Spring at last! Celebrating my birthday and a board meeting this week. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups. Here are five fragments that stood out to me last week…
The Print Shop trucked in none of the traditional rationales for home software: it digitized no knowledge, created no efficiencies, and quantified nothing. Instead, the appeal was in the sheer novelty of customization, of endlessly combining borders, fonts, text layout, and graphics into personalized mementos or forms of public communication. Rather than feel constrained by The Print Shop’s limited design capacities, users found delight in what was perceived as a computer-aided expansion of their personal creativity.
– Laine Nooney, The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, 2023. Makes me think too of what makes Canva compelling. (Matrix led the seed round, but well before I joined.) It was a joy to meet Laine at GDC last week—thanks to Chris thinking to connect us!
When I joined Facebook to lead the Oculus team in 2017 after the acquisition, one of the many battles I found myself in the middle of almost immediately was the “devkit war”. The Oculus team’s DK1 and DK2 legacy was so strong that it was not uncommon to hear arguments in product meetings pushing for us to launch VR headsets still in prototype stage as “devkits” to end users. Since Oculus was no longer a startup — and had the resources to both extensively test prototypes without launching them as products and run extensive pre-launch developer programs — it no longer made sense for Oculus devkits to exist. This stance often didn’t make me very popular amongst some of my Oculus OG colleagues.
– Hugo Barra, “Vision Pro is an over-engineered ‘devkit’ // Hardware bleeds genius & audacity but software story is disheartening // What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right // Why Meta could finally have its Android moment,” March 12, 2024. The dream of connecting with early adopters and true enthusiasts runs deep—one of the gifts of working in startups is meeting the optimists you could well know for the rest of your life. As a Vision Pro DAU (nearly two months after my first-run experience! I’m typing inside it right now), I appreciated the intense level of specificity throughout this account. Thanks to Ilya for sharing it.
Though it can vary across languages, cultures, and speakers, the amount of time for someone to stop speaking and another person to start in a conversation, is surprisingly fast. On average, it takes only ~200 milliseconds.…Quick aside: Cognitive scientists and linguists don't have a full understanding of how turn-taking happens so quickly, see this review for more. Basically, the time that it takes to plan to utter a word can be around 600ms! But somehow we can manage this on-the-fly and keep our own personal human latency far below that.
– Rime team, “Latency and the Speed of Conversation,” March 13, 2024. Though I’m not an investor in Rime, this article (and many of Rime’s recent articles) struck me as particularly strong instances of my favorite kind of startup content: I learned something, I learned where to go to learn more, and I got to learn along with experts still in awe of their field.
Though officially some of the team still had desks in Building 1945, they mostly worked in 1965 because it had a better espresso machine in the micro-kitchen.
– Steven Levy, “8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story,” Wired, March 20, 2024. This account of the origin story of transformers and the “Attention Is All You Need” paper is full of golden details like this one. So much of invention is circumstantial. See also Jakob Uszkoreit’s closing statement on the conditions for innovation—“It’s getting people who are super excited about something who are at the right point in their life.…If you have that and have fun while you do it, and you’re working on the right problems—and you’re lucky—the magic happens.”
I don’t know if you’re interested, but I’ll tell you because it’s important to me: I’ve always been interested in stories that are rooted in our world and the times we live in. Not necessarily because I’m the most conscientious citizen; it’s because that is the terrain where the greatest stakes are and the greatest drama is.
– Jeremy Strong in an interview with David Marchese, “Jeremy Strong Isn’t Sure He Knows Who He Is,” March 9, 2024. Thanks to Logan for thinking of me and sending this my way. Petition for “I don’t know if you’re interested, but I’ll tell you because it’s important to me” as an instant classic preamble.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com