ENG EP6) Olivia in Silicon Valley — Deliver! Deliver!
10/02/24
“Let us not be afraid to outgrow old thoughts and ways, and dare to think on new lines as to the future of the work under our care” — Jane Stanford
2 for the price of 1
Hello, welcome back! This time, unfortunately, I have to bother you with a two-day full immersion in a single newsletter. Otherwise, I fear I might fall behind on Tesla and Luigi and not providing you with even a bit of the story.
I have landed in Italy safe and sound, a bit worn out, hope to be able to fight my enemy, jet-lag. Just letting you know, there are only two episodes left, this one and the final one. Then we’ll figure out how to survive together without the newsletter, but in the meantime, let’s enjoy it.
87 football fields
On Tuesday, we went to visit the Tesla production facility (I can hear a ‘finally’ from some of you) Fremont Factory, one of the largest manufacturing sites in California. Let me just say upfront: it was not possible to take photos and videos during the visit (so much for “Open Innovation”, thank you Elon). The facility is as big as 87 football fields. 87. We took a sort of tiny indoor train that guided us through the production area, passing by most of the stations like software, hardware, presses, body assembly, sensor insertion, interiors, wheels. It is huge.
The factory doesn’t just expand on the ground floor, it has several levels: while we stopped at one station, a few meters above our heads a Tesla was passing by on a roller. It was headed in another direction, perhaps towards workers doing sensors adjustments or towards another robotic arm that moves cars from one level to another. They showed us the batteries that are inserter in the vehicle, we held the (super) computer. I’ll give you an idea about the size of the Model 3’s processor (I’m not a Tesla expert):
The factory was partially occupied by Toyota before it closed in 2010, then most of the warehouse was acquired by Tesla.
In June 2023, Fremont reached its highest daily production ever, with about 560,000 vehicles manufactured. To give you an idea, the production capacity covers 12,000 vehicles a week, which is about 1,714 cars produced per day. In 2021 Fremont produced an average of 1,221 vehicles per day, so the trend is definitely on the rise.
At the end of the tour, we had a 20-minute test drive for each of us. We could choose any Tesla model we wanted to drive (I repeat: any). So, all excited, I got ready for this crazy ride like:
While I was already struggling on deciding which one to try, I realize I didn’t have my driver license with me.
I started calling the family WhatsApp group, which, for the record, is composed by the five membesrs of my family.
After about 37 rings (and it was 7:30 PM in Italy, not even that late) my dad answers and I ask to send me a photo of the license.
At the same time, I overheard a guy saying something like, ‘if you even scratch it, you have to buy the whole car.’
I start to get a bit nervous, so I tell my dad, who strongly advises me to skip this electrifying experience… I gave up and got into the passenger seat. Maybe Confindustria would have bought a Tesla for me though, who knows.
Not satisfied with the shining sun that accompanied us in the first few days (as you can see from the photo), while we were heading to Tesla’s food area, starving, the factory decided to launch a fire drill for THE WHOLE FACILITY. It was super funny because while everyone was rushing out somewhat panicked, Mati was trying to stop someone to ask to take us the picture. So: chaos all around us, and there we were like this.
Stanford full immersion
At Stanford, we met three individuals: Luigi Bajetti, Cory Levy, and Tommaso Dreossi.
Another person also came to visit us, but I won’t spoil that for now.
First up Luigi , who made his speech on “How to become a successful VC.” Luigi Bajetti is the founder and manager of LombardStreet Ventures, a ventur capital firm investing in scaling startups. He is also an incredible entrepreneur with a long experience in the tech sector.
Before coming to Silicon Valley, he worked for several years in his family’s business, then moving to San Francisco to start his investment company.
To be a successful VC, Luigi tells us that you need to study a lot, keep up to date, be alert, network, understand who you’re dealing with, and be clear-headed and realistic about who is proposing what to you.
In particular, he likes to stay close to his startup founders to spread confidence and motivation; he wants to participate in demo days and desires continuous updates. Life as a VC is self-managed but also very challenging because you always have to weigh each decision and understand well the people you want are collaborating with.
“Silicon Valley is the place to be: you really only aim for big wins: think big, be bold”.
Cory Levy (he looks just like Zuckerberg, I know) is the founder of Z Fellows, a fund for young people who have a strong idea and want to realize it. In his talk, he discusses the importance of controversy, giving us examples like Kanye West, as singer with millions of followers but with several controversial aspects such as his ‘peculiar’ political aversion and public interventions. Elvis Presley, who in 2001 appeared on a late-night show dressed inappropriately by “the standards” of that time.
In today’s corporates there are controversies, just like in Facebook, that initially took the identities of people who signed up to form its database (have you seen The Social Network?), or Snapchat, that was created because people were sending private photos. “Controversy always plays a role in our lives as much as in business”.
Finally, Tommaso Dreossi came to talk, a Machine Learning Engineer at Insitro, a startup founded in 2018. Among other things, they apply artificial intelligence algorithms to discover new drugs, for example, to treat ALS. Tommaso shares his experience: after three years of PhD he works between Italy and France and for a while at Amazon, where, however, he did not feel the same passion and motivation that he has for bioinformatics. Therefore, he moves to San Francisco, where he found much more room to work on projects he enjoys.
He explained in details the recent paper Insitro published an how in the US he feels free to work on what he likes, and how much his company supports him in this.
The special guest
At Stanford, we finally had an unexpected but very welcome guest (special thanks to @missile who organized the meeting). We attended a talk by none other than Federico Faggin, a physicist and entrepreneur who invented the first microprocessor, the touchscreen, and began working on neural networks early on. Bill Gates said, “Before Faggin, Silicon Valley was just the valley”. We can understand now.
Faggin presented himself to us as an incredible humble man: he sat down and asked for a glass of water. After we asked the first question, he began a speech about why neural networks will never be like humans, why they will never have consciousness. He explains the no-cloning theorem which states that the state of a quantum, on which consciousness is contingent, is not reproducible, just like our emotions and perceptions, thus the machine will never be able to reproduce our same perceptions.
A funny story: basically Dario (aka missile) is understandably a huge fan of Faggin. He is currently attempting to read Faggin’s book ‘Irriducibile’, which contains countless pages of pure quantum physics.
We don’t know whether our hero will manage to get through it, but we are definitely cheering for him. As of now, he states “I can’t understand a damn thing”, but our undeterred hero invites Faggin by email to meet us at Stanford and prepares an Excel sheet with a list of questions to ask him. When he arrives, after a brief introduction, missile asks the first question to the old genius. Faggin then launches into a relentless monologue about the theory of consciousness that he has developed in over 35 years. As he spoke, we watched our missile deleting question after question, incredulous at how the meeting was turing out.
In the end, when Faggin asks if ther were any more questions, he concludes satisfied “you’ve already answered them all”.
We love him, as you can see from these memes created specifically for the occasion:
You gotta deliver
My future self will thank me for using up this last bit of energy to do this now instead of tomorrow (for real). Moreover, being the not-so-forethoughtful person, I didn’t charge my laptop before leaving for the airport, of course I haven’t. I took advantage of every available minute in every airport socket to squeeze out an additional 4/5% battery charge, writing down in notes some random stuff that later I could not find.
Tomorrow I’ll send the last newsletter. It will be beautiful, intense, tear-jerking, but extra lovely. I extend my usual thanks for having read up to now, and I’ll save the serious and teary-eyed messages for tomorrow.
Love u. See you soon!!
