YakCon Part 2
Cueing up the conclusion of YakCon
The talk that Kilian Butler gave to kick off Part 1, on productising machine learning research, is online now. You can check it out on our YouTube channel here:
Async week is a wrap, and we head into Part 2 on Sunday, 15th at 1600 UTC. Here’s what we have lined up.
Guest speakers
All-hands intro to YC and 2023 activity previews
Two rounds of breakouts (Fermi Gym or distributed robotics; governance or infrastructure) picking up from last week
The difference will be in our guest speakers. For Part Two we have, rather appropriately, two speakers.
Mike Casey (Farcaster, personal site) will be tackling the difficult question: "Can Crypto Close the $4 Trillion SME Financing Gap?"
Mike specialises in investment and entrepreneurship in complex markets facing capital scarcity — whether that's by geography (think Africa) or vertical (think life sciences). It's an interesting playspace to be in.
For example, in this piece Mike highlighted four dynamics shaping global private markets today:
Primary fundraising is extremely challenging
Consolidation is transforming the strategic landscape
The difficult macro environment is necessitating novel liquidity solutions
Crypto is emerging as an institutional asset class
Mike will be providing some insight into how these dynamics—and others—are unfolding and the impact they're having.
Our second speaker is Dan Grover (personal site, LinkedIn). Dan—designer, engineer, entrepreneur—will be expanding upon and contextualising his essay, Simulation Games Might Be What The World Needs Now.
Spoiler alert, but my favourite snippet from this piece is as follows:
"Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke argues a similar point] – positing that games like Factorio teach transferrable skills for dealing with complex strategic tradeoffs that aren’t taught in business books. It’s difficult at first to imagine this at first with a game like Factorio in particular. After all, it doesn’t even come close to simulating reality – its object is to build and streamline a factory on a hostile alien planet whose purpose seems, perversely, to be to produce the materials needed to further expand the factory.
But even the most unrealistic sim games speak directly to this ever-present, essential, structural truth to the reality we inhabit. These games reenforce that the world is always more complicated than it looks. They teach us that the laws governing the material outcomes we live with don’t care at all about our virtue or intentions – that the Covid virus doesn’t care whether you trust Tony Fauci and the supply chain doesn’t care whether you’d prefer the items you purchase be made in your own country. And most importantly, they teach us how to model, analyze, and problem-solve in the face of such a complex, cruel, and indifferent world and ignore hucksters offering us easy remedies."
And that's just the speakers.
YakCon Part Two is shaping up to be as fun as Part One. Come and join the party. Register for Part Two here and go here to access to the YC Discord.