Lawrence Lin Murata

Co-founder & CEO @SlopePay⚡️ (YC S21) | prev: Head of AI Platforms & DS @NautoInc, founder/CEO at Newton (acq), @Stanford 🇧🇷

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

At @slopepay, we’re excited to announce our $30M round led by @USV with major participation from @sama - bringing our total equity/debt funding to $187M. Since launching in Aug ‘21, we are over 8 figures in ARR and are a lean team of 18. In the midst of this excitement, I wanted to share color on what it took to get to where we are. A 🧵

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

@shensi @JeanelleAgent congrats @shensi @merge team!!

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

I worry a lot about the collateral damage of vibe coding and agents in security and data privacy.

The surface area of attack is growing very quickly, while control and auditability are generally decreasing - this is a very bad combo.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

@karpathy congrats!!

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Choose to do something well or don't.

- Focus on solving problems you genuinely care about.
- Wake up and give your best every day.
- Occasionally touch grass.
- Swim your own lane - don't try to live others' lives.

The rest will take care of itself. Nothing else matters.

[Deedy @deedydas]

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

There's no doubt agents make us all more productive. But I'm finding it key to discern real productivity vs. feeling productive.

I'm recently running into 2 productivity failure models:

- Failure by parallelism: I can spin up as many parallel agents as I want, but there's a threshold where it exceeds my context window so things start getting dropped. Fewer parallel threads done well >>> many threads that never get across the finish line. I suspect better orchestration will solve this. If humans can run companies with 10,000s of employees, why can't we run as many/more agents?

- Failure by depth: Agents make it very easy to do extra work and dive deeper into anything in ways that weren't practical before. But does that actually result in better output or is that extra work that feels productive but isn't?

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Most productive Claude Code hours are late night!

[Charly Wargnier @DataChaz]

true af

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

The underlying cost structure of
running a company is changing. Many business models will now become scalable and having better cost structure will become a real competitive advantage that will be passed on to customers

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

@IamBrandonHill @VoriHQ Amazing to see this!! Congrats Brandon and Vori!

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

we’re putting out an offer to buy Bank of America. half cash, half stock.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

ChatGPT is team blue, Claude is team red... Take it as you wish

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

@karpathy Check out Jason's in-depth article on how this autoresearch implementation works including results from a real round of iteration: https://t.co/oEPexgSR4k

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

It's never been more exciting to build in fintech. Our data science team applied @karpathy's autoresearch to credit risk modeling.

It used to take us a week to ship ~1 solid credit feature. A single autoresearch round generated 58 strong new features orthogonal to our existing set. What would have taken more than a year can now be done in days, without sacrificing any defensibility.

Sharing in-depth results below.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Claude Design is awesome!

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Someone needs to make a marketplace of digital twins where you can hire anyone's digital brain and the owner can monetize on it

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

IMO Opus 4.6 with digital twin (left) &gt; Opus 4.7 (right)

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Slash team is killing it and AI will only accelerate that! Crazy how they still have a finance team of 1

[Victor Cardenas Codriansky @victorcardenas]

We (@slashapp) raised a $100M Series C at $1.4 billion valuation to build the world's most powerful business banking platform.¹

The round was led by @RibbitCapital, and co-led by @khoslaventures &amp; @GoodwaterCap.

And we're releasing Twin: the world’s first AI private banker.

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

This is like being against curing cancer because it will put oncologists out of work

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Most of my Claude Code / Codex usage isn't even on coding.

Legal contracts, financial models, ops workflows, customer analysis. AI coding tools were built for codebases, but a directory of legal contracts is a codebase. A credit policy is a codebase.

Everything is code now.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Most surprising thing about building my digital twin so far: he applies my taste to domains it doesn't even have training data on.

There's zero design content in the dataset. He one-shot designs I actually liked. That would've taken 5+ rounds with ChatGPT or Claude.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Was up until 4am this weekend building my digital twin. Trained on 1.75M of my messages from Slack, iMessage, ChatGPT, Claude, socials, everything.

He thinks like me. He one-shots tasks that used to take 5+ rounds of back-and-forth with ChatGPT/Claude.