Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

It's a terrible medium for science or serious discussion. It's kind of nice for small authentic conversations.

I’m not sure it’d take off so quickly without the pandemic. People have just been missing this kind of interactions. And somehow it works better without the video.

It had early backing b/c the founders were friends of Andrew Chen at a16Z; he was literally one of the first users.

My feeling is it’s not possible to predict in advance what’ll catch. I read the founders tried a few ideas of social networks prior to that the didn’t take off at all.

Paul and Rohan are both successful serial entrepreneurs, they're a very safe bet for investors. Like all founders they iterated ideas, developed MVP, until one caught on and got early traction. Definitely the pandemic accelerated growth, but they would have been aware of it.

But tbh, I only know this b/c I've done the whole pitching to investors, raising seed rounds, developing MVP, G2M strategy, financial modelling, etc. It's less obvious how startups work until you've done it all.

I only have very limited experience with it. Just enough to understand some of the basic lingo and that it’s not for me.

Some ideas are applicable to academia though. Like the whole idea of trying to test the main point of failure in the project first and that failing quickly is a good thing. I found that useful.