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Ela Madej shared thisi've been quietly working on a movie it's my way of processing the times we live in, a coming of age of sorts it's a poetic, feminine, near-future fiction feature i've been learning writing, directing, and film production on the job. we're early in the process. because i'm a beginner with no film portfolio, i want to give my future cast & crew a glimpse of a few scenes as i see them. so i'm doing prototype shoots of core scenes with friends (and myself!) in them these screenshots are from a blocking / prototype shoot of a scene called 'bloodline'. no ai, no edits, just red velvet and a cold stinson beach sunrise immediate learnings: 1. it's much easier to direct when you're not also in the shots :) 2. sunrise comes fast and then, poof, it's gone 3. even for experiments, be crazy prepared: have a run of show, assign roles, brief everyone the day before especially if you're learning on the job 4. experiment experiment experiment 5. some of the best shots were unplanned 6. looking through footage takes a lot of time i will try to share more behind the scenes and learnings in the coming weeks & months if I can avoid spoilers thanks Olivia T. Kasia Bojanowska for jumping into the ocean in the name of art, Elinor Samuelsson for your amazing camera work, and Brandon Chen for sick drone capture!
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Ela Madej shared thisA little something we shot in a 4-week sprint to kick off our storytelling efforts at Fifty Years. It's so fun to make moving images! Sexy founder cameos by John Gedmark of Astranis Space Technologies Caleb Boyd & Kevin Bush of Molten Industries and Lada Nuzhna of General Control. Well done Souvid Datta and team!
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Ela Madej shared thisUnlike D. Scott Phoenix, I don't live in the future. If you told me five years ago that a swarm at agentic AIs would be working at my company, I would say you're delusional. Scott would have probably seen it. And -- unlike me -- it wouldn't have given him a deep sense of discomfort. AI/human merger is another thing that I have a hard time imagining -- or feeling comfortable with. But I've learned the lesson that reality comes whether we're ready or not. That's why it's so fun to work with and be friends with Scott. Listen to his TED take on human/AI merger and how it's the oxygen crisis of our time: https://lnkd.in/dsKedcjX
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Ela Madej reposted thisEla Madej reposted thisChoosing what to build is the highest-leverage decision you'll make! Get it wrong? Waste years. Get it right? You could build an indispensable company 🚀 In our first chats with 5050s, they've started off by choosing ideas that seem novel or interesting. At Kickoff, we address the importance of asking the right questions and share frameworks to answer them too. Swipe through questions that help you choose. 👉 And ask the one that matters most: Will customers actually pay for it? We'll teach you how to answer these questions with frameworks from hundreds of deep tech companies that worked (and those that didn't). I wish I'd know them before building my company 🤓 Whether you're sitting on multiple ideas or ready to build, we're excited to meet you! We'll add some silicon valley spice ✨ and you're in for a ride! 5050. March/April 2026. Free. No equity. 🇬🇧 + 🇺🇸 cohorts. Let's go! Apply today.
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Ela Madej shared this5050 is life changing. Join or recommend your friends!Ela Madej shared this100 companies started from an accelerator. 96% raise success rate. How much equity do they take? None. That’s 5050. No equity. No fees. No hidden clauses. Applications open!
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Ela Madej reposted thisEla Madej reposted this100 companies started from an accelerator. 96% raise success rate. How much equity do they take? None. That’s 5050. No equity. No fees. No hidden clauses. Applications open!
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Ela Madej shared thiswe’re hosting a dope event for builders. Bryan Johnson Emmett Shear Wojciech Zaremba D. Scott Phoenix and Olivia T. will upgrade you and your world model. we'll explore taboos & secrets. we'll play a gradient descent game. we'll share our left-field ideas. reinforcement with human feedback guaranteed :). apply or share with smart folks you love: https://lnkd.in/gg7yVdis
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Ela Madej shared thisEla Madej shared thisToday, we announced a research collaboration with Pfizer to apply Gordian’s in vivo mosaic screening platform to obesity target discovery. Drug discovery is no longer limited by ideas, but by validation. The industry can generate associations and hypotheses at unprecedented scale, but knowing which targets actually change disease biology in a living organism remains slow and costly. That is the gap Gordian was built to close. Our platform is designed not just to identify novel targets, but to prioritize and de-risk them in vivo so they are ready to advance into development programs with confidence. Our platform can biologically validate 500 targets in vivo, in 6 months. In obesity, we run large-scale in vivo screens directly in visceral adipose tissue, prioritizing targets based on true physiological impact rather than proxy models. This work reflects a belief that complex, systemic diseases require validation in a realistic in vivo environment if we want better outcomes downstream. This marks our second signed partnership with a major company in the cardio-renal-metabolic space, and we’re just getting started. Please reach out to partnering@gordian.bio to learn more about our collaboration efforts. Learn More: https://lnkd.in/gsGRVZBd
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Ela Madej posted thisFinally direct Poland <> San Francisco flights!! This makes my heart so happy <3 https://lnkd.in/gfaGE6Gu
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Ela Madej reacted on thisEla Madej reacted on thisI watched this, and halfway through I felt compelled to go build. That's the vibe of September kicking off. It's about cutting through the noise, focusing on the signal and not jumping on the latest bandwagon of AI slop. Amazing work by Souvid Datta and team. Worth a watch! Written by a human - hope you enjoy the change. https://lnkd.in/edKmiH7zEveryone Is Building Slop. He Built Something Real | Indispensable | A 50Y Short FilmEveryone Is Building Slop. He Built Something Real | Indispensable | A 50Y Short Film
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Ela Madej liked thisEla Madej liked thisWe’ve been backing deep tech startups for over a decade. Recently we noticed something strange. A huge number of the best founders are coming out of the same 4 companies: Anduril, Neuralink, Tesla, SpaceX. We started calling them The ANTS. We wanted to know what made these companies such great startup factories, so we flew across the country to talk with these founders.
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Ela Madej liked thisThanks for the feature The Wall Street Journal! The team is working very hard to make more Airforms (���🔥Liquid Cooling Heat-Pumps for your buildings!) right now here in Kailua, Hawaii. You can check out more here at https://airform.space. They are now delivering in Hawaii and California.Ela Madej liked thisA band of ambitious entrepreneurs in Hawaii are building a manufacturing and technology industry that officials hope will rescue the state from a sagging tourism economy, depressed wages and an exodus of young residents to the mainland. Hawaii, once a premier destination for American and international visitors, has lost traffic to newly popular vacation spots. The number of visitors hasn’t rebounded to prepandemic levels, and no industry has replaced tourism, much less with higher-paying work. Economists say Hawaii needs to shift away from the service-based industry that propelled its explosive growth in the late 20th century. The state needs only to cultivate a few successful enterprises to jump-start the economy, said Zack Hernandez, who left for college on the mainland and returned to run a talent-development startup on Oahu. “If you bring 30 or 50 jobs with a $100 billion company, you create 30 or 50 millionaires” who can then invest in more young startups, he said. One possibility is expanding the defense-tech sector, he said, taking advantage of Hawaii’s strategic position between the U.S. and Asia. 🔗 Read more: https://on.wsj.com/4zvhrNU
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Ela Madej reacted on thisEla Madej reacted on thisI just saw the future in Tooele, Utah. In 1942, a site in Tooele, Utah was used as a WWII Army munitions depot. The War Department began hiring women for positions that were traditionally considered men's work. Women who had never worked outside the home were stacking artillery shells in the Utah desert to defeat Nazi Germany. Fashionably dressed no less! 84 years later, the same land is being repurposed to build the lithium supply for the world. We met Eric and Evan through 5050 -- just two Stanford postdocs with a crazy idea: use battery tech to extract lithium in a way no one had ever done before. They started with a single cell no bigger than the palm of my hand. They've now scaled that cell 352,000,000x and deployed their first site. 🤯 In 1942, women who had never held a job answered the call -- picked up shovels, stacked shells in the Utah desert, and helped save the world. In 2023, two postdocs looked at a planet that needs more lithium and answered the call. In 2026, they built the first of many sites. Every generation inherits a problem they didn't create and a piece of ground to solve it on. Fifty Years exists to back founders like Eric McShane and Evan Gardner building the future we all need!
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Ela Madej reacted on this“Sometimes the most important thing to build is the hardest” This is the most personal thing I've directed for 50Y. INDISPENSABLE started as a frustration. Storytelling is growing everywhere in tech. Slickly produced videos with A24 quality aesthetics announcing yet another massive round. Carefully crafted narratives designed to make companies feel inevitable. Increasingly, these videos are being used to sell things that just don't matter. Or worse, shouldn't exist. "Prediction markets" that are really just online casinos. AI fake-influencer startups built to deceive people. It’s been hard to watch. What civilisation really needs are cures for disease, abundant clean energy, new scientific tools, and technologies that genuinely expand human capability, dignity and social justice. To achieve that, we need a different type of ambition. I wanted to make that argument. Not in an essay. Not in a thread. But a film. Assembled in weeks. Shot over four days. With a small, world-class crew on a tight short-film budget. All directed towards one message: we can all aim higher. The opening satirical sequence leans heavily on experimental gen AI and VFX in the polished style of the startup videos it parodies. The rest of the film moves in the opposite direction: single-camera, shot on location with vintage lenses, and slower pacing. Full film: https://lnkd.in/eRm-hC_a If you've ever wondered whether the harder thing is worth building - or you know someone who has - this film’s for you. Thanks for the trust, guidance and epic sprint on this! Seth Bannon Ela Madej Drew Moxon Sheila Nortley Sychelle-Kristina Yanda (Full credits on YT!)Ela Madej reacted on thisCan't we do better? First short film from Fifty Years.
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David Carvalho PhD h.c.
Naoris exists in an industry that rewards two completely opposite things. On one side, there is the startup energy that any modern tech company needs. Building in public, telling a compelling story, staying culturally relevant, moving faster than the incumbents. The kind of visibility that attracts talent, investors, and momentum. On the other side, there is cybersecurity itself. An industry that has been around for decades and rewards the opposite. Quiet credibility. Technical rigor. References. The buyers here, CISOs, governments, critical infrastructure operators, are allergic to anything that looks like hype. Most days, I feel the tension between the two. The same week I might be on a panel with a room full of CISOs who evaluate you on certifications and technical whitepapers, and then in a conversation with a founder or investor who is measuring how well you tell your story. Both audiences are essential to what we are building. Neither is fully served by how you communicate to the other. For a long time, I thought the answer was to pick a side. To go "serious" or go "modern." I have stopped believing that. The founders who build lasting categories in industries like this one learn to hold the tension rather than resolve it. To be credible with both without pretending to be either. It is uncomfortable. But it is also, I think, the whole point.
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Oliver Alexander
For the first time in US History, it's now possible to search for land based on exactly what you intend to develop. Introducing SearchAI Intentions, by Prophetic. When we started building Prophetic, one of the things that frustrated us most about land search was the invisible prerequisite: before you could find a site suitable for your townhome, hotel, data center, warehouse, etc. project, you had to already intimately know the market. You had to know the zone codes. You had to know which municipalities allowed what uses. You had to translate your vision into zoning language and then go hunting. If you didn't have that local expertise, you were starting from scratch or waiting for a broker to call you. That has been true for every developer, in every asset class, since the beginning of the industry. We just changed how the industry works - nationwide. SearchAI Intentions now lets you search by exactly what you want to build with 120+ development type categories, any market, any jurisdiction, and results in seconds. A hotel developer searches "Hotel - Full Service". A data center developer searches "Data Center". A senior living operator searches "Senior Living - Active Adult" or "Senior Living - Assisted Living". SearchAI reads the actual zoning codes across every zone and jurisdiction in your search area and returns every viable parcel, ranked by fit. It cites the specific municipal code section behind every result so you can act with confidence. What this means practically: for the first time, hotel developers, energy companies, warehouse and logistics operators, data center site selectors, cell tower companies, senior living operators, medical facility developers, commercial and retail developers, economic development agencies, and major brokerages have a land search tool built for how they actually think about acquisition. They can find sites that meet their exact criteria, in any market, in seconds - instead of literal weeks. If you have ever spent days in county GIS systems trying to find viable sites for a project, I would love to show you what this looks like now. For a deeper look at how it works and how Prophetic unlocks development across all verticals, read the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/gPzJbt3w #PropTech #LandAcquisition #RealEstateDevelopment #SearchAI #Prophetic #DataCenters #SeniorLiving #EnergyInfrastructure #IndustrialRealEstate #HospitalityDevelopment #homebuilding #cre #realestate #commercialrealestate #realestatebrokerage https://lnkd.in/gz-zrt2P
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