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What a week you. What a week. Somehow the news is still there, even if we’re only an inch from the last half of December. So much for a vacation slowdown! First, a few notes on the main news of the week, then let’s talk about vector searches and some final book shots. Into the breach!
- The end of SPACs as we know them: It’s a damn stupid idea to spend time being at the forefront of any given market move – it’s a great way to look silly in public. Still growing smoke around the Trump Media SPAC has Smog levels reached when the BuzzFeed SPAC deal did everything in its power to fail at the finish line, only to lag the public and then lose nearly half of its value. Above? Above.
- Crypto vs. TradFi: It’s not my job to get into the middle of a religious war, but the technology market really has to decide how crypto businesses are funded and built. And the answer is probably not venture capital? This week we saw them Expectations for the IPO of OpenSea did not meet with warmth among its users, but with contempt. Make public? Why not issue a token and stay in the crypto room? Well, because a lot of traditional money has gone into OpenSea, and these investors have to repay their investors in dollars, not digital duckets. How can one solve it? Unclear, but I wonder if we’ll see crypto companies built entirely on traditional financial lines in the long term. Why not?
- Multiple SaaS: I’m sorry I didn’t write this, but we saw one of them sharpest negative movements in software reviews in recent memory recently. Sure, the prices are still high, but not nearly as high as they were. Watch out, overpriced unicorns.
- And finally, Instacart just lost its president: Just a few months after she joined Instacart is hiring a high profile attitude. The exchange wrote a tiny bit about Instacart back in November, noting reports suggesting that Instacart’s rate of growth has fallen back to earth after the pandemic eased. The company continues to grow, albeit slowly. However, slow growth does not allow the company to go public at a reasonable price. So what’s ahead? We have no idea.
How to get insurance coverage for your company. And, vector search.
One of the best things about a tech reporter is spending time with smart people who can explain the future to you. Not in the near future will we be in the metaverse sense, but here’s a technology that will change the way we handle information in the future.
Input Bob van Luijt, CEO and co-founder of Semi-technologies. The startup is building Weave. As with many startups today, Semi is a for-profit OSS company. In simpler terms, it is building a business on an open source project, which is Weaviate.
Bob was kind enough to not only spend a few hours entertaining me through his company, the unstructured data search market, and how Weaviate works, but also scratched the output of TechCrunch 2021 and into a little GUI to ask so I could play around with it.
This is a great way to get reporters to take care of your business, by the way. Not the scraping; that was an added kind of friendliness – but spending a lot of time patiently answering some silly questions, even if the reporter in question has a lot of ground to remodel.
One really underrated skill some founders have is the ability to teach me things with patience
I’m writing about a co later this week because the CEO spent a lot of time slowly walking me through a bit of tech I’d never learned from before
– alex (@alex) December 1, 2021
Anyway, vector search. What Weaviate enables is the ability to quickly search for unstructured data. Microsoft says the vector search “Uses deep learning models to code data sets into meaningful vector representations, with the distance between the vectors representing the similarities between the elements.”
Bob made it a little easier with an example. In a traditional database, you might have data that suggests the Statue of Liberty is in New York City and the Eiffel Tower is in Paris. But in order to collect these data points, you’d have to look for something precise. Using the vector search – via Weaviate or a related software product – you can request the data to show you what the database of places of interest in France contains. And let the Eiffel Tower data arise.
Neat, right? Very. Tinkering with the TechCrunch portal that Bob and his team kindly set upMost of all, one question that attracted me was one they suggested: “Who writes the TechCrunch newsletter when Alex Wilhelm is out?” In all honesty, this is a funny query because of its inaccuracy. Which TechCrunch newsletter? And what does out mean? Well the search results managed to get a bit of text from. to find exactly this column noticed that I had a day off and Anna would edit the newsletter herself.
Very cool. Semi Technologies is a fairly young company, but I’ll keep an eye on it. For a couple of reasons, firstly because open source startups are almost always more interesting than their closed code brothers. Mainly because founders who build with OSS technology have a slightly less harsh approach to business and because I like Bob.
More will follow as soon as I can condense my almost 3,000 words of spaghetti notes from calls into a little more coherence with Semi.
Credit: Half
Book recommendations
After spending quite a bit of time this week are working on our two-part Venture Capital book recommendation list, let’s add some of our own favorites. Of course, grains of salt like books are as personal as paintings, but we can’t help but share some of the best stuff we read this year!
Some of Anna’s 2021 favorites are:
Fiction:
Born to be Mild: Adventure for the anxious, by Rob Temple
According to my records, this was the first book I read in 2021, but 12 months later, it really stuck with me. You may know its author, Rob Temple, as the man behind the hilarious social media accounts and book series Very British problems. But this book is different. It’s an account of his struggle with fear and attempts to get out of his comfort zone. It’s touching, very relatable, and often very fun – if you’re a Sue Townsend fan like me, there’s a good chance you will love this too.
Non-fiction books:
How To Read Numbers: A Guide To Statistics On The News (And Knowing When To Trust Them), by David Chivers and Tom Chivers
This is the book I am reading right now, with the caveat that I am far from finished – but that is very promising. It may add to the backlash in the media, but it makes sense: many of the numbers we read about in the news need to be viewed with caution. That makes it a great read for journalists and news readers alike. The more experienced readers become at reading numbers, the more sophisticated we become in our analysis.
Some of Alex’s favorite year 2021 are:
The salvation sequence, by Peter F. Hamilton
The best science fiction doesn’t just hit spaceships at the world we live in and put an end to it. In fact, the best science fiction reshapes everything from economics to humanity to science and physics itself. “The Salvation Sequence” is a series of books I read this year that did just that. From the economy and alien handling to what it means to really be human and future politics, it’s all there. And it’s a hell of a ride. Can’t wait for the next part to come out so I can read the whole damn series all over again.
A memory called empire and Devastation called peace, by Arkady Martine
There is more than one way to paint the future. Martine designs a future in which the concept of civilization and barbarism collides with art and empire. And memory. And hidden technology and war. It’s more than I can really tell you in a short blurb other than saying that what Martine built in her science fiction universe is almost more art than science. And that’s kudos.
Black sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse
Fantasy novels are far too often a rip-off of European feudal history. Oh your duke is an ass? Better get the serfs to rebel! That kind of thing. And then there is Black Sun, which takes fantasy in a completely different direction. Seemingly inspired by South and Central American traditions, it’s one darn roller coaster of good. Must be read.
The last graduate, by Naomi Novik
Novik is a damn good writer. “Uprooted” and “Spinning Silver” both kicked the ass. But from my point of view, her masterpiece is “A Deadly Education”. It came out in late 2020. And with that began my countdown to his sequel “The Last Graduate”. I seldom count down the days until a book comes out, but here I had no choice. And “The Last Graduate” was great. If you want to meet a protagonist you’ve never read before and enter a world where everything has teeth, check out these books. Read them. You will thank yourself.
