1879 (per death certificate) or 1870 (per the 1910 census), in russia, poland or lithuania. maiden name yospy ... or yudelowitz?
and their kids: 'isaac' in 1910 became 'michael' in 1920, 'louis' in 1910 became 'abraham' in 1920. 'rosie' in 1910 was 'mary' in 1920, there was a 'helen' in 1940 with 'mary' on her grave. sarah was 'sarah' on every census but 'shirley' on her grave.
this is endlessly fascinating to me!
i had always heard that my (maternal) granddad's family was from poland. it appears this came from a 1910 census, when census enumerators were asked to specify a region ('nation') of origin alongside country ('emperor'). the family's origins were thus noted as 'russia: pol', language noted as yiddish.
by the 1940 census those origins shifted to lithuania though. (probably within the old suwałki province, but i'm still trying to narrow it down)
wildly, each of these data points is consistent!