@bloombergbeta; of the San Gabriel Valley; investing in 2050; working to improve the second derivative; looking for troublesome ringleaders!
Palo Alto, CA
Joined October 2007
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Sometimes, all it takes is to find kindred souls to feel like the world is an amazing place.
OH in Palo Alto: I don't think any of us have internalized how much change is in the process of happening. Because this is still the “slowly” part.
James Cham retweeted
I went to Phoenix to spend time with the Taiwanese community. TSMC will invest $265 billion and send thousands of engineers and their families, which marvel at their new lives in the Sunbelt
My first feature as a contributing writer to the New York Times:
nytimes.com/2026/10/23/opini…
James Cham retweeted
The only way to defeat the tide of slop is to raise our own expectations for what great work looks like
A $300M exit, $15M in revenue at his new company, and Quinten Farmer (@quintendf) still runs Tolan on what he calls constant dissatisfaction.
His team includes people from Pixar and Oculus who have won Apple Design Awards.
AI tools tempt teams like that to ship a lot and see what happens: "I think that's completely wrong."
He wants the space AI creates used to be "more demanding of ourselves creatively, right, and more ambitious creatively."
That's why his team keeps going back to the drawing board on Tolan's characters.
James Cham retweeted
It's no longer necessary to debate product experiences in abstract.
You can just build every permutation and see how each feels.
James Cham retweeted
is there anyone in New York that can print and bind ~100 beautiful 150 page books within 7 days
Some VC advice is very good!
"There are some 8 billion of these tiny supercomputers spread around the planet, interconnected via the internet" and we should help them be as weird and personal as possible... kevinkelly.substack.com/p/mo…
Rambler is nice on the new pixel phones but the big disadvantage is that you don't see what you're saying so it misses out on one of the fundamental advantages of a pixel: voice typing has been so fast that it feels like it's reading your mind.
James Cham retweeted
Lots of VCs kindof sound like this: "Your basketball team doesn't have a moat, any healthy human can throw the ball into the basket thingy. "
People who have not run companies before don't understand how much the team matters more than some imagined structural moat.
Surveillance as love language. thedriftmag.com/on-the-grid/
What happens when the quant barbarians invade your industry?
One of the most important trends in business over the past few decades has been industries "going quant."
Think Renaissance Technologies in finance, Obama's quantitative campaign operation, or Billy Beane's Oakland A's.
Applying systematic, data-driven prediction to important decisions improves how an industry works and, more importantly, changes who wins.
I think AI is setting up the next wave. My three bets: trial law, entertainment, and general management.
Why now? AI makes far more information available for systematic prediction and makes it possible to generate and test alternatives that were previously too expensive to experiment with.
In my latest Faint Signals, I explore what makes an industry susceptible to going quant and where the next opportunities might emerge.
What other industries would you bet on?
What Goes Quant Next? faintsignals.substack.com/p/…
Replit + Stripe Atlas + one of Bill Gross’s 1.2 million startup ideas = something you should work on today. idealab.ai
The smartest investor in the world pay Matthew a lot of money to hear his thoughts. Kind of a miracle that he’s just giving them away for free on substack now. Highly recommended!
One of the most important trends in business over the past few decades has been industries "going quant."
Think Renaissance Technologies in finance, Obama's quantitative campaign operation, or Billy Beane's Oakland A's.
Applying systematic, data-driven prediction to important decisions improves how an industry works and, more importantly, changes who wins.
I think AI is setting up the next wave. My three bets: trial law, entertainment, and general management.
Why now? AI makes far more information available for systematic prediction and makes it possible to generate and test alternatives that were previously too expensive to experiment with.
In my latest Faint Signals, I explore what makes an industry susceptible to going quant and where the next opportunities might emerge.
What other industries would you bet on?
What Goes Quant Next? faintsignals.substack.com/p/…
James Cham retweeted
This is an interesting question because the answer is not obvious.
Which, by the way, does not mean AI coding tools are not leading to massive improvements, but, as research keeps showing, the bottlenecks to product improvements are often elsewhere.
James Cham retweeted
Electricity was dangerous before it was convenient. Before it could be widely adopted, we had to find a way for electricity to fail small. (Think fuses and circuit breakers.)
AI needs a way to fail small. A new @common_fabric lab note: commonfabric.com/notes/fail-…
James Cham retweeted
Went deep on AI memory and model intelligence with @jordihays and @johncoogan earlier this week
We've invested deeply in memory at Tolan, starting with our early work in partnership with @OpenAI: openai.com/index/tolan/
(if you want to work on realtime AI memory alongside @evangoldschmidt: we're hiring! [email protected])
“How to build a bad research center” by someone who made very good ones…
www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/…
