Chris Hyams (he/him)

On Election Day, with so much still undecided, one thing we know for certain is that Leading the Future’s war chest has blown up in their faces. Per @SLThomas:

“While the AI industry is likely to remain a major spender in elections moving forward, it is abundantly clear that Leading The Future has completely and unequivocally failed in [its] political strategy. Deep pockets were supposed to make [it] a political powerhouse, but the unpopularity of [its] agenda and [its] funders have made [it] a liability instead.”

Happy Halloween y’all.

Anyone concerned that a reckless race to AGI is bad for AI safety and ethics should be deeply concerned about the pending frontier lab IPOs. If they go forward, the current race will look quaint by comparison. A public company's stock is worth zero today if the company will not be worth more in the future. The relentless grind of quarterly earnings will make it impossible to pause growth and focus on safety. The race to AGI is gas on a fire. The race to AGI plus public quarterly growth targets is napalm on gas on the fire.

Yesterday, friends and loved ones gathered in Austin to remember and honor @JoshuaBaer. I was heartbroken to miss the gathering.

I knew and loved Josh for 27 years. I first met him when we hired him at Trilogy in 1999. Trilogy’s new college hires were famously full of intellectual curiosity and seemingly boundless energy, but Josh stood out even among that class. He vibrated on a different frequency. He had a confidence that was easy to misread as arrogance, but he was so goofy and lovable that most everyone was charmed.

He was a perpetual motion machine of big ideas. Josh always believed there was something better just around the corner. But even in his youth, he had not a whiff of competitiveness. Josh wanted everyone to win. This was a theme for the rest of his life. No one who met Josh could ever mistake his will to win for a desire to “beat” anyone. Sadly, this is a trait missing in much of our industry. But Josh was a player / cheerleader for team humanity.

It was clear early on that Trilogy was not big enough for Josh. He needed to be free from bureaucracy, rules, or restrictions of any kind. He needed to lead the way, to cut his own path through the jungle. He was gone in a year.

To love Josh was also to occasionally scratch your head at Josh. In the early days of Twitter, Josh innocently posted that he had to drive his “backup” Porsche because the fan belt light came on in his main Porsche. This got the attention of a new site called tweetingtoohard.com which featured Josh as the #1 most obnoxious tweet on Twitter.

Most people in Josh’s position are extremely thin-skinned, and would either go on an all-out offensive, or shrivel up and hide if called out. Josh thought this was hilarious. He was happy to be the butt of a joke, and laughed along with everyone else. But he was not thick-skinned, either. He was genuinely open-hearted, and as far as I ever saw, never had hatred for anyone. And of course he kept tweeting about the cars.

Once Josh experienced financial success, he started investing in other entrepreneurs. I was extremely fortunate to have Josh as one of the first seed investors in my startup, B-Side, back in 2006. He was an incredible supporter, and an invaluable advisor. He invested again in a follow-on Series A round.

I appreciated all of this of course, but what was more meaningful was the support Josh provided when B-Side ran out of runway and shut down in 2010. Josh lost *all* of his investment. In the 15+ years since, he only ever expressed gratitude for being a part of the journey. We became even closer after that experience. This is not typical behavior from investors when you lose all their money, trust me on this. But of course Josh was not typical.

When Josh started Capital Factory, he clearly found his true calling. All of his energy, ideas, love and support for community, love and gratitude for Austin, the ability to cheer, to sell, to get people on board, to celebrate their success, to hold them in their stumbles — it all found fertile soil in CF.

Much has been written about the impact of CF on Austin, but no matter how much hyperbole has been lavished on Josh, it’s honestly all understated. To be clear, there is no Austin as a global tech powerhouse without Josh Baer. Lots of people came and built and did what we could, but Josh put Austin on the map, and then made the map bigger and bigger. There is no part of the city that his legacy does not touch, no one working in or adjacent to tech that doesn’t have Josh to thank.

After I joined Indeed in 2010, Josh became our biggest cheerleader. He had no actual skin in the game, but of course he had skin in the game because he wanted everyone to win. He wanted Austin to win.

Josh had an incredible admiration for Indeed’s co-founder Rony Kahan, and the admiration was mutual. I’m sure everyone has heard the story at this point, but it bears retelling.

In 2011, a small group of Indeed employees went to SXSW, and we decided we needed a t-shirt. Our UX lead at the time, Chris Garcia, had a scribble in his notebook that said, “I help people find jobs.” We changed the “find” to “get,” and Indeed’s “I help people get jobs” shirt was born.

Rony loved Josh’s entrepreneurial evangelism — his tireless advocacy for people to take risks, leave their jobs, and start something new. Rony went and had a custom shirt made that he presented to Josh: “I help people quit jobs.” To Josh, this shirt was the greatest compliment imaginable — one entrepreneur to another. The shirt, and the phrase, were a sort of talisman for Josh. His LinkedIn and X profile pictures have him wearing that shirt, grinning, and pointing with both index fingers at the text. His bio on both platforms starts with “I help people quit jobs.”

I loved watching every minute of Josh’s growth into the extraordinary man he was. A Buddhist teacher once told me that the spiritual journey is primarily the transformation from self-centered to other-centered. At some point in his life, Josh had the realization that takes many people a lifetime — if ever — that our purpose in life is to be helpful to others. He dedicated himself to this mission with an urgency and commitment that is truly one of a kind. The same teacher told me, “practice as if your hair was on fire.” Josh poured into the community like his hair was on fire (despite not having any).

I learned so much from Josh over the years. I am grateful for all the time we spent together, and am sad for all the time we didn’t. If the past few months have shown us anything, it is that the old adage is absolutely, incontrovertibly true: people live on through the lives they touched. Josh will be around for a very, very long time.

I am heartbroken to have missed the in-person community celebration and remembrance of Josh. I have been moved beyond belief by the incredible outpouring of love and compassion. I am grateful to have been part of that community in spirit.

My heart is cracked wide open for Amy and the family. May Josh’s memory be a blessing.

“Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family. This need is all the more urgent given the frequent imbalance between the speed of technological growth and the slower development of awareness, norms, safeguards and institutions capable of governing its effects. It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required. Otherwise, change will be governed only by technocratic thinking and presented as necessary and inevitable, ultimately imposing rules shaped by those who control data, infrastructure and computing power.”

🔥 🔥 🔥

“Magnífica Humanitas” by @Pontifex should be required reading for anyone thinking, writing, or talking about AI. And for those who are not yet thinking, writing, or talking about AI.