Hello from the end of April. 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 caught my eye last week…
Nanite is Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry system which uses a new internal mesh format and rendering technology to render pixel scale detail and high object counts. It intelligently does work on only the detail that can be perceived and no more. Nanite’s data format is also highly compressed, and supports fine-grained streaming with automatic level of detail.
– Unreal documentation, retrieved April 26, 2024. Learned all about Nanite last week and always enjoy finding moments of poetry in developer documentation—“only the detail that can be perceived and no more.”
Many will look to this book to teach them the secrets of Disney animation so that they can become instant successes. Unfortunately, the craft cannot be learned by just reading a book, and not overnight under any circumstances.
– Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, originally published in 1981. Thanks to Anjali for the thoughtful recommendation—I love stealing glances at this book at my desk at work. The stern admonition here strikes me as true of startups, too.
I would always leave my tablet readers at home. Unless I knew I would have a specific opportunity to read while out. Now that I have the Palma, it goes everywhere with me, and I can read on the fly. So for me, yes I will never go back to a tablet style e-reader.
– Reddit user on the BOOX Palma, March 5, 2024. Daniel offered to send me one for some top-secret testing, so thinking again about what qualifies something as an everyday device. Makes me think too about the longform piece I wrote a long time ago now on the history of pocket-sized technology.
The only way to create hype is to get people to see what you see.
– Mihika Kapoor, PM at Figma, on Lenny’s Podcast. Loved learning from Mihika here—I’m always on the lookout for density of insight, and this episode was chock full of gems.
The informal archives of BBS history combine memoir and materiality in equal measure. The scanned pages of a magazine contain handwritten notes and a shipping address. A BBS advertisement is stowed away in a ripped CD-ROM of 1990s shareware. Telephone numbers appear on the title screen of a pirated PC game. These bits of digital marginalia remind us that these are histories of technologies-in-use. These surviving data were not made to last. They were smuggled into the future.
– Kevin Driscoll, The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media, May 17, 2022. I’m realizing that so many friends from my ROFLCon chapter have written books now. Here for it.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com
p.s. Coming up on three years since I first posted “The MBA Decision Guide for Product Managers,” I’m making time this week for three calls with folks approaching that fork in the road who could use some extra perspective. If that’s you, just hit reply here or email diana@matrix.vc with a glimpse of your thought process and I’ll get back to you from there. Or forward to a friend!