The Bootstrapping Byte #2 - Go big or go home!

My picks this week: Two crazy stories from the VC-backed startup world (Gorillas and Mistral.ai) illustrating the "Go big or go home!" mentality, Vercel releasing an AI library, YC tipps to improve landing pages, a map of the Generative AI landscape from Sequoia capital.

🦍 Go big or go home (part 1): The rise and fall of Gorillas

"Hell of a ride" seems really to be the right term to describe Gorilla's two years of life. From 0 to 10.000 employees in one year to the 1 billion financing round one year later followed by a dramatic sell-off a few month laters. It's a fast life!

🌬️ Go big or go home (part 2): Mistral.ai into the wind raising €105m with no product

The venture scene went bananas last week when the founding team of Mistral secured €105m in pre-seed financing to create the European champion of process & generative AI. In addition to the "more open" model approach, the core team, which seems to have the skills to match their ambition, interestingly brought on board two eminent figures from the French tech ecosystem. Looking forward to seeing the first results at the beginning of 2024 ;)

See the pitch memo that raised €105m for four-week-old startup Mistral | Sifted

Reactions were mixed when Paris-based AI startup Mistral raised a whopping €105m with no product, four weeks after launching and just days after hiring its first employees. Some heralded it as a big milestone for European tech — with top talent from Meta and Google returning home to launch a possibl…

SiftedTim Smith

📦 DIY - A chatbot out of the box

Vercel released an AI SDK to build your own chatbot in minutes. Nothing crazy in itself but it provides all core functionalities to build your own LLM interface out of the box and supports different providers: LangChain, OpenAI, Anthropic, and HuggingFace 🤗. Again Vercel is doing a great job selling shovels during gold rushes.

GitHub - vercel-labs/ai: Build AI-powered applications with React, Svelte, and Vue

Build AI-powered applications with React, Svelte, and Vue - GitHub - vercel-labs/ai: Build AI-powered applications with React, Svelte, and Vue

GitHubvercel-labs

🔫 YC Partners roasting landing pages

This is a design review of selected landing pages from Y-Combinator's Aaron Epstein and Gary Tan. It provides hints about mastering value proposition formulation, call-to-action and basic UX rules. These are always good to watch.

🌲 Sequoia's perspective on the LLM landscape

The team at Sequoia provides a deep dive into the current and future applications of AI and language models across various industries. This makes it a valuable resource for entrepreneurs, developers, and AI enthusiasts who want an overview of the current state of the LLM landscape.

The New Language Model Stack

How companies are bringing AI applications to life

Sequoia Capital US/EuropeMichelle Fradin and Lauren Reeder

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