Hello September! I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
For any founders in your life gearing up for fall fundraises, I hope they’ll consider Matrix. We’re a tight-knit team of nine former founders and product leaders investing out of an $800M fund (our twelfth).
And now, five fragments that stuck with me last week…
I really view language models as a new kind of scientific and creative instrument, like a microscope for a mathematical space of ideas. And as our understanding of this mathematical space and our instrument improves, I think we’ll see rapid progress in our ability to craft new ideas and imagine new worlds, just as we’ve seen for color and music.
– Linus Lee, “A notebook for seeing with language models,” July 28, 2024. This reminds me of a book I shared in the very first edition of Diagonal: Benoit Mandelbrot’s memoir, The Fractalist. Math can introduce a “new dimension” for exploring all kinds of phenomena—in Mandelbrot’s case, roughness.
Another interesting nugget was that children really needed as much or more computing power than adults were willing to settle for when using a timesharing system. The best that timesharing has to offer is slow control of crude wire-frame green-tinted graphics and square-wave musical tones. The kids, on the other hand, are used to finger-paints, water colors, color television, real musical instruments, and records.
– Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, “Personal Dynamic Media,” Computer, March 1977. Kids have usefully high expectations—this is true in my experience as well. Related: a post I wrote about Kid Pix and generative drawing back in 2022. Discovered by following the trail from the Knowledge Navigator page on Wikipedia; thanks to Curran for the pointer.
Stock methods of doing things are careless animation; very often, moreover, they are based on no observation at all. Frequently, some animator will animate not something he has observed, but something he has memorized that some other animator has done.
– Bill Tytla, a renowned animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios, quoted in The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, originally published in 1981. This gets at something I find important about insight generally and craft specifically: it has to come from direct observation, from primary source material.
I remember [Alan Kay at Xerox PARC] saying, “We have five years to produce the dream.” We were told, Do anything that was our dream, and the company would then take it from there. Sort of this idea that you were creating a whole new industry for the company.
– Adele Goldberg in her oral history conducted by Janet Abbate for the IEEE History Center, July 3, 2002. Went looking for more on Adele Goldberg after reading “Personal Dynamic Media” and found this gem of a longform oral history. Now interested in hunting down more takes on what it felt like to be a part of Xerox PARC in the early days.
On the day the world ended, Lenk Sketlish—CEO and founder of the Fantail social network—sat at dawn beneath the redwoods in a designated location of natural beauty and attempted to inhale from his navel.
– Naomi Alderman, The Future, November 7, 2023. Cal’s reading list inspired me to grab this novel off the virtual shelf. So far so good, with an eerie first paragraph like this one. “Designated location of natural beauty”—what kind of future is this?!
Until next time,
Diana
diana@matrix.vc
Love these fragment articles! My favorite hobby is rabbit holing or bread crumbing! Thanks for more to explore. I’m off to read