Alliance

We help crypto & AI startups reach product-market fit.

Apply by July 22. Receive $500k funding:

[Alliance @alliance]

What is Alliance?

[Alliance @alliance]

We asked @usv's Nikhil (@uninsightful) one question: why NYC?

0:25 How Nikhil joined USV
1:15 Showcasing the USV office
1:54 Lessons learned from @fredwilson
2:50 SF vs NYC from a builders perspective
3:46 USV's investing approach
4:40 NYC's culture & lifestyle
5:42 NY is the place to get customers

[Alliance @alliance]

@Vatan_sever_444 @crime_xbt @sstrenev message @realsimon

[Alliance @alliance]

@crime_xbt @sstrenev We deprecated our rfs for now.

[Alliance @alliance]

@davidasinclair @ydeigin @lifebiosciences Fair point @davidasinclair, and thanks for adding it. Life Biosciences and the safe OSK work go back years earlier than a single tweet can hold. The full essay gives that history its due, including your lab's role in getting reprogramming to the clinic. Honored to have you here.

[Alliance @alliance]

This is the story of four proteins that can rewind aging, and the $4 billion racing to put them inside a human being.

For a century, biologists treated aging like a rusting car. Parts wear out, damage piles up, no reverse gear. A small group now argues that's wrong. Much of what looks like permanent damage, they say, is really a software problem, and software can be rewritten.

Every cell in your body carries identical DNA. What makes one a neuron and another a skin cell is a second layer of information sitting on top, telling each cell which genes to run. The heretical claim is that aging is the slow corruption of that information. And in 2006, a failed orthopedic surgeon named Shinya Yamanaka found four proteins that can retrieve it.

His recipe could take a fully specialized cell and walk it all the way back to a blank, become-anything state. It won him a Nobel. Then scientists found something stranger. Turn the factors on briefly, not long enough to erase a cell's identity, and old mice get younger by every measure, and live about 30% longer. A heart cell stays a heart cell. Just younger.

The boundary with cancer is razor thin. Run the factors too long and you manufacture tumors in bulk. The whole trick depends on not finishing.

Now the money has arrived. Bezos backs @altos_labs. Sam Altman seeded @RetroBio_. Brian Armstrong co-founded @newlimit. David Sinclair's Life Biosciences got through the door first. In January 2026, its eye therapy became the first cellular reprogramming treatment ever cleared for human testing.

The realistic prize isn't immortality. Nobody's living to 300 on an eye injection. It's compression of morbidity, squeezing the sick, declining years at the end of life into a shorter window. The question has finally narrowed. Not "can a cell be made young?" but "can a patient be made well?"

By the early 2030s, we'll know.

Read @QwQiao's essay on the Yamanaka factors below.

[Alliance @alliance]

Read the essay.

https://t.co/pTzf2QcnyU

[Alliance @alliance]

NYC always, Knicks in 4.

[Imran @lmrankhan]

I’ll forever be bullish on crypto.

I think we overestimated how quickly crypto would become the next major computing paradigm. A lot of people were searching for the next platform shift and assumed it would be crypto, but in many ways that ended up being AI.

Over the past decade, ton of capital flowed into crypto, and much of it went toward overbuilding. Instead of focusing on a handful of narrow sectors where crypto had a clear advantage, the industry tried to reinvent everything all at once. What we’re seeing now is a natural pullback and consolidation after that period of excess

I don’t think the core thesis is broken by any means. Crypto’s biggest success may not be apps first (even though we have a few), but rails first. As stablecoins, wallets, tokenized stocks and onchain financial infra via neobanks reach every human and eventually every AI agent, crypto becomes the default settlement layer of the internet.

Once those rails are everywhere, many of the ideas that arrived too early like DAOs, decentralized marketplaces, machine to machine payments, and the ideas Vitalik wrote about in the early days of Ethereum may finally have the distribution needed to get it off the ground.

[Alliance @alliance]

@M1towoxie Lets see who wins.

[Alliance @alliance]

Less than 24 hours left to apply, get $500,000 and prove everyone wrong → https://t.co/4rDXZ2sdVX

[Alliance @alliance]

@sai__kc @lmrankhan @captur_go good luck sir.

[Alliance @alliance]

@kingafk_ @lmrankhan 👀

[Alliance @alliance]

@Groovy_HQ @JosipVolarevic2 🫡

[Alliance @alliance]

@craftsdev thanks!

[Alliance @alliance]

@albertofdez20 @Lid_onchain good luck sir.

[Alliance @alliance]

@CyreneAI 👀

[Alliance @alliance]

@maazuxi Thank you sir

[Alliance @alliance]

@UncleLinx preach

[Alliance @alliance]

@evans1vn @DangerWillRobin good luck my friend.

[Alliance @alliance]

@jeivyou send @realsimon a message.

[Alliance @alliance]

@kyparus agreed.