Bo Ren

Managing Director at @siliconvlybank, championing the founders of today and tomorrow. Past @meta @instagram @tumblr | Opinions are my own

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

My parent were tasked with the job of survival and I with self-actualization. The immigrant generational gap is real. What a luxury it is to search for purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

Love seeing @ali_debow and the Swsh team soar to new heights! I've been impressed by Ali's scrappiness, persistence, and chutzpah since day one. Can't wait to see this new evolution of fandom!!

[Ali Debow @ali_debow]

We're excited to announce a $4M Seed round led by @GameChangersVC, with support from incredible investors including @scooterbraun, @GuyOseary, @stellation, @SignalFire, @MaCVentureCap, and others.

A few years ago, while hosting community events and testing early products, my co-founders @WeilynChong, @NathanAhn, and I noticed a consistent pattern.

After every event, people asked the same questions:

Where are the photos? Who captured that moment? How do I reconnect with the people I met?

https://t.co/hxhuPkNM3O

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

Love what @JeremyGalen and Charlemagne Labs are doing to protect enterprises at the speed of the bad guys!! Security hacks are no longer just committed by technical hackers but also by the nontechnical human engineers too.

[Charlemagne Labs @charlemagnelabs]

AI cyber risk isn’t just autonomous hacking. It’s autonomous deception.

Today, Fortune covered the shift we’re building for: scams that adapt in real time, impersonate trusted people, and defeat “think before you click.”

Security has to move to the moment of interaction.

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

One of the unexpected benefits of ADHD is finding gifts from your past self. One day I forgot I had cupcakes in my backpack for a whole day and then found them walking to work so I had two cupcakes for breakfast. 🧁🧁

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

The best part about having been around the block and “aging” as an elderly millennial tech operator is advising the next gen of founders who are inspired by the products you built at @tumblr. I know our industry has its qualms with aging but the way I see it getting older has its perks bc you carry the wisdom of lived experiences to help founders learn from your mistakes, product graveyard, and shoulda/coulda/woulda(s). The whole point of staying long enough in this game is to help the next generation of founders and builders do better than you did. Tumblr walked so Lore could run.

I am betting on @zehranaqvi to build the future of IP ownership, fandom, and story telling in the AI age!

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

@tonitrades_ THIS. 👆🏽A huge reason why I left SF.

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

SF tech myopia is an occupational hazard and social byproduct of knowing the top 0.1%. I call it the silver medalist mindset. Silver medalists in the Olympics are the least happy medal winners bc they know how close they were to gold.

[Deedy @deedydas]

The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.

Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).

Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.

Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.

As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.

2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"

3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.

4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."

I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.

Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".

Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.

[signüll @signulll]

what’s interesting to me is that the previous gold rushes didn’t credibly threaten the safe path simultaneously while dangling the jackpot.

like you could sit out the dot com boom & keep your accounting job. the current bit where the same technology is both the lottery ticket & the thing eating your fallback is pretty damn novel & also kinda nasty.

[Brian Graham 🦬 @iroasmas]

me as i read 40% of what claude wrote back and type in “continue”

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

10 years ago I was told “you’re not technical enough” by SV no matter how hard I tried as a PM. Now AI has made the liberal arts thinker vital to the intellectual class and pushing forward human-centered technology. I said it then and I will say it again: liberal arts thinking is vital to human progress, specialization is for insects. Thanks @AravSrinivas for the reminder that AI rewards the most curious of minds. 💻🤔🧠

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

Token usage on Perplexity Computer Search results is cheaper than other AI competitors like Gemini, Xai, Claude, and GPT.

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

Thanks @perplexity_ai for inviting me to your Perplexity Ask NY event today to learn more about the Personal Computer. Love that our beloved AI search favorite has evolved into an infrastructure orchestration layer on top of frontier models (plays nice with Claude and Chat), localized to our own computer, and designed for deep research mode. The Perplexity Computer is built for the most curious of minds. 💻 🧠

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

Computer is built with connectors to your favorite SaaS products, saving you on SaaS subscriptions. Now the switching costs of SaaS is lower than ever so the best products will win out.

[Jeremy Philip Galen @JeremyGalen]

Huge thanks to @willknight and @WIRED for digging into a neglected AI risk: the human side of hacking. Using @charlemagnelabs' eval suite, Will tested whether leading models could carry out believable social engineering ploys and the results were unsettling. cc @RichardWhaling

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

@JeremyGalen @willknight @WIRED @charlemagnelabs @RichardWhaling MAJOR!!!!

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

The business model for therapy is broken bc the incentives aren’t aligned for patient breakthroughs. The current therapy model is a LTV business, microdosing you on progress so you keep coming back for more similar to a dating app match algorithm. Just good enough progress but not completely disruptive. Instead of optimizing for client retention, it should be a success fee billing based on speed and efficiency of breakthroughs and hitting healing milestones. Your therapist should be willing to fire you instead of retaining you for as long as possible.

[Michael Luo @michaelluo]

This was a lot of fun. Thank you @NYPLSNFL for having me and to @QianJulieWang for being such a thoughtful, generous moderator. Thank you to everyone who came out!

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

Loved this intimate and timely this discussion, covering the origin of Asian American invisibility, otherness, and discrimination throughout history. Understanding the past helps us avoid repeating it in the future. @michaelluo thank you for being the Howard Zinn of Asian American history! Asian American history is American history. ✊🏽

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

Incredible in-depth book discussion tonight at the @nypl between authors @QianJulieWang and @michaelluo. Michael’s book Stranger in the Land outlines overlooked Asian American history. History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. So much of what Michael covers in his book is currently unfolding today again.

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

I'm that point in my career and late 30s adulthood where having a regulated nervous system is the utmost privilige. Anyone diving deep into Polyvagal Theory? The vagus nerve controls everything.

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

@MistahLee 💯, they are gonna be a pain in the ass to raise tho. My parents always complained about how headstrong I was. My dad said raising me was like raising five haha

[Bo Ren @Bosefina]

I want my future kid to be a world bender. Someone who shapes and wills the world around them. When I talk to amazing founders they all carry world bending characteristics: stubbornness, perseverance, conviction, and a sense of possibility that’s unwavering.