#086: First Mary Meeker Report in 6 Years, Links to Get Ahead in Life, TikTok is Cooked

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 week, we will take a look at a report from an industry giant that was six years in the making, the best single books to help understand an entire industry, a tutorial on how to build a nuclear power plant, and more.

Let's dive in:

Best Single Books on Understanding an Industry

​Will Manidis threw out a perfect engagement tweet asking, "what is the single best book you can read that will explain an entire industry?"

Here are some of the answers:

Tutorial on How to Build a Nuclear Power Plant

Nuclear reactors in the US have a reputation for taking forever to build—often a decade or more. This is mostly because of a tough regulatory environment, custom plant designs for every site, and a lot of financial and technical uncertainty along the way. Each reactor ends up being a massive, one-off construction project, which means long approval processes, supply chain headaches, and frequent cost overruns.

​Aalo Atomics is trying to flip the script by treating nuclear reactors more like industrial products than giant construction projects. Matt Loszak, CEO of Aalo, recently shared a step-by-step guide on how to build a nuclear power plant.

They’re currently building a factory in Austin to mass-produce modular reactors, which can be shipped out and installed much faster than traditional plants. For those interested in nuclear, this is a fascinating behind the scenes look at how costs and timelines can be cut down while scaling production.

TikTok is Cooked

Chat, is this real?

​Andrej Karpathy may have just dropped one of the most mind-bending tweets discussing how video generation is optimized for four things:

But what does point 4 mean? Karpathy goes on to emphasize and explain 'the gravity' of it a bit more.

Right now, apps like TikTok just pick the best videos from a limited set made by humans and show them to people using algorithms. But with new AI models like Veo 3, videos can be created instantly by computers and tailored exactly to whatever goal you want, like keeping someone watching or clicking an ad.

This means instead of just choosing from existing videos, the system can generate unlimited new ones and keep tweaking them to get the best possible results. This could make video content much more powerful and engaging than anything we’ve seen, but it might also lead to outcomes we’re not prepared for.

He finishes by saying "TikTok is nothing compared to what is possible. And I'm not so sure that we will like what 'optimal' looks like."

First Mary Meeker Report in 6 Years

Legendary venture capitalist and 'tech prophet' Mary Meeker just released her first report in over 6 years. This is huge, because she previously released these reports on an annual schedule from 1995-2019. The world has obviously changed a little since then, most notably with the ubiquitous adoption of AI in everyday life.

Not gonna lie, it's long. Like over 300 pages long.

In an ironic twist of fate, this almost seems like something I would task AI with to give me the TLDR of everything. Luckily, a few people helped out on Twitter by making summaries of the key takeaways, with my favorite being from Trung Phan and Bearly AI. You can access that here.

The main topic covered is of course AI, mainly showing how quickly it's scaling build-out and usage. For those that would rather listen to a breakdown, you can hear Trung talk about it on the Not Investment Advice podcast at minute 28:13 here.

Links to Get Ahead in Life

​Babak Nivi is one of the co-founders of AngelList and Venture Hacks, and he's known for his collaborations with Naval Ravikant, particularly on the Naval Podcast.

He recently shared a tweet that said, "When I meet people who are trying to get ahead in life, these are the links I send them:"

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J.B.