Will Robbins
@whrobbins
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General Partner @contrary: Ramp, Anduril, Zepto. Personal investor: Rippling, Epic Games
Joined September 2013
Red Bull is worth 20B, Monster is worth 50B. Someone should build an energy drink brand for the productivity-chasing professional managerial class.
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Has anybody ever pejoratively described the airlines as a "Boeing wrapper".
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Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low status.
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Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low status.
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One of the stated reasons that Travis Kalanick was booted from Uber was his extreme spending on the autonomous division. Just 6 years later, it's increasingly likely that TK was the only one who correctly acted on the future.
I’ve been taking the driverless robotaxis around SF. They’re safe and fun. Also slower and less efficient than Ubers, because they’re strict rule followers. What’s wild is that we’re back to a world human-taxis are expensive and hard to find. Suddenly it’s easier and cheaper
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Zepto grew to millions of users in less than 3 years. I flew to India to discuss with @aadit_palicha and @v0hra.— how to build an online grocer.— what growing up was like for India's newest tech icons.— Zepto's four values. Watch the full video we recorded in a warehouse:
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I've become convinced that charisma is 75% physical energy level.
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@BackpackerFI I used to work at a startup that advertised on Craigslist. It was a tedious challenge to post ads and give them our money. Wonder how many billions they’ve left on the table by doing zero product innovation in a decade.
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Instead of sponsoring base jumping stunts and monster trucks, simply sponsor chess tournaments and YC demo day.
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Zepto has announced a $665 million round on a $3.6 billion valuation. @aadit_palicha and @v0hra are thinking on 20+ year time horizons, and have never failed to do something they said they would do. Since Aadit would tell me that fundraising is not milestone worth celebrating,.
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The untold history of many great companies — from Facebook to Snapchat — include very young founders working closely with top people decades their senior. E.g. 20 year old Zuckerberg hired 40 year old Jeff Rothschild (2-time IPO billionaire) as his founding engineer.
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2500 words on Contrary's hiring process and lessons learned interviewing 100+ venture investors
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LA is the "barbell" startup scene. Every company is either a fake web3 creator economy startup, or a hardcore industrial manufacturing co that calls itself a tech startup. No in-between.
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I remember being at a career fair when @scale_ai was quite young. Everyone at the event had recruiters collecting resumes. But @alexandr_wang printed out a really hard probability theory question, and a dozen people were sitting around trying to solve it. Totally different.
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Remarkable that in Silicon Valley elite circles there is more talk about longevity drugs like metformin than on getting real nutrients from real foods.
From obesity and microbiome decline to autoimmune disorders, the modern industrial diet has become a species-level biosecurity threat. Today from @davideoks .
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Speed is a massive advantage for VCs. We aim for:. - Monday intro call.- Tuesday full-team call .- Wednesday formal offer .- Thursday references, discussion .- Friday signing, wiring, portfolio onboarding. But it's surprisingly hard to execute this pace.
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@zanemountcastle I was stunned how quickly competitors emerged. There was lots of narrative which made it feel like a singular advance. Not sure what to make of that!.
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Read the leaked email written by 23 year old Evan Spiegel discussing:. - fundraising during hyper-growth chaos.- turning down the FB acquisition offer.- thoughts on the market generally.
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🚨1/ We've raised $75M for our third venture fund!. @contrarycapital exists to relentlessly support the world's most talented founders for life. Can't wait for everything we have in store (beyond a nice new website at !
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Notice that "minutes worked" is a metric that Devin shares with users. The first AI company to successfully sell their software as *labor* rather than *SaaS* will print money. Imagine if ChatGPT charged you $20 per "hour of research" rather than $20/month flat rate.
Devin is 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 at data extraction. Over the past few weeks, I've been scraping data from different blogs and Devin. 1. writes the scraper to navigate the website.2. executes the code.3. returns a labeled CSV file. Devin is a multi-step agent that actually works 🤯
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🚨 Dropping a new role in venture! 🚨. I'm looking for a Chief of Staff to do everything alongside me and the investing team. High agency role. Optimizing for talent, not credential.
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You can grow on Twitter by 1) constantly posting “serious” opinions about an ever-expanding list of topics or 2) memeing with increasing absurdity and irony. Weird things happen when these two strategies occupy the same timeline.
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Another idea would be to systematically show how weak the peer review process is in some fields. It’s not just a plagiarism problem. Hire 1000 Alan Sokals and let them repeat the Sokal Affair.
My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source. Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story.
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Stopped at a red light in San Francisco, sketchy guys will leer at me. Stopped at a red light in Mumbai, a friendly guy knocks on the car window and sells me a bootleg copy of Zero to One for 500 rupees. What a special place 🇮🇳
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With @BillAckman's recent Harvard work, I thought back to this side-by-side comparison. I would recommend reading the full 1978 and 2022 commencement addresses. Night and day difference in scholarship and vision.
Fascinating to compare the 1978 Harvard Commencement Speech with the 2022 Commencement Speech. Both comment on the fragility of the Western world. '78: '22: One is a deep sociopolitcal analysis, one blames social media algorithms.
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Uber driver got paid $10 for a $28 ride. Seeing a rather negative sentiment with drivers lately, wonder what that means long-term for ride share. Had a $120 ride where the driver was getting $50, so we cancelled the ride and split the difference in cash.
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Early Amazon is unthinkable by today's standards. I know of some startups that are 7 days/week in the office, but none like this:
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Emil Michael: America’s Regulation Problems and Opportunities. The great innovations of the past 20 years — Uber, Airbnb, Bitcoin — all involved companies dealing with real-world regulation. @emilmichael led this charge at @Uber. As AI potentially impacts all industries, self
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The modern world is built on the Great Books, whether you realize it or not. @JohnathanBi quit his job to produce world-class lectures on these foundations. See the first release here. I’m lucky to have attended the filming and strongly recommend!.
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@rex_woodbury Goes even deeper - this was the assumption underpinning Marxist thought in the 19th century. It turns out that even in a post-scarcity world, there is still unlimited demand for competition of status (if not subsistence resources) between people. So it makes sense to work that.
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I love the phrase “zero interest rate phenomenon” because it basically addresses “decadence” in a more popular, less moralizing way.
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@paulgb @MidwitMilhouse @krrishd I think it was because some frustrated bank customers thought they’d get more attention and support when popular accounts are tagged in a complaint. So they reply hoping that the top-level poster with 2M followers is factored into the bank’s customer support urgency.
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One of the best career decisions I've made: going to a college surrounded by 100 miles of cornfields in every direction. A few years of relentless focus was exactly what I needed. I can't imagine anything more productive than my time being single in an Illinois winter.
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@nikitabier You get more days you can go outside, but arguably as much *time* you can go outside. No such thing as summer nights - freezing after dusk in LA & SF. And many places are too hot at midday. The sun is closer to Greece or Africa strength rather than Western European strength!.
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Observation: most founders we work with fit 1 of 4 categories. - lucky to be born with overflowing energy.- drinks caffeine when working, recovers when not.- puritanical avoidance of alcohol/drugs.- stringent fitness routine and diet. The energy you have is the life you have!.
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Remember when @pmarca tweeted looking for an app to manage 10,000 PDFs, and then never again mentioned that library of secret knowledge?.
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🚨 The world's supply chain today runs on tech developed a generation ago. It gets the job done — a stunning 77% of all transactions globally touch an SAP system — but the modern economy demands more. That's why we've backed @recurrency, ERP for the 21st Century.
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@RickTheRoofer09 @BackpackerFI Valid!. My guess is not that much since Craig could just hire a CEO for relatively cheap. Marketplaces like this are clearly stable. But still fair point.
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@simonsarris I think a Liquid Death style office, home, and on-the-go form factor is most compelling to people.
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@paulg Would highly recommend @bryan_caplan's book "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids". Walks through all of the research on this and related topics, in an accessible plain-English way. Can't argue with twin studies!.
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Privacy software stack:. @brave browser.@signalapp messaging.@skiffprivacy docs & email.@PrivacyHQ payments. What else?.
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Lots of people branding themselves as investors in fintech, dev tools, "SaaS," "american dynamism," and so on. Nobody's built an investor brand focused on ERP, but it's one of the most epic software categories. Could be a career-making space for someone to specialize in.
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There's recently been talk about the pace of innovation at Google. Search, Maps, Gmail, Android, etc were all game-changing. But what's happened over the past decade?. In July 2012, two titans of industry sat down for a fireside chat. Eric Schmidt, then
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@jbrowder1 Wait isn’t the restaurant one reasonable if diners skip a reservation? That takes tip money out of waiters pockets, and restaurants rarely stay afloat, especially in SF!.
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@JohnArnoldFndtn Now compare commencement speeches….
With @BillAckman's recent Harvard work, I thought back to this side-by-side comparison. I would recommend reading the full 1978 and 2022 commencement addresses. Night and day difference in scholarship and vision.
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My latest in @TechCrunch: a defense of generalist investing. In an era of VCs focused on AI, crypto, climate, and other verticals, the challenge of finding transcendent talent is as strong as ever, and it'll emerge in spaces we don't expect!.
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Being responsive is exceptionally impactful to one’s career. I find myself about 50x more likely to send info or opportunity to someone that responds in < 1hr compared to >24h. Same on the receiving side. Serendipity and opportunity is a terrible thing to miss out on.
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Can't help but notice the symbolism of Hallow (faith, transcendent purpose, and local community) duking it out with Temu (consumption of ever-cheaper plastic goods) for the #1 slot in the App Store last week. Does this Super Bowl ad showdown foreshadow where our culture is
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Contrary hired a research team to study the top 3 reasons that founders start companies. They are:. 1. innate desire to own a single-word .com domain.2. freedom to HQ in The Cloud (parent's basement).3. firm belief that crypto money laundering is a form of "privacy".
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Fascinating to compare the 1978 Harvard Commencement Speech with the 2022 Commencement Speech. Both comment on the fragility of the Western world. '78: '22: One is a deep sociopolitcal analysis, one blames social media algorithms.
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In the past week:. * NYT headlines Hamas' fake news.* TechCrunch suggests that @pmarca doesn't care for poor people.* Lex's interview with Jared Kushner shows that someone ridiculed by media for 4 years is actually remarkably competent. Interesting moment we're in right now.
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This is similar to the “automation will kill jobs” debate of the 2010s. Where exactly do you draw the line between robot that replaces factory worker, and more efficient operational processes that also increase productivity?. Can you ban McKinsey from making a biz run smoothly?.
👀.
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@CalumDouglas1 Reminds me of this video my dad showed me when I was young. Around The Corner - How Differential Steering Works (1937).
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Had no idea that one of the greatest biographers of our generation just writes out million-word books by hand and then transcribes his pages with a typewriter. Another good reminder that productivity tools have incremental effect while focus has revolutionary effect
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The older I get, the more I see that in reality, execution speed is actually correlated with quality, not a trade-off.
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@alexeyguzey It's remarkable to me how many institutions are essentially pay-to-play immigration efforts, or simple status laundering. US masters degrees if you did foreign undergrad, magazine lists of people, TED talks, various awards/associations, etc.
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@FlavioRump @Carnage4Life Switzerland has 800 years of practice running relatively localized governments. LA and California are far more large and diverse yet have no social fabric to incentivize sanity. (I’m a CH citizen living in LA!).
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All the AI companies should be proud to be OpenAI wrappers and argue that they'll drive their cost-of-intelligence down to zero over time. Lean into the "OpenAI wrapper" critique with pride.
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Zepto raises 200M at 1.4B valuation. Most of the dark stores are EBITDA-positive. Doing over half a billion in annualized sales. Epic.
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@varianceswap You assume genius would lead to better health decisions, maybe he’s like Erdos and that chain is reversed!
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@amasad Link for those interested in reading more. Really enjoyed Hard Drive. Best title for a biography too.
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Gen Z will become the “High Variance Generation”. Some have had the world’s information at their fingertips since infancy, some have had their brains turned to mush by dopamine-optimized content feeds. Best way to describe the future is high variance.
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@ChrisJBakke A testament to how much having a mission you care about and a real challenge is critical to our sense of purpose.
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Every time a friend is interested in an investing career, I send them this instant-classic @semil post. "Context" on the world is central to all fields and life itself. In the internet age, there is no excuse for not picking up context left and right!.
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Re-reading my "30 one-sentence views on the venture industry" and am convinced they are still as true as ever
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In the West, there's deep skepticism of grocery delivery. But India is a structurally different market. India may "leapfrog" the Western world and go straight from kirana stores to online cloud grocers. @aadit_palicha and @v0hra are making it happen!.
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True for basically everything, Delian’s right. There were no GREAT sharing economy companies after Airbnb, and no GREAT gig companies after Uber. And so on.
Do most people realize. The Anduril of X. Is going to just be Anduril.
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Who would win: one craftsman in Ojai or 100 SWEs in fluorescent cubicles?. Article on the Mythic Computer Co:
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@Altimor I also find it interesting that the issue is somewhat politically coded in my observation. That’s 1) a problem, and 2) odd since health seems like it should be obviously nonpartisan. (a big part of the effect is due to more obesity, but still it’s a scary trend after adjusting).
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The more that products such as @Replit or @googledocs move work to the cloud, the more pressure for a better browser experience builds up . Not a trend I’d bet against over the next decade. Probably a 100B opportunity.
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If we installed solar panels in some nature-like fractal pattern instead of ugly grids, people might be more excited to install them in public.
Iceland is installing electrical columns in the form of walking iron giants.
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We're about a decade into the "Khan Academy Era" where world-class educational content is free and available. There was talk of "flipping the classroom" to focus on problems rather than lectures. But seems like nothing really changed broadly?. The "exit vs reform" debate will.
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Basic questions such as “is my loaf of bread significantly less nutritious than ancestral methods of agricultural processing” seem to be unanswered and uncared for, for the most part .
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Massive opportunity to build a worldview focused on "social fabric" a la American Dynamism. - country club 2.0.- dating apps that aren't a scam.- sports-league-as-a-service.- what else?. These business models all work. Airbnb had interesting elements of this back in the day.
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New post: a more nuanced answer to the in-office vs remote work debate. The "war room" model:
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@luke_metro And one day if the US fixes high-skill immigration policy, there'll be no need for all these Masters degrees used to launder credentials for the immigration office.
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I would argue there’s no such thing as a low-energy rich *person* either. Find vitality through lucky genetics, diligent diet and exercise, or good sleep. (Or caffeine.)
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What are the most "hardcore" startups to work at these days?. In the academic world, I think of Caltech, Harvard's Math 55, and the Putnam Competition as truly truly challenging even for the best students. Unclear to me who has reached parity with these examples in tech/venture.
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@zebulgar Reminds me of the classic LA Speed Story. Strongly recommend if you haven't read it already.
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"Twitter is developed in code written in Scala, a concise 18-year-old programming language, compared to Python, a 31-year-old programming language that Tesla engineers are currently using.". The people writing these articles have no idea they're completely outing themselves.
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Very well said!. Raw energy is rarely discussed as a trait to hire for or invest in, but is directly correlated with success in my experience. This should be discussed more!.
Society has a hidden energy crisis, and our entrepreneurs are our power plants.
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Counter to the metaverse narrative, it's never been a better time to invest in "real-world startups". Seeing huge opportunity in supply chain, software for physical activities, defense/security, cities, silicon, etc.
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Plotting the market cap of the 72 public software companies. All investors should bow in deference to the power law.
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Looking to chat with all startups building in BalloonTech right now.
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Has any great company been started because of a "request for startups" post?. As tempted as I am to suggest ideas to talented people looking to start companies, I'm unclear on whether startups can be born inorganically.
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My latest in @TechCrunch: what are VCs building in 2023?. Lots is changing in the venture world. Firms need to build moats to stay relevant in the long-run. I cover 6 ways that firms are trying to innovate.
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Vesto has come out of stealth with a Contrary-led seed round!. In this post I cover everything about Vesto's treasury management platform, why we invested, the treasury market, and what lies ahead:.
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@s4m4rn0ld Spot on. Sleep quality, workout habits, etc matter so much for my output and motivation. Hard to justify anything besides treating yourself like an athlete in terms of health if you’re serious about high mental/emotional performance.
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You never actually own a Mythic computer. You merely look after it for the next generation.
I'm proud to announce the Mythic Apollo collection: Reservations are now open — only 27 made-to-order pieces will ever be created. Each piece will be delivered in the order it was reserved.
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Over-discussed: the power law of financial returns in venture. Under-discussed: the power law of reputational returns in venture. This one piece of paper did more for @a16z's brand than 100 podcasts!
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This product earns $30 Billion in revenue each year. Remarkable. We're still so early!
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The middle-aged guy next to me on this plane runs a business leadership consulting firm and has spoken at many conferences. He also spent 20 min googling "difference between copyright and trademark". The confidence of the F500-consultant TEDx-speaker class is impressive, frankly.
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