https://colossus.com/mag Articles from Colossus Magazine en Wed, 20 May 2026 08:43:58 GMT https://colossus.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/cropped-colossus-logo-black-1-192x192.png https://colossus.com/mag https://colossus.com/article/scott-wu-tapes-cognition/
Editor’s note: Cognition is a Colossus sponsor and portfolio company of Positive Sum. There is a familiar arc to the type of mathematical genius that captivated audiences in the days when Americans had sex, won wars, and shoved nerds in lockers, and the public face of technological power belonged to the WASP, the good old boy, and the jock. Act I: an explosion of virtuosity on the back of a new proof or theorem that turns a field on its head, making enemies of the dons and prize-winners whose authority it threatens. Act II: a campaign of vindication through papers, lectures, public appearances, and a retinue of loyal pupils, stifled at every turn but ultimately forcing reluctant institutional acceptance, while also arousing the interest and manipulation of government goons and foreign spooks. Act III: the no longer ignorable symptoms of crippling insomnia and paranoia, followed by divorce, malnutrition, self-harm, commitment to a psychiatric clinic, or decline into a figure of campus f]]> https://colossus.com/article/scott-wu-tapes-cognition/ https://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-deepmind-mallaby/
The following is an exclusive excerpt adapted from the author’s new book, THE INFINITY MACHINE: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, out today. In the autumn of 2015, Mustafa Suleyman embarked on a grand experiment in making AI good for society. Together with Demis Hassabis, the senior co-founder of the London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, he began an extended negotiation with Google, to which they had sold the previous year. Suleyman was determined to ensure that powerful AI, when it emerged, would not fall under the sole sway of the parent company’s shareholders. For anyone concerned with AI safety, this saga remains relevant today. It shows what happens when, under unusually favorable conditions, a handful of leaders set out to create a control structure for a new technology. The trigger for this experiment was the failure of DeepMind’s first AGI safety board meeting. In August 2015, Hassabis and Suleyman had convened the board at SpaceX; Elon]]> https://colossus.com/article/project-mario-demis-hassabis-deepmind-mallaby/ https://colossus.com/article/raspberry-pi-eben-upton/
Raspberry Pi is quietly ahead of the Silicon Valley zeitgeist. It is a computer company that exists to make people more creative programmers. It solved the automation challenges to reshore manufacturing over a decade ago. It has spent years making slightly sub-frontier technology more cost-effective to use. And it has built an ardent community around a rather bare metal platform. The company’s credit card-sized computers are the third most popular in history, after the PC and the Mac. Over 60mn were sold before the company’s IPO in 2024. The line ranges from the $205 Pi 5, equivalent to a decent desktop, to the $10 Pi Zero, which still has enough juice to add intelligence to your hardware product or teach you Python. For another $100 or so, you can equip a Pi computer with a neural network accelerator hefty enough to run small LLMs, all in the palm of your hand. I first encountered Raspberry Pi in grad school, when an administrative blip got me into a mechatronics seminar I had no prer]]> https://colossus.com/article/raspberry-pi-eben-upton/ https://colossus.com/article/beyond-the-sky-jeffrey-yan-hyperliquid/
On a Friday in January, before dawn, a 43-year-old was taken from his home in Saint-Léger-sous-Cholet, in western France. He was driven 30 miles to the small commune of Basse-Goulaine, where he was beaten, bound, and abandoned. Twelve hours later, once the sun had set in the suburbs of Paris, three men armed with a single handgun kicked in the door of a family home in Verneuil-sur-Seine. They beat a husband and his wife in front of their children, cable-tied all four of them, turned the house over, and left for the train station. It was the 70th such attack worldwide in under a year. I’d flown to visit a team of 11, but the first person I met at their office was not one of them. He was a solid American with close-cropped hair and stubble, sitting behind an Apple laptop at a small desk in the corner of the lounge, with a frame that suggested he was not there to write code. He was a bodyguard. One of the firm’s co-founders, who goes by iliensinc, short for Aliens Incorporated, had walked]]> https://colossus.com/article/beyond-the-sky-jeffrey-yan-hyperliquid/ https://colossus.com/article/inside-notion/
Today’s discourse is littered with obituaries: Software is dying, legacy giants are dead, swaths of startups are going extinct. Stuck at the center of this wave of AI creation is a debate about which companies are “over.” And the consensus is that one type of company is deader than the rest: the pre-IPO, pre-AI startup that everyone used to love. If you’re not AI-native, the internet tells us, chances are you’re not going to make it. Thinking it might make for an interesting follow-up to Inside Cursor (the ultimate AI-native company) in our Company Dispatch series, we started asking around about which companies might be proving the internet thesis wrong. One name came up more than any other: Notion. We were intrigued. Each of us had our own prior relationship with the company and assumptions about what we’d find. Camille joined Notion at the start of 2019 to lead marketing when it was just 10 people in a room. Brie drafted an early version of its values as an off-and-on editorial consi]]> https://colossus.com/article/inside-notion/ https://colossus.com/article/we-have-learned-nothing-startup-pundits/
Any method for building a startup, once widely known, causes founders to converge on the same answers. If everyone follows the same bestselling startup techniques, everyone ends up building the same company and, with no differentiation, most of those companies fail. The truth is, anytime someone insists on a method for how to build a successful startup, you should do something different. The paradox is self-evident, once you think about it, but it contains the seed for how to move forward. Before the wave of New Punditry began 25 years ago, the body of startup advice it displaced was, admittedly, worse than useless. It consisted of a naïve amalgam of Fortune 500 corporate strategy and small-business tactics, of five-year plans and day-to-day blocking and tackling. But for high-growth-potential startups, long-range planning is worthless. The future is unknowable, and focusing on daily operations leaves founders exposed to faster-moving competitors. The old advice was built for a world o]]> https://colossus.com/article/we-have-learned-nothing-startup-pundits/ https://colossus.com/article/the-patriot-shyam-sankar-palantir/
The Cotillion Room in The Pierre hotel has wall panels painted with pale green laurel wreaths, plush carpet patterned with grey-blue arabesques, crystal chandeliers dangling from oval recesses, and heavily draped windows overlooking Central Park—all of which makes it seem natural here, if only here, when people still refer to themselves, with a straight face, as members of “the conservative movement.” By the look of it, there are around 400 of them here tonight, ranging from ages 20 to 110. Many are sipping the evening’s signature cocktail: an Old Fashioned infused with apple cider syrup and served over a large ice cube engraved with the monogram of our hosts, the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. On this cold November night in Manhattan, we are gathered here to celebrate the presentation of the 2025 Herman Kahn Award to Alex Karp. After an hour of drinks and distributing genialities around the Cotillion Room, we are steered into the Grand Ballroom, where the a]]> https://colossus.com/article/the-patriot-shyam-sankar-palantir/ https://colossus.com/article/3g-capital-built-to-own/
At two in the morning on September 2, 2010, the 37th floor of 600 Third Avenue was dark except for the boardroom. At one end, 3G Capital’s chief financial officer was arranging papers across the conference table. At the other, two junior lawyers checked signatures under the hospital lights. Burger King’s board had agreed to sell the company for $4.1 billion to 3G Capital, but the firm was obscure enough that the previous day The Wall Street Journal had mistaken it for a different company entirely. The deal would be one of the largest buyouts since the financial crisis. Outside, Manhattan’s towers blinked in the late summer heat. Three hours earlier, across the river in Queens, Andy Roddick had been knocked out of the US Open by an unseeded player in the second round. Somewhere in the city, he was probably still awake. So was Daniel Schwartz, sitting in an airport hotel room in Miami with a phone to his ear. He was 29 years old, a partner at 3G, and he had until the New York Stock Excha]]> https://colossus.com/article/3g-capital-built-to-own/ https://colossus.com/article/education-broligarchy-silicon-valley-canon/
One of the most conspicuous paradoxes of Silicon Valley has been that the leadership of the tech sector, with all its power, wealth, and influence for remaking our world, failed to maintain a decent quality of life in the one major city where it’s concentrated, San Francisco. Academics and journalists, who tend to scorn Silicon Valley’s ambitions as absurd or dangerous, and to dismiss its achievements as superficial, inadequate, or pernicious versions of what a government headed by a proper set of intellectuals (i.e., by us) would accomplish, have likewise claimed that the mutual disappointments of the last year’s alliance of MAGA populism and tech elites should have been predictable from the start. After all, they argue, the latter had until recently expressed their political interests mainly by dreaming of independent city states, while failing to make the kinds of contributions to society and culture that even the robber barons of the Gilded Age had made. So what did you expect from]]> https://colossus.com/article/education-broligarchy-silicon-valley-canon/ https://colossus.com/article/henry-ellenbogen-last-human-edge/
Henry Ellenbogen called Reed Hastings on a Saturday morning in November 2011 to tell him Netflix might go bankrupt. The company had just executed one of the more spectacular self-immolations in corporate history. Four months earlier, CEO Hastings had announced that Netflix would split its DVD-by-mail and streaming services into separate offerings, raising prices by 60% after one of the worst recessions in memory. 800,000 subscribers canceled. The stock collapsed from $300 to $77. The media called it one of the worst blunders in tech history. Hastings reversed course in October, admitting the changes had been arrogant. Now, in the quiet of a weekend, with markets closed and no one watching, Ellenbogen was about to tell him it might not matter. “Hey, Reed, look, I could be reading this wrong,” Ellenbogen said. “But there is a scenario here where you have to raise money.” “What are you talking about, Henry?” Hastings said.]]> https://colossus.com/article/henry-ellenbogen-last-human-edge/ https://colossus.com/article/inside-cursor/
Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a series of Company Dispatches, in which a member of Colossus or Positive Sum temporarily embeds with a company—either as an employee, investor, or informal observer—and reports back on their impressions. I was first introduced to the Cursor team through a former colleague who said the company was looking to meet people with “interesting perspectives on marketing.” We had a 30-minute chat followed by an invitation to drop by Cursor’s San Francisco headquarters, which rolled into a handful of informal (I thought) conversations with team members. I followed up with some reflections from my conversations and went about my week. The next thing I knew, I was getting texts from former colleagues about the Cursor team “backchanneling” me about a paid role to which I was not aware of having applied. This was somewhat irritating but also flattering, and in what I’ve now learned is typical Cursor fashion, within two weeks I had a Cursor laptop at m]]> https://colossus.com/article/inside-cursor/ https://colossus.com/article/taste-in-math/
In post-Napoleonic France, there lived a boy called Évariste Galois, who saw something beautiful and fundamental no one else had yet articulated. But as he came of age, his life unraveled. In 1829, when Galois was 18, his father committed suicide. The following year, he was expelled from the École normale supérieure for political insubordination. Later in 1830, on Bastille Day, during the July Revolution, he was arrested and sent to prison, where he continued to work on math through depression and desperation. Galois was released in the spring of 1831; one month later, he was killed in a duel. He was 20. The night before the duel, Galois wrote 60 feverish pages of mathematical notes to his friend Auguste Chevalier. His parting words pleaded that the trusted mathematicians of his day would “give their opinion, not as to the truth, but as to the importance of these theorems. Later there will be, I hope, some people who will find it to their advantage to decipher all this mess.” Galois’ l]]> https://colossus.com/article/taste-in-math/