Hi everyone,

We're shifting HAVAC emails to a newsletter platform instead of my personal Haverford email. This will make it easier to join, share, and unsubscribe if needed.

I hope you enjoyed chatting with Han last week. It was impressive how much he packed into such a short talk. If you'd like to learn more, he's happy to help at hanmahle@gmail.com.

Our next weekly session is this Friday at 7 PM in the VCAM Makerspace. We'll spend the first half discussing how to find and evaluate startup ideas, then work on projects as usual. We'll aim to meet in person, but since it's spring break, a Zoom link will be available for this session.

Best wishes for any exams or papers due ahead, and hope you have an awesome spring break!

Best,
Fahim & Reid

A personal note from Fahim:

I mentioned this at our last session but wanted to reiterate that any videos, books, articles, or other media I share are meant to spark discussion and reflection, not "tutorials" to be taken as gospel.

My goal in sharing these is to familiarize you with the contemporary Silicon Valley and VC canon. We'll watch Y Combinator Startup School videos, discuss Paul Graham essays, and reference Zero to One — not because they're the best or most accurate startup strategy for you — but because the VCs (who’ve never run a successful company) you'll eventually pitch to think they're the best startup strategy for you. At minimum, you should know the key ideas and references well enough to use them strategically to your advantage. Techbros will randomly quote Yann LeCun at startup mixers, so like any other industry, it helps to know the lingo and "what's cool on Twitter rn."

I'll always link everything we watch or discuss in the post-session email. Just remember that the real learning happens in the discussion that follows, not the video itself.