#66 | $306M Fund, Miami, PWB, Curb, Crowd Work, Ed Sheeran

Benjamin Joffe

May 13, 2024

My irregular newsletter on work and play. Unsubscribe at the bottom. LinkedIn

Back from a few business trips. Here’s what’s new with me.

1. WORK

New Fund

It’s done. $306M focused on early stage planetary and human health.

Virtual Events

Both the Health Tech and Climate Tech virtual (and free) matchmaking events are a wrap. In total they attracted about 1,200 investors and 1,500 startups, generating thousands of meetings. I haven’t seen other virtual event come close to those numbers. Have you? Click here to pre-register for upcoming ones (it’s free!).
We held a series of 8 online talks during “Earth Week” with great founders and investors. Videos are here. I used some code and AI to produce podcasts here.

Conferences

I spoke at Hello Tomorrow (deep tech), ChangeNOW (sustainability) in Paris and SIM (tech) in Porto.
I participated for the first time in the VC Platform event held in Miami, which was a nice surprise with lots of talks on operations, content, comms and automation. I ran a well-attended workshop talking about automation and was surprised to be the only one who could code! (here is an example of podcasts produced with AI from a virtual event)
SOSV also held a deep tech meetup in Boston, joined TechCrunch Early Stage, and held demo days for its HAX hard tech program.

2. EXPERIENCES

Miami

I extended my stay after the conference to visit a bit. Here is what I came across:

I had a bit of a 80’s scifi moment stumbling upon dingy pink delivery robots on the sidewalk. They looked both modern and beat up. Apparently remote controlled and offering a lower fee to merchants than Uber Eats, and supported by ads.
I saw a car advertising free self driving rides and gave it a go. There was a driver “car-sitting” and taking over for some manoeuvers, as they were still testing out the technology and customer experience. The driver was a musician who simply answered a vague ad about driving and tech. He wasn’t allowed to have his phone in the car and was reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy during his extensive downtime.
I swung by the Miami History Museum and learned about its business of cigars, the rise and fall of the sponge industry, slaves and more. It also finally became clear to me that Miami’s aesthetics are deeply associated with the Art Deco movement.
The Rubell Museum (modern art) was pretty good, but while Rubell had more famous artists, I liked better the Istanbul MoMA.
Strolled on Miami Beach - saw 3 pelicans in formation fly over.
World Erotic Art Museum. A surprisingly interesting collection there, including pieces from children book author Tomi Ungerer, a drawing by Cocteau and many more.

The Art of the Brick

Visited this LEGO show created by a lawyer turned creator. Some interesting pieces. Lots of tedious work!

3. CULTURE

SHOWS

Fleabag**** & Crashing**
I rewatched Fleabag - truly an exceptional show. My take is that under its guise of depicting the struggles of a young British woman, it’s a story of redemption / self-forgiveness, with a couple of Christic characters. Phoebe Waller-Bridge created it based on her standup show, and the TV version is - interestingly - vastly superior. Out of curiosity I watched her earlier show “Crashing”. It’s about a girl crashing a community of young adults living in an abandoned hospital, but not as good — clearly an early work. I look forward to PWB’s future creations!

Curb Your Enthusiasm Final Season****
A great ending for the 12th season of this show. Larry David’s outrageability is unmatched.

Phil Hanley*** (YouTube)
I came across this standup comic who has a knack for crowd work. I later found an old interview where he describes how his skills grew by accident as he was filling in between bands in Canada, and only realized later crowd work was also comedy. There is some echo with Ed Sheeran’s story (see below).

Dungeon Meals** (Netflix)
A Japanese fantasy animation depicting a team of broke adventurers who decide to “live off the land” (= monsters) in a dungeon.

MOVIES

Dune 2**
A pretty good job. Oddly, I prefer the charm of the David Lynch version (despite its flaws and lower production value).

Président*** and Second Tour**
Two movies 20 years apart by/featuring French director/actor Albert Dupontel as the republic’s president. I liked both though the older one better.

White men can't jump**
An oldie with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson as basketball hustlers. Not amazing but still a pretty good time. There is a modern remake but I didn’t finish watching it.

DOCUMENTARIES

Ed Sheeran*** (Disney+)
I finished my Disney+ subscription with a documentary on Ed Sheeran. It was very interesting to see how young he decided to become a music guy and the kind of work and hustle he put into it. Some notes:

He stuttered following some facial laser to remove a birthmark near one eye, which he solved unintentionally (?) by singing rap songs he liked slowly at first.
He doesn't read and write music. A very common trait of modern musicians. It makes you wonder what music education does aside from producing concert players and disgruntled music students.
He thought that success would come from simply outworking others. Funny enough, singer/songwriter stages didn’t really welcome him so he went to rap stages, jazz scenes, anywhere they would have him. He played 3 times per night. This reminded me of what serious standup comics do: move to a city with a big scene to get more stage time. As I heard before, he “figured out the price and paid it”. Quite similar to what I heard about Lady Gaga’s debut.
He is very selective with the songs he puts out as he has to “live with them”. Quite different from some musicians “filling the album” around the one hit song.

4. THOUGHTS

On A.I.

Amazon/Audible now has 40,000 titles using virtual voices. And it’s good enough. A.I. is coming for many, many jobs — better learn how to use it, or and up like portrait painters when photography took off!

21st Century Sports

Now we’re talking.

Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League: “10,000 spectators and 600,000 online viewers witnessed history as eight AI-powered cars battled for a $2.25M prize.”
Enhanced Games: “Sport is safer without drug testing.” Coming soon.
As a side note, I am waiting for the Mike Tyson / Jake Paul match. Apparently an exhibition match with 16 ounces gloves, 2min rounds. Maybe not the best design for a quick K.O. by Tyson, but maybe protecting the fighters better? I root for Tyson (bets seem to favor him slightly).

Art or Not

“Art” today often feels like a sacred cow. While it has many functions (read The Artistic Ape), its production used to be mostly considered the domain of craftspeople. So there is the idea, the craft then the audience. How to rate the idea and craft of the following artworks?

I asked a guy who was painting a cool mural how he did it. He (1) staged a photoshoot with a friend (2) used photoshop to clean it then “posterize” a version (reducing the number of colors used) (3) projected it onto the wall to trace it (he sometimes used a grid instead) (4) painted while looking at the printed versions of the 2 images. He added an imaginary background as well. The painting part took him about 20 hours over 2 days. Where is the creative part? The photo staging and a bit the background. The rest is all '“busy work” without real difficulty. My rating: Idea: ** Craft: ** (because tedious)
The art nouveau Czech painter and illustrator Alfons Mucha is known for his dreamy posters and product packages. Turns out he took loads of photos around 1900 as source material for his illustrations. Not that different from the painter above. My rating: Idea: *** (more elaborate photo staging) Craft: *** (decoration + color sense)
Visiting the studio of a graffiti artist, who sells black&white graffiti on canvases. I found it fun to realize that he (1) didn’t steal the paint cans (2) painted indoor (3) painted on canvases (4) sold the paintings. Quite a departure from OG street art. My rating: Idea: **, Craft: ** (though I don’t really know how to evaluate this…)
An early Jeff Koons piece featuring neon tubes and a vacuum cleaner - like an updated ready-made from Duchamp. My rating: Idea: *, Craft: * (marketing: ****).
The art market is also a bit of a mystery, with a few tastemakers deciding the value of pieces, often quite unrelated - IMO - to either the idea or the craft. I visited annual drawing fair in Paris and found a good half of the pieces lacking in both…
Eventually, it’s up to each of us to decide what each piece is worth to us.

Music For All

Before you could have 10 million songs streamed on your smartwatch, music used to be only heard when performed live. And before cities, it was in small groups, and likely much more participatory.

I remarked previously how modern musicians often do not have formal music education. I came across yet another example: Michael Jackson used to sing whole compositions into a recorder for musicians to copy later as he could not play well any instrument nor read/write sheet music.

More to come in the next newsletter!
— Ben

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