Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕✓

I love getting a solid cold email or DM from founders! No need for an intro to 1517. Some things will make your message standout and get a response (faster than others)🧵:

Ok this is fun and wacky: "Likewise, if you’re passionate about a certain hobby or creative pursuit, the 1517 angel number is a sign that you should continue pursuing it with all your heart. You have great potential in this area and can achieve great things if you stay focused and dedicated."

1517 Angel Number Meaning:

RT @_Shark_byte: Last year I was a recipient of a grant from @1517fund I was building @getunuvo at the time and unsure of what life would look like after graduation Even though to many $1k may seem small, to me it meant so much And while I ended up shutting down Unuvo and joining @tryramp, those months grinding taught me more than any internship or class ever could, helped me land my current role and inspired me to keep building All of that that would not have been possible without @1517fund and @DStrachman it only takes one person believing in you to change everything

We've been hosting sci fi field trips for the last 4 years and they are a blast. Cam is hosting one with Marathon Fusion, also a 1517 portco, next week! Invites like this rarely come along. Get in there and see what the future holds!

Want to learn more about @MarathonFusion? I'm hosting an experience at their SF HQ next week. Come meet the team, see their plasma reactor, and learn about work they're doing to build the future! Limited space, RSVP on the event page below!

RT @camwiese: Small grants and encouragements of ambition ("you could go bigger") are still extremely underrated

RT @1517fund: Phoebe Yao got $1K from us, $8K from Tyler Cowen, $100K from the Thiel Fellowship, and raised $4.5M in 2022. When asked which was most meaningful, she pointed to the first $1K. It changed what she thought she was capable of. We still give out those grants.

The dream team. We had and built something very special together!

Danielle, Michael, and Jonathan were the best colleagues and friends anyone could want. We had audacious candidates to choose from, and generous, talented volunteer mentors who helped guide the fellows as they became founders. @William_Blake @jonathanhcain

Really impressed and looking forward to watching!

Tomorrow we're releasing a full UATX course for free: all 19 lectures of Professor Isabella Reinhardt's Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome, filmed in class with our students. It runs from Rome's mythical founding to the Third Century Crisis. It ends on a question the class spent a whole session arguing about: did Rome ever really fall?

There is one, and only one, newsletter that's allowed in my inbox every day and it's Arnold's. Gems like this abound: "The Empathy Test: Why You Tune Out When Someone Needs You Someone you care about starts telling you about their rough day. Two minutes in, you’re nodding along while your brain drafts tomorrow’s to-do list. They notice before you do. “Anyway,” they say, and the moment is gone. The Old Question: Am I an empathetic person? The Better Question: When do I check out, and how do I come back? It’s tempting to treat empathy like eye color. You either got it or you didn’t, and every time you drift feels like proof you got shortchanged. That’s not what the research shows. People differ in how naturally empathy comes. But when researchers reviewed 18 randomized trials of empathy training, the training produced a moderate, reliable improvement. Empathy works more like a skill than a fixed setting. It also works like a choice you make over and over, and each one costs effort. In one set of 11 experiments, researchers showed 1,204 online participants photos of strangers. People picked between two tasks: try to feel what the person was feeling, or simply describe how they looked. People chose empathy only about one in three times. They avoided it even when the faces were happy. The more draining it felt, the more they steered away. Nobody was asked for money or time. Mental effort was the only price, and it was enough. So if you tune out sometimes, you’re normal, not broken. Here’s the interesting part. When researchers told people they’d scored in the top 5% at empathy (the feedback was made up), the avoidance disappeared. People chose empathy about as often as the easier task. The barrier wasn’t ability. It was a forecast: this will be hard, and I’ll be bad at it. You can’t just talk yourself into a better forecast, though. A large 2025 project ran five preregistered studies. It tested short messages saying empathy is unlimited, can grow, or is what good people do. None reliably raised empathy toward the strangers in the stories. One message sometimes backfired: hearing that empathy is a limited resource made people feel less of it. That doesn’t mean empathy can’t grow. It means a few sentences on a screen don’t train it. Real confidence comes from reps you actually complete, like in the gym. (Also worth knowing: these studies used strangers in photos and stories. Your partner after a long day is a different test.) So the goal is to make each rep cost less. Care without carrying everything. In a small brain-imaging study of women, training to feel others’ pain while watching footage of suffering increased negative emotions. Compassion training came next: warmth and wanting the person to be okay, without taking on all their distress. It reversed the negative emotions and boosted positive ones. It’s a small study, so treat it as a clue rather than proof. But it matches what most of us know. Absorbing someone’s pain is exhausting, and exhaustion is when you check out. Give your attention a job. In one study, strangers chatted online for 15 minutes. People randomly told to ask at least nine questions were liked more than people told to ask four or fewer. Follow-up questions did the most work, because they prove you heard what came before. Partners saw the question-askers as more responsive. Most people don’t expect questions to matter this much. The next time you notice yourself drifting while someone talks, ask one follow-up question about something they just said. Then listen to the whole answer. If even that feels like too much, start smaller. Repeat back the last thing they said before you respond. You don’t need to be born empathetic. You need to notice the moment you leave and come back with one question. Every time you do, that’s a rep, and reps are how this skill grows."

RT @lisatomic5: What career advice am I even supposed to give my 15yo right now? His favorite subject has been computer science, he likes speech & debate, is very social. He is skeptical that college makes sense at all, and I am entirely unsure at this point

RT @regardthefrost: Exceptional talent is widely distributed. Permission to use it is not. We started the Thiel Fellowship to find extraordinary young people and give them the freedom to pursue ambitious ideas. Fifteen years later, see what they’ve built.

From 2011 - 2014, the Thiel Fellowship gave out 40 $100k fellowships to entrepreneurs That were all under 20 years old at the time... 13 unicorns have since been built by those 40 fellows 4 of those 40 fellows are also now billionaires Absolutely insane hit rate

The founding team of the Thiel Fellowship hosted a documentary crew for the first and second years of the fellowship, but very few people paid attention to our work then. See the comments for some early videos of teens who would go on to become tech titans. You'll catch a glimpse of what we saw and believed in before anyone else.

Dylan Field on the origins of Figma:

Chris Olah's passion for math turned him towards AI but he started his fellowship as a 3D printing enthusiast:

RT @zebulgar: Anthropic cofounder, Chris Olah, was a 2012 Thiel Fellow alongside Dylan Field, the 2nd class... Chris started with 3D printing + open-source design software. But the Fellowship's whole thing is a bet on people, not just their first idea. The program has an insane hit rate...

I thought it was getting better too but Market and 6th and the Mission are still a nightmare.

I just walked down all of Market St in SF and didn’t see: - a single tent - signs of homelessness - needles - human poop It was safe. There were kids playing. SF is healed. I’m amazed.

RT @anjulipie: My mom was talking to a friend today, telling her about this therapy she has been doing that has changed her life and given her real hope in her battle against dementia and Alzheimer's. The friend has four sisters who all have dementia, and she is terrified this will happen to her. She said, "I will do anything to prevent myself from losing my brain. Tell me more about the therapy." So my mom goes on to explain, and then the friend goes, "But how much does it cost?" And my mom says, "$8,000." And the friend goes, "Oh, that's a lot.” I think that speaks to much of what is wrong with medicine in the United States. Not that a therapy should cost $8,000, but that we should believe that is too much to pay out of pocket for something that could change our life. Over the years, my mother has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in her war against Alzheimer's. Every single penny of which she gladly handed over. Why? Because she understands that health insurance is not the same as healthcare. She is not going to begrudge spending money on a therapy that is not yet “proven”. Especially not when she believes that it has truly given her life back.