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Samantha Whitmore
Founder, Experienced Engineer and Physics Researcher
Samantha Whitmore, Founder of New Computer
Samantha Whitmore is the co-founder and CEO of New Computer, a startup building transformative consumer experiences powered by AI.24 She co-founded the company with Jason Yuan, a former member of the Apple Design Team.3
Some key facts about Samantha Whitmore:
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She was previously the Head of Engineering at Kensho Technologies, a startup that used early NLP techniques to organize information for financial clients.3 Kensho was acquired by S&P Global for $550 million in 2018, at the time the largest AI acquisition in history.3
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Whitmore also served as Head of Engineering at Maximus, a startup that partnered with IMAX to build video super-resolution software.3
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She was an early core contributor to LangChain, pioneering the implementation of Memory.3
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Whitmore holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude.1 She also has a Master's degree in Experimental and Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge.1
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In 2019, she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.1
New Computer's first product is Dot, an intelligent AI guide designed to help users remember, organize and navigate their lives.24 The company has received over 25,000 signups for Dot and is currently hiring a founding machine learning engineer and designer.2
Highlights
halfway thru & love this book, brilliant work @nayafia
have been reading w one specific curiosity in mind - why is the joy of parenthood so antimemetic, especially in SF / tech circles? this concept has fascinated me ever since I became a mom. how could this thing that made my life infinitely more meaningful have been completely invisible & fundamentally unknowable to me for so long? I am constantly shocked at this.
this book so far has helped me put some theory behind this curiosity. here are some thoughts on it -
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parents have little motivation to "transmit" their joy to non-parents, b/c preaching is fundamentally unattractive. what's more, there is a chance people are unable to have kids or are just not at that life stage yet, and the messaging of "my kids make my life infinitely better" feels like it could be bragging / lording it over a person who can't have the same thing. it feels more polite to keep the positives to oneself. what's funny is that once i became a parent i could easily "transmit" and share this joy w/ other parents. i've connected w/ others in the tech industry and 100s of moms on the street / in public places at this point, both of us beaming over our children. there's this secret parent network where it becomes possible to acknowledge this joy to eachother that i never knew existed. but externally, there's little individual benefit to me trying to incentivize others to have kids, and a potentially large social cost to me bragging / pressuring people who aren't ready.
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joy in parenthood also qualifies as having a "taboo" associated as i think especially in the culture of silicon valley, having divided focus between your career & another life "north star" has become a negative quality. both startups & big companies want to hire for people who are singularly devoted to their mission. VCs want to fund entrepreneurs with singular focus. if you publicly say your children are the thing that make your life great, you are admitting that you have another guiding light in your life rather than your work. parents don't want to admit this publicly & harm their careers. never mind that these joys can coexist & feed each other. that nuance is lost in complexity. never mind that in general speaking about parenthood can be scary b/c you always feel like you might get something "wrong" and be dunked on.
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the final concept i'm trying to unpack is immunity to receiving the message. it's true that sometimes (more frequently now, with TFR panic - but still not that often) I see parents say “parenthood is the best thing that ever happened to me & I wish I’d done it sooner” - yet those statements are quickly forgotten. before I was a parent I myself was fairly immune to them & didn’t even “hear” them. the only thing that made parenthood more visceral to me was close friends starting to become parents - public statements like the above could not have swayed my perception beforehand. why was i so "immune" to the idea? i think dense networks, where you have repeated exposure to the joy of parenthood through being "shown" by friends you trust rather than being "told" offhand, allows you to really internalize it. you know these people, you know how they were before, you see how they are now, and the concept of you changing to be like them feels more tangible.
this is the concept i'm still most curious about and the one i'm least sure i've gotten right, so curious what others think... where does "immunity" stem from? there's also a potential link to the idea of mimeticism in the girardian sense, where our public figures that we admire don't publicly espouse parenthood as their north stars, so its less easy for us to "want".
anyway long ramble, unedited w/ chatgpt or claude or anything like that, curious what others think
would love to see stories that just happen to take place in a future utopia
if the tech is the focus of the story it will by necessity be a dystopia otherwise there’s no narrative tension
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”
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