Last week was YC’s Open Source day for 2025. We got to connect with a small number of other founders and hear from some folks like Guillermo Rauch, Shay Banon, and Reynold Xin.
A few idle observations from me:
Traditional top-down enterprise sales motions are thriving. I feel like enterprise sales went out of fashion for early-stage companies for a while. The conventional wisdom suggested that the path to enterprise ran through a Series C financing and a huge sales team. Doesn’t seem that way anymore.
Demand for well-built, open source infrastructure SaaS is going through the roof. People are building much more demanding software than they used to, and they’re rarely keen to build it all in-house.
A surprisingly diverse set of customers is driving business for some of these companies. We’re well into the later innings of cloud transformation, and all kinds of companies are making big software investments. I’m hearing about huge projects at traditional industrial firms.
What We’re Reading
The Mysterious Flow of Fluid in the Brain: surprisingly, no one really knows how cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) gets moved around. Similarly, no one really knows what it’s doing when it moves around. There’s a popular hypothesis that CSF flushes waste from the brain, but it’s still controversial. The paper discussed here seems to lend some more support to that hypothesis, but it has many critics.
Starboard Value’s letter to Autodesk: I’ve previously referenced Starboard Value’s spat with Autodesk management. Things escalated a little bit. In this letter, the hedge fund claims that management “appears to have embraced an alternate reality wherein it claims strong business performance,” further wondering, “why the Board and management are so satisfied with returns that can only be charitably referred to as mediocre.” Tough.
AI-Generated Voice Evidence Poses Dangers in Court: there’s been a lot of grandstanding, unimpressive hot takes on the implications of AI fakes. This article is really thoughtful. It makes a concrete, simple policy recommendation by its end. I’d love to see more AI policies like this.
'Banal and hollow': Why the quaint paintings of Thomas Kinkade divided the US: one of the most commercially successful artists of all time, Thomas Kinkade still has many critics years after his passing. Wrote one critic of his art, “It's a cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea.” His story is really more interesting and multidimensional than that.
Marin beach covered with thick carpet of peculiar creatures: I took my little dog Fred to Crissy Beach this weekend, and there were tons of these gross little things everywhere. These are some odd cnidarians – relatives of the jellyfish – that float around and collect plankton. They’re notable mainly for their big sail that propels them around the surface of the water.
Gambling with Memes: I’m still a crypto hold out. I have never owned Bitcoin. I’ve never bought an NFT. I still don’t get it… at all. But this is nonetheless a pretty helpful primer on memecoins.
Even More Venmo Accounts Tied to Trump Officials in Signal Group Chat Left Data Public: truly breathtaking incompetence and wanton lack of concern for security. I have nothing to add. Dumb.
Nerd CornerTM
In school, we learn that Lamarckism – a particular model of biological inheritance – is wrong. Strangely enough, modern biology observes some phenomena that look pretty Lamarckian.
In relatively rare (and relatively minor) cases, we can observe that certain environmental conditions shape inheritance. We see this across species – e.g., in rats and humans.
From one of the linked articles:
Exposure of pregnant rats to vinclozolin produced increased apoptosis in spermatogenic cells, which was observed in each of the four generations after this initial exposure
It turns out that biology is complicated! Classical genetics doesn’t tell the whole story.
Other Cool Stuff
Velato: an esoteric programming language that takes sheet music as inputs instead of normal code. It relies on the pitch and order of notes.
Light Pattern: an esoteric programming language that takes photographs as inputs instead of normal code. This is really bizarre.
Vant AI’s Neo1: a new foundation model for molecular biology – in principle a massive leap in the same general family of achievement as Alphafold2
From The Archives
(2009) Author’s guild calls Kindle 2’s text-to-speech software illegal
(2010) Ron Conway’s confidential investment guide: the tech megatrends
(2011) How GitHub works
(2013) Uber’s Kalanick denies pitching investors for funding at $1B valuation
(2015) Look! A PC on a stick!
Thanks,
Ned