building world models for sports @_tisc | prev @uber @wishshopping @meta @intuit
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2025
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arp retweeted
Arpan is a force of nature
at @_tisc, we are building Doctor Strange for sports.
imagine being able to stop time, see every possible future, and pick the one where you win
arp retweeted
Some things I learned working at Microsoft:
1/ large numbers everywhere. $100M ARR service isn't even a footnote on executive slide decks. Leadership time is too valuable, come back when you're $1B+. Msft ecosystem is so rich that $1B+ sales are common (it's ludicrous how much work goes into closing these). Azure has ~250 services, some are a few mil and stagnant, others in hypergrowth, some are cash cows, you see every quadrant of the growth-share matrix. Imagine the imperial navy with ships of vastly different sizes as far the eye can see
2/ more on immense scale-- the smallest of Azure services run on 10K+ VMs. Large services run on 1M+ (some maybe 10M+ VMs, idk). Msft is stamping one new datacenter into the ground every four days (!!!!), a bewildering rate. Demand is so high, even with all this buildout we're forever capacity constrained. Azure brings in $100B in revenue and is growing 40%+ annually (at this size!!) There are ~225K msft employees. You almost have to think in scientific notation, 10^4 is a tiny number here
3/ msft is totalitarian re serving the customer. It's counterintuitive to outsiders, but the warts in msft products fall out of this culture. For example, it would be easy to improve the Azure Portal. But in all my time working with customers and partners here, I haven't heard even one person complain about the portal UI. Msft invests $0.00 dollars in anything that doesn't serve the customer and is completely unapologetic about downstream implications of this mindset
4/ msft can reshape itself overnight (when it has the will). People argued whether we waited too long to adapt after Storm-0558/Midnight Blizzard hacks (with the benefit of hindsight, we definitely did). But once the leadership team privileged security, everyone's job changed in two weeks. LT tied every engineer's comp to security, centralized reporting of embedded security teams, every org reshuffled its roadmap. Within days everyone was pushing PRs with security fixes. I would have thought it inconceivable to mobilize 200K+ employees this fast
5/ Azure is complicated. Postgres depends on compute, networking, AKS (or EKS for you aws people), secrets, etc. AKS depends on compute, networking, some datastore (probably Cosmos but idk), a dozen other things. Cosmos depends on... you get the idea. When anything breaks, everything above can break too. Some construction crew accidentally cuts a fiber cable in Brazil South, or a dedicated hardware compression chip browns out in storage, or compute failure rate in west eu spikes for some reason, or a million other failure modes. Msft is relentless about improving this, idk exactly but fully loaded probably 50% of engineer time goes into resilience
6/ re lifers who work 20+ years here, SV sneers at this but I now see it differently. I was once on the bridge debugging some IO issue, we call storage, the guy diagnoses it in about a minute, we chitchat, turns out he built NT asyncio support. Or same story but with networking, the guy built NT tcp/ip stack. I used to have a boss here, we were bumping into some problem, she casually goes oh yeah, we hit that when I was working on .NET bytecode. The ex-DEC VAX/VMS database engineers built SQL Server, some are still here. I love bumping into these people
7/ I never *really* understood distribution until I got here. As an example, our team had a customer in Seoul w/ a deep performance problem. We had to fix it to unlock one of these giant contracts. We don't speak Korean, they don't speak English. Of course msft has specialists in Seoul who get to the customer site before you could even get on a plane. There is an office in every major city, a relationship with every major entity, legal experts in every jurisdiction. You can reach these ppl instantly. Claude tells me msft has ~180 offices in ~100 countries (!!) U.S. government has ~270 consulates in ~170 countries. So msft outposts aren't quite as vast as U.S. diplomatic network, but pretty vast
8/ in the 90s everyone was afraid of msft. The lore is that BillG was ruthless. He'd clone you, beat you via ecosystem/distribution strength, and moreover make the ecosystem stronger with the new product. I wasn't there to compare, but msft of today is ruthless about winning, has the will to adapt, and has the wherewithal to undertake colossal projects. Ppl see Teams bugs or whatever and completely misread the signals. Teams is less polished than Slack because msft doesn't care one iota about polish. It cares about winning, and is frighteningly good at it. Underestimate at your own risk
arp retweeted
There is no secret cabal running the world. The consistent bad decisions from leaders you see are due to ideology and entropy. They don’t have to coordinate. Decay is the default. Blame democracy itself, not its figureheads. Government incentives are bad.
arp retweeted
He is correct.
Serial killers don't have above average IQs, for example. There are no masterminds or brilliant schemes. The great art-heists were always just smash and grab jobs. There are no sophisticated criminal subcultures with codes and mythologies.
Almost all crime is just dumb guys with poor impulse control.
The intelligent, sober-minded, and conscientious criminal is a cliché at the heart of so many fun movies that I sometimes wonder if people realize it’s totally fake and in the real world crime is almost all dumb guys with poor impulse control.
boxd.it/h6zc7X
100% true
the world will chew you dry and spit you out
but you need to wake up the next morning with a new zest for life or whatever the fuck
can't be 'bitter'. can't be 'complaining'.
you've got to absorb the harm done to you and then make sure nobody is inconvenienced by it
arp retweeted
truth bomb: this is totally fine!
don't keep your round open forever. raise what you need, close it, thank everyone, and get back to building.
in the valley, when talking to people you already know, direct, no-fluff communication is totally fine. "form" is just in-group signaling and for every VC who thinks you lack it there's two more who appreciate your brevity.
(many VCs unfortunately like to keep you stringing along forever as a form of optionality. don't fall for it, especially not at pre-seed! after all you're here to build a successful business, not raise money!)
arp retweeted
People who never heard of Dunning-Kruger by default don’t think it’s real. And people who are familiar with the latest psychology research also know it’s not real. But there’s an intermediate level of understanding where people have heard of Dunning-Kruger and believe in it.
venture capital is exactly like owning sports teams. Neither is a "real” asset class. stakeholders care 100x more about vanity metrics than actual returns.
No one really cares if the 9ers sell a few more tickets by converting Facebook ads better if they're not winning a lot of games.
no one really cares that a VC has a great DPI if they were not early to Anthropic
arp retweeted
For roughly the same yield as treasuries, you could have a tenant call you at 3am demanding you pay for their stuff after they drunkenly set off the sprinklers.
arp retweeted
They’re using a third-rate model (Sonnet) to perform brain surgery.
The tyrannical reign of doctors, lawyers, and all other contemporary cabals is over. We will spit on their graves as we fill them in.
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
arp retweeted
you know what i think society's real deadweight loss is?
if you are sensitive, you might be tempted to become stoic. to the serious intellectual, the advice is to lighten up so you can be more fun at parties. the idealist is told to spend more time on the ground, the analytical to trust their gut over the faculties they've also spent years developing, the skeptic "ugh, won't you believe in something?" let's remind the competitive person winning isn't everything.
the thing is, we are a civilization of specialization.
when the sensitive person develops thicker skin, they risk losing the capacity to feel the goosebumps everyone else overlooked. when the idealist spends half the week with their feet on the ground, we lose someone capable of maximally seeing what's beyond the horizon. analytical minds give us our tools. when we shame the skeptic, who will ask whether the emperor has any clothes? and sure, we might be right that winning isn't everything, but we forget that much of human progress has been driven by the competitive who didn't care.
knowing your shadows is important, but find your allies. don't water down. the world needs more of YOU.
arp retweeted
Founders: Discovery call qualification flags:
🚩 No specific business impact
🚩 Multiple 'committee' decisions
🚩 Currently using spreadsheets only
🚩 'Exploring options' with no deadline
🚩 Budget discussions make them uncomfortable
Two strikes and they're out of your pipeline.
arp retweeted
my unfiltered thoughts on the data industry right now:
there are too many brokers in the data space. in the last 4 months this industry has become the new equivalent to dropshipping.
i have no issue with that. but if your entire moat is spam calling smb owners all day and begging them to license their data for a micro1 referral fee, you are not going to make it, and you are not the next mercor. most of you are not building anything at all.
to everyone reading this, and the hundreds of other posts on your timeline from 18 year old sf kids claiming $200m run rates please ignore them. these are the modern day elizabeth holmes’.
they're taking one day of contracted (not paid) revenue and multiplying it by 365. the worst i've seen is someone who made $100k off a micro1 referral fee in 6 hours and claimed they're at a $73m run rate (12 (daily working hours) / 6 x $100k x 365).
this is literal fraud, especially if you raise money off of this claim. you see this in a lot of yc companies in recent batches.
the only businesses i see surviving this are the giants that already exist (mercor, micro1, surge ai, turing) and the non consensus bets: consumer data collection apps like kled, robotics data collection companies like build ai and meckaai, etc.
tldr: don’t believe everything you read, and just brokering company data is not a venture scale business and should not be claimed as such.
arp retweeted
Seeing more universities/colleges giving guaranteed admission if you hit X GPA and SAT threshold.
Exactly the kind of thing we need to de-escalate the adolescent opportunity cost arms race. You did enough, you have requisite IQ, well done now please go, date, and be normal.
