Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. And no spam!
What will I read about here?
A lot of things have been changing in the world—technology, geopolitics, and the basis of our micro and macro economies. This publication is my attempt to make some sense of all of it.
My background happens to be at the intersection of a lot of disciplines. I was part of the investment team at a global macro hedge fund, who specialized in macroeconomics. I’ve founded a startup in AI/hardware/women’s health. I am an investor at a deep tech venture fund that invests in AI, synthetic biology, and advanced materials. I have an MBA. And I have a Masters in Computer Science. I majored in philosophy and economics in my undergraduate education, and worked in non-profit education and West African microfinance early in my career.
While I can nerd out on things in depth, if you want purely that, you should read some of the folks I recommend.
Why you should read my Substack is to gain perspective around some of the fast moving complexity. A common saying in economics and statistics is, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” What I generally try to do is simplify enough that one can build intuition around what’s going on—but not simplify it so much that the model loses so much resolution that one can’t intuitively reason about what might be coming next.
I professionally put food on the table by observing things, betting on them, and getting it right. Here is partly where I think out loud.
Why “Weighty Thoughts”?
The symbol theta (the original name of the website) is often used for learned weights—which is what machine learning models actually learn in order to make them work. They’re usually just a matrix (and usually just a single column) of floating point numbers, but it sometimes costs millions of dollars to get there and is what makes the “magic” of AI happen.
This Substack isn’t just about AI, but given my own background, having this cool domain name (hey, I think it’s cool), and the reference to what the symbol means came together into the name.
Reader Feedback
Please give feedback and comments! It’s helpful to know what people find interesting and useful. Inevitably, even being conscious of it, it’s hard to get around the “Curse of Knowledge”—meaning, some things that are obvious to me, are new and highly useful to others who have spent less time marinating in the topic.
About James Wang
James is a General Partner at Creative Ventures, an early stage VC focusing on healthcare, agriculture, and industrial technologies and a Co-Founder and CTO of Lioness Health. Previously, he was on the core investment team at Bridgewater Associates, founded a non-profit consulting firm specializing in microfinance, and did a stint at Google X's Makani project. He's also been a software reviewer for Manning Publications.
James holds an MBA from UC Berkeley where he was a Jack Larson Fellow in Entrepreneurship, an MS in Computer Science at Georgia Tech, and a BA with Honors from Dartmouth. He also holds a Data Science Specialization from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and completed the course track for a PhD Designated Emphasis in Computational Sciences and Engineering at UC Berkeley.
James has been a regular guest lecturer at the Berkeley Haas School of Business Founder Workshop, speaker at numerous investment conferences, and was (most interestingly) presented on stage at CES Last Gadget Standing. He’s done a number of podcasts and interviews, which you can find in the Podcasts/Interviews section here: https://jameswang.ai/
