1/ Today @Cruise announced over $2 billion of new funding from Microsoft, GM, Honda, and some great institutional investors.

The vanity metric: $30 billion post-money valuation
The real metric: 0 million customers

Wait… what?

2/ Food. Energy. Real Estate. Transportation. The handful of true multi-trillion dollar markets and the building blocks of human life. Substantial change here requires - at minimum - the proverbial “10x better” product. That is a hard thing to build.
3/ Cars are driven by humans. Humans improved safety by ~2x in ~50x years. We suck. Robots are likely to improve this by 100x or more in 3-5 years. That is a big deal. Car accidents are the #1 killer of teenagers in the US, a very uncomfortable fact.
4/ But safety ain’t enough (sadly). Self-driving cars also give you *time* back, one of the most precious resources. They’ll also cost less than using rideshare, which is still priced as a luxury. And soon much less than owning a car. Ours also feel like riding in a spaceship.
5/ AVs will be a major lifestyle upgrade for billions of people, and one that requires almost zero effort to unlock.
6/ Tech to do this is hard. It’s not just AI, but realtime, safety-critical AI. There's also manufacturing, industrializing new tech, and rollout of fleets. Few companies can acquire or already possess the critical mass of talent, capital, tech, and expertise to pull this off.
7/ Even fewer co’s will achieve escape velocity; most will end up being worth nothing. There will be little incentive to use any product that’s not one of the best.
8/ A handful of front-runner AV companies that look most likely to win are attracting substantially all of the best human capital and a huge chunk of the financial capital.
9/ That is how a company without millions of customers can be valued at $30 billion. We've made some incredible progress towards this vision, but there is much left to do. Back to work!

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APIs in general are so powerful.

Best 5 public APIs you can use to build your next project:

1. Number Verification API

A RESTful JSON API for national and international phone number validation.

🔗
https://t.co/fzBmCMFdIj


2. OpenAI API

ChatGPT is an outstanding tool. Build your own API applications with OpenAI API.

🔗 https://t.co/TVnTciMpML


3. Currency Data API

Currency Data API provides a simple REST API with real-time and historical exchange rates for 168 world currencies

🔗 https://t.co/TRj35IUUec


4. Weather API

Real-Time & historical world weather data API.

Retrieve instant, accurate weather information for
any location in the world in lightweight JSON format.

🔗 https://t.co/DCY8kXqVIK

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.