sethbannon

For those interested in learning more about Bell Labs, I highly recommend "The Idea Factory". It's a history of Bell Labs, focusing both on the biographies of the engineers and also a meta story about how you create an organization that consistently produces impactful innovation.

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...

The vivid color contrasts in these photos make them visually stunning, but do they serve any functional purpose?

I'd suggest a transparency section. Without companies committing to this it'll be easy for them to sign on publicly but privately act differently.

Something at the end like:

"Transparency: On an ongoing basis, we will offer our employees and our users reports on how we're fulfilling the above commitments."

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the administration is taking down government websites in an effort to bury climate data and scientific information. Useful to remember it's not just countries like China and Turkey that try to limit citizens' access to information.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

You're absolutely right on the pricing and go to market strategy.

The regulatory frameworks are still up in the air. I know from having attending the 1st and 2nd Cultured Meat Symposiums in Maastricht that both the USDA and the FDA are looking at clean meat. While both agencies seem pretty open and friendly towards it, they unfortunately both think they should be the one to regulate it :-)

The costs are still too high for commercial viability but they're dropping rapidly. In 2013, the first cultured burger cost $330,000 to make. Just under a year ago, Memphis Meats was at $18,000/lb of clean beef produced. Now they're at $9,000/lb. This is before any sort of efficiencies from scale, and before many steps of the process have been anywhere near fully optimized. They expect their costs to reach 2 cents/g by 2021, which would be cost competitive.

You're absolutely right that conventional chicken is the hardest nut to crack when it comes to achieving price parity (beef and pork are easier), but I'm much more optimistic than you.

In 2013, the first cultured burger cost $330,000 to make. Just under a year ago, Memphis Meats was at $18,000/lb of clean beef produced. Now they're at $9,000/lb. This is before any sort of efficiencies from scale, and before many steps of the process have been anywhere near fully optimized. They expect their costs to reach 2 cents/g by 2021, which would be cost competitive.

And while chickens are somewhat efficient, they're not as efficient as culturing techniques ought to be at scale. Memphis Meats' process will require 3 calories of input to produce 1 calorie of beef. That's just better than chicken, and massively better than beef or pork.

After not eating meat for over 20 years due to the environmental and ethical concerns over how it's conventionally been made, I was lucky enough to be at the tasting described in the WSJ article. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@sethbannon/i-just-ate-meat-for-the-first...

"When we surveyed our companies and asked them where they met investors, it was rarely at an actual pitch event."

Seems like the author might be learning a lesson based on Village Capital's apparently unsuccessful demo days and applying it to all demo days. As someone who's gone through YC's demo day and who's attended it a few times since, I can tell you that startups meet a lot of great investors there. That some demo days add no value to either startups or investors is not in doubt. That doesn't mean the structure of a demo day makes no sense.

One thing YC recently did to address some of the concerns he has is introduce "Investor Day" immediately after their demo day. Will be interesting to see how that experiment plays out. https://blog.ycombinator.com/investor-day/

All that said, his points about pitch day formats exacerbating existing biases is quite interesting. Would love to see more data on that.

Animal agriculture seems to me like one of those things that in 50 to 100 years people will look back on with bewilderment. "You mean you birthed whole animals, let them grow for two years, fed them all the while, just to kill them, chop up their remains, and ship that to people?" Plant based protein and maybe even more so cultured/clean meat (e.g. http://www.memphismeats.com/) seem likely to totally replace how we do things now.

Disclosure: I'm an investor in Memphis Meats

If you like far-sighted Churchill reading, I highly recommend reading his 1931 essay "Fifty Years Hence". He predicts cultured meat, cellphones, genetically modified food, among other things.

http://rolandanderson.se/Winston_Churchill/Fifty_Years_Hence...

"Each night after the play ended, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centre added computations to sharpen the AI's strategy."

This sounds more like an "advanced chess" setup, where a human teams up with an AI to play. The title of the article should really be "amateur poker players + AI defeat professional poker players". The real test would be if the AI self-corrected over the length of the tournament, without human intervention.

This is what business leadership looks like. Truly inspiring to see the corporate world embrace civic responsibility like this.

You're answering the question of "what the world values" not "what the world needs".

"I think the best way to pick what you want to do is to find the intersection of what you’re good at, what you enjoy, what the world needs, and what the world values."

Sam, how do you figure out "what the world needs"? As you point out, this is often very different from "what the world values" (see: Coca-Cola).

All quite interesting but the important bit is in the conclusion: "In addition to mechanical and related considerations, the authors’ methods of analysis of sensor data to derive thrusts rests on untenable grounds... Therefore, until more control tests are performed allowing a more accurate method for estimation of thrusts, no faith can be placed in the thrust magnitudes reported in the paper."

Love seeing YC increasingly focus on helping solve the world's biggest problems.

So there is hope America finally switches to the metric system!

There are currently 4 billion people on earth with no access to the internet whatsoever [1]. If that's not a massive problem that also represents a massive business opportunity, I don't know what is.

1: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/4-billion-people-stil...

We're learning more and more that microbes are essentially radically optimized factories. They've evolved for millions of years to be really good at producing stuff. Typically, though, it's not stuff we want. But if we edit the genetic code of the microbes we can direct that productive capacity towards making things we do want.

That's exactly what Lygos is doing for industrial chemicals. And the beauty of the microbes Lygos is engineering -- specifically yeast -- is that they feed on sugar & water. Feed them sugar & water, and out pops specialty chemicals. This allows Lygos's microbial factories to produce industrial chemicals with sustainable inputs and with no toxic outputs.

I'm incredibly excited by the potential for synthetic biology to reinvent the way we produce all sorts of things we like to eat, wear, or make things with in the decade ahead.

This article seems to have an agenda. It feels like it's intentionally portraying things in a mischievous frame. Maybe that's just because it's getting its information from a lawsuit written by hostile lawyers, but it still doesn't seem unbiased. As an example, the line "While on the committee, Andreessen slipped Zuckerberg information about their progress and concerns, helping Zuckerberg negotiate against them." could easily have been written as "While on the committee, Andreessen kept Zuckerberg up to date about their progress and concerns, helping Zuckerberg know how to best proceed with the discussions."

Here's the one of the most egregious examples of LinkedIn's dark UX. The transition from "I'm accepting incoming invites" to "I'm inviting people to connect or join LinkedIn" is intentionally subtle: https://goo.gl/photos/ncnTiMWeSBJfg3rZ6

If you look more than 50 years into the past, to any civilization on earth, there are a number of behaviors and norms that were totally acceptable to the people of the time that modern man/woman would consider morally repugnant. Not allowing gays to marry, not allowing people of different races to marry, not allowing women to vote, slavery, ritual sacrifice, etc. It follows then, that there are likely things we view as morally OK that future generations of humans will condemn us for. It's a healthy exercise to imagine what those things might be.

Reading about this research makes me think that this sort of animal experimentation will certainly be one of those things.

Anyone understand how it's color coding the boxes on the right? Seems like green, blue, and purple all likely stand for different categories of objects.

We were previously worried about filter bubbles -- that is, people only seeing true news that agreed with their worldviews. This election cycle we seem to have a rise in blatantly false news that agrees with people's worldviews spreading through social media. Everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter fueling this problem, but it seems not even Google is immune. A healthy democracy relies on an informed citizenry, so this phenomenon is truly a threat to democracy itself.

Seeing the .gov really makes it hurt.

TL;DR -- Luke Iseman, YC's hardware focused Partner founded a hardware startup, which he's now taking through YC as a founder, after having set up a bunch of deals and processes to help hardware startups as a YC Partner.

Seems like pretty good evidence YC is now great at helping hardware startups that he's choosing to go through the program himself.

Algiers was nice in every way. Wish I could have read a book over tea there one last time.

Bravo to Sam for the endorsement and for calling Trump out for what he is.

On the issue of Peter Thiel, for those of you that believe it's wrong to fire someone based on their political actions, is there any limit? If David Duke ran for office, or the Ku Klux Klan fielded a candidate for president, and someone gave a high profile speech endorsing them and supported their campaign with a million dollars, would it still be wrong to part ways with that person?