Jonathan Abrams

Entrepreneur and investor, co-founder of @8bitcapital

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

Are there any good posts on here that tell me about the 12 secret settings I should be using in some app, or something similar about Costco or Amex?

[Nick Schrock @schrockn]

Going through a big life transition

[Adam Cohen @adambcohen93]

Founder friendly VCs in the 90's

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

The Atlantic’s new cover story by @rosehorowitch is absolutely definitive on the end of the age of reading in America—and the emergence of a new post-literate age in modern life

Some core facts and anecdotes:

1. Reading is shrinking. The share of Americans who read for pleasure declined by 43 percent between 2004 and 2023. While Americans might see more words than ever—between all those texts, posts, emails, and captions—less than half of Americans read books, anymore. The average sentence in NYT bestsellers are one-third shorter than a century ago.

2. Americans can swallow words and sentences, but they’re losing the ability to think deeply about writing that’s longer than an Instagram post. Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

3. It’s worse for the young. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent.

4. “Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read”: Most high-schoolers consider reading for pleasure an alien practice. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, says some students view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, it's as if “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

https://t.co/kk8qktY6fd

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

@nickgrossman great post, have you seen https://t.co/4XTrsZ4Zd7 ?

[Selene Mariposa @Selene_Mariposa]

The World Cup has turned America into a discovery channel for the rest of the world.

And they are not handling it well.
In the best possible way.

Here is what they are discovering:

Free public restrooms. Europeans pay every time.
Free water at every restaurant. Just appears.
Free refills. Coffee. Sodas. Iced tea. Unlimited.
Free chips and salsa before you even order.
Free warm bread with dinner.
Ice in drinks like civilized people.
Air conditioning everywhere. Not a moral debate. A fact.
Parking lots attached to the actual place you are going.
Drive throughs where the food comes to the car while you sit in it.
Ranch dressing by the gallon.
Tex-Mex that cannot be explained only experienced.
Dental care that actually works.
Buccee’s. There are no words for Buccee’s.

Then they found the grocery stores.

Five of them within one mile.
Each one the size of an aircraft hangar.
Burgers. Steaks. Brisket. Ribs. Pulled pork. Lamb. Veal. Every cut of every animal ever domesticated by human civilization available in one refrigerated aisle at ten in the morning on a Tuesday.

The Germans stood in the meat section for forty five minutes.
In silence.
Processing.

They finally understand why we do not have trains.

We have roads wide enough for the cars we actually drive.
Parking lots the size of small European countries.
Airports in every city worth visiting.

Why would we need trains.

The Germans are taking ranch home by the bottle.
The Dutch found queso and briefly lost the ability to speak.
The Japanese are photographing HEB like it is the Louvre.
The Czechs are weeping in West, Texas.

Welcome to America.
Everything is free, enormous, air conditioned, comes with chips, and has five grocery stores within a mile that will sell you any cut of any animal you have ever imagined.

Write that down. 🦋

[John Felix @johnfelix123]

As a career LP, I never fully appreciated how much awful LP behavior exists until we started raising our own fund. Clearly I was naive.

Everyone knows about the usual stuff like ghosting, never-ending process loops, reneging on verbal commits (happens way more than you think).

But my personal favorite: an LP reached out proactively, claiming to work at a large MFO. We had a great call, he seemed genuinely interested and asked for our data room.

Right before hanging up he says “oh and by the way we charge a $100k non-refundable fee for get approved and shown to our clients with no guarantee of any investment. Would that be ok?”

I told him no and suggested that’s probably something worth mentioning up front. He didn’t take the feedback particularly well.

Raising a fund has made me much more sympathetic to GPs than 10+ years of being an LP ever did.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

If you can’t make your company interesting to a VC who is literally only in business to fund startups, how are you going to make it interesting to recruits and customers?

[dan @irl_danB]

everyone is building an agent or a tool

you don't want an agent or a tool, you want a reactor

I've been working on something cool and I think you'll like it

it's simple: an agent session DAG that keeps a declared world-model up to date in an efficient (memoized) render

each render node is an agent session: you declare the desired state with OpenProse markdown files

once invoked, each agent session acts as the provider. the agent session uses the open source openai-agents-sdk, extensible however you like with any model (I use with opus, sonnet, haiku)

the facets of the world-state are memoized, so not every agent has to run on every event, saving you on inference

if that sounds a lot like React or dataflow, that's because even in our brave new world the wisdom of the agents holds fast

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A.

12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going.

I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital.

You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious.

It's a dance.

And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious.

If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird.

No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there.

It is weird.

[Mark Cummins @mark_cummins]

Our second round was rough. I think I pitched every VC on the planet. Some of the weirder ones:

- I arrive at a Chinese VC firm on Sand Hill Road. The building is locked, lights off, nobody inside. I wait 10 minutes after meeting time. A car pulls up. The partner emerges, she has a large pack of toilet paper under one arm. She unlocks the building, turns on the lights, leads me inside. She disappears into the toilets with her rolls of paper. Then, toilets attended to, we start the pitch.

- Offices of a small deep tech investor. Receptionist greets me and leads me to the meeting room. I set up, wait, wait, wait. Eventually someone walks in, invites me to start. Something feels a bit off. It gradually dawns on me that I am pitching the receptionist. The partner had double-booked herself and apparently decided this was preferable to rescheduling.

- Pitching a London VC. He tells me he likes me as a founder but my business will never work. I've never had someone say this before, usually VCs like to preserve optionality. But he's very explicit. "You might close this round, but you will just waste a year or two of your life and then fail, this idea can't work"
A month later, I get a message from him. "I hear (big name) invested, can we get into your round?". Dude, seriously?

- Another London VC. I'm chatting to the associate while we're waiting for the partner to arrive. He tells me about one of their portfolio cos that needs a bridge round, he's working on squeezing them as much as possible. He's quite direct about it. Eh.. thanks for the transparency I guess, you seem like a great firm.

- The all time weirdest. A French VC with a London office. The associate meets me, as we're going up to the meeting he says something about how the partner can be a little unconventional. We start the pitch.
"What did your father do?" the partner asks me in a thick French accent. OK, this is a new one. I say he trained as a theoretical physicist, but then went into business. "Aha! Your father was a failure!"
"What did your mother do?" I say she was a biochemist and then became a school teacher. "Also a failure!" he exclaims. The associate is visibly dying inside. Is this some strange test, or is he just an asshole? I have a hundred employees and we need funding. "Would you like to hear about my company?" I ask him.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Friendly reminder that Microsoft has ~80 products or tools with the name “Copilot”.

Tey Bannerman counted them up: “there are now Copilots inside Copilots, Copilots for other Copilots, and a physical Copilot key on your keyboard for summoning them.”

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

SF was over if not for OpenAI and Anthropic!

Before that, it was over if not for Stripe, Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Salesforce, Visa, Gap... and if you go back a bir further - Levi's, Bank of California, Spreckels Sugar, Wells Fargo, Union Iron Works, Southern Pacific :)

The city gets “saved” by the next boom every time. After the gold rush, there was silver, railroads, shipping, banks, sugar, utilities, Pacific trade, defense, semis, PCs, biotech, enterprise software, the internet, social, mobile, SaaS, fintech, crypto, and AI.

I think that's just how it goes in this town.

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

https://t.co/rRoEt1qEnr

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

Welcome friends from NY 😎

"The Big Apple Is No Longer Big Enough for New York Venture Firms -- ‘You can’t ignore San Francisco right now,’ says one New York venture capitalist"

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

"Senator Bernie Sanders says he will introduce legislation that would give the public a 50% ownership stake in major AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, arguing that because AI is built on humanity’s collective knowledge, its wealth should flow into a sovereign wealth fund that benefits ordinary Americans rather than a handful of tech billionaires"

🤯

[marty.com @martymadrid]

The first @ycombinator SAFE created, drafted, and sent for signature on ChatGPT via the @AgreeHQ MCP!

[marty.com @martymadrid]

Your invoice just got a major upgrade with the @AgreeHQ MCP inside of @claudeai. You can now create, send, and get paid all from a prompt.

And, it doesn’t just generate an invoice, it pulls your customer contacts from @HubSpot, it connects your bank information around secure virtual account/routing numbers, embeds billing logic, and instantly sends for payment!

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

https://t.co/38zwbXc1xj

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

VC firm sues California regulator over portfolio diversity disclosures

"PLF argues the disclosures violate the First Amendment by compelling investors to speak and the 14th Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection, along with the Constitution’s commerce clause. It additionally claims the law violates federally protected civil rights."