aileenlee

Founder of @CowboyVC, we back & help build seed stage tech cos.
Mom/wife who❤️ food, tennis, travel & fighting for equality. Pitches to not DM pls.

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

You are a treasure, Lexi Reese. Thank you for sharing and, THANK YOU to all our incredible healthcare workers, esp at the @nih. https://t.co/XHF99P3Cqo

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

“There is a massive opportunity to reinvent every layer of the physical world stack…”. Like it @rebeccakaden 👇👇👇

[Rebecca Kaden @rebeccakaden]

https://t.co/eFbRXtKO8M

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

Really fun sesh with this crew, thanks for having us on, TWIST!

[This Week in Startups @twistartups]

How fast does your startup need to grow? According to @aileenlee, much faster than venture capitalists expected in the pre-AI era. Aileen, Floodgate’s @m2jr and Lerer Hippeau’s @BenjLerer joined TWiST to dig into massive Seed rounds, rising exit volume, startups rolling their own model (and why it might not be a good use of time!), and even how to grade the White House’s recent adventures in AI regulation!

0:00 Aileen Lee, Mike Maples, and Ben Lerer join the show
5:13 Venture liquidity returns: what SpaceX/Stripe distributions mean for LPs
9:13 Bending Spoons prices IPO at $29/share, roughly $18.4B valuation
10:31 https://t.co/xQao2Q9LNf - Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract-to-cash stack. Go to https://t.co/1LJvXhyz3p and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life!
12:09 "Companies get bought, not sold" — Ben on taking first offers seriously
17:41 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://t.co/AhhYi7Bzen and use code TWIST for 10% off!
19:34 Mutiny's burn-the-boats AI pivot with Jaleh Rezaei
20:19 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://t.co/9ClMm7s02I
22:15 Mike's KeepSafe story: the "rule of 70" and profit-first companies
25:12 The new growth bar: 5x, 4x replaces triple-triple-double-double
28:55 Fund size is your strategy: why Floodgate and Lerer Hippeau stay small
30:11 CLA - Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://t.co/eKQsRnfsUx
37:39 The $100M Series A: Starcloud, General Intuition, Scale Cognition, Scout AI
40:35 King-making rounds and why mega-seeds destroy optionality
54:11 Open-weight models: the GLM-5.2 moment and going model-agnostic
55:30 Why fine-tuning open models is a treadmill, with Cursor/Kimi as an example
1:03:28 Grading the Trump administration on Mythos and Fable
1:06:33 Rising anti-AI sentiment, the wealth gap, and lessons from social media
1:11:43 Raising kids in the post-intelligence era
1:12:35 Where to find the panel and what each firm is investing in

🎥 Watch the full episode here 👇

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

@alex @m2jr @BenjLerer @twistartups lol you should’ve done the pod in the tank top!

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

Where is the SV show when we need it… so so many good storylines rn

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

this is wild... thanks for sharing @bznotes

[Bilal Zuberi // Red Glass Ventures @bznotes]

I remind myself of this quite often.

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

At the #allocatebeyondsummit watching @Samirkaji in convo with @mamoonha. Giant kudos to Mamoon, @ilyaf & team @kleinerperkins for how they have stewarded the mantle of a a legendary instution so successfully. Generational transition is not easy, and Mamoon has led with brilliance and humility. Big big respect and appreciation 🙏

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

@teddyschleifer @kimmaicutler Yup. The tax on voting shares is a GiANT issue.

[Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler]

None of the billionaire tax coverage about Sergey Brin in Bloomberg or the NYTimes reports the most important structural detail of why he opposes it so much more than Jensen. It taxes voting shares as ownership.

It taxes Page and Brin as if they own 50+% or >$2 trillion of Google rather than 3% each. Jensen does not have super voting shares so he is just taxed like his actual ownership of Nvidia.

Imagine if you were taxed like you earned 10 times as much as you actually did last year. @bizcarson @teddyschleifer

[Jaleh Rezaei @jalehr]

We decided to break marketing's monopoly on customer-facing content and hand sales the keys. Everyone told us this was a bad idea.

Four months later, sales is creating assets 4.5x faster, marketers love us for it, and Anthropic just published a case study about it.

Read the full @AnthropicAI case study: https://t.co/iqkHaVWGLQ

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

Excited at @CowboyVC be part of the team backing @Standard_Kernel (and an @MIT founding team!) to push the boundaries of GPU performance with AI generated kernels, optimized for specific workloads 🚀🚀🚀

[Anne Ouyang @anneouyang]

Excited to share @Standard_Kernel's seed round and some reflections on what we’ve learned about kernel generation and what we believe is next. Grateful to our amazing team, supporters, and the broader community pushing this space forward.

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

Trump's DOJ has been quietly removing Epstein files from the DOJ website since the attack in Iran ; CBS reports.

This is a coverup.

[Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice]

Oink, oink.

[Bilal Zuberi // Red Glass Ventures @bznotes]

I am ashamed my President posted that video.

Regardless of your political affiliation, you should be too.

And if not, look inside your soul and try to find some humanity.

[Senator Andy Kim @SenatorAndyKim]

“When people show you who they are, believe them.” -@DrMayaAngelou

We've seen it for decades, let's start believing it.

[Pirat_Nation 🔴 @Pirat_Nation]

A new open-source tool called EpsteIn (Epstein + LinkedIn) lets you check if any of your LinkedIn connections appear in the publicly released Jeffrey Epstein court documents.

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

wrote more about major subsectors in professional services, and where we see oppty here ... welcome more feedback & ideas on what we missed, and what's exciting: https://t.co/0qHWcDzLPu

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

🎉 call for early stage teams building AI for Professional Services 👇

Prof'l services have been constrained by people and pricing - so much manual work in reading, comparing, tagging, summarizing... projects get expensive when billing is by the hr.

AI is going to massively re-imagine professional services. AND unleash how businesses and consumers are served by outside, AI powered expertise - in IT, sw dev, security, legal, staffing, accounting, tax and more.

If you're building a US-based AI-powered prof'l services startup, or know someone who is - we're holding OFFICE HOURS at the @CowboyVC corral later in Feb.

Come meet investors & get friendly, honest feedback from us + experienced VC & operator friends like @jakesaper @emergencecap, @FayHazaveh @nttvc , @KanuGulati @khoslaventures, @Jeff_Wong @EYnews, @cgao @SapphireVC.

👇 link to apply here - we're excited to meet you 🎉 🙏
https://t.co/XmVKTRziiG

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

🎉 call for early stage teams building AI for Professional Services 👇

Prof'l services have been constrained by people and pricing - so much manual work in reading, comparing, tagging, summarizing... projects get expensive when billing is by the hr.

AI is going to massively re-imagine professional services. AND unleash how businesses and consumers are served by outside, AI powered expertise - in IT, sw dev, security, legal, staffing, accounting, tax and more.

If you're building a US-based AI-powered prof'l services startup, or know someone who is - we're holding OFFICE HOURS at the @CowboyVC corral later in Feb.

Come meet investors & get friendly, honest feedback from us + experienced VC & operator friends like @jakesaper @emergencecap, @FayHazaveh @nttvc , @KanuGulati @khoslaventures, @Jeff_Wong @EYnews, @cgao @SapphireVC.

👇 link to apply here - we're excited to meet you 🎉 🙏
https://t.co/XmVKTRziiG

[aileenlee @aileenlee]

@reidhoffman @sfstandard Thank you Reid!! Appreciate you and your leadership 🙏🙏🙏