Jonathan Abrams

Entrepreneur and investor, co-founder of @8bitcapital

[Mark Cummins @mark_cummins]

Our second round was rough. I think I pitched every VC on the planet. Some of the weirder ones:

- I arrive at a Chinese VC firm on Sand Hill Road. The building is locked, lights off, nobody inside. I wait 10 minutes after meeting time. A car pulls up. The partner emerges, she has a large pack of toilet paper under one arm. She unlocks the building, turns on the lights, leads me inside. She disappears into the toilets with her rolls of paper. Then, toilets attended to, we start the pitch.

- Offices of a small deep tech investor. Receptionist greets me and leads me to the meeting room. I set up, wait, wait, wait. Eventually someone walks in, invites me to start. Something feels a bit off. It gradually dawns on me that I am pitching the receptionist. The partner had double-booked herself and apparently decided this was preferable to rescheduling.

- Pitching a London VC. He tells me he likes me as a founder but my business will never work. I've never had someone say this before, usually VCs like to preserve optionality. But he's very explicit. "You might close this round, but you will just waste a year or two of your life and then fail, this idea can't work"
A month later, I get a message from him. "I hear (big name) invested, can we get into your round?". Dude, seriously?

- Another London VC. I'm chatting to the associate while we're waiting for the partner to arrive. He tells me about one of their portfolio cos that needs a bridge round, he's working on squeezing them as much as possible. He's quite direct about it. Eh.. thanks for the transparency I guess, you seem like a great firm.

- The all time weirdest. A French VC with a London office. The associate meets me, as we're going up to the meeting he says something about how the partner can be a little unconventional. We start the pitch.
"What did your father do?" the partner asks me in a thick French accent. OK, this is a new one. I say he trained as a theoretical physicist, but then went into business. "Aha! Your father was a failure!"
"What did your mother do?" I say she was a biochemist and then became a school teacher. "Also a failure!" he exclaims. The associate is visibly dying inside. Is this some strange test, or is he just an asshole? I have a hundred employees and we need funding. "Would you like to hear about my company?" I ask him.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Friendly reminder that Microsoft has ~80 products or tools with the name “Copilot”.

Tey Bannerman counted them up: “there are now Copilots inside Copilots, Copilots for other Copilots, and a physical Copilot key on your keyboard for summoning them.”

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

SF was over if not for OpenAI and Anthropic!

Before that, it was over if not for Stripe, Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Salesforce, Visa, Gap... and if you go back a bir further - Levi's, Bank of California, Spreckels Sugar, Wells Fargo, Union Iron Works, Southern Pacific :)

The city gets “saved” by the next boom every time. After the gold rush, there was silver, railroads, shipping, banks, sugar, utilities, Pacific trade, defense, semis, PCs, biotech, enterprise software, the internet, social, mobile, SaaS, fintech, crypto, and AI.

I think that's just how it goes in this town.

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

https://t.co/rRoEt1qEnr

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

Welcome friends from NY 😎

"The Big Apple Is No Longer Big Enough for New York Venture Firms -- ‘You can’t ignore San Francisco right now,’ says one New York venture capitalist"

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

"Senator Bernie Sanders says he will introduce legislation that would give the public a 50% ownership stake in major AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, arguing that because AI is built on humanity’s collective knowledge, its wealth should flow into a sovereign wealth fund that benefits ordinary Americans rather than a handful of tech billionaires"

🤯

[marty.com @martymadrid]

The first @ycombinator SAFE created, drafted, and sent for signature on ChatGPT via the @AgreeHQ MCP!

[marty.com @martymadrid]

Your invoice just got a major upgrade with the @AgreeHQ MCP inside of @claudeai. You can now create, send, and get paid all from a prompt.

And, it doesn’t just generate an invoice, it pulls your customer contacts from @HubSpot, it connects your bank information around secure virtual account/routing numbers, embeds billing logic, and instantly sends for payment!

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

https://t.co/38zwbXc1xj

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

VC firm sues California regulator over portfolio diversity disclosures

"PLF argues the disclosures violate the First Amendment by compelling investors to speak and the 14th Amendment guarantees of due process and equal protection, along with the Constitution’s commerce clause. It additionally claims the law violates federally protected civil rights."

[dan @irl_danB]

if you've been using OpenProse, you now have a bunch of dynamic workflows saved as code that lean on best practice classical engineering principles to build composable scalable dynamic workflows

and all your programs got better and faster and cheaper for free

model: opus-4.8
harness: claude code + /workflow

is rapidly approaching Prose Completeness

[Tommy @_TommyMason]

Left, Ferrari Luce $645k
Right, Nissan Leaf $35k

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

Does anyone have any breakdowns or analysis for the SpaceX S-1 ?

[Adam Shuaib @adamshuaib]

One of the worst predictors of founder success we've tracked is how well someone pitches. The correlation between pitch quality and outcome was actually negative.

Zuckerberg was so awkward in early investor meetings that VCs left wondering if he could manage anyone. Larry Page refused interviews and earnings calls for years. Jan Koum sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $19B as a Ukrainian immigrant whose English investors had initially struggled to follow.

What polished people are good at is the meeting itself; the 1hr ritual of telling a story to strangers. It's a real skill, but it's separate from building a company. People who spent years optimising to be persuasive in a room have, on average, optimised away from the building skills that compound over the seven years of execution that follow. The pitch room is the one environment where smooth talkers have the structural advantage, but people mistake that single environment for general capability.

Pay more attention to things like how they behave in the five minutes after the pitch when they think it's over. Or how they treat the most junior person in the room. None of those show up on a slide.

The articulate founder will impress your partners. The awkward one will return your fund.

[Jonathan Abrams @abrams]

blatant copycatting! crazy!

[Avi Patel @avipat_]

General Catalyst just co-led a $31.5 million seed round into a blatant rip-off of my company, Kled.

(skip to 40 seconds if you want to skip context)

I would typically not speak on things like this, but this level of blatant copycatting is egregious and completely unacceptable, and needs to be made an example of.

This is one of hundreds of YC startups who have conducted this disgusting behavior. Unimaginative slop that continues to get rewarded due to nepotism.

[John Felix @johnfelix123]

One under-discussed dynamic in LP investing is the principal-agent problem

The people doing the work and building conviction are often not the people making final decisions…they’re advocating to a broader committee

This can create situations where the most internally defensible decision and the best long-term investment decision are not always the same thing

Especially once career risk enters the equation

[Hubert Thieblot @hthieblot]

Just a reminder: Investors have no clue which ideas will actually work.

Some of the best companies in the world were passed by hundred of investors originally because investors couldn’t see the future.

look at what the "hype" was every year versus the companies that won big

[Ethan Perlstein 1-to-N @eperlste]

If you pick up someone at the bar and get rejected, it would be weird if they then said “but how can I be helpful?”

So when an investor says that to a founder they pass on, it’s equally performative and unnecessary.

People who want to help you don’t preannounce that they’re going to help you — they just fucking do it.

So be an adult and part ways with a simple “not a fit but good luck out there!”

[shirish @shiri_shh]

This tweet single-handedly made Anthropic and OpenAI scramble and issue full statements on secondary stock deals.

$500B of paper value just got wiped out overnight.

[Ho Nam @honam]

This deserves a longer form blog post but for now a thread about an idea mentioned in our Q1 LP report.

We have a saying at Altos. Organize our funds around companies — not the other way around.

It sounds simple. In venture, it’s almost heretical.