Nic Baird

Co-founder @koahlabs | Founder Fellow @southpkcommons

[Faraz Prentice-Khan @farazKhan404]

Today we're excited to share how we are evolving the @koahlabs brand.

A new mark, type, color, and imagery — built around one idea: the Perfect Moment.

Here's how, and why. 👇

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@koahlabs @bcherny @vasuman free claude!

[Koah @koahlabs]

@bcherny @vasuman what if ads were actually a value add to the user AND the business? a vibe coded example..

https://t.co/SgNaYLzbms

[Ruchi Sanghvi @rsanghvi]

10 years ago, there were 10 people around my kitchen table. No structure, no brand, no certainty. Just a handful of builders showing up for something that yet didn’t exist.

Since then @southpkcommons has grown to over a 1000 members. Today, 25,000 people apply to SPC every year. We have offices in SF, NYC, and Bangalore.

But SPC isn’t about the numbers, it’s about the people and what emerges when they choose to show up for each other.

It looks like @anuraggoel, already successful and credible, showing up with generosity, helping others, sharing work, iterating in public. Patterns sharpened and @render was born.

It looks like @thejamescad and @dbabbs, who met at SPC to become cofounders building @tryprofound. One of the superpowers of SPC is the collision rate—not the shallow kind, but the kind that only happens when people keep showing up long enough to build trust.

It looks like @MaximilianMona, who moved out to California in an RV to be at SPC and eventually build Ironsite. That’s someone saying, with their whole life: this matters.

And it looks like @AshtonJEaton, an Olympic gold medalist, walking into SPC not for a career pivot, but for a deeper reinvention. To trade mastery for learning. Not for optics. For truth.

SPC has been designed by the community and for the community, with one goal that hasn’t changed: pay it forward. We’ve helped normalize taking time to find truly meaningful work, whatever shape that might take.

So on this ten-year anniversary, I want to thank the people who made SPC what it is.

The ones who showed up when they didn’t have a narrative.
The ones who lived in the question — and lingered in uncertainty for long enough to find out.
The ones who came back, again and again, for the work and for each other.

Happy ten years, SPC. Thank you for showing up!

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@sama seems hard to keep the conversation private while also targeting the ad to the topic of the conversation.

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@paraschopra DoB on mobile is super hard to use. Have to manually scroll back month by month!

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@daniel_nguyenx Everyone can make money, even https://t.co/dueWhp3xJx :)

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@koahlabs *sponsored*

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@thejamescad @spenserskates wrekt

[Koah @koahlabs]

Koah has raised a $5M seed round led by @ForerunnerVC, with participation from @southpkcommons.

In just 8 months, apps reaching 100M+ users are monetizing sustainably with Koah’s AI-native ads.

We deliver $10+ eCPMs, premium demand, and minimal impact on retention. We are quickly becoming the standard for consumer AI monetization.

This round will accelerate our mission to make scalable, native monetization effortless for every AI app.

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

work for us only if you want to have really hard stuff to work on

[Chris Barber (in SF and at AIE) @chrisbarber]

I asked a few founders & investors: "What are 1-2 interesting startups for software engineers & researchers to join, beyond the big labs?"

1. MatX - chips for LLM training and inference - Founders: Reiner Pope, Mike Gunter (both ex-Google)
2. Prosper - domestic-work robots for households and businesses - Founder: Shariq Hashme (ex-OpenAI)
3. Manifest - core ml research lab - Founders: Jacob Buckman, Carles Gelada, Sean Zhang
4. Physical Intelligence - foundation models for robots - Founders: Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Brian Ichter, Quan Vuong, Adnan Esmail, Lachy Groom
5. Mechanize - rl environments with an initial focus on sw engineering - Founders: Tamay Besiroglu, Matthew J Barnett, Ege Erdil
6. Lindy - AI agents for workflow automation - Founder: Flo Crivello
7. Forge - workflow automation for large enterprises - Founder: Markie Wagner
8. Reflection - agentic models with an initial focus on code - Founders: Misha Laskin, Ioannis Antonoglou
9. Fractal Software - venture studio building vertical SaaS companies - Founders: Nate Baker, Mike Furlong
10. Thinking Machines Lab - product-focused AI lab - Founders: Mira Murati, Barret Zoph, John Schulman, Lilian Weng, Andrew Tulloch, Luke Metz
11. Meter - managed internet and secure networking for offices hardware and software - Founders: Anil & Sunil Varanasi (brothers :))
12. Allen Institute for AI (AI2) - nonprofit AI research - Founder: Paul Allen (1953-2018)
13. Abridge - AI medical scribe - Founders: Shivdev Rao, Sandeep Konam, Zachary Lipton, Florian Metze
14. Higgsfield - video gen models and apps (mobile focused) - Founder: Alex Mashrabov
15. Black Forest Labs - FLUX image models - Founders: Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, Andreas Blattmann
16. LMArena - LLM evals for big labs - Founders: Anastasios N Angelopoulos, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ion Stoica
17. Marathon Fusion - fuel for future fusion plants (and creating gold?) - Founders: Kyle Schiller, Adam Rutkowski
18. Luma AI - Dream Machine video model - Founders: Amit Jain, Alex Yu
19. Aravolta - software for data center monitoring and control - Founders: Margarita Groisman, Jack Sutton
20. Harmonic - AI math and reasoning lab - Founders: Vlad Tenev (Robinhood co-founder), Tudor Achim
21. Socket - prevent vulnerabilities from dependencies in your code - Founder: Feross Aboukhadijeh
22. Expo - framework and cloud platform for making cross platform apps - Founders: Charlie Cheever, James Ide
23. Koah Labs - native ads network for AI chatbots - Founders: Nic Baird, Herrick Fang, Mike Choi
24. Brisk Teaching - AI tool for teachers feedback, lesson plans and assessments - Founder: Arman Jaffer
25. Anysphere (Cursor) - AI code editor - Founders: Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark
26. Letta - memory for ai agents - Founders: Charles Packer, Sarah Wooders
27. Baseten - serverless GPU hosting - Founders: Tuhin Srivastava, Amir Haghighat, Philip Howes, Pankaj Gupta
28. Mithril (prev ML Foundry) - GPU compute for training and inference - Founder: Jared Quincy Davis
29. Quill Meetings - AI notetaker for meetings - Founder: Michael Daugherty, add Nick Adams
30. Pluralis Research - multi-participant training of models, for cryptocurrency protocols I think - Founder: Alexander Long
31. Linear - issue and roadmap tracking - Founders: Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo, Tuomas Artman
32. Qualia - real estate closing platform for title escrow and lenders - Founders: Nate Baker, Joel Gottsegen, Lucas Hansen
33. CodeRabbit - AI code review for pull requests - Founders: Harjot Singh Gill, Guritfaq Singh
34. Sygaldry Technologies - quantum computing for AI inference and training - Founders: Chad Rigetti, Idalia Friedson
35. HealthMC - AI powered medical coding - Founders: Ian Blumenfeld, Brian Johnson, Judah Rabinowitz
36. Lorikeet AI - AI that does customer support ticket resolution - Founders: Steve Hind, Jamie Hall
37. RL Core - RL for optimizing water and wastewater plants - Founders: Martha White, Adam White, Alden Christianson
38. Protege AI - a marketplace for AI datasets - Founders: Bobby Samuels, Travis May, Engy Ziedan, Richard Ho
39. Periodic Labs - AI driven materials discovery for energy and electronics - Founders: Ekin Dogus Cubuk, Liam Fedus (Ekin is ex GDM and Liam is ex OAI)

Thanks to the nominators: @calvinfo, @tamaybes, @Altimor, @lachygroom, @finbarrtimbers, @aranibatta, @MorganSchwanke, @AnjneyMidha, @jacobmbuckman, @ROWGHANI, @NWischoff, @ccheever, @herkhere, Nate Baker, @ianblu1, @dolaoseb, Anon, @FlintCasey, @cjc, @LilyPetherick & @auren

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@_robyn_smith am I ronaldo

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@_robyn_smith wait I did exactly this and we're happily married

[Mario Gabriele @mariogabriele]

The Future 50 is here.

5 months ago, we asked +200 of the world’s best VCs to pick the 2 companies with the highest ceilings. The only rule: they had to be valued under $200M.

After months of research, we chose the 50 we believe are best-positioned to dominate.

More here:

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@adityaag Agree with most of this but I think one of the other main causes is sticky customers. If customers are indecisive / slow, it can be a huge hit to momentum. Fire those customers and find one that match your pace of learning in the early days.

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@reidhoffman @koahlabs coming in hot

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@andrewchen @andrewchen you're wrong about ad channels - AI search is effectively becoming the new 2015 Facebook, low CPAs and 1:1 personalized copy. Hard to beat actually.

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@martin_casado For non b2b apps, probably worth considering how to monetize those free users if costs are going to increase...

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@adityaag Couldn't agree more. We got a bunch of investor inbound and took a few meetings, feeling good about that validation. But what we really needed was to make our customers were happy and earn conviction for ourselves. Now we have that, and the business is much stronger as a result.

[Nic Baird @bairdone]

@lacker @natolambert @benthompson A new format isn't required but performs dramatically better.