This thread analyzes the approval of IBIT options in the context of existing crypto options markets. Deribit trades $40 billion notional monthly in BTC options compared to CME's $3B. Though a short squeeze is unlikely, increased derivatives volumes, volatility dampening due to structured products, and an altcoin boom could occur if crypto lending returns. The author predicts compression of basis spreads in Bitcoin futures vs spot and highlights the complex interplay between traditional finance and crypto-native markets.
The EIGEN and liquid restaking tokens airdrop narratives have primarily ended. Other restaking protocols like Symbiotic and Karak might offer moderate-sized rewards. A good play might be to use a restaking protocol for Babylon using Bitcoin, like Bedrock or Mezo. There might be some potential in gaming projects, especially those with NFTs that have been out for a few years but are already written off as dead. Hyperliquid is expected to be great, while Scroll will likely be disappointing.
An influencer shares his rates openly — $1.5k per educational post and $3k for bundled content — to encourage transparency in the creator economy and help others understand market rates.
Apple's next-generation CarPlay, launching this year with Porsche and Aston Martin, will feature an entirely redesigned interface with split-view, a customizable gauge cluster, and deeper integration with car systems. CarPlay will offer widgets and personalized layouts, but automakers like Mercedes-Benz are yet to support these features. The design may evolve before launch.
Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) is expanding to OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus and Teams subscribers, introducing five new voices and a revamped design. The feature offers enhanced accent recognition and faster responses. Enterprise and Edu customers will receive it next week. It is unavailable in several regions, including the EU.
Mark Zuckerberg introduced AI-powered video avatars for creators at Meta Connect 2024, allowing voice interactions across Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Previously limited to text, these avatars aim to enhance creator-fan engagement. Despite minor glitches, they offer a promising way for creators to scale interactions, with testing set for next year.
Figma is reintroducing its "Make Designs" feature, now renamed "First Draft," to streamline the design process by utilizing AI. The feature harnesses AI models like GPT-4 and Amazon Titan to arrange and customize design components based on user inputs, generating a starting point for designs. First Draft offers flexibility with four design libraries, ranging from low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity components. Figma plans to allow custom libraries for organizations. First Draft aims to help designers transform ideas into visual drafts, enhancing productivity and creativity.
Slack's new AI feature, Recap, required more than just expected functionality: it needed to be delightful, playful, and reflective of Slack's brand essence. The design team took on flexible roles and tasks beyond their usual scope to ensure the product's craft excellence. Effective communication and rich prototyping were critical in managing tight schedules and incorporating real user feedback.
Disagreements in digital project design are essential for fostering innovation and better ideas. Effective technical decision-making requires open communication between UX designers and CTOs, balancing user needs, business goals, and technical constraints. By embracing diverse perspectives, teams can navigate trade-offs and transform challenges into opportunities for growth and improved user experiences.
This site contains tools for slicing your font into pieces. It uses a filter to create playful and visually rich variable fonts that you can play with.
A Design Documentation Notion Template centralizes all project details, improving collaboration, progress tracking, and consistency. It supports design processes from the project overview to usability testing and developer handoff, ensuring alignment and efficiency among designers, developers, and stakeholders throughout the project.
Not all UX problems are equal, and their prioritization should consider both the number of users affected and the severity of the issue. Combining the RICE method with Funnel Analysis can provide a comprehensive view of user workflows, helping to prioritize major projects and persuade teams to address larger design challenges.
Accessible design begins with legible fonts that enhance user experience. While sans serif fonts are often more readable, some serif options like Georgia also work well. Not all fonts suit every need. Designs like Atkinson Hyperlegible and Frutiger emphasize distinct characters and spacing for better accessibility across various platforms.
If you're a founder, you know the best businesses are international. But you also know that unfamiliar regulations and establishing local premises make global talent hard to tap.
Building a marketing function from scratch at a startup requires a unique blend of speed and patience, similar to a dual-threat athlete who excels in both sprinting and distance running. To succeed, marketers must be able to quickly spin up new campaigns while also investing in long-term initiatives like SEO and content marketing. By prioritizing clear messaging, testing different channels, and measuring what works, marketers can create a robust marketing strategy that drives growth and revenue.
The software market is facing challenges due to macroeconomic uncertainty, post-COVID SaaS consolidation, and the early adoption of generative AI, leading to a contraction in net-new dollars available for startups. However, significant opportunities remain outside the industries most disrupted by generative AI, with over 85% of winnable IT spend in sectors preparing for AI's medium- to long-term impact. To succeed, companies should focus on sophisticated enterprise sales strategies, demonstrate clear ROI, and build strong product roadmaps that align with customer needs and the evolving AI landscape.
When evaluating startup founders, investors look for signs of "execution velocity," or the ability to quickly take action and make progress. This can be assessed through various indicators, such as the speed of communication, the ability to rapidly revise and improve pitches and strategies, and the swift onboarding of design partners. Ultimately, the fastest and most efficient founders are often the most successful, as they can quickly adapt and execute in a rapidly changing environment.
2024.09.27·
sriramkrishnan.substack.com·3 min read·TLDR Founders
Success in the startup world is not solely determined by having a superior product, as many factors such as market fit, strategy, and timing also play crucial roles. Even the most innovative solutions can fail if they do not address tangible pain points or if the startup lacks a deep understanding of the market dynamics and customer needs. To succeed, startups must pair their technology with effective market strategies and be adaptable to changing circumstances.
The next wave of generative AI is shifting from basic search and synthesis capabilities to more advanced AI agents that can think and act on behalf of humans. These agents are built on four core elements: reasoning, external memory, execution, and planning, which enable them to automate complex workflows and make decisions autonomously. As AI agents continue to evolve, they are expected to have a profound impact on the human-machine dynamic, transforming enterprise applications and infrastructure.
Pricing enterprise software can be challenging for young founders, but there are several strategies to navigate the process effectively. By understanding the customer's purchasing habits, conducting pricing discovery, and offering flexible pricing options, founders can avoid common pitfalls and build trust with their clients. Ultimately, the goal is to find a pricing model that aligns with the customer's needs and budget while ensuring the long-term success of the startup.
Having a supportive manager or mentor can be transformative for personal and career growth, providing valuable feedback, guidance, and accountability. For those without a traditional manager, mentorship can fill this gap, but it requires effort and dedication to find and nurture these relationships. Individuals can unlock the power of mentorship and achieve their full potential by identifying their needs, seeking out mentors with relevant experience, and showing gratitude and commitment.
To become a successful investor, one needs to raise capital, invest in great companies, and add value beyond just providing funds. This can be achieved by starting a fund, which allows for control over the entire investment process, from sourcing deals to supporting founders. Investors can position themselves for success and potentially become part of the top 1% of investors who generate outsized returns by answering key questions such as "why you" and "why now" and developing a clear fund strategy.
The increasing power of LLMs poses a significant risk to startups that rely on these models, as the companies behind the LLMs may eventually compete with their own API developers. This could lead to a scenario where LLMs become "drop-in" AI workers who can perform tasks autonomously, making many AI application software redundant. To future-proof their companies, B2B AI application layer founders should focus on building a network effect, capturing proprietary data, and executing quickly to establish a strong presence in overlooked verticals.
Alex Schultz, Facebook's VP of Growth, advises that startups should not have separate growth teams - the entire company should instead focus on growth with the CEO leading the effort.
In the startup world, it's common for sales teams to claim they can compensate for poor performance in the first half of the year with a strong Q4, but this rarely happens in practice.
Cybernews has uncovered an Internet-accessible, passwordless database belonging to MC2 Data, a background check firm. The 2.2TB database contains information on over 100M US citizens as well as the data of the 2.3M users who subscribed to MC2 Data. The exposed data includes extensive personal information.
Many Kaspersky users were shocked to discover that the antivirus software was abruptly removed from their systems and replaced with UltraAV and/or UltraVPN based on their plan. Kaspersky announced that it would be shuttering its business in the U.S. due to a sales and distribution ban. It informed customers via email on September 5 that Pango Group, which owns UltraAV, would provide customers with continued protection, but did not mention the forced installations.
A fake app called WallConnect mimicked the legitimate WalletConnect project on Google Play, tricking over 10,000 users into downloading it. Once installed, the app led users to a malicious website where they were tricked into authorizing transactions, resulting in the theft of sensitive wallet information and digital assets totaling over $70,000 from 150 victims.
Tenable discovered a vulnerability affecting GCP Cloud Composer that could allow for RCE via a dependency confusion attack. GCP suggests in its documentation that customers utilize the --extra-index-url argument when using PyPI packages from a private repository and follows this guidance internally as well. Tenable researchers discovered that when a package with the same name exists in a public and private repository, pip will prioritize the higher versioned package, whether private or public, and will prioritize the public repository if the package is pinned. This allowed Tenable to identify a package used by Cloud Composer that did not exist in the public PyPI repository and create it themselves, which could have led to RCE if used maliciously. Google has remediated the issue by switching to using the --index-url argument.
Amazon has expanded GuardDuty's capabilities by adding a security agent that can collect runtime metrics for EC2 instances. GuardDuty uses the agent to monitor system commands and arguments and uses event correlation to surface findings in 5 new finding types. AWS recommends using these findings in an event-driven architecture to be able to rapidly respond to findings and potential compromise. This blog post walks through sample scenarios and details deployment strategies.
HKDF is a key-derivation function used for cryptographic purposes specified in RFC 5869. It can be FIPS-compliant for key-agreement and general purposes with specific guidelines outlined in various NIST standards. HKDF-Extract combines keys and data, while HKDF-Expand serves as a general-purpose key-derivation function.
Trustero's patented AI suite unlocks superpowers for GRC teams. To see it in action, watch the GRC leaders on-demand session: _Unlocking the Real Value of AI in Compliance_ [12]. Prefer to work hands-on? Try Trustero's AI questionnaire automation, AI audits, and the AI report scanner — start free with 2x the AI credits [11].
Jenganizer is a tool that maps hidden services in AWS. It does this by following the triggered events of users' actions. When a user performs an action in AWS, it can trigger other events in other services. By following these events, users can identify services that are indirectly deployed by their actions.
Monocle is a tool that uses a large language model to search compiled binaries for specific code like encryption or vulnerabilities. It provides live tracking of analyzed functions and their scores based on search criteria.
AWS' WAF team announced a set of enhancements to the bot control managed rule group. AWS added token reuse detection across ASNs and geographic locations with customizable sensitivity levels. It also added new bot categories, labels for cloud service providers, and labels for automated browser extensions such as Selenium IDE. WAF labels will be emitted in CloudWatch logs for each rule to enhance visibility.