David Cheng

GP @ Costanoa Ventures. Ex-DCM/Coreline Ventures. Love basketball. Early NYC K-bbq food truck employee. Writing at

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

EvenUp, one of the fastest-growing Vertical AI companies, announced their $2B+ Series E last week.

They were rejected by YC three times.

When I led their seed in 2020, few investors saw what they could become.

Today, they’re the poster child for the “sell the work” thesis.

[Dan Primack @danprimack]

(not everything you dislike is a Chinese psyop)

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@kevinleeme Doing away with the ancestral mantra of “if you fail I won’t love you and you’ll be poor forever” I see

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

Lol

[nick kokonas @nickkokonas]

@hilbertspaess you have not internalized game theory.

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

Guys...we manage money. Not military. Not police. Not firefighters. Even lifeguards see more danger than we do.

[High Yield Harry @HighyieldHarry]

The concept of a VC torturing himself like this is something I don't think even HBO's Silicon Valley could've written

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@negroprogrammer @VCBrags @BillSimmons

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

Finally a robotics company that solves something I care about. The lines at Ding Tai Fung

[Lindon Gao @Lindon_Gao]

Many Thursdays ago, I got this text:

“Understand u guys r quite tied up with existing deployments, but when can we get our next batch of robots?”

I read it three times.

Anyone who has built something from 0 to 1 knows the feeling. For months, you’re pushing a boulder uphill. You don’t know if there’s a top. Then one day, almost quietly, you feel the boulder start rolling on its own. The question had changed from “does this work?” to “when can we get more?”

We found our fit.

The path there was not obvious. For a long time, the question I got most about Dyna was: are you a model company or a deployment company?

What I rarely admitted was that I wasn’t entirely sure either.

We knew what we were doing, but it felt like we were swimming against the tide because investors kept pushing us to pick a lane. The cleaner path was to just build the brain. It was a story with no revenue pressure, software-like scalability, better multiples, and less messiness. But the real world is brittle, and robots are not LLMs. So we kept coming back to what we were actually here to build.

The answer wasn’t another breakthrough model. And it wasn’t more unscalable deployments. It was a robot people wanted.

It took us a while to realize there was a third path. Frontier research makes the product possible. Deployment teaches us what the research needs to solve next. Each makes the other better. Both are necessary to build a PRODUCT people want. After all, isn’t that why we’re building robots in the first place?

We are Dyna. A product company that turns frontier intelligence into real-world impact.

There’s still more to come.

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@spencermpeter congrats!!!

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@conconconling

[Jon Baker @jonpbaker]

Here’s an idea:

Connect sensitive personal emails, calendar, payments, etc to a startup in stealth mode who’s founders can’t even be easily identified and who’s terms of service and privacy policies are terrible.

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

This TK Senra podcast is going to set VCs so far back. 😂

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@ElliotComite Is it comment "grifter" for link?

Jk. please share :)

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@pitdesi @nico_laqua Sheel didn't do anything wrong giving his analysis. Especially explaining to people why 2x leverage ETFs are dangerous

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@nico_laqua I bet you're a really great hang

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@stevencheng @buildpbc

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@RandianCapital Him and Lex are the same

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

Now would be a good time for some Nassib Taleb

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@Rick_Zullo @BennettSiegel 1869 unread is a new record

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

Congrats on the announcement to @rissa_cao @LengyueMatrix and the entire @FishAudio team!

Super happy to see you finally get to share with the world the product of so many late nights and technical breakthroughs. No one works harder than this team!

Honored to have led their seed.

[Fish Audio @FishAudio]

We went from an open-source repo to $21M ARR in one year. To our early believers and investors, thank you

[David Cheng @Chengdavid923]

@Rick_Zullo @united two weekends ago they cancelled me on a Saturday at Newark and booked me for tuesday. Waited on standby at the airport all weekend for any flight going west. The sounds of United's wait tone everywhere. Apparently it's because of crew/pilot shortages wrecking the entire chain

[Fish Audio @FishAudio]

Today we’ve raised $52M Seed and we are announcing the public launch of S2.1 Pro.

>It can clone a voice from 5 seconds of audio
>2x faster than Cartesia & 1/6th the cost of Eleven Labs
>most expressive model with word level control over emotion, intonation, pacing etc

We support frontier AI companies including HeyGen, LiveKit, Retell, Sanas, and OpenArt all run our model in production.

If you're a business and we can't cut your voice AI costs by 50%, we'll give you 1 year of Fish Audio for free.
Book a demo: https://t.co/vHkyZf9JoG

To celebrate our first birthday, we'll give you 1 month of S2.1 Pro for free. Like, retweet, and comment “Fish” to get it.