Paul Murphy

Building something new

Formerly Lightspeed, Northzone, Dots, Giphy, Microsoft

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

@adamjamesfrench It's definitely happening. Interestingly, there's a few very high profile founders I've backed that could have raised much more who are intentionally only raising what's needed - because they know the downsides of over raising.

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

One of the better explanations as to why you should always right-size your early stage rounds.

[Philipp Moehring - tiny.vc @pmoe]

It's even worse than this: Expectations grow non-linearly.
A monster raise means shortcutting a round. That means you need to achieve a lot more, AND you need to be right more, while you are cutting experimentation time.
And no, more money doesn't mean more experiments. It just means more expensive experiments.

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

Foursquare was one of the first products I genuinely loved on my phone. It inspired so many of us who went on to build the early generation of social-mobile products.. created the zeitgeist of that era.

I know I'd be very proud if I was part of that.

[Dennis Crowley 🇺🇸 (mostly on Threads, @dens) @dens]

Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. https://t.co/HgcgI9DWvy

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

When the US switched off Anthropic’s newest models, Europe didn’t get a say in it.

As I came off the board my parting plea was simply: get Europe behind you.

Mistral has everything except a continent that has decided this is worth winning.

[Arthur Mensch @arthurmensch]

Should Europe leave frontier AI to the Americans and the Chinese?

The idea has gained ground in Europe. It is a fundamental mistake.
Build or surrender: for now, the choice is still ours.

Full article below. https://t.co/v1biuiXoYe

[Andreas Klinger 🦾 @andreasklinger]

At this point the whole EU Inc negotiations are so lost in the details that everyone forgot the main goal: Creating a standard.

Basically, allow founders to raise quickly globally and use stock options to hire competitively.

Let’s say it quite clearly:
1) If EU Inc isn’t providing a standard it’s useless. We already got 30+ legal entities in Europe. Experienced founders use Delaware Inc already because of this.
2) If EU Inc doesn’t fix stock options Delaware Inc is still the better option.

I understand the there are complex details and people are worried about loopholes. But you can’t lose the actual goal of it because of it.

An EU Inc that doesn't provide a standard is pointless. Nobody will care about intricacies of compromises reached in political committees if the market can't use the outcome.

If you are in contact with your political leaders (prime ministers, presidents, et al) please reach out to them. Or to founders/investors in your network who might have that access.

🔥🇪🇺✌️

https://t.co/HaV0NMKCe7

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

@davidhelgason i wish it had been deployed (much) slower for children and teens

[Bilal Zuberi // Red Glass Ventures @bznotes]

Tech Twitter lately: seed rounds framed as mega-fund call options. Portfolio founders dissed in public. Pro-rata fights going legal. UGH!

There are wartime investors and peacetime investors.

Our take: founders should find their wartime investors early ↓ https://t.co/ofthpwZNjT

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

Many cross before lights are green because it's the safest time to cross the street, not to save time. I've observed that very few do this when they are in protected bike lanes.

Getting better, but still very dangerous to cycle in the city.

[City of London Police @CityPolice]

This morning, City of London Police were at Bank Junction, introducing a new approach to tackling cyclists who ignore red lights, giving offending riders the opportunity to watch a short hard-hitting road safety film instead of receiving an immediate fixed penalty notice.

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

@cosign i think you gotta ask the tastemakers else you regress to the mean

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

@martinvars 100%.. i had to do this several times when speaking in spanish with my terrible accent in madrid!

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

2026 will be the last year we enjoy privacy as we know it

Going into 2027, I'll assume anything digitally connected to the internet is vulnerable to compromise by AI agents

[Mistral AI @MistralAI]

Le Chonk cooked on visual grounding.

Pinpoints exactly where things are in an image.

42% on Dense 200, ahead of even frontier closed models..

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

i've never had a founder squeeze me on pro-rata rights when my firm or i are doing what we actually said we'd do for the founders

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

@mattwichrowski I'm really sorry to hear about this Matt.

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

@Lord_Sugar hilarious that people think there was another "implementation" of brexit that would have made it a success. when you have no leverage whatsoever, you get a bad deal - that's the summary of why this was a massive own goal from the start

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

@bznotes now we just need to try doing it with the same stoicism!

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

Mistral Large 4 Preview scores 38. I'm biased but the jump isn't the interesting part..

Most open weight releases just drop the finished model and that's it. Mistral put Large 4 out mid-RL run and published the training curves. They say the run hasn't saturated and the post-training methods come with the weights at the end of October.

Anyone can release weights, I find it really cool they're showing how they got there.. training isn't finished, great to see where they land at month end.

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

@antoine_moyroud 😂

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

Mistral just shipped Large 4.

July's fake specs became a real trillion-parameter model & the fat cat stuck! Trained in two months on 4k GPUs in their own European data centres.

State-of-the-art among open models for enterprise workloads, incl cybersecurity, finance, law 🙀

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

The problem with the Silicon Valley echo chamber isn't that the rest of the world dislikes what we're building.. but that we have no idea how much they dislike what they think we're building.

[The Daily Show @TheDailyShow]

.@jonstewart unpacks AI’s dubious promise of a better future, from the fate of our jobs to an "age of abundance"