Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• A team at Mother Jones interviews Sam Bankman-Fried in prison, where he continues to argue that there was no fraud. (I was originally sympathetic to the idea that the company was literally such an operational mess that they didn't know they had used customer funds—not that that's an excuse for losing them! But things like using a random number generator to fake the size of their insurance fund are pretty damning.) The interview doesn't press him as much as it could on some of this. For example: ". SBF and another FTX insider contend that it was well known within the company that Alameda had the ability to borrow from FTX and vice versa." There are two problems here. First, an exchange should not need to borrow money, unless it consistently runs into the problem where an over-levered customer gets more than 100% wiped out before they're fully liquidated, which is an issue FTX specifically advertiszed it did not have. And second: FTX had a special rule that it wouldn't liquidate Alameda positions automatically, and would let them trade even if they didn't have the cash or collateral necessary. So saying that Alameda could borrow from FTX is the most misleading possible way to say something technically true.
• John Psmith has a collection of brief book reviews, on enterprise software sales, p-adic numbers, and the historicity of the gospels. All differently-fun topics. It would be fun to see how far back the starting riff, about salespeople having lineages that can trace back to one super-salesman, could be traced back even further. IBM produced lots of great salespeople, and Fairchild Semiconductor, most recent common ancestor to a huge fraction of the tech industry, was actually funded with IBM-heir money. The last section, the analysis of the historical accuracy of the gospels, is lots of fun, because so many of the tests are so clever—they chose period-appropriate names, and they're apparently pitch-perfect for the time period in which the gospels are set. This happens a surprising amount with very old stories: there's architectural evidence for ancient Troy, and some of the locations and characters in Beowulf also show up in historical records. (On the other hand, the Iliad and Odyssey are examples of stories which were first written down long after the events they were based on, which we can see because of anachronistic weapons and military tactics.) Which, if nothing else, means that if you're reading that text, you're reading something that has been relatable for longer than almost any other document.
• Gaurav Ahuja interviews Michael Dell on surviving tech cycles but also missing a few. A fun interview—as delightful as it is to talk about strategy in tech, and big pivots in business models, sometimes the boring stuff has a surprisingly long and lucrative half-life. Also fun because of some of the aggressive tactics Dell used in its early days, like putting up billboards advertising Dell jobs outside of Compaq's headquarters. We probably see fewer of these kinds of tactics than is optimal, because they get reassessed when the company that did them is no longer an underdog, and tend to come off as more anticompetitive in that context. It’s only a matter of time until we see another “The End of Software” Campaign being run at an incumbent’s conference. 
• Austin Vernon on the economic advantages of Standard Oil. The short version is that oil refining has very favorable scaling laws, and that whoever got biggest first was likely to be biggest forever. Actually executing on that is complicated: in terms of how it raised money and how it structured its business, Standard Oil feels a lot more like modern private equity. They raised risk capital and put it to work in a risky business, which turned out to do quite well. One compounding advantage Rockefeller had was that he'd been through more oil cycles than most of his competitors, so from early on he was the safest oil company to lend to. And that meant that he always had access to cheap capital that he could raise in advance and deploy when cyclical downturns stressed his more poorly-capitalized competitors.
• In The New Yorker, Ben Yagoda has an appreciation of H.W. Fowler, who was somehow both a stickler for correct English usage and for refusing to be excessive about things (he was fine with split infinitives and felt that a preposition was a perfectly fine thing to end a sentence with. But despised the use of words like "meticulous" and "phenomenal" in their current sense. One reason to care about all of this stuff is that, because the rules are somewhat arbitrary, they're prone to drift, and that drift slowly makes older texts less accessible. But also, because the rules are somewhat but not completely arbitrary, it can often be a delight to find out that there's a good reason for what looked like a completely made-up rule.
• In this week's Capital Gains, we ask: when does industrial policy work? The libertarian critique of industrial policy is generally correct, in that it really does incentivize bad economic decisions that are good for particular swing voters. But sometimes, there's enough upside to overcome this headwind and still deliver something worthwhile.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• Other than Michael Dell, who are some CEOs who stand out because they've survived lots of cycles, especially if they didn't necessarily call those cycles correctly?

Diff Jobs

Companies in the Diff network are actively looking for talent. See a sampling of current open roles below:

• A startup is automating the highest tier of scientific evidence and building the HuggingFace for humans + machines to read/write scientific research to. They’re hiring engineers and academics to help index the world’s scientific corpus, design interfaces at the right level of abstraction for users to verify results, and launch new initiatives to grow into academia and the pharma industry. A background in systematic reviews or medicine/biology is a plus, along with a strong interest in LLMs, EU4, Factorio, and the humanities.
• A transformative company that’s bringing AI-powered, personalized education to a billion+ students is looking for elite, AI-native generalists to build and scale the operational systems that will enable 100 schools next year and a 1000 schools the year after that. If you want to design and deploy AI-first operational systems that eliminate manual effort, compress complexity, and drive scalable execution, please reach out. Experience in product, operational, or commercially-oriented roles in the software industry preferred. (Remote)
• A leading AI transformation & PE investment firm (think private equity meets Palantir) that’s been focused on investing in and transforming businesses with AI long before ChatGPT (100+ successful portfolio company AI transformations since 2019) is hiring Associates, VPs, and Principals to lead AI transformations at portfolio companies starting from investment underwriting through AI deployment. If you’re a generalist with deal/client-facing experience in top-tier consulting, product management, PE, IB, etc. and a technical degree (e.g., CS/EE/Engineering/Math) or comparable experience this is for you. (Remote)
• YC-backed founder building the travel-agent for frequent-flyers that actually works is looking for a senior engineer to join as CTO. If you have shipped real, working applications and are passionate about using LLMs to solve for the nuanced, idiosyncratic travel preferences that current search tools can't handle, please reach out. (SF)
• Ex-Bridgewater, Worldcoin founders using LLMs to generate investment signals, systematize fundamental analysis, and power the superintelligence for investing are looking for machine learning and full-stack software engineers (Typescript/React + Python) who want to build highly-scalable infrastructure that enables previously impossible machine learning results. Experience with large scale data pipelines, applied machine learning, etc. preferred. If you’re a sharp generalist with strong technical skills, please reach out.
• Fast-growing, General Catalyst backed startup building the platform and primitives that power business transformation, starting with an AI-native ERP, is looking for expert generalists to identify critical directives, parachute into the part of the business that needs help and drive results with scalable processes. If you have exceptional judgement across contexts, a taste for high leverage problems and people, and the agency to drive solutions to completion, this is for you. (SF)

Even if you don't see an exact match for your skills and interests right now, we're happy to talk early so we can let you know if a good opportunity comes up.

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