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 🧵

[Slope @slopepay]

https://t.co/GmRRMCci1c

[Slope @slopepay]

Today, @Experian announced Experian Cashflow Attributes for commercial lenders. 💸

Experian Cashflow Attributes for commercial lenders leverages technology from @slopepay to help accelerate the delivery of commercial cash flow capabilities to clients.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Link to apply! https://t.co/0OhUQOQFH4

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

We’re hiring 2 Senior Backend Engineers at Slope!

We’re building AI-native credit infrastructure for B2B commerce across embedded credit, payments, underwriting, data science, and risk. Our customer base grew 8x last year, and we’re scaling quickly.

We’re looking for backend-first engineers who have:

• High agency, speed, and strong engineering taste in an AI-assisted world
• Strong TypeScript/Node.js and SQL fundamentals

You’ll build the core systems that determine how Slope understands risk, extends capital, and helps businesses grow.

SF preferred.

Interested? Email [email protected] or apply using the link in the replies.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

An understated aspect of AI is increased clarity of thought. Now everything needs to be spoken or written, and clearly enough to hand off to an agent

[Slope @slopepay]

@slopepay and @Fiserv are bringing AI-powered embedded financing to B2B payments! Slope will integrate with SnapPay®, Fiserv’s B2B payments platform, enabling eligible enterprise and mid-market merchants to offer their customers flexible payment options at checkout.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

@justinemach_ @sumanyu @HammingAI @aiDotEngineer great interview @sumanyu!!

[3Jane @3janexyz]

3Jane has purchased a total +$60M in loans from @slopepay, crossing the $50M hold-level on the forward flow announced in June

Slope gets access to effectively unrated ABS economics via a USD3-funded forward flow- a meaningful structural innovation in the $15T securitization mkt

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

The future of funding is decentralized.

2nd forward flow sale in a few weeks, 3x'd the facility size.

[Slope @slopepay]

Coming off of our recent announcement, we’re excited to share that @3janexyz has upsized its Slope facility with an additional ~$18m purchase. Let's go! 🎉

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

The future of credit applications won’t be a faster application, it will be no application

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

Excited that Slope completed a loan sale to @3janexyz.

This is one of the first transactions of its kind -- it tokenizes SMB loans via USD3/sUSD3 stablecoins, increasing efficiency, transparency, programmability.

This changes how business loans are funded and helps us scale towards our mission!

[Slope @slopepay]

We are excited to announce that we have completed our 1st forward-flow loan sale of $8.5M with @3janexyz, a cryptonative credit protocol. This is the 1st phase of a broader $50M program and one of the 1st whole-loan purchases of a U.S. fintech loan book by a DeFi protocol.

[Lawrence Lin Murata @LawLM]

@usekernel very cool!

[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!