Seth Bannon 🌻
@sethbannon
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Entrepreneur. Investor. Happy warrior. Founder @fiftyyears . ❤️ climate, bio, deeptech. Helping great scientists become great founders is my jam.
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2009
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Pinned Tweet
A VC that builds?
To best support founders, VCs can't run like law firms. They need to run like the startups they back. They need to build.
We're excited to show you some of the things we've been building at
@fiftyyears
. 1/
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American Hospital Association "Best Guess Epidemiology" for
#codiv19
over next 2 months:
96,000,000 infections
4,800,000 hospitalizations
1,900,000 ICU admissions
480,000 deaths
vs flu in 2019:
35,500,000 infections
490,600 hospitalizations
49,000 ICU admissions
34,200 deaths
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Years ago Tony Hsieh learned I was visiting downtown Vegas and immediately insisted I stay at one of his places, made sure I knew local vegan places, and set me up with friends of his to go rock climbing with. He showed this love to everyone he touched. He was a kindness factory.
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NVIDIA once had to lay off 75% of employees and had only 9 months of runway left to tape out its next chip. No time or money to test prototypes, they went straight from simulation to full manufacturing. It all nearly didn't work.
Never give up.
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"Where do I think the next amazing revolution is going to come? And this is going to be flat out one of the biggest ones ever.
There's no question that digital biology is going to be it."
Jensen Huang, founder & CEO of NVIDIA.
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We want to create a revolving door VC firm.
We want founders to join our team, spend a few years helping support other founders, leave to start their next thing (we'll even put up the initial $$), and then we want them years later (succeed or fail) to come back.
Why? 👇
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Source on American Hospital Association numbers:
Source on flu stats:
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If you want to understand how badly this will break the US healthcare system, read
@LizSpecht
's excellent thread 👇
I think most people aren’t aware of the risk of systemic healthcare failure due to
#COVID19
because they simply haven’t run the numbers yet. Let’s talk math. 1/n
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4 things almost everyone wants in their careers:
1) to work on interesting things
2) to work with great people
3) to make $$$
4) to do good in the world
You used to have to choose 2 or 3 of those. Not anymore.
The best & brightest flock to companies that offer all 4.
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I really truly don't care that someone bought an NFT for $100k and then flipped it for $1.2m a few weeks later. That's simple speculation.
You know what's cool tho? People taking a long view and working hard to build things the world actually needs. Now that's interesting.
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At
@fiftyyearsvc
we're on a mission to fund startups solving the world's biggest problems.
#SDGs
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Introducing the Spinout Playbook, a free guide to spinning a startup out of academia.
Why is this needed? The process of “spinning out” science from universities is broken 👇🧵
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FYI after feedback from informed eyes, I believe the "epi wave 2 months" refers to the length of the "epidemic wave", meaning these estimations are for total cases in the US, not just cases over next 2 months. Still quite disturbing.
Thanks for helping clarify, all.
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👀 2.5 megajoules of energy output from 2.1 megajoules of energy input. 120% output to input!
Like the internet and GPS, it's possible that the holy grail of limitless, zero carbon energy may come from a US government lab!
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Founders, don't build a company investors want so you can raise money from them.
Build the company YOU want and find investors that happen to want that too.
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Too many incredibly high potential people are working on incredibly low potential things.
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This is what the founder of a multi-$100m deep tech VC fund looks like at work. Mom power 💪
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Worth saying that First Republic Bank is now on EXTREMELY SOLID FOOTING. This move by the fed to protect SVB depositors calmed the markets, JPM offered FRB $10B, they have a strong balance sheet, and access to $60B more in federal borrowing if they want it. No concerns!
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I'm still shocked at how few VCs are actually focused on helping build important, impactful companies.
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The SaaS startup playbook doesn’t work in deep tech. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t apply when building nuclear reactors or bioengineering cell therapies.
That’s why we built 5050, “a cheat code for starting a deep tech startup.” (quote from an alumni)
Applications open!…
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Study in the Lancet finds that
#COVID19
viral shedding can be UP TO 37 DAYS, with an average of 20 DAYS.
*Patients may still be contagious during that time*
VERY BIG DEAL because current guidelines recommend only a 14 day (2 week) isolation time. 1/n
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The
@WhiteHouse
just released an Executive Order outlining Bold Goals for US Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing and it's 🔥
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I won't forget where I come from.
I remember the embarrassment I felt as a teenager when everyone in line at the supermarket heard the cashier announce that some food item I had in my cart wasn't covered by the food stamps my family relied on.
No child should have to feel that.
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San Francisco sucks.
If you want to host a meetup / dinner / hackathon about AI, climate tech, bioengineering, etc it's impossible to find a day where there's not already a great event on that thing. Too many amazing people. Too many amazing events. How do people live here?
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Entrepreneur AI anxiety is real. Everything is moving so fast that many feel the ground is shifting under their feet. A 10x product of last month may be obsolete today. Many are asking the same question:
Where is defensibility in the age of AI?
👇
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Paying attention?
@sacca
, arguably the most successful VC ever, is focusing entirely on climate tech.
After seeding Twitter, Uber, Instagram, he thinks the next big trend is "technologies to reduce CO2 emissions, remove carbon from the atmosphere, & actively cool the planet." 👊
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Well this is wild. Engineered photosynthesis demonstrated in mammalian cells *in animals in vivo* and it can be used to treat certain conditions 🤯
Synthetic biology is on fire.
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Candy bars now come in drink form. Our species is in trouble.
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As an American I'm pretty jealous of Finnish politics where their biggest scandal is apparently the Prime Minister being too cool.
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The climate is heading off a cliff.
Thousands die every day of malnutrition.
People can't afford to see a doctor.
And some Silicon Valley VCs are tweeting about how proud they are of the e-sports franchises they funded.
Talk about misallocation of resources.
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~20% of the companies we partnered with in
@fiftyyears
Fund I are now unicorns. All backed from pre-seed or seed.
Of the 109 companies we've backed over 9 years (all from pre-seed or seed), only 9 have wound down.
50Y founders are 🔥
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HUGE news in climate tech!
@solugen
just raised $200m at a >$2B valuation and is on track to make >$100m revenue this year!
🧵
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For 4 years we've been shouting from the rooftops
@fiftyyears
that supporting sustainability startups is a moral imperative & a huge business opportunity.
Inspired that in the last few months Sequoia, Lightspeed, USV, BlackRock have all come around.
But we still need 10x more.
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Incrediblly excited to share that
@fiftyyears
led the seed round for
@elicitorg
! AI to accelerate research!
Over 2M scientific papers are published each year. That’s 5,500 per day! If you worked 24 hours a day with no breaks, you’d have to read 1 paper every 16 seconds to keep…
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Every modern society, looking back fifty years, condemns behavior once considered normal (male-only voting, interracial marriage bans, jailing gays, etc).
Industrial animal agriculture will be one of the things today's society is condemned for, fifty years from now.
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@paulg
@brianklaas
@amirnathoo
My partner and I recently wanted to buy a hybrid or electric car. 3 years ago, would have been a Tesla. Instead, we got a Volvo.
Why? For better or worse, Tesla the company is very associated in our minds with Elon the person. And Elon the person has become a malicious bully.
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Can finally share the
@AnsaBio
news: they've created the world's longest DNA oligo produced using de novo synthesis! 1,005 bases! 99.9% stepwise yield 🤯 Huge accomplishment, massive for bioengineering. Ansa will enable applications of synthetic biology never before dreamed of.
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Slowly & then all at once.
Companies pausing Facebook advertisements until FB stops spreading posts that divide, disinform, promote hate, glorify violence:
★ Unilever
★ Coca-cola
★ Pepsi
★ Starbucks
★ Levi Strauss
★ Unilever
★ Diago
★ Patagonia
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Many VCs see their job as chasing markups -- investing in companies & then "selling" those companies to other VCs to invest in at higher valuations.
Some VCs see their job as backing founders & helping them build real value over the long term.
As a founder, you want the latter.
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Omg people come on.
A private company being able to choose not to broadcast the messages of the leader of the country is the EXACT OPPOSITE of autocracy!
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So tired of VCs touting how "proud they are" of their portfolio startups reinventing the seamless retail experience.
WHO. CARES.
Pride should come only from supporting things that actually matter, not anther sales optimization whatever.
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Brilliant by
@ChrisMurphyCT
highlighting that clean energy is the only truly domestic, truly secure American energy. Such an important point if you care about American energy independence!
“If you’re serious about energy independence, then you’re not being serious by saying we can get there through oil drilling. Because oil companies only drill when they’re going to make a profit, and much of that oil goes overseas, not to American consumers.”
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Warren Buffett is an incredibly talented investor but he represents a broken form of capitalism. Huge champion of Coca-Cola and other companies peddling sugar and recently bought big into Chevron and other fossil fuel conglomerates, because they make him money.
We can do better.
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This is huge. Yes it's in dogs but for the first time the FDA has said lifespan extension is an acceptable endpoint for a therapeutic! This could help open the floodgates for longevity therapeutics and will 💯 be written about in the history books.
1 - Loyal has earned what we believe is the FDA’s first-ever formal acceptance that a drug can be developed + approved for lifespan extension
2 - We have 'technical section complete' AKA the 'does it work' data for LOY-001 - our large dog lifespan extension drug - is done
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If you're having a tough fundraise, just remind yourself that
@JeffBezos
took 60 meetings to raise the first $1M for Amazon at a $5M post-money valuation.
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Too many are focused on progress within the same few areas like SaaS or low-code tools. This overconcentration comes at a huge cost: brilliant people who could build the next massive leap forward are instead grinding out incremental innovations that others would have soon found.…
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LLMs meet lab automation! A team at our AI + Bio hackathon just showed that you can explain your pipetting protocol in plain english and GPT4 can already write your
@opentrons
code for you 🤯. Very useful for biologists!
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Slowly and then all at once.
Mitt Romney is in favor of a carbon tax, as well as significant federal investment in new climate technologies like carbon capture. Let's go!
"I’m very, very open to a carbon tax, carbon dividend, where there’s a tax on oil companies and coal companies," Senator Mitt Romney said at the DealBook DC Policy Project.
#DealBookDC
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Too many "accelerators" push PhD founders to team up with MBAs they just met as co-founders. Much better to co-found a company with someone you've known for a long time or worked with before. And all-PhD founding teams work perfectly well! No MBAs needed!
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Just when you think you've seen peak silicon valley, a crypto startup aquires an asteroid mining startup.
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When Bell Labs announced the transistor -- arguably the most important invention of the modern age -- the New York Times buried the story on page 46.
Don't get discouraged if people don't understand the value of what you're working on.
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For ~9 years we've been trying to convince VCs to back the hard things that actually matter. Today 19 of the 20 fastest growing areas in VC are just that! We're so back.
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2M scientific papers are published each year.
That’s 5,500 per day! If you worked a 10 hour day with no breaks, you’d have to read 1 paper every 7 seconds just to keep up.
So we built the Paperscraper to help us programmatically stay on top of the latest scientific research. 1/
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My father was absent from my life. To my mom and all the other single mothers that picked up double duty, happy father's day! 👩👦
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🙌
@MemphisMeats
has closed a $161M Series B! The future of food is bright indeed!
With this round they'll build the first U.S. production plant for cultivated meat. THIS IS HAPPENING and sooner than most thought.
Some thoughts on where we've been and where we go from here 👇
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The winner of
@TechCrunch
Disrupt is a climate tech company and 4 of the 5 finalists were deep tech companies 😎
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🎉
@fiftyyears
has $90m more to back heroes using technology to solve the world's biggest problems. Even more exciting is who joined us as investors. 44 founders of unicorn companies, including the founders of Skype, Spotify, GitHub, Klarna, Dropbox, Snowflake, Zendesk, Twist 1/
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There are so many incredible scientists, engineers, and founders building real solutions to the world's big problems. We need more people telling their stories. It would kick the world into optimism mode.
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This is what scaling up synthetic biology looks like.
Let’s end the climate crisis.
Let’s improve safety by ending plant explosions.
Let’s make products that are carbon negative.
Let's build our sustainable future with synthetic biology.
@solugen
's Bioforge is this future.
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Arrogant aggressive bullies on Twitter (and in life) are just injured humans deeply hurting on the inside.
Truly confident people who are comfortable with themselves don't constantly brag about their accomplishments while belittling others.
Respond with empathy, not anger.
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Michael Bloomberg on work ethic: "I'm sure someone, someplace is smart enough to succeed while keeping it in perspective and not working too hard, but I've never met them. The more you work, the better you do. It's that simple."
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1/ You know what's cooler than 🐵 NFTs?
CARBON. NEGATIVE. CHEMICALS.
@solugen
just raised a $350m Series C valuing the company at $1.8b to further the mission of decarbonizing the chemicals industry.
Read more:
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San Francisco. Pre-fires and today. Same view at noon. No filter.
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Raphael Warnock's mother picked cotton and tobacco when she was young.
Her son just got elected a U.S. Senator.
I fucking love this country.
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4 years in, Microsoft had only 11 employees. Growing headcount is nothing to celebrate. Moving mountains with limited resources is.
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In labs right now are researchers working on innovations that can cure disease, end malnutrition, fix the climate crisis, connect the world.
But scientific innovations don’t solve problems on their own. By default they end up published in a journal and that’s it. No impact. 1/
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🙏 So grateful to the ~60 people in front of me in the SFO security line who cheerfully waived me to the front when I told them boarding had started 20 minutes ago and then cheered me on when I started running to the gate.
They made my day and I made my flight to Boston! 🛫
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Drug development in space!
Big news from
@VardaSpace
, announcing their first focus: enabling the manufacture of therapeutic small molecules (1st up: ritonavir). They also won a $60M STATFI contract to advance hypersonics.
Make drugs in space, test hypersonics on the way down.
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VCs who only list their "select investments" (the breakout companies) on their website but not all their other portfolio companies too are telling you everything you need to know about their culture.
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Hello
@fiftyyearsvc
Fund 2!
$50m more to support founders solving the world's biggest problems with technology.
To support our founders better, we've welcomed founders of some of the world's most iconic tech companies into the Fifty Years family as LPS.
And we're hiring! 1/
Thrilled to announce we have $50m more to put to work supporting founders solving the world's biggest problems. We're honored to welcome founders of some of the world's most iconic tech companies as LPs. Our portfolio founders deserve no less!
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Introducing "the Mr Burns test" for sustainability companies.
Build a product that Mr Burns (the prototypic self-absorbed egoistic greedy capitalist) would buy not because it's sustainable but because it's the best / cheapest / most convenient.
That's the 🔑 to impact at scale.
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This is why
I was concerned going into 2023 that the VC crunch would hurt capital hungry hard-tech companies.
The exact opposite has happened. My hard-tech investments are doing great and raising rounds but the SaaS/Fintech investments are struggling.
Why do you think that is?
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@WizLikeWizard
@codybrown
@samfbiddle
2022 homicide per capita. SF lower than Miami, Denver, Portland, Fort Worth, and just about every other city. Same as Austin & Seattle.
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Half of unicorn startups in the USA are founded by immigrants. Over half of the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children. The CEOs of Microsoft, Google, Uber, Oracle, Adobe, IBM are immigrants. These are the folks the UK wants to keep away? What are they thinking?
From today, the majority of foreign university students cannot bring family members to the UK.
In 2024, we’re already delivering for the British people.
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One reason Texas/Florida will not overtake California as the world's innovation capital
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Nice
#COVID19
work from
@StanfordMed
researchers showing new ways to safely decontaminate and reuse N95 face masks without losing filtration efficiency:
• UV light, 30min
• 70° hot air in an oven, 30 mins
• hot water vapor from boiling water, 10 mins
Could help! The data 👇
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I wish I could open source all the conversations I have with PhDs and founders. It would immediately eradicate pessimism and replace it with optimism and hope.
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In the next couple weeks we'll launch
👩🔬 A guide to help PhD founders spin out
🧪 A community for top bio PhDs
⚡ A podcast on moving insanely fast
🧬 Funding for female reproductive health research
The
@fiftyyears
team is on 🔥
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Just partnered with a team that has a real shot at putting a serious dent in global wealth inequality.
One of the biggest and boldest ideas we've seen. Just on the right side of crazy!
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Bio today is where the internet was in 1994. Our ability to measure, understand, and engineer it is growing exponentially.
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People blaming VCs for causing this SVB mess. What?
1/ This is entirely on SVB management for massively bungling their communications after somewhat messy treasury management. The CEO call was awful and spooked many.
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Before recombinant production, making one pound of human insulin required 8,000 pounds of pancreatic glands from 23,500 dead animals. Synthetic biology rocks.
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WFH = being slightly more productive working on the wrong things.
Working physically together = being slightly less productive working on the right things.
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Biking through NYC, where I lived for years. Never has the city felt so vibrant.
Everywhere, parking places turned into dining tables. Streets closed. Cars traded for people eating, drinking, laughing. Sidewalks bustling. Masks everywhere.
Can't keep this city down!
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