Colin Chapman

It is time again to come together among friends and talk about climate, forests, and startups. If you are on the eastside on Thursday September 19th, join us from 4:30-7 at Cascadia Pizza (https://lnkd.in/gwFq6A_5). Looking ahead, we’re going to have great weather affording us one more chance to occupy the patio. Come on out before the season turns and we start regularly getting weather colder than… August! In the last month I’ve been reading some forestry papers with suggestions on how to fix NEPA, a busy topic now with many folks chasing permitting reform as a silver bullet to enable the green transition (or vastly expand fossil fuel infrastructure depending on your hopes or fears). This was a little different, in that the specific recommendations deal with changing the baseline of analysis under the law for NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air Act. That’s the big core of environmental law, that’s a big deal! What’s up? It turns out our hard-won regulations all share the myth of wilderness; the belief that a natural space is a space without humans. The Forests of the American West are the way they are because of humans maintained those lands for thousands of years. In order to square this circle the suggestion is that we must classify some human interventions and actions as in-human actions! When your regulations miss basic assumptions things get weird! We’ll be talking more broadly about startups, Nicolas Garfinkel and I both went through some accelerators, interviews, and important demos over the last month, and generally have some good conversation fodder for anyone curious about early-stage startup life. Please join us for pizza and a pint as we talk about climate! We’ll be geeking out, enjoying the taplist, menu, and friendship while we talk forests, carbon, environmental law here at the end of Summer 2024. I’ll be wearing a hardhat and cruising vest – feel free to walk right up and join our table. Event Invite here: https://lu.ma/3qb3ch0k - Please Share

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When you’re in the trenches building, amazing things reveal themselves that you could never have foreseen at the outset.✨☺️ Life imitates art and all that. I have been hard at work creating a product/market fit course for climate software startups and along the way I found an incredible launch partner in Koray Parmaks from Carbon Zero Capital. 🚀 Koray, a Founder/CEO turned investor, and his partner Eric Tong, are putting $ from their exits into climate startups.💚 Together, we are offering an invite-only bootcamp to help selected founders gain conviction on the path to Strong PMF.🧗‍♀️🦾 💰At the end of the bootcamp, Carbon Zero Capital will make investments in bootcamp grads that meet their PMF criteria.💰 Yes, for real. Our PMF bootcamp helps early stage stage climate founders hit their next milestones📈: -> Progress $0-500k, $500k-3M ARR -> Increase % customers that truly love your product -> Patch your leaky bucket (funnel) -> Right-size your unit economics -> Raise your next round If you want to join the bootcamp or learn more, request access at https://lnkd.in/g3yrQQvi !!🤘

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Introducing: GrowNotes: Garden Journal Free on the App Store (coming soon to Android) https://www.grow-notes.com A simple way to track plants in your garden. Each plant gets its own dedicated journal and is easy to reference later to help make informed decisions that will lead to healthier, happier plants. As a backyard gardener, I built this app to make it easier for me to take garden notes and find them later. I hope others can find it useful too. Anyone who has a plant, whether it’s an indoor potted plant, a front yard shrub, or a flourishing garden might find this app useful. GrowNotes is in the MVP stage meaning it’s rather barebones and you may encounter bugs. I highly appreciate any feedback, features requests or bug reports. I'm planning to monetize with planned premium features should there be enough interest in the app. Anyone who's interested in joining as a co-founder with experience in sales/marketing, promotion, social media, etc to help grow the app please reach out. Equity 50-50. Also launching today on ProductHunt...a first for me! #gardening #plants #greenthumb #grownotes

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Really proud of what we built this last year at Bountiful. Truly a product born out of necessity for farmers. Attempting to put into practice what Y Combinator tells startups: get product out to your customers quickly, talk to them and iterate. Good is better than perfect. And sometimes, do things that don't scale. Paul Graham's blog on that is a gold mine. Counterintuitively, this process helps you identify the best way to scale and build for the future.

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It's great to see Victor Dibia, PhD and Chi Wang started writing a book on AutoGen with Manning Publications Co.! Building multi-agent systems is a frontier topic now, and AutoGen is one of the most interesting frameworks in the field. https://mng.bz/mRJM I had some experience writing multi-agent systems with AutoGen, and I like it. I truly believe in agentic workflows, as collaborative agents are the next step after using plain LLMs (even with all the magic of Chain-of-Thought, Self-Consistency, RAG, and even brand-new Reflection and Reasoning). Do not undervalue materials from the authors of AutoGen and AugoGen Studio! They know what they are talking about!

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Big day for the Rails Foundation: 1Password is the first new Core member to join the board since we launched. Looking forward to working with Jason Meller on the board. You might be thinking: 1Password? Rails? YES. 1Password recently acquired Kolide, a Rails app, and integrated it into the core of its XAM. With today’s world of remote work (and the apps we rely on at work) combined with the ever-increasing threat of data breaches and bad actors, this Rails app now handles “thousands of web requests per second, authorizes millions of authentication attempts, processes billions of asynchronous jobs each month, and consistently delivers four nines of annual uptime for customers”. Not bad for a Rails app, ey?

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I really enjoyed this podcast from Indie VC and Linear's Cofounder Karri Saarinen: https://buff.ly/47Ay117 Main takeaways: * Build your company the way you want to build it. This is "founder mode." * You don't have to grow fast in venture. You can think long term and build a sustainable business. * You can focus on product quality over growth. There's a craftsmanship and a love of quality that can really shine through if you do. * Remote work can work. Design deliberately though. * Build a great product and users will tell other users about how great it is

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After taking a short break, I came across this fascinating story that I had to share. For many of us in the tech industry, it's been obvious for a while now that AI has the potential to be more capable, fair, and pragmatic when it comes to decision-making, even in areas as complex as politics and government. This article about a Wyoming mayoral candidate who wants to govern by AI bot really drives that point home. The candidate, Victor Miller, has created an AI chatbot called VIC (Virtual Integrated Citizen) that he says will make the actual decisions if he's elected, while he serves as the "meat puppet" attending meetings and signing documents. While there are certainly legal and ethical questions to be ironed out, I find this to be a thought-provoking glimpse into the future of governance. VIC, built on ChatGPT 4.0, could analyze hundreds of supporting documents for each council meeting in mere seconds - a feat that's practically impossible for a human. The bot also claims it will focus on "data and evidence-based policies that benefit all citizens" in a nonpartisan way. Of course, there's still a lot of uncertainty around AI, and the "move fast and break things" mantra may not be the right approach for something as consequential as government. But I believe this story is a sign of the transformative potential of AI to make our institutions smarter, fairer, and more efficient. I'm excited to see how this story unfolds and to continue exploring the ways AI can be responsibly leveraged to drive progress. I'd love to hear what others think - do you believe AI has a role to play in governance? How can we balance the benefits with the risks and challenges? #AI #FutureOfGovernance #InnovationInPolitics #EthicalAI https://lnkd.in/eFaCKwXH

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Hey y’all. I’ve launched and run a distributed, thimble-sized software company, and we’ve created a government so small you can fit it in your pocket. Our customers are mostly indigenous and separatist movements, including this one in the Pacific Northwest (see the link).Domestically our target market is the large percentage of Americans that live in unincorporated communities and in small towns, most of whom have not felt the beneficial halo of a government for generations, if ever. Internationally we focus on transitional and developing economies with a large “shadow economy,” which is not the same as a black market. A “shadow economy” is that which would be technically legal if people were declaring the income to the tax authorities, and our value proposition is incentivizing people to formalize this shadow economy, which helps them maintain a state of communal autonomy, vis a vis criminal enterprise and black market which tends to seek a safe haven within shadow economies during times of hardship and political upheaval. Our technology is “private label,” and our customers publish the app within their communities without the necessity to reveal that we are behind the scenes, anonymously maintaining the platform. The app and architecture itself has the capacity to function almost invisible to mass surveillance, making it attractive to those seeking autonomy within the malignant halo of oppressive governments. The app is what’s called a progressive web application (or a “PWA”), which is an architecture first introduced by Twitter in 2017, enabling apps to be distributed outside the stores without the necessity of a device being jailbroken. The app handles ordinary currency, but is technically a web3 app, so if and when a community is ready, we can help them transition to the use of a complementary currency which is introduced as a “buy local first“ program. Outside this endeavor I volunteer my experience within a variety of open-source projects, most of them related to privacy and security, putting into service my decades of hard/earned professional experience in the domain of product development in Fortune 1000 and large privately-held corporations in the information security and anti-fraud space.

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I have learned so much from our Chief Sustainability Officer Mary Nitschke. Our conversation in the link below takes a deeper dive into our new BPS Management Solution, as well as a general discussion around how regulation is growing and shaping a more sustainable future in Multifamily real estate. #environment #cleantech #apartments #startups #climateaction

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Getting software out fast, with quality is way easier said than done. While complexity and features conspire to ruin your day, I’ve found a few key things to work at my tenure at big and small companies. 👍 Simulate large environments, you’re never going to get the real in dev. 👍 Use tools to isolate complex bits, it’s too much for humans to handle nowadays. 👍 Automate the pipeline from the get go, in small chunks. 👍 Don’t forget to bring the data (the context) of the environments with you. Otherwise the environments are an empty shell of what you want. 👍 As always, one size does not fit all. If you’re small and easy, bootstrap app architecture first. Check out my latest blog on Speedscale and our Ephemeral Environments to learn more. https://lnkd.in/eJvnzpD5

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California Governor Newsom vetoes the controversial AI Safety Bill! And the reasons behind it are worth noting. Stifling innovation is a major concern but so is the lack of nuance in the assessment of risk He states that the bill would 'give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology' Which honestly- is spot on! The Bill tries but both goes too far & not far enough. We covered the topic in great detail in our inaugural episode of TheOutpost.ai podcast Do check out our short of it here & let us know how you think the world will react to the veto! https://lnkd.in/gfs3vVN4

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Great podcast with Bret Taylor (CEO Sierra). Stellar communicator. Covers a lot of ground. One area he touches on are engineering changes instigated due to agentic frameworks. Resonates with a lot of the work we are doing at Doyen AI. A few nuggets - engineering moving from rule-based to goals & guidelines, increased focus on statistical approaches for managing non-deterministic systems, core agentic components are (a) knowledge of the business, (b) knowledge of business processes, and (c) knowledge of underlying systems for actioning. Worth a listen! #agents https://lnkd.in/ezdghk_v

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30 days. Thats how long before we launch the worlds first useful domestic robot. Why will we succeed at being the first? Instead of spending millions on demo videos, we spent time with real people, in their homes, and found out how to best meet their needs. We are starting with a low-cost very useful robot, and moving onto expensive humanoids later. We are growing 8% month on month If you know somebody with a mobility disability who would like to be part of this journey, please contact us. We are delivering as much agency and empowerment as we can with an affordable task-performing robot. There is no chatGPT in here. This is our own AI system, and data is sovereign to the end-user. Indy (one of our robot family) is featured on the Federal Governments robotics strategy, as a case study of AI for good (bottom LHS of the page) Under "Trust, Inclusion and Responsible Development"

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Interesting news out of Cheyenne, Wyoming! AI emerges as a mayoral candidate claiming it will make decisions without human input, sparking discussions on AI’s role in decision-making. At Parse AI, we advocate for AI as a teammate, not a replacement for expert decision-makers. Our platform empowers title agents and landmen to work efficiently while retaining the power to input and edit information as needed for accurate and accountable title reporting. The title expert makes the final decision. What are your thoughts on AI in the title industry? #AI #artificialintelligence #realestate #oilgas #renewables #energy #government #technology www.parseai.co

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One of the useful resources on Sea & Wind.

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One of my favorite advantages of Y Combinator is that thousands of YC veterans have specific advice for you. Sometimes, that advice isn't public. But this essay is one of the best, and anyone can read it. Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale" describes a common thread between almost every successful company. Here are a few of his examples: Recruiting - "You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them." He describes Stripe (one of the most successful YC companies ever) not waiting to onboard users who wanted to sign up in the early days. If they agreed, one of the Collison brothers (the founders) would simply use their laptop to sign them up on the spot. Instead of being shy and lazy about it, they were bold. Initial fragility - "Almost all startups are initially fragile. Founders ... unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones." It's fine if reporters and juggernauts dismiss your startup, but dangerous if you start to dismiss or doubt your own. Delight your users - "Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made." Wufoo (one of the early YC startups) sent each new user a hand-written thank you note. This is one of many ways you can delight them - try to make them TOO happy. Experience - "The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get." Laser focus on an "insanely great" attention to users. He explains that the product doesn't have to be insanely great at the beginning, but the user's experience does. That means over-engaging, which is fine. It promotes a tight feedback loop. Fire - A narrow focus is critical. "It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs." Startups who build things for themselves ("I was so sick of experiencing X, so I created Y solution") will do this without even thinking about it. Manual - "There's a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software, but are your software." Essentially, do things manually that you would automate later. A feature doesn't have to be code complete if you can get away with it at the beginning. There are more in the article - I highly recommend reading it. But my main takeaway is the most successful companies didn't automate and scale every single action from Day One. In PG's words, "startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going." That usually means manually doing things that don't scale.

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Should we prioritize people, or tech innovation in our large-scale development projects? The strategy's slowly shifting to people. And that’s exactly how California Forever CEO Jan Sramek wins over skeptics like Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Not bad. “There’s a lot of baggage that tech has created in building new cities that, unfortunately, we are at the receiving end of”, explains Sramek. So smart cities and tech libertarian network states aren't the focus here. Quite the contrary. He calls the project (in this context) “really, really boring.” The focus: ∙ More housing ∙ Walkable cities ∙ Affordable by design* ∙ Improving the country for residents *(housing prices to start at $400k) I recently covered California Forever, dubbing it a future ‘Tech Utopia’ given its massive Silicon Valley backing. So it’s exciting to see Sramek's positioning and skillful handling of the grilling. Is the era of the smart city over due to its 'baggage'? Time will tell. More on California Forever and other visionaries designing new cities from scratch here: https://lnkd.in/e9-i386q Full interview: https://lnkd.in/eMnT8QhU #futureofcities #urbandevelopment

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Ethernet always wins. It has already adopted most of the features of Infiniband. Now, Meta reports Ethernet is more reliable.

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