Pratap Ranade

The equivalence between entropy (thermodynamic) and entropy (information theory) will be the key to ASI and also to quantum gravity. Bits = Joules / Kelvin.

This is a dream job for fellow applied physicists

It's inspiring to see fusion move from R&D to commercialization. @TheArenaAI will be at @iterorg HQ in France next week to share how AI is accelerating this transition, alongside commercial fusion leaders: @proximafusion @GeneralFusion @StartorusFusion @FLFusion @ericschmidt @MarvelFusion @deutelio @TheaEnergy @GaussFusion @renfusion @CFS_energy

@TheArenaAI @iterorg @proximafusion @GeneralFusion @StartorusFusion @FLFusion @ericschmidt One of our very own physics PhDs, @m__frei, will be giving the talk – tune in at 9a CET on Tuesday

The best metric for human technological progress = The Kardashev scale. We aren't even at level 1: Type I civilization: Access all energy on its planet Type II civilization: Directly consume a star's energy Type III civilization: Capture all energy from its galaxy https://t.co/S0CB7C4byg

550kph, flying at 13ft above the ground with stubby little wings, by utilizing ground effect. The Lun-class Ekranoplan was designed in 1975 as a soviet high-speed troop transport. Our thinking has been stunted through pattern-recognition. We see planes, helicopters, quadcopters. They are just a few viable form factors for flying machines. It's time to go back to physics and first-principles thinking to unleash the next hardware revolution.

In honor of @ycombinator's 20th anniversary, here are my 6 favorite lessons: 1. The 7 minute espresso rule: Our first meeting with @sama lasted just seven minutes. The batch hadn’t even officially started yet and my cofounder @ryanrrowe and I drove down from Mountain View to the tiny SF YC outpost to meet him. Sam was making an espresso when we walked in. He opened with – “have you launched”? We said no, too many bugs. Our product, kimono, made it easy to just point and click to build a web scraper. Our promise was to get you an API in 60 seconds, without writing a single line of code. But, the web is vast, and websites are very different. We needed it to work on a large enough spectrum of sites so that our first users would have a good experience. It worked on just a handful of sites at the time. Sam pushed us to make sure we were launched in less than 2 weeks. We debated, highlighting the complexity of the bugs and the limits of underlying headless browsing technology. The espresso finished brewing, he picked it up, looked at us and said, “well, you better get going then and fix those bugs”. We left, launched within those next two weeks and learned one of the most important lessons that day - speed matters. Ship something you’re embarrassed by. 2. There are no experts. Ryan and I were not prepared for the rapid influx of user on launch day. We did 88 user interviews to validate our product idea, and everyone basically said they wouldn’t use it. We thought they were wrong and built it anyway. It got tons of traffic on day 1. We didn’t sleep in the 48 hours following because our servers and database kept crashing. We hadn’t indexed it properly. We realized we weren’t the experts and needed to hire one. We went over to @mwseibel's apartment for advice. Michael smiled and told us about the early days at SocialCam, that eventually became Twitch – experts thought the streaming video problem was too hard to be possible. The answer wasn’t hiring an expert, but hiring someone young, capable and naïve enough to give it an earnest try. So we opted to just figure it out ourselves. 3. Messages in Pizza Boxes. Startups win through incredible customer service, then through product, not the other way around. @mwseibel told us how SocialCam’s streaming infrastructure went down while a key teammate was unreachable off-grid in a Tahoe cabin for the weekend. Normal people would have waited until Monday. Not Michael. He called a local pizza delivery place and asked the delivery person to send a large pizza with an urgent message in the box to the cabin. Their infrastructure was back up in hours. 4. The Twinkle can matter more than the TAM. Ambition matters just as much as practicality. Before demo day, we were struggling with the end note of our pitch. We knew the value of our product, and had a fanatical and fast-growing user base, but the market size we calculated either seemed so ridiculously big that it was not plausible, or so narrow that it was equally silly. @paulg and @gralston sat with us and showed us that if we can really pull it off at scale, it would be bigger than Google. So, we could skip the market size, if we really believed it. PG suggested not talking about market size, but just making sure people could see the twinkle in our eyes when we talked about what you might be able to do with a structured copy of the internet that’s larger than Google’s. 5. You’re always at the Origin. Our demo day was successful beyond our wildest beliefs. Afterwards, Geoff Ralston drew a chart for us on a whiteboard. It was a hockey stick. He asked us where we thought we were. It was a rhetorical question. He said we were at the origin, and that the most important thing is to remember that. Sam Altman doubled down. When he invested in Kimono, he gave us a Zimbabwean Trillion dollar note (the result of extreme hyperinflation in Zimbabwe), as a cautionary reminder that the fundraising and valuation mean nothing. We have channeled this into our culture at @TheArenaAI with our ritual around neon shoelaces and a pair of neon track spikes hanging on the wall to remind us that we’re at the Olympic starting line, but we don’t have any medals yet. 6. High bandwidth discussions with users don’t happen over email. The Collison brothers, who founded Stripe, took user engagement to the next level – so much so that “Collison installation” is part of YC lore. @collision told us that talking to users was essential because email and chat conversations were not “high bandwidth” enough. He emphasized the importance of what you can learn being with users in person or talking to them over Skype (remember, this was early 2014!). We took this to heart, and spoke to hundreds of users at Kimono regularly over Skype. One power user @alexanderchung, who I met this way, has become a close friend and even attended my wedding in India. At Arena, we now go a step further and regularly fly to our users. We over-invest to a degree that is almost crazy in order to be more than a supplier — a true partner to our early customers. YC taught us it’s the only way to understand their problems on the ground and really make sure our products work for them. YC taught us to outsource very little. Own the problem. Own the outcome. And if you do, you get to be stupidly ambitious. If you’re curious about @kimonolabs (which we later sold to @PalantirTech ), here was our launch demo. No-code web scraping before “no code” was even a term: Here's our demo day pitch, from 2014. Forever grateful to those above + @garrytan @jesslivingston @tlbtlbtlb

100%. We need to turn Iain M Banks's Culture Series into a show. Humans & AI minds collaborating as equals to build a utopia.

Access to CAD / EDA shouldn’t be costly, and the barrier to learn shouldn’t be so high. Changing this would unlock the creative potential of so many — growing a hardware talent pool that’s in very short supply today

“Manufacturing capacity is our greatest vulnerability. We need more manufacturing and smarter weapons. AI is the only possible way we can keep up with China’s numerical advantages.”

The lack of hardware talent is a real and overlooked crisis in the context of the 🇺🇸 economy

RT @tbpn: We asked @PratapRanade how the tariffs will affect @TheArenaAI. "You have a ton of panic in the system." "It's a forcing functi…

Thanks for having me on @tbpn. If you’re excited to build out the nervous system for autonomous hardwire, we are hiring @TheArenaAI

Today, I'm excited to announce @TheArenaAI's $30M Series B and to introduce Atlas – an AI hardware engineer that is used by many of the world's most respected and ambitious hardware companies – in semiconductors, aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and defense. We’re hiring software engineers, electrical engineers, design engineers, and ML scientists who want to alter humanity’s innovation trajectory for hardware. A meaningful acceleration in hardware innovation will let us achieve space colonization, develop breakthrough medicines, unlock nanorobotics and commercialize nuclear fusion centuries sooner than we could at our current course and speed. Come build with us or sign up for early access (links in comments)! Grateful to our amazing investors – @fifthdowncap , @Initialized , @GoldcrestCap, @ShieldCapVC, @foundersfund, @garudavc, @friendsfamcap , @137ventures , @9yardscapital , @peterthiel, General David Petraeus, @typesfast , @mwseibel , @qasar, @garrytan, @AldaLeuDennis , @lymusing, @traestephens, @taps , @arpanpunyani , @j_richards27 @dougproctor @neelmaster, @CrumbaughK61525, @tolgaoguz5

Apply here: https://t.co/iTWuaGJjNp

Apply for the waitlist here: https://t.co/ECnJnCbUSg

RT @TheArenaAI: (1/3) We're hiring for three engineering roles at Arena! Learn more at https://t.co/vjlQdlTvwt. Design Engineer🎨: Play a c…