Funston Brief (Issue No. 19)
This month, our featured commentary discusses the release of The Monkey King, one of China’s most successful cultural exports. We also dive into the future of finance and how amazing founders operate.
The Monkey King, a new film released on Netflix this August, is one of China’s most successful cultural exports. The film is the latest in a long line of adaptations of “Journey to the West,” the most famous novel in Chinese literature, published in 1592. However, it is a rare example of a Chinese work spreading to the West.
Tanner Greer analyzes this very intriguing question in an essay: Why has China's "soft" cultural influence increased so little compared to its economic might? Despite great military and economic development, China has few effective cultural exports. Greer references Dan Wang's 2021 letter in which he makes the following claim: "Over the last four decades since reform and opening, the country has produced two cultural works that have proven interesting to the rest of the world: the Three-Body Problem and TikTok." Greer and Wang offer different justifications. The difficulty of censorship and innovation to coexist, in Wang's opinion, is a direct outcome of "the deadening hand of the state." Greer claims that this exaggerates the circumstance. In addition, despite a crackdown on dissent over the previous ten years, China's cultural influence was less significant before the Xi era. Greer believes the fundamental issue is "an information ecology locked off from the rest of humanity." Look at other non-Western countries like South Korea that have lately achieved success with cultural exports abroad. You'll discover they did it by leveraging a common set of venues, most notably YouTube.
However, as geopolitical tensions between China and America escalate, the Monkey King has come under fire from Chinese internet users who argued that the cartoon creature appeared too "Western.”
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS.
Large language models explained with a minimum of math and jargon: When ChatGPT was introduced last fall, it sent shockwaves through the technology industry and the larger world. Machine learning researchers have been experimenting with large language models (LLMs) for a few years. Still, the general public had not been paying close attention and didn’t realize how powerful they had become.
Key Insight: If you know anything about this subject, you’ve probably heard that LLMs are trained to “predict the next word” and require vast amounts of text. But that tends to be where the explanation stops. The details of how they predict the next word are often treated as a profound mystery. One reason for this is the unusual way these systems were developed. Conventional software is created by human programmers who give computers explicit, step-by-step instructions. In contrast, ChatGPT is built on a neural network trained using billions of words of ordinary language. Read more to find out how these systems work. Link
EAR TO THE GROUND.
Podcast Episode: Invest like the best - How Stunning Founders Operate
Guests: Dan Rose
Takeaway:
Dan Rose is the chairman of Coatue Ventures. In this episode, Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Dan Rose cover the story behind Amazon’s Kindle, the relationship between innovation and constraints, and how Dan would build a Frankenstein of effective leadership styles.
“At the time, there were no devices with e-ink screens. We took a big bet on e-ink. We thought this was a big part of the answer to making the digital book as comfortable to read as a physical book. And we always said, and Jeff started the whole thing by saying physical books are an incredible invention, they've been around for hundreds of years. In order to convince people to put them down and pick up a new device, it's going to have to be better.”
- Dan Rose, Chairman of Coatue Ventures
2.0B
During its Q2 earnings conference, Google announced that more than 2 billion logged-in monthly users are watching YouTube Shorts, giving it an edge over competitors like TikTok and Instagram Reels. This number is up from 1.5 billion monthly logged-in users for YouTube Shorts announced last year. Link
PROFILE.
Plaid is best known as a provider of financial data APIs. However, over the past few years, the fintech has rolled out robust products spanning identity verification, payments, credit, and beyond. It’s become a proper multi-product company with room to run. And after turning down Visa, the $13.4 billion fintech is thriving solo. Have fun reading!
“Visa offered us incredible opportunities to grow a lot faster and really internationalize in a big way,” Perret said of his initial rationale to sell. “They offered to fund us as an independent entity, so after going back and forth, we decided to sell. It was a difficult, emotionally-complex decision, but even with perfect hindsight, I believe it was the right decision at the time for the company to sell [...] The main reason we walked away from the transaction [in 2021] was because [Plaid] was a fundamentally different business.”
- Zach Perret, Co-founder and CEO of Plaid
ON MY RADAR.
The state of AI in 2023: Generative AI’s breakout year. Link