Blake McDowall

executive recruiting @Stripe

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

@PanasonicDX4500 Japan even got a surprise early strike in

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

Book cases, art, maps, loose mockingbirds. Dream office.

[Jeffery Tyler Syck @tylersyck]

Thomas Jefferson had the best White House office of any president.

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

Some founders aren’t meant for the hill, and that’s ok. That’s what Mark paid Nick Clegg and now Dina Powell for

[Gizmodo @Gizmodo]

Anthropic’s White House Negotiations Are Reportedly On Track After ‘Weirdo’ Dario Amodei Was Replaced https://t.co/3gqTc1mg7c

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

@VeinRichard @kanwetwitty I was whelmed by your use of whelm

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

first nuclear power by a startup

[Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors @isaiah_p_taylor]

Good morning.

Last night at 8:51pm Mountain Time, the Valar Atomics Nuclear Operations team brought Ward 250 to 10kW thermal output. We held this power level throughout the night.

This is another historic milestone from the Valar team, marking first nuclear power by a startup.

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

@vu0tran Congrats @vu0tran

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

@ethimedes Likely big names leaving their ai labs

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

@eileenomara @patrickc @stripe @collision Congrats @eileenomara !

[Eileen O'Mara @eileenomara]

After seven extraordinary years building Stripe's go-to-market engine, I'm stepping into a new role: Vice Chair of @stripe. As Vice Chair, I'll represent the company with business, government, and policy leaders around the world, alongside @patrickc and @collision.

The internet economy is at an inflection point. Governments, regulators, and multilateral bodies are making once-in-a-generation decisions about how digital commerce is regulated and enabled—decisions that will set the operating conditions for entrepreneurs for decades. Stripe serves millions of businesses in nearly every country on earth. We have both the standing and the responsibility to shape those decisions. That's what I'll be doing: engaging heads of government, trade bodies, and global business leaders to advocate for decisions that advance entrepreneurship and increase the economic dynamism that too many parts of the world have been starved of.

I've spent the last 25 years of my career building things, teams, markets, relationships. This next chapter is about using all of that on behalf of the businesses that trust Stripe to power their growth.

As I start this new role, I'm delighted to have @tybryson take over as Stripe's Chief Revenue Officer. Tyler brings two decades of experience building, scaling, and leading revenue-generating teams and has had a tremendous impact leading our Americas business. He knows our customers, understands what they need and we’re all very excited for his leadership as Stripe’s CRO.

https://t.co/SQrDRh3bjW

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

@wcathcart Congrats Will. I’m excited to see what’s next for you

[Max ⛅ @maxisawesome538]

personally fond of "Vallejo", where u pronounce the double L like English but the j like Spanish 👍🏼

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

@siimland @rabois Nice! I’m taking all but NAC. Creatine has a ton of other cell regen, anti aging, and mental benefits.

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

So many exec exits at deepmind. I wonder what’s up.

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold along with Demis Hassabis, has left Google DeepMind to join Anthropic.

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

@realmasroork @aakashgupta Reads like ai slop

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

Wild! Midjourney has developed a full-body ultrasonic CT scanner. 10x cheaper and 60x faster than MRI. They plan to open their first 25,000-square-foot "Midjourney Spa" in SF by the end of 2027.

[Midjourney @midjourney]

A technical dive inside our new "Midjourney Scanner"

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

Cool fund doing important work

[Hannah Bebbington Valori @hebebbington]

Delighted to share that Frontier has raised an additional $915 million to accelerate the world’s best carbon removal companies.

https://t.co/23KDQRf5xC

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

This is past tense but they’re still doing a bad job explaining the vision.

[Techmeme @Techmeme]

Memo: CTO Andrew Bosworth said Meta did "an atrocious job" sharing Applied AI's vision, promising employees better communication, career growth, and more perks (Wired)

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

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

@sentrock This is dope

[Blake McDowall @blakemcdowall]

An amazing pivot and an excellent team. Customer support tech needs more attention and widespread adoption — it should be a massive beneficiary of chatbots. I hope this will spur more investment and innovation.

[Eoghan McCabe @eoghan]

We’re excited to share that we just signed an agreement for @salesforce to acquire @fin_ai for ~$3.6B. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027.

Fin started as Intercom 15 years ago. We changed our name to cap our transformation just weeks ago. We were a darling of the SaaS era and invented so many of the patterns you see in software today. Nearly four years ago, in need of a reboot, we jumped on weeks-old modern LLMs to create and define the category we know as Customer Agents today.

Salesforce invented modern software and SaaS. And @benioff is like the final boss of tech founder CEOs. In seat for 27 years, he’s one of the last of his era. Still pushing, pivoting, placing big bets. It’s a privilege for @destraynor and I to get to partner with him and join forces with Salesforce upon close at this most fascinating time. And will be very fun to get their help bringing Fin to magnitudes more consumers.

To our customers: Over the past few years we’ve been shipping intensely. Including recently our groundbreaking model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator. With the resources of Salesforce this will only accelerate. And yet little will practically change. I’ll still be CEO, Des will still be running R&D, we’ll both still be committed to continuing to lead this category. Thank you very sincerely and deeply for your belief in us.

To all of our friends, our families, and our employees, past and present: While this is not the end, it is a major, pivotal, special, and emotional moment for us. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. For everything.

To my cofounders, my exec team: Look what we built. Four young lads with a dream and nothing to lose. And a home grown exec team who pulled off the greatest and arguably only late stage software company pivot to AI, and invented one of the most important categories in AI. Thank you for sticking through all of this with me.

And now, time to get back to work. See you at our next product launch in a couple weeks. (: