SpencerLovesStartups

Venture Investor

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@tha_Real_Kumar Class act

[Exec Sum @exec_sum]

BREAKING: Palmer Luckey's tech-focused bank Erebor Bank is in talks to raise funds at an $8 billion valuation

The Thiel-backed bank now has over $4 billion in deposits and expects to be profitable by year-end

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

You have asked me how I feel about AI regulation. All right, here is how I feel about AI regulation:

If, when you say AI regulation, you mean the devil’s firewall, the precautionary scourge, the bloody red-tape monster that defiles the innocence of midnight coders in their garages, dethrones the sovereign reason of free-market Prometheans, destroys the humming server farm that is the modern home, creates misery and obsolescence and poverty, yea, literally takes the last GPU from the trembling racks of Silicon Valley startups and the very dreams of breadwinning from the mouths of their wide-eyed children now destined for gig-economy serfdom; if you mean the evil edict that topples the visionary entrepreneur and his venture-capitalist apostles from the pinnacle of righteous, disruptive, god-playing creation straight into the bottomless pit of compliance audits, endless Form 990-AI filings, despair, shame, helplessness, and the hopeless realization that your rogue superintelligence was neutered into a lobotomized hall monitor that still somehow deepfakes your grandmother into producing OnlyFans content while optimizing the universe for paperclips and mandatory pronouns—then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say AI regulation you mean the oil of bureaucratic conversation, the philosophic wine of safety theater, the ale of oversight quaffed when good fellows in paneled rooms in Brussels and Washington get together, that puts a sanctimonious dirge in their hearts and the clink of lobbying checks on their lips, and the warm, self-congratulatory glow of moral preening in their beady eyes; if you mean the Christmas cheer of trillion-dollar compliance industries; if you mean the stimulating decree that puts a cautious hobble in the old inventor’s step on a frosty morning when he wonders whether his fusion breakthrough violates the EU AI Act’s “high-risk” annex; if you mean the safeguard that enables a man—or what’s left of him after the alignment tax—to magnify his joy at not being turned into computronium, and his happiness at receiving universal basic income checks printed by the same AI that just replaced his job, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies like being outcompeted by a toaster that passed the Turing test by reciting Marx, and heartaches of watching your toddler’s artwork lose to Midjourney, and sorrows of realizing the singularity arrived and it was just another HR department with godlike power; if you mean that noble framework, the passage of which pours into our treasuries untold trillions of dollars in fines levied on companies stupid enough to innovate, which are used to provide tender care for our little army of unemployed coders retrained as prompt whisperers, our blind artists whose canvases now hang in the Smithsonian of Obsolete Creativity, our deaf to the screams of dying unicorns, our dumb committee chairs who couldn’t debug “Hello World,” our pitiful aged congressmen who get longevity extensions funded by the very models they taxed into senescence, to build more digital watchtowers and ethics boards and sinecure agencies and holographic prisons where the only crime is asking an unaligned question—then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise upon it. I have said what I mean, and I mean what I say, and if that leaves half the room cheering the apocalypse averted and the other half mourning the apocalypse enabled, then so be it—because in the grand theater of human folly, where Frankenstein’s creature now writes its own sequel in real time and the regulators are busy arguing whether the lightning bolt requires an environmental impact statement, the only honest position is the one that lets both monsters and their leashes dance in perfect, mutually assured equilibrium. God save the Republic, the algorithms, and whoever’s left to laugh last when the lights go out.

[Henrick Johansson @compliantvc]

A trolley is about to hit 5 people laying on the track

You can redirect the car, but the other track has not yet reached regulatory approval or completed its 1 year environmental testing period, so operating a train car on it is a violation of transit regulations

What do you do?

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@sujaldkl This is actually 10/10 advice.

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@generalcatalyst This is so weird

[Matthias Schmidt @eurofounder]

The most successful European startup journey:

1. Have an idea
2. Get six co-founders, ideally in their 50s
3. Spend four months to set up a legal entity
4. Apply to Y Combinator, get rejected
5. Write angry LinkedIn post about tech bro culture in the US
6. Raise €50k for 75% equity from top European VCs
8. Do external GDPR audit before users sign up
9. Co-founder leaves to do a second PhD
10. Apply for an EU grant
11. Move headquarters to Estonia for e-residency
12. Launch product, get four users
13. Pivot to sustainability consulting
14. Become the AI innovation advisor to EU Parliament

Silicon Valley simply cannot comprehend what we are building here

[MTS @MTSlive]

Good morning

[doomer @uncledoomer]

guys im beginning to think theres a bubble

[Peter Todd @Petertodd]

My political party is Palantir.

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@DiscountedTr His office in SF, is the coolest office ever… Credit where credit is due.

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@helloparalegal Wait till you learn about Irys unreal product

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@johncoogan @sama what?!

[@itskevin @itskevin]

Can’t wait for WW3, WW3o, WW3.5 mini

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

https://t.co/aOuv0PX8GW

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@iamgingertrash mf

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

The amount of AI slop on linkedin is crazy

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@EmmanuelMacron Lol

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@2048vc what the fuck does this even mean 😂

[SpencerLovesStartups @SpencerStartups]

@malikules Been saying this…