Seth Winterroth 🤖

Partner at @EclipseVentures. Digital and physical worlds are colliding. @Wayve_ai @The_TrueAnomaly @Oxidecomputer @Ursamajortech @foxglove @mytraUS

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

Eleven years ago we started @EclipseVentures and bet everything on atoms. Rockets, robots, chips, factories, power systems, defense. The things civilization actually runs on.

Today, we're announcing $1.3B in new capital to keep building.

The physical world is overdue for transformation. Transportation runs on systems designed decades ago. The energy grid cannot keep up with demand. Healthcare depends on manual procedures that don't scale. Defense development moves at a fraction of the speed threats evolve. These are not software problems. They are full stack engineering and operations problems, and they have been underinvested in for a generation.

But there has never been a better moment to solve them. The best engineers are leaving big tech to build in the physical world. AI is compressing timelines from years to quarters. Policy is aligned. And customers are not waiting — the DoD, the hyperscalers, hospitals, and the Fortune 500 are all desperate for technology that makes physical systems smarter, faster, and more resilient. Talent, capital, technology, policy, and demand are all converging at once.

This is our moment 🇺🇸

We built Eclipse for this exact moment and in doing so, we launched a movement. Today that movement is 100 companies strong (and growing!). These companies supply each other, share customers, and help solve each other's hardest problems. Propulsion systems powering orbital defense. Modern supply chain infrastructure moving the worlds goods. Autonomous vehicles on three continents. Surgical robots performing procedures that used to require the world's best hands. Cloud hardware powering the AI revolution built on American soil. That's not a fund. That's an economy — an Eclipse Economy.

The door is open to rebuild the physical infrastructure of the country. We intend to run through it.

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

Let’s go TA!

[True Anomaly @The_TrueAnomaly]

Thank you to everyone who came out to the True Anomaly Block Party in Long Beach.

The space frontier is getting closer, and this event brought together the people building, thinking about, and shaping its future.

We are building the team for space’s next chapter and looking for talent to make that happen. Explore open roles at the link in bio.

#TrueAnomaly #SpaceTech #SpaceJobs

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

@AlexanderGrieve Fired up!!

[Eclipse @EclipseVentures]

When Eclipse Partner Jiten Behl joined @Rivian in 2015, the company had a big vision, but little else.

In the first episode of our new Operators with Capital series, Jiten shares lessons from building Rivian’s West Coast operations from scratch and why the right team is the foundation of every great company.

https://t.co/hVb4XIokMp

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

@mhdempsey Bet

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

Monster hire by @Mind_Robotics

[The Verge @verge]

Ford’s former EV and software chief will run Rivian’s robotics spinoff at a time of maximum hype for physical AI. https://t.co/0mWQKSmZyw

[Ursa Major @ursamajortech]

We’re proud to announce Jason Meredith as President of Ursa Major!

Jason is a proven leader in aerospace and defense with the experience to lead Ursa Major through our next phase of growth. As President, Jason will lead execution across Ursa Major’s full advanced weapons and space systems portfolio as we scale manufacturing, increase production and deliver critical capabilities to the warfighter.

Jason’s leadership strengthens our ability to execute with speed, meet growing demand and stay focused on the mission.

We’re excited about what’s ahead. Congratulations, Jason!

Learn more at: https://t.co/YdQwpRhu2m

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

Couple of legends right there

[Adrian Macneil @adrianmacneil]

We founded Foxglove with a two part thesis. At the time, both parts were highly non-consensus:

1. There are going to be billions of autonomous machines deployed over the coming decade. If we already have the technology to make cars drive themselves around San Francisco, imagine everything else humans do today that can be automated. The technology is here, just not widely distributed.
2. Infrastructure is the biggest bottleneck. The first generation of AV companies had to build all their infrastructure in-house with thousands of engineers - data infra, sim infra, training infra, fleet infra. The next generation of physical AI companies cannot succeed without great off-the-shelf infrastructure.

Of these, #1 is now a pretty mainstream belief. But #2 still feels pretty non-consensus.

This feels good, if i'm not building against the mainstream consensus I tend to get uncomfortable.

[Scott McNealy @scottmcnealy]

Flume Ventures. Jacks Valley Ranch. Conversion Capital. Arthur Ventures. Proof Capital. https://t.co/jxYikhKu1N. About 30 startups that I am advising (time is money). Solamere Funds. And you?

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

@Vikas_Enti 🫡

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

Robotics

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are:

• Proprietary data
• Network effects
• A physical component

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

No need to pivot. Been all in for decades.

[Vinny Lingham @VinnyLingham]

Pivot to hardware.

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

Ya I’m good with that

[Michael Dempsey @mhdempsey]

Ok I’ve got it.

how about pro rata rights for everyone except the people in the Epstein files and that dude who called seed founders call options and then we forget last week ever happened and never talk about any of this again?

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

@zarathepirate It’s grindy no doubt. But great spouse, good family infra, and a supportive community helps a ton. It takes a village!

Plus watching your toddler fall in love with their new sibling is magic

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

@FinnMurphy12 🫡🫡

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

Some top of market dynamics. Don’t be in the cuck tranche

[Brayton Williams ⏻ @BraytonKey]

Something missing from the pro-rata debate:

Tranched rounds with different valuations.

Existing VCs are asked to waive pro-rata at the lower valuation, then offered allocation at a higher price in the “same round.”

The bigger the valuation gap, the bigger the ask.

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

What do you think? Safety certified L3 in consumer vehicles is 2-5 years away?

Can’t come soon enough. Will be a truly society altering technology product!

[@jason @Jason]

We’re actually close to this being allowed!

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

That’s right

Momentum trading vs. Adventure Capital

[Aaron Slodov @aphysicist]

venture capital was never about how much money you manage or how many people are at your firm. it was about having the courage to bet on people who want to change the world.

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

I hope this turns out to be the case

• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:

• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.

• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.

• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!

• It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)

• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to).

• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.

• Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.

Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

If you know the supply chain automation space well it was easy to see this coming.

Complex HW systems with thousands of components struggle to scale, are inflexible, and typically plagued with downtime.

The best part is no part

@MytraUS system design keeps the HW super simple and this is how we generalize and scale!

[Techmeme @Techmeme]

A look at Walmart's troubled push to automate its ~200 US warehouses, as it and partners like Symbotic face technical setbacks; Walmart owns 12.6% of Symbotic (@sarahnassauer / Wall Street Journal)

(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

[Seth Winterroth 🤖 @Sethwinterroth]

What Lisa and Mark have done at AMD in the last decade is GOAT level. Insane.