Banana Capital 🍌🧢

Backing your favorite startups at Pre-seed and Seed. Listen in at @ThePeelPod

[Chris Hladczuk @chrishlad]

AI-native services is the platform shift of this era. No one wants another SaaS tool that they can build with Claude in a day.

[Banana Capital 🍌🧢 @BananaCap_]

“Get paid to get jacked”

[Zac Valles @zacharyvalles]

This is the team that will be shipping some of the coolest consumer hardware designed in San Francisco.

If you’re passionate about building at the intersection of wellness and technology, we want you @Fort. Bonus you get paid to get jacked

[Banana Capital 🍌🧢 @BananaCap_]

Using real-time data is the best way to escape the permanent underclass

[Artie @artie_labs]

We filmed three data engineers in their natural habitat.

Not shown in the doc:
> Monitoring a pipeline that was 'definitely fine' five minutes ago.
> Reading logs like they’re a crime scene.
> Doing recovery math while someone asks if the dashboard is up to date yet.

Moving data is easy. What’s difficult is keeping data correct and current, and knowing how to recover when pipelines restart, schemas change, or data falls behind.

That’s why Artie now has a Free plan: so anyone can run real-time replication without building and operating the infrastructure themselves.

Deploy a pipeline and watch your data replicate in real time.

Try it: https://t.co/Fc3zRHpxgB

[Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak]

New @ThePeelPod with @alfromnexhealth

Today @nexhealthHQ infrastructure serves 89 million patients and 81% of new AI healthcare startups are built on it.

But at one point, the company had $4k in the bank, a maxed-out Amex card, and was on the brink of running out of cash.

I sat down with Al to talk about why 75% of dentists still run a server in their closet, the reason innovation is so hard in healthcare, and why AI value will accrue to chips, models, and the action layer.

Full episode here + links below.

Timestamps:
0:00 Healthcare skipped 3 platform shifts and went straight to AI
4:10 75% of dentists still have on-prem servers
10:05 How data interoperability holds back healthcare innovation
16:02 Why everyone blames Epic
20:15 Building the developer platform for healthcare
24:36 Why everyone fails to fix the problem
29:11 Fragmented markets enabled developer platforms
32:32 Working as a receptionist at a doctor’s office
36:13 Building a prototype on Twilio
39:15 How incumbents went from blocking to partnering
46:05 Canvassing Soho dentists door-to-door
53:47 Reverse-engineering 40-year old databases
56:21 Funding NexHealth with side hustles for two years
57:30 The scheduling wedge no one could match
1:02:20 Raising $391k from professors and customers
1:03:46 Running out of cash, why customers kept churning
1:07:45 $4,000 in the bank and a maxed-out Amex
1:11:12 The $36k pre-pay that saved the company
1:13:24 NexHealth’s three businesses today
1:20:18 Payments and the “admin-day” problem
1:26:15 72% sales win rate
1:28:27 The term sheet signed the week before COVID
1:30:26 Spending half the Series A on an acquisition
1:33:47 Raising $176M they didn't need
1:37:28 Why starting before 2022 is an advantage
1:42:22 Where AI value accrues: chips, models, the action layer
1:44:55 81% of AI products are built on NexHealth
1:48:24 Staying patient for three years after ChatGPT
1:51:25 Competitors building on their API
1:54:02 “We’re a tech company, not healthcare company”
1:56:09 Hiring from outside healthcare
1:58:34 Shoes, email over Slack
2:01:21 What AI changed inside the company
2:04:16 Inspiration from Microsoft in 1977 - 1990

[claire vo 🖤 @clairevo]

using @inngest is like a little gift to myself

[Banana Capital 🍌🧢 @BananaCap_]

@FlexSuperApp Assembling the dream team

[Flex @FlexSuperApp]

Today, we're excited to welcome Michael Barrett as Flex's CTO.

Before joining Flex, Michael spent the last 6 years leading engineering at Chime, where hundreds of engineers reported into his organization.

During his time there, he helped build and scale the technology behind one of the world's largest fintechs. Chime serves over 10 million users and is an approximately $11B publicly traded company.

Michael led the teams responsible for building and deploying Chime's proprietary in-house fintech infrastructure, including its payment processing, ledgering, and core banking systems, reducing infrastructure costs by roughly 60%.

He also played a key role in launching and scaling Chime's card program, which now serves more than 6 million users.

We're incredibly excited for what's ahead.

Welcome to the team, Michael!

[Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak]

New @ThePeelPod with @itstonyhb

- the hidden layer of AI infrastructure
- why evals today are "batshit insane"
- building @inngest's own cloud to get 20x lower cost
- growing 35x YoY after AWS and Cloudflare copied them, and
- building a company without a personal brand

Timestamps:
0:00 The hidden infra layer every AI agent runs on
1:46 Building complex chains of logic
3:31 Why agent SDK's don't go far enough
4:49 Healthcare was the original event-driven nightmare
6:32 Storing traces on your infrastructure enables self-improving loops
14:26 Why Inngest was already in the right place for AI
15:49 Score agents off product events, not LLM's
17:31 The OpenAI copy-paste signal
21:24 Swap in LLMs and cut costs
23:44 How customers pulled the product forward
25:41 Orchestration belongs outside the sandbox
29:48 Building a neocloud to cut costs 20x
32:09 Most neoclouds just resell AWS
32:54 AI infrastructure is all converging
34:49 Why Claude can't just build your backend
36:44 How to build a software factory
39:12 Agents are a lottery you get addicted to
42:44 Loops must always exist
45:38 If models keep getting better, why orchestrate?
48:28 When incumbents steal your features
52:30 You can't vibe code infrastructure
55:54 Why Tony has no personal brand
59:38 Dev tools GTM without Twitter
1:03:20 Lessons from the founder of DuckDuckGo
1:10:39 Truth as a company value
1:13:08 Taking too long adapting to AI
1:15:10 Startups are 100% R&D
1:17:19 Ali from Databricks
1:19:03 Writing his own code, Voice-to-text with local models
1:23:53 Evals are batshit insane

[Banana Capital 🍌🧢 @BananaCap_]

@defyneric @AccVentures @coinfund @bcap @PanteraCapital @ycombinator @variantfund @a16z @archetypevc @PortalVentures @hack_vc @peakxvpartners @6thManVentures @lattice_fund @EV3ventures Wow incredible list.

Glad to be included 😎

[Banana Capital 🍌🧢 @BananaCap_]

@zaidrmn @FlexSuperApp @RyanQualtrics @ryanjsweeney @halo_fund ⬇️ Heads down
⬆️ Cash flows up

[Zaid Rahman @zaidrmn]

Today, @FlexSuperApp, raised $70M Series B1 to launch The Full Financial Home for Business Owners. Making Flex officially a unicorn.

Led by @RyanQualtrics and @ryanjsweeney’s @halo_fund, with participation from existing investors.

And we're introducing Flex Global.

[Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak]

Cut the tape, use @hanoverpark

[Zaid Rahman @zaidrmn]

Best engineering team in fintech.

Join us.

[Chris Hladczuk @chrishlad]

Radical truth-seeking is the most important value at @hanoverpark.

[Chris Hladczuk @chrishlad]

I finally got my co-founder @NickPuljic in front of a camera... it took a film crew showing up at our NYC office to do it.

And I let the Hanover Park team do the talking instead of me.

Here's a behind the scenes look at the team we're building:

[Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak]

Great read on what @mirandanover @zacharyvalles and @paulschneider_ are up to at @fortwearable

[Inngest @inngest]

Well this topic seemed to be of interest...

Full article in thread.

[Chris Hladczuk @chrishlad]

"The people who are not deep in the details and go to the source waste everyone’s time - this includes me as CEO. I will likely have less details than you on a topic - so I expect you to tell me I’m wrong and push back hard."

^ This is from "How to Succeed at Hanover Park" which is a doc that every new teammates reads on their first day.

It's important that we stay relentlessly truth-seeking. I don't care if I'm "right". I care that we get to the right outcome as fast as possible.

And this means that living in the details is the best opportunity to shape Hanover Park.

We don't believe in big hierarchy or bureaucracy.

We believe in individual contributors that act with full autonomy and agency to solve hard problems.

[This Week in Startups @twistartups]

🚨 TWiST is LIVE with a VC Roundtable at 12PM CT!

Today, we're joined by @TurnerNovak, solo GP of @BananaCap_.

What started as a meme account from Ann Arbor turned into one of the best seed track records in the game:

Bun got bought by Anthropic, Bee by Amazon, BeReal by Voodoo, and Chainguard turned into a multi-billion-dollar machine.

While everyone else is writing the seed-stage's obituary, Turner keeps cashing in exit checks.

We'll see you in one hour!

[Banana Capital 🍌🧢 @BananaCap_]

@twistartups @TurnerNovak 🍌 🍌 🍌