Naval Cures Loneliness With New App

Meanwhile, a61z closes a new gajillion dollar fund and the internet hates on the Humane AI Pin

Author

Adam Hardej
April 15, 2024

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A lot of people are saying they like Naval’s new app. It seems cool. He seems smart. Someone who was a part of building Tinder is involved. Everyone is still lonely. Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz raised a new gajillion dollar fund and the internet is hating on the Humane AI Pin.

Naval Ravikant’s Airchat is a social app built around talk, not text

“Visually, Airchat should feel pretty familiar and intuitive, with the ability to follow other users, scroll through a feed of posts, then reply to, like, and share those posts. The difference is that the posts and replies are audio recordings, which the app then transcribes.”

Andreessen Horowitz closes $7.2 billion for new funds

“Online ticketing rival SeatGeek has also reportedly been evaluating a potential IPO this year. If StubHub does enter the public market, it will trade alongside competitors Vivid Seats and Live Nation. Vivid Seats has a market cap of $1.2 billion and Live Nation is valued at just under $24 billion, according to FactSet.”

Humane AI Pin review: not even close

“That raises the second question: should you buy this thing? That one’s easy. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. The AI Pin is an interesting idea that is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways that I can’t think of anyone to whom I’d recommend spending the $699 for the device and the $24 monthly subscription.”

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​In case you missed part of the presentations, you can find the full recording on Twitter here and on Linkedin here.

​If you would like to get in touch with the founders that presented last week, you can reach out to them through Linkedin using the links below:

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​​Eric Jorgenson (Twitter / LinkedIn) is an investor at Rolling Fun. He is also CEO at Scribe Media and author of The Almanack of Naval and Anthology of Balaji. 

​​Christian Keil (Twitter / LinkedIn) is the Chief of Staff at Astranis, where he helped launch their first communications satellite and scale to $1B in sales. In his new show, First Principles, he asks deep tech founders dumb questions until he understands how their tech works from the ground up.

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Not an app (overly nostalgic but still relevant)

Letters From The Editor

Misc. (short for miscellaneous)

Assorted Hot(ish) Takes:

Airchat feels like an interesting contribution to the general idea of how we interact with strangers online. Other than that it feels completely overblown. Niche usage by niche internet communities. Which is fine. The thing I really don’t like is when the whole “we’ll solve loneliness with tech” thing gets thrown around. At best I think it’s just wrong. At worst I think it actively takes people down the wrong path and is negative for humanity.

Andreessen has so much money. It’s a different type of VC and shouldn’t be thought of in the same terms as your typical Seed fund or even growth fund. Separate game entirely.

I think Humane AI is getting more shit than they should. They were early on this whole thing. The models they’re built on top of will improve. The biggest risk they face now is a talent exodus given the public backlash. More than the tech not being able to make it.

Talk soon,
Adam

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