Top Secret #20: UI Improvements, Puppies, Fractals, Trail Cameras, and Zombie Startups
This week, we talk about the comprehensive redesign of the Tesseral console, activist investors, AI in mathematics research, the Sierpinski triangle, and more.
We landed a bunch of minor changes to Tesseral over the last week, but here’s the big one: we’ve shipped a comprehensive redesign of the Tesseral console.
We heard from users over the last few weeks that the console had felt spartan, which was pretty much in line with our expectations. We knew it wasn’t a great experience. It wasn’t as intuitive or beautiful as we’d have wanted. After all, it was a pretty thin UI laid over a rapidly-changing API; stuff was just jammed in there haphazardly.
Over a few days, our founding engineer Blake threw out the original console altogether. He rebuilt a new experience from scratch. It’s faster, cleaner, and more intuitive than what was there before. There’s always refinement to be done with such things, but this is a much better foundation.
We’ve also been fortunate to connect with some of the teams in the YC S25 batch. Here’s some pictures of an event from last week:
What We’re Reading
Novo Nordisk Stock Climbs on Report of Activist Investor Parvus Building Stake: it’s been a strangely rough year for Novo Nordisk. After leaping out to a huge lead with its Ozempic and Wegovey weight-loss products, the company rocketed to a ~$500B market cap. It’s struggled to grow, though, at least partly due to strong competition from Eli Lilly and compounding pharmacies. Its lame duck CEO suddenly fired, the company is under siege from activists. I think that’s probably reasonable. Novo doesn’t seem all that eager to press its advantage – only now pursuing partnerships with telehealth services. That lack of urgency is expensive.
GameStop bought $500 million of bitcoin: I don’t get it.
Can A.I. Quicken the Pace of Math Discovery?: I studied math in undergrad and considered pursuing a doctorate after graduation. There are definite limitations to ChatGPT and other LLMs in solving math problems, so it’s cool to see these new initiatives to break ground in applying AI to math.
We Asked ChatGPT to Be Mean: ChatGPT can be too peppy, even when it tries to be mean... at least it always has a decent comeback.
Nerd CornerTM
This week, our CTO Ulysse Carion offers up: the sierpinski triangle page to end most sierpinski triangle pages ™
“What starts off as a cool exploration of some properties of fractals turns out to be just that, plus a crazy tutorial on fun things you can do with the programming language Mathematica.”
Other Cool Stuff
Here are some neat links for you.
From The Archives
(2004) Everyone’s Encyclopedia
(2013) Zombie Startups
(2014) HashiCorp Announces New DevOps Management Tool And $10M In Funding
(2014) More Success For The Zendesk Mafia, OneLogin Closes A $25M Series C
(2020) Quibi Is Shutting Down After Raising $1.75B In Funding
Thanks,
Ned