Building @esquisse_camera. Prev: https://xitter.gq/t.co/dH5RWGv2iq & https://xitter.gq/t.co/LFI3YSMpUw (acquired).
Joined February 2011
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America and Europe needs this (especially the network of suppliers that can iterate fast and do small MOQs)
China has a hardware YC. They want 10% for about $70k.
I went to XbotPark in Songshan Lake today. Same professor network that helped birth DJI. DJI products are still on the wall. Hard-tech incubator with a real campus, camps, mentors, and a shared factory.
What they told me on the tour:
• About $7k non-dilutive, just to explore
• Then about $70k for 10% once you're building a demo
• Later angel around $420k to $700k
What they emphasize is the shared factory, suppliers who will take a tiny MOQ, and coaching on product definition.
Average founder age here is about 20. Lots of students. Li Zexiang has said publicly that C-end is for people in their twenties, and roughly "over 30, don't do C-end."
Curious what hardware founders would take that deal for.
Here's the issue with personal assistant: they good at assisting you but most people don't need any assistance at all.
Booking a flight ticket isn't a hassle if you're doing it 1x a year. Answering emails suppose you have a lot of non-work emails to answer.
Most people are bored when they're not working, they're not SF techies who always have more stuff to do.
I'm very bullish about these in the work place, not so much for personal life.
Very good example of why investors should give money to @esquisse_camera instead: lean team, reasonable valuation, predictable outcome and we build software and data along the way.
But sure ai soft porn factories are nice too.
.@pitdesi explains why even a $1 billion unicorn is no longer a great outcome for seed investors as AI startup valuations skyrocket:
"A lot of seed rounds are being done at $100 million valuations. If this company's worth a billion dollars, a unicorn, it actually still isn't that great of an outcome for me."
"If I was investing at $100 million valuations, I would need a lot of $10 billion-plus outcomes. There aren't that many $10 billion-plus outcomes in history."
"I went to a seed summit yesterday. Some folks were like, I’m a seed investor, but I invest in companies sometimes at $200 million valuations."
"Man, it's just hard to make the math work. My brain hurts thinking about that."
@btv_vc
Here’s my take: there’s an M-shaped future for the US stock market:
- Short term: bullish. Sure, it crashed today, but (1) it comes after a record streak of strong performance, (2) you’d have to be a fool to bet against US tech, and (3) P/E ratios are not absurd.
- Medium term: bearish. At some point, I think the US will be held back by its underfunded, poorly maintained infrastructure and societal divisions. This is when we’ll stop treating China as an outsider and more like the new imperium it is.
- Long term: super bullish. The US is the only developed nation that keeps making babies, and I think the philosophical roots of American society are much, much stronger than most people believe.
Things I still have no clue about: when the breaking points will happen, whether the US and China can coexist (I think they can), and whether robots can substitute for humans.
The timing of today's market crash is noteworthy.
As selling pressure spreads, the Nasdaq 100 is now down nearly -5% on the day.
Meanwhile, the market-implied odds of a Democrat "sweep" in the Midterms next week has surged from 65% to 72% today, a record high.
That's +7 percentage points in 2 days amid this market downturn.
We have yet to receive a comment from the Trump Administration regarding the current situation in the market.
However, what is clear is that the timing of today's market crash will be consequential.
And, even as technology stocks drop sharply, US Treasury Yields are barely seeing any relief.
This leaves us with high rates, a falling stock market, $100+ oil prices, and rising CPI, PPI, and PCE inflation.
Next week is going to be interesting, to say the least.
I’ve been wanting to upgrade to the Oled MacBook Pro for the past 2 years and now it’s there I’m not sure I want it anymore.
I’m currently on a 12hr flight to sf and haven’t touched my MacBook once. I connected it to WiFi when we took off, launched Claude and have been interacting with it through my phone.
I like the comfort of having an actual keyboard and screen but do I really need a $3k mbp for that…?
This is a perfect example of how distribution is everything and the rest doesn’t matter much.
So I recently badgered my cinematographer @steveyedlin into making my ideal iPhone still camera app. It shoots RAW, bypasses the iPhone's look processing and instead uses the same image processing we use on our movies. apps.apple.com/app/apple-sto…
There are two ways out of this:
1) break up the eurozone
2) let inflation slip
I don’t bet on #1
The AfD can end it if they want, but it would mean that Italy and Spain won't be buying as much German stuff anymore. Absent a sudden surge of extra-EU competitiveness, German factories would take the hit. These claims built up because Germany entered the euro at too low a level vis the deutschmark, and screwed down on labour costs with the Hartz labour market reforms. At the same time, the Latin countries suddenly had access to much cheaper capital (debt). So, Spain, Italy, et al started consuming much more than they saved (they bought more stuff from Germany than Germany bought from them) and Germany saved more than it spent (they loaned money/sent capital to those countries to fund the purchase of German stuff).
This, in fact, is the core problem of the eurozone: it is unbalanced. Unwinding it would be painful on both sides: Italians and Spaniards would have to accept much lower standards of living, and Germans would have to accept industrial job losses. This is made worse by the present geopolitical circumstances and the fact the euro does not allow the simple revaluing of various free-floating currencies to restore balance. Instead, the Italians and Spanish would have to grind down on wages to force deflation, which would make their debt metrics worse (because the Germans absolutely refuse to engage in inflationary policies) -- all against a nasty and inflationary geopolitical backdrop. It's a problem.
It’s true, but I can be a founder with a 0.01% chance of a successful exit while making serious money along the way, whereas there’s a 0.00% chance I can be an anthropic employee.
But, yes, if you’re smart, please let us monkeys build companies cause we don’t know what else to do.
if you had 2 cofounders, raised from top teir vc, exited for a few billion dollars, you still wouldnt make as much as employee #400 at Anthropic will from the IPO.
Just let that sink in for a moment
My cofounder and I started @esquisse_camera mostly thanks to AI. It's essentially an AI-led company at this stage. It started out of necessity because the camera market is small and we had to be super capital-efficient.
One of the perks I hadn't seen coming, but that seems obvious in hindsight, is that part of our progress comes directly from advances in the models we use.
For instance, we've done more since Opus 5.5 came out than we did in the rest of 2026 combined. It's like having a whole team of engineers with IQs of 160.
And when things go wrong, it's mostly because we left something out of the specs or didn't think of something when writing our prompts.
This makes me very optimistic!
As a result, what I wrote a year or so ago aged poorly: xitter.gq/compose/articles/edit/…
What matters:
- Network & access (getting your hands on the right parts is hard)
- Community & distribution
- Data
Côme retweeted
please listen to dessa.
i have never heard anything artificial that sounded so… human.
if you ever doubted that human-ai-relationships were going to be a thing. well. this snippet will convince you otherwise.
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
I think one of the reasons for this is the total lack of investors who can back entrepreneurs building rapidly profitable businesses. They’d need to simultaneously a) provide a large investment amount and b) hold it for a few years until some liquidity (OBO, LBO, or dividends) is provided.
For instance, I know I’ll need to raise at some point with @esquisse_camera. Let’s say $2–3m. I won’t really need funding after that (or it’ll come through debt). But it’s probably going to be 5–7 years before I can do an OBO or pay dividends. As a result, that doesn’t work for VCs, and it’s going to be a long, tedious process to assemble a business angel syndicate.
Same story with CitizenPlane.com. We raised a $1.3m seed round (yeah, you know the 2010s were different lol) with a VC and never ever touched it. Except we have no pre-agreed way to return that money, although the company makes a couple millions EBITDA every year.
So I think this calls for a vastly different kind of structure that is compatible with the seedstrap model. It’s probably more akin to PE btw. I hope we’ll get there soon. Founders need it.
