Life is a Succession of Lessons

Welcome to?The?Art?of?The?Impossible, a weekly newsletter where I unearth five pieces?of?content which I hope will both inspire?and?embolden you.

PODCAST

This week’s guest is Asif Ahmed, Partner & Head of Early Stage for Tech & High Growth companies at accountancy firm Cooper Parry. He previously founded Acclivity Advisors which was acquired by Cooper Parry and his role at both has been to work closely with early-stage founders and entrepreneurs across all accounting, tax and advisory disciplines - ensuring founding teams are able to help navigate and scale their startups. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts from.

In this episode, we discuss Asif’s background and how the pivotal moments in his life shaped him including his father’s sixth diagnosis of cancer which was, sadly, terminal. Asif took over his father’s business to support the family and this really shaped who he became and what he went on to do in his career. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts from.

We also discuss when a founder should set up the startup’s finance function, when is the right time to raise outside capital, why every startup should have a finance bible, and what one piece of advice he would offer a younger Asif.

I do apologise for the sound quality which is not perfect in this episode but hopefully it doesn’t take away from the important lessons Asif shares about founders and the importance of getting your finance function up and running from the start of your startup journey. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts from.

Enjoy!

QUOTE

“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

INTERVIEW

OpenAI's Noam Brown, Ilge Akkaya and Hunter Lightman on o1 and Teaching LLMs to Reason Better

Combining LLMs with AlphaGo-style deep reinforcement learning has been a holy grail for many leading AI labs, and with o1 (aka Strawberry) ,we are seeing the most general merging of the two modes to date. o1 is admittedly better at math than essay writing, but it has already achieved SOTA (*SOTA is an acronym for State-Of-The-Art. In the context of AI, it refers to the best models that can be used for achieving the results in a task*) on a number of maths, coding and reasoning benchmarks.

OpenAI researchers Noam Brown , Ilge Akkaya and Hunter Lightman discuss the ah-ha moments on the way to the release of o1, how it uses chains of thought and backtracking to think through problems, the discovery of strong test-time compute scaling laws and what to expect as the model gets better.

This interview is conducted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady of Sequoia Capital. Watch the full interview here.

BOOK

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber

A timely investigation of the causes of technological and scientific stagnation, and a radical blueprint for accelerating innovation.

From the Moon landing to the dawning of the atomic age, the decades prior to the 1970s were characterized by the routine invention of transformative technologies at breakneck speed. By comparison, ours is an age of stagnation. Median wage growth has slowed, inequality and income concentration are on the rise, and scientific research has become increasingly expensive and incremental.

Why are we unable to replicate the rate of progress of past decades? What can we do to reinvigorate innovation?

In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber take an inductive approach to the problem. In a series of case studies tracking some of the most significant breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to fracking and Bitcoin—they reverse-engineer how transformative progress arises from small groups with a unified vision, vast funding, and surprisingly poor accountability. They conclude that financial bubbles, while often maligned as destructive and destabilizing forces, have in fact been the engine of past breakthroughs and will drive future advances. In other words: Bubbles aren’t all bad.

Integrating insights from economics, philosophy, and history, Boom identifies the root causes of the Great Stagnation and provides a blueprint for accelerating innovation. By decreasing collective risk aversion, overfunding experimental processes, and organizing high-agency individuals around a transcendent mission, bubbles are the key to realizing a future that is radically different from the present. Boom offers a definite and optimistic vision of our future—and a path to unleash a new era of global prosperity.

Pre-order the book here (out on Stripe 19th November).

WATCH

Wilson Miner - When We Build

Thank you to Michael Nielsen to leading me to this wonderful 2011 talk by Wilson Miner , Product Designer at Apple.

“We shape our tools and our tools shape us.” As more of the tools we live with every day become digital instead of physical, our opportunity?–?and responsibility?–?as designers is multiplying. We live in a world of screens, and we are the ones who decide what goes on them. We are in a unique position to have an impact?–?one that lasts longer than the next redesign or the latest technology. What happens when we stop thinking of ourselves not just as developers or experience designers, and take up the mantle as a new generation of product designers for a digital world?

Watch the full talk here.

Thank you so much for reading?the?newsletter?and?for listening to?the?podcast , and?if you enjoy them, please do share with your network - my goal is to have these stories reach as many as possible so that others can be inspired too. And if you have two minutes, please do leave a review for the podcast - it would mean the world to me and helps others to find it too.

Danielle