What's coming up next on Caffeine
Plus: Some weekend fuel and will VCs be the last job to be automated?
Good morning Caffeinators,
Haters said it wasn’t possible but we made it through a full 5 day week.
Read on to take a sneak peek at what’s coming from Caffeine in the next few weeks for our paid subscribers, your usual Weekend Fuel recommendation and a musing on what will be the last jobs automated in the AI wave.
As mentioned on Monday, we are so excited to have Georgia Dive join the Caffeine Team as our new Commercial & Partnerships Lead.
She isn’t just interested in the founder community, she’s truly part of it.
Georgia is the previous founder of Bright, formerly known as Babysitters Club. Her service provided parents across New Zealand with interactive and highly experienced childcarers, using technology to disrupt the market.
If you’re interested in working with Caffeine as a partner, flick her an email on: georgia@caffeinedaily.co
And if you’ve got a story, press release or interview to pitch - send it over to me on finn@caffeinedaily.co
Have a great weekend, look after each other and we’ll see you next week.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
Coming up on Caffeine:
A chat with Bizzy CEO Corinna Stukan: As we’ve discussed before, Fintech is the fastest growing and arguably the most fascinating space in NZ right now, with a 10-year compound annual growth of 32 percent - four times higher than the tech industry as a whole.
Recently I caught up with Corinna Stukan, founder of Insights Driven PM and current CEO of new fintech startup, Bizzy for a wide-ranging conversation about fintech, AI and how you can start measuring the metrics which really matter in your business. Part one of that conversation will drop on Tuesday, focused on Bizzy with another to follow in the weeks ahead on the bigger picture of how we start measuring what matters.
Cori and I worked together many moons ago and unfortunately she’s one of those frustrating people who manage to simultaneously be extremely skilled, exceptionally smart but also really nice.
Don’t you you just hate them? It’s so rude.
An interview with a founding member of Twitter on how the Bird was Broken: Alright, this one is entirely on me. I teased this weeks ago but was far too ambitious in my release schedule as we had a pipeline of content which got backed up over Easter. You will finally get to read my conversation with Rabble next Wednesday!
What happens when a product you make to bring people together ends up tearing them apart? Evan Henshaw-Plath was Employee #1 at Twitter and had an ultimate insiders view to one of the most tumultuous and consequential companies in Silicon Valley history.
A conversation with BioOra’s John Robson: One of the coolest things I happening in New Zealand right now which I feel doesn’t get nearly the attention is deserves is how we are quietly becoming a world leader in a cutting edge, life saving medication called CAR-T cell therapy.
It involves taking genes from a patient, editing them and then reintroducing them to the body reprogrammed to attack cancers. It has truly remarkable results and is saving lives right now but it’s hard to overstate the potential of the tech in both medical and economic terms.
I recently caught up with John Robson. Managing Director at BioOra, to hear more about the transformative potential of this technology. Check that one out week after next.
Here’s what’s on our radar. Hit us with your own recommendations.
The Pitt: I think everyone has different levels of what they would consider ‘relaxing’ content. Some people need ‘Love on the Spectrum’ to remind them of transcendent purity of human tenderness and some need a hellishly stressful medical drama to remind them of how much worse their job could be.
If you’re one of the masochists in the latter category, definitely check out ‘The Pitt’, streaming now on Neon. Taking place across one shift in an ER (each episode being one real time hour), this one is a lovely mix of soapy drama and gritty glimpse into the desperate hustle of emergency medicine.
If you’re as terminally online as I am you’ve likely seen many medical influencers praising the show as ‘the most medically accurate of all time’. I imagine that’s a relatively low bar to clear and I have literally no expertise to judge this by but it does definitely appear to pay unique attention to the tiny, often gruesome details of how you actually save a life.
Imagine The Bear but less ‘Yes, Chef’ and more ‘Time of Death’.
Watch it now on Neon
Marc Andreessan says the one job that might be safe from automation is, conveniently, his one.
Predicting what jobs will and won’t be affected by the coming wave of automation is essentially an industry unto itself at this point. Personally I’ve always liked the framework Kevin Roose from NYT uses, whereby jobs with ‘High Chaos, High Physicality and High Responsibility’ will be hardest to replace. So for example, a kindergarten teacher would be very, very difficult to automate.
Of course, there’s a lot of disagreement here and one person who thinks almost all jobs can and should be automated is Silicon Valley royalty and Business Humpty Dumpty, Marc Andreessan.
All jobs, except maybe being a high level VC, which he says contains skill sets which might be ‘timeless’.
He made the comments in a recent a16z podcast interview and it does tickle me a little bit to have someone invested so heavily in accelerating us into a post-work, post-scarcity AI future boldly assume that it can do every other job except his super special one.
This is no knock on VCs, some of Caffeine’s best friends are VCs. But I think the moment you assume your specific job is safe while everyone else’s isn’t, you’re essentially implying that you are in the most uniquely gifted category of humans on Earth.
Personally, I feel safe predicting an AI VC before an AI kindergarten teacher.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co. Look after yourselves this weekend and we’ll see you Monday.
We did make it through this week somehow.. so excited for the upcoming articles - thank you for having me!! Love your work 💚