Video Archives

3D Printing Wowza

If you have ever customized your home setup, or done extra work to make the cable just so, it’s impossible not to delight in the very deep rabbit holes this person goes in 3D-printing custom holders for everything in his junk drawer. I’m in awe. It’s an ad for Bambu Lab, but honestly it’s the kind of thing I could watch all day. So satisfying. Scott Yu-Jan is someone to keep an eye on.

To me, this embodies the maker / hacker / creator mentality that I try to imbue in all the software I work on. How do you make it your own? One of one, but then open source it and see how it gets better.

Bending Spoons

The story of what Bending Spoons has built is very impressive, and I’m a customer of theirs through Evernote, WordPress uses Meetup a ton. I think Automattic’s Noho office used to belong to Meetup. They’ve built an incredible engineering and product culture that can terraform technology stacks into something much more efficient. I think their acquisitions of Vimeo and AOL are brilliant. This interview with Luca Ferrari on Invest Like The Best goes into their story and unique culture. I also always love a good Matrix reference. 🙂

Conversation with John Borthwick

I’m often on the other side, but it’s such a delight to be an interviewer, I really enjoy it and put a lot of work into coming up with questions and shaping a conversation I think will draw out something novel from the person. Besides the Distributed Podcast, I’ve had a chance at events to interview great minds such as Steve Jurvetson, Patrick Collison, Dries Buytaert, and now John Borthwick.

We discussed his early investments in Airbnb and Tumblr, what made the NYC tech scene so special back then, and how it has evolved since. We also touched on the recent mayoral race, where Betaworks fits into the city’s tech ecosystem, and delved into one of my favorite topics: the comparison between open-source and proprietary models in AI.

Boom & Deepseek

What an exciting time to be alive. I was hipped to Deepseek by Andrej Kaparthy’s tweet the day after Christmas, it was clear then that something big had happened and that it was truly open source and open weights (not this fake Llama stuff). It’s been fun to see the rest of the world catch up to it, and how radically accessible and deployable these models will be for people to hack on. I don’t have any comment on public markets or stocks.

The other super inspiring thing today was Boom’s first supersonic flight. It’s worth watching the video. We’re 4-5 years away from halving flight times with supersonic flight. In that same timeframe we might have something even more dramatic from SpaceX, like Houston to Tokyo in 30 minutes. Really cool to see the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation around all of these things. It’s tempting to get distracted by drama (WPE and legal battles), but there’s such freedom and joy in just continuing to build, to engineer, to solve problems. I’m so grateful I get to do so every day with such incredible colleagues at Automattic.

Carmack & Rogan

I guess something has changed with the Joe Rogan / Spotify deal and now all the old episodes are on YouTube again, which means the gems from the archives can now pop up. I was alerted to this conversation between Joe Rogan and John Carmack, and it’s pure gold. I know I’m five years late in watching this, but that makes it even better because it’s so prescient. Joe asks amazing, in-depth questions that reveal deep domain knowledge, and it sparks John Carmack to make observations that are quite wise. No filler. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see both Joe and John being absolutely right. This is one of my favorite podcast episodes ever.

Paul Davids and Jacob Collier

I know I share a lot of Jacob Collier content, but this one is particularly interesting because you can see him learning things in real-time, exploring an instrument that is not his native tongue but he’s already world-class in. It’s so interesting to me the polymath musician friends I have who can play so many instruments how they bring the technique and language across their learning, and this video illustrates it well.