[Founder’s Real Talk #23] Silicon Valley Bank crisis & Generative AI disruption

Haven’t been writing since we had our board meeting and strategic discussions. It was a good trip to the east coast and a good change of perspectives to get out of the bay area bubble.

The SVB crisis definitely caught a lot of people off guard. Crazy to see a bank run unfolding over 48 hours. Panic everywhere, but luckily we had limited exposure and thus moderate risk. All good now, but definitely a good lesson on risk management.

Looking back, I don’t think there was any major mistake in any of the steps and decisions I made since last Thursday when I just heard the news. The only improvement I could have made was to make sure to allocate money under FDIC/SIPC insurance limits and diversify them into several accounts so that we don’t suffer liquidity issues.

Next big thing is generative AI — GPT-4 and Microsoft’s Copilot. Still not sure the total impact on the knowledge economy, but for sure they are (and their future versions will even to a larger extent) going to wipe out a lot of low-skilled labors and positions and render many skills no longer relevant.

They can certainly empower many people, but also will reshape out work will be done and how people are going to collaborate together and interact with tools.

I’m thinking about the future world in this triangle framework:

• Production: AI 2.0 is revoluntionizing productivity in the knowledge workspace.
• Relations of Production: Distributed work + crypto are going to reshape organizational behavior across timezones and geolocations.
• People: driving the flywheel of Production + Relations of Production with creativity (e.g. emotions, meaning of life, motivations, etc.) & distribution of resources (e.g. connections, networks, communities, etc.)