Decibel

Founders investing in founders. We're an independent VC firm pushing the conventional boundaries of early stage investing.

[Chris Lattner @clattner_llvm]

I'm excited to share that Qualcomm is acquiring Modular: this will accelerate our path to unifying accelerated compute with an open platform. This will also mark a new era in open software development for Qualcomm. 👇

[Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda]

Show episode here: https://t.co/b3PkrvFG0Y

[Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda]

The cyber market is noisy and it is time to break from conventional wisdom - is AI helping or hurting you when trying to raise VC funding?

AI accelerates what's possible and allows everyone to convert concepts into code

But it is also “generalizable” intelligence and unintentionally can undermine what makes a startup idea special

Now more than ever we need to go back to basics and lean into our unique stories as founders when we pitch VCs

Thank you @riskybusiness for tackling this often misunderstood topic - enjoy the show!

[Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda]

We are excited to announce that Accenture has signed a definitive agreement to acquire runZero as part of a $4.2 billion M&A transaction that brings together leaders in OT and IT security including Dragos and NetRise 🔥

runZero started as a small research project in @hdmoore's basement and grew rapidly as one of the best ways to discover hardware and software on your network

It is now an essential tool and is the best way to understand your attack surface in a post-Mythos world

Like many cybersecurity founders, I have been inspired by the impact HD has had on our industry over many years

His work @metasploit and @runZeroInc are a reminder that we can’t protect what we can’t see, and what hides in the dark will come out in the light with frontier LLMs

It is nice to be able to recognize all of his contributions to the field in a meaningful way today. Congrats HD and the team!

[Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda]

To read more about the "self-driving" movement in cyber, see our founder Q&A here:

https://t.co/wRlYvZQjVV

[Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda]

We are excited to announce our investment in Ent, an endpoint security platform built for the era of AI

We needed a paradigm shift in security. Adversaries have had an unfair advantage using frontier LLMs to compromise end users

Ent took a lesson from Waymo, deploying local AI with computer vision to build a world / work model for every machine 🤖

It is the first product to discern normal work from real risk to defend against LLM-based attacks 🛡️

This is the “self-driving” moment in cyber and finally changes the game for defenders 🔥

Congrats to @emanousos @bsdixoner and the team @Ent_Security on your launch today!

[Vasek Mlejnsky @mlejva]

That’s a 1 with nine zeroes followed!

The rate keeps accelerating. Any tool used by agents directly must be ready for enormous growth in the upcoming months. We started E2B with an idea that agent is our user. Now it’s finally coming true.

[Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda]

Congrats to @chriswandrew, @rbm, & the @ScrunchAI team on their acquisition by @Sitecore 🔥

Websites were built for humans. Now they need to be rewritten for AI agents 🤖

This combination will be a game changer for all and we are excited for what comes next 🚀

[swyx @swyx]

notes

The general loop is do good work and then tell people about it. Example (4M views https://t.co/HONnO7qpCW - 1-2 months of work, 2 days of writing)

Sowing:
- doing good work, even in a niche, is interesting to people not in the niche. (example: best pokemon player talking about his craft)
- use [TOOL] for everything, solve and find all problems
- talk to customers who were using [TOOL] inefficiently. realized that there were basic things they werent doing right, and it felt too basic to write but it reached a wide audience because he solved a pain point that customers had but employees maybe wouldnt experience

Reaping:
1. Tell a story. (not simply "how we built x", "how to do x" - more informative/subtle than that)
2. Keep it as simple as possible
3. Don't sell something you don't believe in - if you dont use it, dont write about it.
4. Share secrets - some "real alpha" that you're even a little scared to reveal to competitors

misc:
- Q: How do you write? A: very unstructured... "you have nothing until you have everything", range from
- Q: how much time do you spend writing for work? A: very spiky - one week a lot, one week just heads down engineering, aim for 50-50 sowing-reaping
- Q: how do you make diagrams? A: Claude Design - make 5 different SVGs, make a concept and choose one. diagrams, code snippets. use principles of claude design, give design system and references.
- Q: how much time you reading articles? too much marketing slop. "i read our slack alot".
- Q: getting feedback before posting - use ABCD feedback framework.
- Q: series - Lessons from Claude Code
- make sales collateral
- Q: did u make something more / less popular than expected? -> the skills post

TLDR: Build implicit knowledge, and then make it explicit.

[Alessio Fanelli @FanaHOVA]

Saturday morning write & learn with @trq212, @MilksandMatcha and @swyx!

[Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda]

We kicked off our "Founder Festival" at RSAC yesterday! Thank you to our guests of honor who brought laughter and energy to our community throughout the day:

* Alex Pall (@AlexPallNY), Co-Founder, The Chainsmokers & Mantis VC
* Pat Opet (@patopet), CISO, JPMorgan Chase
* Francis deSouza (@fdesouza), COO and President, Security Products, Google Cloud
* Ashish Rajan (@hashishrajan) and Caleb Sima (@csima), AI Security Podcast

🎉 Tiger Cage Winners and Judges 🎉
Lou Manousos (@emanousos), Brandon Dixon - Ent Security
Damien Lewke - Nebulock
Lina Lau (@inversecos), Ty Yarwood - Xintra
Anthony Grieco (@agrieco) - CSO, Cisco
Joe Sullivan (@joesu11ivan) - fmr Uber / Cloudflare
Mark Thornberry - Guidepoint

Today we are excited to host our “Unsupervised & Unhinged: Coding Agents Unleashed" meetup with @clintgibler (tl;dr sec) and @DanielMiessler (Unsupervised Learning) and our "Proudly Offensive" edition of Risky Business with Patrick Gray, Rob Joyce (@RGB_Lights), and Andy Boyd.

We'll be launching more companies from stealth and welcome back Bipul Sinha (@bipulsinha), Founder and CEO of Rubrik to give our "Founders Helping Founders" fireside 🔥

There will be great vibes and networking all day - drop by for coffee, lunch, or cocktails any time. We look forward to seeing you all soon 🌴

[Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda]

Every founder knows the feeling when they are about to release something fresh and different that can change everything 👀

How can we unlock this power more often? I could think of no better creative mind to tap than Alex Pall (@AlexPallNY), Co-Founder of The Chainsmokers and Mantis VC.

He has become a refreshing new voice in the cyber industry and we’ll be sitting down with him at the RSA Conference to unpack his process for creating new tracks that rise above the noise 🔥

We are excited to open our doors tomorrow to our community of founders and early adopters at the Decibel "Founder Festival" - come by to make new friends, find ideas worth spreading, and leave inspired after our 2+ day event! 🌴

Many thanks to all of our guests of honor and partners who made this event possible 🙏

Check out our full lineup and register at the link below if you have not done so already:

[Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda]

3 Days. 100% Founder Vibes. A New Tiger Cage. Are You Ready??? 🔥

Excited to announce our inaugural “Founder Festival” at the Children’s Creativity Museum next to Moscone during the RSA Conference!

Our doors are open to founders and early adopters seeking fresh ideas in our “Founder Oasis” 🌴

We'll have fireside chats, live podcasts, product demos, and our epic “Tiger Cage” competition 🎉

Guests of honor:
* Alex Pall (@alexpall, @TheChainsmokers, Mantis VC)
* Bipul Sinha (@bipulsinha, Founder of @RubrikInc)
* Francis deSouza (@fldesouza, COO, @GoogleCloud)
Pat Opet (@patopetciso, CISO, @JPMorgan)

Shoutout to our partners partners: @AshishRajan (Cloud Security Podcast), @calebsima (WhiteRabbit), @clintgibler (tl;dr sec), @DanielMiessler (Unsupervised Learning), @riskybusiness (Risky Business) 🙏

Full lineup & schedule link below!

[David @dzhng]

Introducing Duet - the best way to run Claude Code and Codex in the cloud

- Everyone gets own server
- Slack-like interface
- Add coworkers for multiplayer prompting
- Switch between Claude Code & Codex mid session
- Built in image / video / audio gen skills
- Schedule w/ cron

[Jéssica Leão @jesslionness]

🎉teamed up with @AISupremacyNews on a massive AI year-in-review:

"2025: The Year the Old Rules Broke" 🌊

"just scale it" — DeepSeek said no
"distribution wins" — Anthropic beat everyone
"america leads open source" — china shipped 9 models, meta shipped 2 🇨🇳

link 👇

[Jéssica Leão @jesslionness]

Big week:
⚡ Google ships Gemini 3 Flash + Deep Research API + MCP + Disco
🎨 OpenAI Image 1.5 claims #1 on LM Arena
🧑‍💻 GPT-5.2-Codex drops

No one's sleeping through the holidays 🫠👇

[Jéssica Leão @jesslionness]

Thrilled to announce @DecibelVC is backing @unconvAI and the legendary @NaveenGRao 🏎️

I first met Naveen in 2022 when I had the privilege to back MosaicML – a pioneer in open source AI that first taught the industry to think about proprietary data, specialized models, and training efficiency. Before that, he founded Nervana to rethink AI training from first principles.

Now he's back with his boldest bet yet: AI training is still shackled to the GPU, an architecture designed for graphics, not intelligence. Unconventional is building silicon that runs neural networks on the physics directly – targeting biology-scale efficiency. The human brain runs on 20 watts. We're going to need something closer to that if AI is going to be everywhere.

I cannot imagine a better founder to tackle the most important AI infra problem of our generation.

But more than anything, Naveen is just someone I genuinely love working with. We've closed more Vegas bars at infra conferences than I can count, gotten way too deep on cars and racing, debated endless open source hot takes, and he's gone out of his way to champion rising researchers, new voices in the industry, and even my own growth as a VC.

One-of-one founder. Honored to join this Unconventional journey.

[Jéssica Leão @jesslionness]

🚨 This week in AI: OpenAI in crisis mode, Claude reclaims coding crown, Anthropic eyeing $300B IPO, and reasoning models now account for 50% of all inference.

A year ago that last stat was near-zero 🤯
Read more 👇

[Jéssica Leão @jesslionness]

Loved this conversation, @GayatriSab! ✨Always a treat to sit down with a friend and talk about where AI is headed and what founders should be thinking about as the landscape shifts.

[Jéssica Leão @jesslionness]

Bangers after bangers this week! @sundarpichai must be having the time of his life.

- Gemini 3: 1501 Elo (highest public rating ever)
- Nano Banana Pro: solved text rendering
- Antigravity IDE: coming for Cursor
- Pricing: +60% over Gemini 2.5 (done racing to the bottom!)

Google's legitimately back. The AI game of thrones continues 👑

Plus: @grok 4.1 held #1 for ONE glorious day before Gemini knocked it back down (lol), @OpenAI shipped GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, @AnthropicAI did a 3-way partnering with @Microsoft + @nvidia & raised $15B

Full breakdown in this week's blog, link 👇