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Ben’s List for Entrepreneurs W53 – Selected

Ben Costantini Ben Costantini
December 23, 2020

With the year coming to an end – (but wait, there’s still week 53 and a new mutation of the virus ‍♀️ ‍♂️) we thought it would be interesting to check again on the recent articles and ideas that I shared on a weekly basis for the past 2 months.

Technically it’s not really my 2020 reading list, but it gives you a bird eye’s view of what my brain is usually busy with. These are the things I find interesting and valuable, hopefully you do too.

Unsurprisingly, I dove into everything related to the launch of Selected by Sesamers lately. So a lot about community, newsletters, marketing and social media. The bread and butter of any business nowadays.

I also entertained my mind with literature, neuroscience and a bunch of exotic concepts around quantum mechanics. A few are shared below.

My top advice to those reading this last article of 2020:

Take the time to be a better manager and infuse the right strategy within your organization.

My New Year’s Resolution is to improve in these areas in 2021.

And to keep sharing what I learn along the way.

COMMUNITY

1. How to Launch an Online Community — Lean Community Launch Framework

Community isn’t just another word for audience. It’s a special space you create for your most engaged members to gather and interact.

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Credit: Ludovic Célérier 
  • Link: yenfm.substack.com/p/how-to-launch-an-online-community
  • Author: John Saddington
  • Source: Yen.fm

2. Big trend: online communities at the intersection of content curation and knowledge management

We are living through the emergence of a new business category that doesn’t even have a name yet, but which I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: online communities at the intersection of content curation and knowledge management.

This is EXACTLY what we’re aiming for with Selected

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Credit: Sari Azout / Check Your Pulse

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

Diagnosing Symptoms of Success

Here’s one for you on-the-go.

Dive into Kaizo’s podcast with Talixo’s Jan Brenneke as he shares his expertise in the application of analytics & metrics in the context of Customer Service and it’s intersection with management science.

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Credit: @KaizoHQ

LITERATURE

To Believe in Things: Poet Joseph Pintauro’s Lost Love Poem to Life, Illustrated by the Radical Nun and Visionary Artist Sister Corita Kent

You are not everything but everything could not be everything without you.

I shared this with Dan. He cried

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Credit: BrainPickings

MARKETING

Your Marketing Org is Slow. Here’s a framework to move faster.

I’m always an advocate of “done is better than perfect” and I believe that it’s even more the case with marketing. Conveying your story to the right audience is timely. Sometimes it’s a matter of hours for a campaign to become irrelevant to the cultural context.

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Credit: First Round Review

MANAGEMENT

1. Successful Remote Teams Communicate In Bursts

We started to experiment with flex hours after 2 months of working from home. It means that we are all on deck from 10am to 3pm.

I can confirm that “burstiness” works very well for a small teams like ours. It involves agreeing on some work routines that allow everyone to respond to messages fast and have short and intense periods of communication.

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2. The Psychology of Focus: How Great Teams Find Traction Amid Distraction

In this podcast, NFX General Partner James Currier sits down with Nir Eyal, author of Hooked and Indistractable to analyze what high performing teams are doing right in a world full of distractions.

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Credit: NFX

NEUROSCIENCE

Altered states of consciousness: the elusiveness of the mind

Maybe instead of considering a default state and a myriad of altered states, we need to contemplate the possibility that all these states of consciousness are all equally important modes of perception.

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Credit: ScienceFocus.com / James Kingsland

NEWSLETTERS

The best newsletters to follow on European tech

Startup News, Weekly Roundups, Data, Deeptech, … and the list goes on. Great compilation. Now if only they had an Events category …

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Credit: QuickMeme

SOCIAL MEDIA

LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe

And I quote:

LinkedIn is the fucking worst.

Especially considering the basic fact that…

If you have a job, you might lose it. If you don’t, you might find one. So, we stay. Even if it sucks. LinkedIn is bizarre because it tries to make this hostage situation fun. Even though it’s not.

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STRATEGY

Build a Network of Ideas, People & Products

Jack Butcher, founder of VisualizeValue walks us through his thoughts and process of finding people you can help, and building products that help them.

Ideas -> People -> Product.

VENTURE CAPITAL

1. Why investors are betting on Silicon Valley’s second climate boom

If the U.S. Presidential election showed us nothing else, Climate Change is now back on the agenda at The White House. It’s on The Valley’s list too.‌

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Credit: Quartz

2. The VC “Strips off” – Silicon Roundabout Ventures VC Fund Deck Reviewed Live by Draper Esprit LP

From a network access perspective, being able to access an engaged community is not just a “nice to have” but really a “must have”.

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Credit: Dilbert (dilbert.com) – Tuesday July 10, 2012

ZOOMITIS

Home Screens: Quarantine is the future big tech wanted us to want. How long before we want out?

Before the pandemic, tech companies treated space as an annoying set of limitations to be overcome by apps

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Image: Every Way You Turn (2019) by Aaron Elvis Jupin. 

Users experience Zoom more as a stultified form of virtual reality than an augmented one, because it now feels like there’s little off-screen reality available to augment

SEASONAL

Eight hours of 4K footage and ASMR audio of a cozy fireplace

Because when you can’t have an actual fireplace, this is the next best thing

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Ben Costantini

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Fundraising 4 hours ago

London-based AI laboratory Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed on 27 April 2026. The financing is the largest seed round ever raised by a European company and one of the largest first-money-in rounds in the global history of artificial intelligence. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participating investors included Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, the British government’s recently established vehicle for backing strategic AI capacity on home soil. A bet on a different path to general intelligence Ineffable Intelligence was founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former Vice President of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind and the principal architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar. He is joined by three further DeepMind alumni: Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt and Junhyuk Oh. All four have spent the past decade at the frontier of reinforcement learning research, the discipline behind some of the most consequential demonstrations of machine learning over the past ten years. The company describes its objective as building a “superlearner” — an AI system capable of acquiring knowledge directly from its own experience rather than from human-generated text or imagery. “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement accompanying the launch. “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.” The framing is a deliberate departure from the dominant industry trajectory. Most leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind itself, have built large language models trained primarily on the corpus of the internet, then refined that training with human feedback. Ineffable’s wager is that the marginal returns on scaling text-based pretraining are diminishing and that the next leap in capability will come from agents that learn endlessly from the consequences of their own actions, in much the same way AlphaZero learnt the game of Go without studying any human matches. Why $1.1 billion at seed The size of the round is unusual even by the inflated standards of the 2026 AI capital cycle. Two factors appear to explain it. First, frontier reinforcement learning at the scale Ineffable describes is computationally extraordinarily expensive: the company will need to operate vast simulation environments and train very large models against them, an undertaking that consumes capital at a rate closer to physical R&D than to traditional software. Second, the round signals a strategic move by Europe’s investor and policy ecosystems to retain the most ambitious AI researchers on the continent. The presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed and Nvidia is the clearest expression of that intent. The British government has publicly framed the investment as a bet on breakthrough AI that “can discover new knowledge”, positioning the country as a willing co-investor in domestic frontier laboratories. For Ineffable, the implication is access not only to capital but to compute, regulatory engagement and the still-resilient academic talent base around UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Founder pledge of historic scale Alongside the funding announcement, Silver disclosed that he is committing 100 per cent of any personal proceeds from his Ineffable equity to charity via the Founders Pledge network — described by the organisation as the largest pledge in its history. At the round’s $5.1 billion valuation, that commitment could ultimately exceed several billion dollars if the company succeeds. It is a meaningful gesture in a sector where the reputational stakes around concentrated AI wealth are escalating, and one likely to be referenced in subsequent founder-led commitments. Implications for the European AI landscape Ineffable’s emergence reshapes the European AI map in three concrete ways. It establishes London as the home of the continent’s largest-ever seed-stage company, complicating Paris’s recent narrative of frontier-AI primacy after Mistral’s earlier rounds. It validates a thesis — that reinforcement learning, not transformer scaling, is the next frontier — that has lately been losing capital share to language-model incumbents. And it confirms that the UK government is now willing to act as a balance-sheet co-investor in domestic AI laboratories, a posture much closer to the French model than to the predominantly grant-based regimes elsewhere in Europe. The execution risk is non-trivial. Reinforcement learning at frontier scale has historically required years of careful environment design before producing competitive systems, and Ineffable’s “first contact” framing sets a high bar against which it will be judged. But for now, with a billion dollars on the balance sheet, four of the discipline’s most accomplished researchers in the founding team and a sovereign co-investor at its back, Ineffable Intelligence is the most heavily resourced new entrant in the European AI cycle. Sesamers covers European fundraising rounds across deeptech, fintech and AI. Source: tech.eu.

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