#025: Exceptional Startups, 3Blue1Brown Masterclass, Colosseum Engineering

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This edition is helped in part by the support of Boot.dev. Be sure to check them out in the P.S. for a special signup offer and more information. Let's jump into this week's finds:

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life

The renowned economist Adam Smith is known primarily for authoring his seminal work, The Wealth of Nations, which is widely regarded as the foundational text within the field of economics. What people are less aware of though, is his book published nearly 17 years earlier titled, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

I was first introduced to this book and the ideas within it, by reading a more recent piece called - How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life by Russ Roberts. It breaks down the main ideas of Moral Sentiments in a modern, digestible way and is easily one of my favorite books. The applications of microeconomics in our daily lives in relation to happiness and virtues will force you to look at the world through a new lens.

Exceptional Startups For Those Interested

Recently came across this amazing list from Ben Lang, who outlines 40 of the fastest growing Series B - Series C startups out there for anyone interested. All of them have 'breakout trajectory', $5 million in run-rate revenue, and 50-100% year-over-year growth. In other words, these companies are some of the best places to look if you're interested in joining or relocating within the startup world.

Big thanks to Tyler Hogge for putting this list together, and you can find more updates on each of these companies at the amazing website exceptionalstartups.com.

How to Get Those Companies Interested in You

After that last entry, you may be thinking to yourself, "Gee, I wonder how I can even break into consumer tech?" Well, thankfully for you, Nikita Bier has just the action plan outlined for you here (we highly recommend reading the entire post).

The TLDR is this: try establishing yourself on the 'ladder' of the system by proving yourself with a small project you can build alone. It should have viral potential and should be done 100% yourself without any outside engineer, designer, or investor. Once it establishes traction, this gives you more credibility. From there you can pursue it deeper, reach out to other members in the industry, and overall offers you more flexibility.

Wait, I think that's a huge recurring theme across anything you're trying to build and not just within tech?

3Blue1Brown Drops GPT Masterclass

We have all been patiently waiting for this one to drop, and for good reason. Legendary channel 3Blue1Brown just released a video outlining everything you wanted to know about deep learning from the latest "But what is a GPT? Visual intro to Transformers".

This is a 27 minute masterclass explaining the subject in great depth, with excellent animations to match. Even if you don't understand a thing within this video, we just inception'd you to go back and watch the rest of the videos in the Neural Networks series of theirs. Overall, super helpful if you want to understand AI and will help you be better prepared for what to expect out of it in the future.

Architecture of the Roman Colosseum

One of my favorite things I came across recently was this beautiful sectional plan of the Roman Colosseum from architect Francisco Gomez de Tejada. It's not often we think about the engineering that was performed and used nearly 1,500 years ago, but this is a great illustration to help us understand what it was like.
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If interested, you can see even more 3D diagrams of the Colosseum here.

Francisco Gómez de Tejada | arquitecto @gomezdetejada Sección del graderío del Coliseo de Roma. 3:35 AM • Mar 30, 2024 197 Retweets 1557 Likes Read 3 replies

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Always wishing you the best,

J.B.