| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: How Dylan Field thrived after the Adobe deal died |
| • Artificial Intelligence: Silicon Valley’s summer obsession? AI note taking |
| • Plus, our Recommendations: A true crime podcast about a ninth life; the Roosevelts and the panda bear; and revisiting a cruise from hell |
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| Augustus Doricko has never been shy about his identity. |
| When he spoke to The Information about a year ago, he likened his efforts on his startup, Rainmaker, to a Biblical quest. “What we’re working on is like part of us working out our faith and trying to help bring about the kingdom of God on Earth,” he said, dressed in a beige suit over a pair of cowboy boots. |
| With Rainmaker, Doricko, 25, hopes to commercialize cloud seeding, a method of adding chemicals to the sky to produce rain clouds. He developed some of the technology while on a Thiel Fellowship, and he now lives and works within a community of young founders in El Segundo, Calif., just south of Los Angeles. Like Doricko, the other founders have strong business and personal connections to the right-wing tech world established by Peter Thiel. Among these guys, MAGA may as well be just another balance-sheet acronym. |
| So you’d think their Republican ties might’ve spared them from the conservative misinformation machine. Yet the machine gobbled up Doricko this week, spinning conspiracy theories about Rainmaker and alleging it had played a role in producing the recent torrential flood in Texas. Of course it didn’t. But that didn’t stop conservative influencers and politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from running with the story. (Greene says she will introduce a bill felonizing cloud seeding, describing such weather modification techniques as “dangerous and deadly.”) |
| I might’ve expected the machine to reserve its rage for lefties. But Doricko’s still getting devoured. That’s how big—and ravenous—it’s become. |
| DOGE Goes On |
The tensions between the Trump White House and DOGE have risen lately, and while Elon Musk and many others have left the organization, Joe Gebbia, an Airbnb co-founder, remains. Recently, he pitched Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, on a refurbished National Park Service website using a “Mad Men”–style presentation.
“Susie listened,” a White House official told The Wall Street Journal. “There were no major decisions made.” |
| Hard to say what derailed the meeting, I guess. Oh, well—I’m sure it’ll come out in the administration's next batch of accidentally leaked Signal messages. |
| An AI Wunderkind |
| Hugging Face, an AI startup that provides a catalog of models and datasets, is trying its hand at something else: selling two humanoid robots, the Reachy Mini Lite ($299), which should begin shipping next month, and the Reachy Mini Wireless ($499), which will come out later this year. |
| The company picked a final design for the robots—small devices meant to sit on a desk—when executives noticed how one tester’s five-year-old daughter wouldn’t give up one of the early prototypes. (Maybe more hardware makers should ask children to review their designs. I picture ladybug-shaped drone missiles.) |
| Of course, humanoids are one of the hottest parts of AI, and I suppose if the Reachys really catch on, it’s only a matter of time before Mark Zuckerberg tries to hire that five-year-old, too. |
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| From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, all eyes will shortly fall on Figma CEO Dylan Field as he leads his company to a long-awaited IPO, expected sometime in the next few weeks. The journey has been remarkable—all the more so given how Field has skillfully guided Figma since his blockbuster $20 billion deal with Adobe fell apart. |
| When the feds blocked the Adobe purchase in 2024, it put Figma’s future in doubt—while also putting Field into overdrive, our Cory Weinberg reports in this week’s Big Read. Investor Danny Rimer offers up a simple explanation for what has happened with Field. “He had a chip on his shoulder,” he said. |
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| “There isn’t a good norm around note taking,” Rebecca Kaden sighed. She should know—she’s constantly jotting down information about this, that and the other thing as a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Sometimes it can distract from the conversation. “My meetings feel better when I’m engaged, not scribbling on a piece of paper or writing on my computer.” |
| That’s why venture capitalists and plenty of other members of the tech elite are positively obsessed with the rise of AI note-taking software—particularly Granola, a sleek app with a simple, pleasing design. |
| Nikhil Basu Trivedi, a co-founder of Footwork, a San Francisco–based venture firm, is another fan of the app, and his fondness for Granola is a little bittersweet. He has known Chris Pedregal, Granola’s CEO and co-founder, for quite some time: In fact, he invested in an earlier startup Pedegral founded, and Pedegral initially sought out Trivedi as an angel investor in Granola. Trivedi passed. |
| “It could end up being one of the deep regrets of my career,” he told me. “It’s one I am currently regretting.” |
| Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, wonders if Krypto is as terrified of the vacuum cleaner as every other dog. You can reach him at abe@theinformation.com or find him on X. |
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| Listening: “The Final Days of Sgt. Tibbs” (New Hampshire Public Radio) |
| A disappearance jolted the sleepy city of Manchester, N.H., last year when a 19-year-old went missing—that would be Sgt. Tibbs, a tiger-striped Maine Coon cat. Tibbs was the beloved pet of local resident Rose Garcia, who quickly discovered there was more (dun dun dun) to the vanishing than she initially suspected. “The Final Days of Sgt. Tibbs” is one of those stories about a tiny incident in an out-of-the-way place that nimbly reflects some bigger truths about everyone everywhere, a “story about trust and miscommunication and a story about what we owe our pets and a story about what we owe each other,” says Todd Bookman, a reporter for the station who hosts the podcast. As another Manchester resident put it rather eloquently: “If the internet has taught you anything, it’s that you don’t fuck with people’s cats.”—Abram Brown |
| Reading: “The Beast in the Clouds” by Nathalia Holt |
| Like many a moderately disappointing heir, Ted and Kermit Roosevelt longed for an adventure that would etch them into history: Why not go get a giant panda—and bring one home? |
| In the 1920s, scientists knew precious little about pandas. The bears’ natural habitat—mountainous Southwest China near Tibet—made it impossible to easily reach them, let alone pitch camp and study them. “No one, not even naturalists who had worked in China all their lives, could say precisely where the creature lived, what it ate, or how it behaved,” writes Nathalia Holt (who previously penned “Rise of the Rocket Girls,” a 2016 bestseller on the Space Race’s overlooked women scientists). |
| Pandas weren’t the only part of the natural world that remained shrouded in mystery during the early 20th century. No one had yet summited Everest or visited the furthest depths of the ocean, as Holt notes in “The Beast in the Clouds.” As a result, a feat of discovery and daring could really catapult someone to fame and fortune, an outcome that greatly appealed to Ted (a failed politician) and Kermit (a failed businessman) as they permanently languished in the shadow of their father, former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. So, in 1929, they set out into the Himalayas, eager to make their mark in a world that “was still a checkerboard of wonder” and to return with a creature some people still dismissed as mere legend.—A.B. |
| Watching: “Trainwreck: Poop Cruise” (Netflix) |
| There was a time in my life when I’d be embarrassed to admit that I spent part of an evening watching a documentary called “Trainwreck: Poop Cruise.” But one thing I respect about a TV show or movie is a title that gets to the point, and “Poop Cruise” leaves zero ambiguity about what it’s all about. In case it’s not obvious: It covers the plumbing chaos that erupted when the power went out on a Carnival cruise ship in 2013. |
| While I personally don’t have much interest in ever going on a cruise, I found the cast of passengers in the documentary funny and charming, especially a group of women who were upset in their quest for a booze-soaked bachelorette party on the high seas. And to its credit, “Poop Cruise” tells its story in a compact 54 minutes. There’s nothing more annoying than trashy entertainment that doesn’t know when to wrap it up, and an hour or so is just the right amount of time to spend in these fetid waters.—Nick Wingfield |
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| :: checks pulse :: |
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