News

Announcing our Series A Investment in Skupos

08/12/2018

This August we led a $6.4M Series A investment into Skupos, the leading data analytics platform for the convenience store industry. Dynamo Fund, Loup Ventures, and other insiders also participated. We first invested in Skupos in 2016 as part of their Seed round led by Dynamo, before their initial MVP was complete. Today, over 2,500 convenience stores are on the Skupos platform.

Evolution Lottery

Scientists believe that wisdom teeth and the appendix are leftover “equipment” from when humans ate a primarily leaf-based diet. As the human diet changed, these appendices have become essentially useless.

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Ultimately every living thing can trace its ancestry to a bacterium that lived billions of years ago.

Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well.

—Yuval Harari, Sapiens

Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download.

—Max Tegmark, Life 3.0

We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures.

—Yuval Harari, Sapiens

Sixty-some years ago, biochemical organisms began to assemble digital computers. Now digital computers are beginning to assemble biochemical organisms. Viewed from a distance, this looks like part of a life cycle. But which part? Are biochemical organisms the larval phase of digital computers? Or are digital computers the larval phase of biochemical organisms?

—George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral

A few hundred thousand years ago, in early human prehistory, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for productive capacity to increase sufficiently to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 BC, following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, the world economy grows on average by that amount every ninety minutes.”

—Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence

Modern evolution theory recognizes that evolution does not always mean progress. If the environment changes, more advanced animals can die out while less advanced relatives survive.

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes.

—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Hiccups may date back to humans’ watery ancestors. Wiring in the brain that pushes water over fish gills and makes amphibians gulp air has been imperfectly rewired in mammals. It can make the diaphragm go into spasms, which causes hiccups.

The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.

― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Take reason out of the interactive context in which it evolved, and nothing guarantees that it will yield adaptive results.

—Sperber & Mercier, The Enigma of Reason

Humans share about 31% of their genes with yeast, a single living cell that replicates every 90 minutes. They share about 50% of their genes with a banana.

If the entire course of evolution were compressed into a single year, the earliest bacteria would appear at the end of March, but we wouldn't see the first human ancestors until 6 a.m. on December 31st. The golden age of Greece, about 500 BCE, would occur just thirty seconds before midnight.

― Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True

Birds evolved from dinosaurs and both are descended from reptiles. The closest living reptilian relation of a bird is the crocodile.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

—Yuval Harari, Sapiens