Q3 2024

personal news, thoughts, photos and links from the past 3mo

Oct 24, 2024

San Francisco 🌁

Since returning from San Francisco in August, I’ve been thinking a lot about the city, the industry it hosts, and the people who work there.

Immediately, it’s abundantly clear that the city was unlike anywhere I’ve ever been. From the moment you walk by the robot baristas in the terminals of SFO, to a conversation with your ex-startup founder Uber driver, and the venture capital gossip overheard in cafes — you realize you’ve entered America’s future factory.

I was there to help run ODF22 with the team, a fellowship program we run for early-stage founders five times a year. Being in the company of Julian and Noemie who know the city like the back of their hand was an awesome privilege. The weeklong program took the founders (and by proxy, me) all over the city: startup office to startup office, neighborhood to neighborhood.

All around me, I saw evidence of people who not only could tell the future but were also able to summon it. A city that not only accepts but encourages people (with tens of billions of dollars per year) to make these outrageous bets. It’s been nearly 200 years since the original gold rush in San Francisco, but to this day there are still people selling shovels (Nvidia, Stripe, Salesforce) and then those flocking to mine for gold with them. Only now, they’re mining astroids or trying to make dogs live longer.

California has a long history of turning prophecy into reality. A novel written in 1500s Spain described a magical island rich with pearls and gold, populated only by women. It was actually named after the supposed leader of the Island, Queen Calafia. While California (which was literally mapped as an island for hundreds of years due to the allure of this novel) wasn’t, in the end, inhabited only by women, it was in fact in possession of large quantities of gold.

Many head to California in pursuit of dreams that, to the naked eye, lack basis in reality — yet sometimes when you push and push and push some more, you can will these dreams into existence. That’s what I love about San Francisco.

Updates 🗞️

Progress has been exciting with Merge Club! We started Merge as a community for young grant recipients — many of whom are geographically and capital-constrained. Wherever they live, most under their family’s roofs, we want them to be able to access an awesome group of technical friends and make progress on their projects.

This quarter we also tried out giving grants of our own. We cut $100-$1,000 no-strings-attached checks (and accompanying perks) to high school and college students working on great ideas. From a headband device to monitor the glymphatic system (which can pick up early markers of neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc.) to a no-code platform that allows governments, universities, and individuals to utilize LLMs for endangered language preservation, grantees have been making great strides. Want to meet them? Read our Q3 update where we go into more depth on each of the grantees and their projects here.

We’ve also been recording podcast episodes with community members and our grantees. These episodes are often the first long-format recordings for them, acting as great time capsules for high-potential teenagers. You can check out our episodes on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple. I loved our conversations with the past two guests, speaking on topics ranging from why phages might be the single most underrated organism in biology to how a 14yo grew an education non-profit to 1,500 students across 20 schools in rural China. Give them a listen!

My bigger-picture hope with this work is to 10x the number of breakthroughs we see in the upcoming decades. I firmly believe we can do this by increasing the amount of non-dilutive capital going into the hands of young people building ambitious things. We’re experimenting with different ways of accomplishing this and will be shipping more soon. In the meantime, if you’re someone interested in backing the next generation of technologists and founders, even in a small way, shoot me an email.

We also had our first larger meetup in SF while I was there which was a blast - Pinball and Pizza 🍕🎰

Numbers 📊

UltraRice 🌾

$13.7k+ in the bank (13% decrease)
In the throws of research

Photography Lounge 📸

20.5k+ members (10% increase)
12.1M+ messages (11% increase)
700k+ images sent (13% increase)

Bagel Fund 🥯

$5k deployed
14 grantees

Read our Q3 update with the list of Bagel Fund grantees and their projects here.

Links 👀

Must-watch shows and movies 🎞️

First Man, Netflix

The Sound The CIA Doesn’t Want You to Know About, YouTube

In Her Place, Netflix

Ripley, Netflix

The Truffle Hunters, Netflix

Top-notch resources and links 🔥

The Mind of Marc Andreessen, The New Yorker

Puritans of Venture Capital, Investing 101

Grant Guide, Merge Club

Founders and Customers: Love and Service, Julian Weisser

Palmer Luckey: American Vulture, Tablet Mag

Scrapbook 🤳🏼

Here are some photos from California. I’ll be heading to San Francisco again in November which will be great for my photo albums and bad for my film budget. I was also selected as Lomography’s photo of the day recently which was an unexpected win - check my film profile out here.

Thank you to alexa, jack, julian, and mom for reading drafts of this.

see you next quarter 👋🏼

Ari's Quarterly

Discussion about this post