Sam Altman walked into YC, offering founders $1M in free tokens for a slice of equity.
Jason's advice: run.
OpenAI is watching your token usage, ranking the winners, then shipping the top 5 as native features.
Get off the frontier models, use open source, and own your data.
@Jason
I can’t believe I happen to be in New York when the knicks win the championship - it makes me both miss the energy of this city and also want to run away from the chaos
Erik Voorhees explains how Venice's dual token model actually works
"You can stake 100 VVV to get pro access to Venice. We take a bunch of our revenue, buy the token, and burn it"
"We want to take that to its extreme and try to buy every last token we can and burn it all"
"You lock up VVV to mint DIEM. Each DIEM you hold gives you $1/day to use on any AI model you want"
"We built it so AI agents could hold an asset and get marginally free inference"
"It changes the economic calculation. We thought that'd be an interesting design space to explore"
Never thought I'd be that person walking around talking to myself all day into Wispr into Telegram to communicate with my Hermes agent that I set up through a VPS
Venice by Voorhees is the clearest AI growth play
A few broad strokes I want to point out
1/ Fundamentals wise Venice has 3 million+ users and Yan is estimating a 12 month forward ARR of ~$260M. This means VVV trades at 2.5x forward revenue (Circulating market cap). This is rare in Crypto especially at a time when stakeholders want real revenue.
2/ Thesis wise people desire private inference while accessing open source models without sending their data to China. This is hard to do (China APIs, or intermediaries that route anywhere). Venice is private and hosts some models on private data centers and some in an E2E TEE Fashion for extreme privacy. Yan covers all of the tiers. Venice solves the market for those who want private inference but can't setup hardware at home and dont want to send data to China.
I've talked about this a lot that its very hard to find a subscription service, that is private, lets you access leading open source models with zero data retention.
Enterprise wise @YanLiberman is right the enterprise no data retention plans are solid from AI Labs, but they are API based and get very expensive. With Venice you can get similar guarantees on a $68/mo subscription, if you graduate from a user to enterprise API plan for work privacy guarantees your bill goes up 10-20x (this happened to us!). Net I think more enterprises/businesses use venice than we are assuming to save money vs graduating to enteprise AI tiers for similar privacy guarantees.
3/ Founder wise Erik is the guy who took down SBF live on a podcast. He's the guy who got the entire conference going at Permissionless on AI. When Erik eventually goes up against trillion dollar centralized AI founders to share the vision of private/open source AI he will inspire folks and bring them into Venice. The best storyteller is king.
4/ Future wise I think the biggest jump is autonomous agents holding VVV/DIEM, accessing models, earning capital and buying more VVV/DIEM for more usage. Then Agents build out their entire AI economy.
Disclosure I am Long $VVV. H/T @ErikVoorhees
$750M+ gone from defi in 2026. drift, kelp, now litecoin…
litecoin’s MWEB was added years after launch as a privacy extension, and the exploit hit the seam between the base chain and the extension. privacy shouldn’t be an afterthought when you're dealing with this much capital
@chamath there’s also @AskVenice 👀 - 25+ models behind one endpoint, trait-based routing so you don’t even pin to a model name, and zero data retention on top. Feels like the same thesis applied to a privacy-first stack.
🚨 Do you understand what’s happening?!
> Lovable just got valued at $6.6 billion and a guy with a free account read another user's source code, database credentials, and AI chat history in 5 API calls.. Customers include Uber, Zendesk, Nvidia, Microsoft, Spotify.
> The Lovable researcher reported the bug 48 days ago through HackerOne. They marked it a "duplicate" and closed it. It still worked the day it leaked…
> Vercel got breached this week through a third-party AI tool an employee installed.. ShinyHunters listed the stolen API keys and source code on BreachForums for $2 million.
> Lovable's response was "we did not suffer a data breach." Then they admitted they patched the API in November and left every project from before that date exposed..
> When you vibe code an app you paste your Stripe key into the chat. You paste your database URL into the chat. You paste customer records into the chat. The endpoint that leaked.. returned chat histories.
> Anthropic built a model that scored 83.1% on finding real software vulnerabilities. Found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD and a 16-year-old flaw in FFmpeg. They named it Mythos and locked it behind a 50-company firewall because public release was too dangerous..
> Two of the world's biggest dev infrastructure platforms got breached in 48 hours and a $6.6B company's first instinct was to argue about the definition of the word "public..."
> Every founder who shipped an MVP on Lovable in early 2025 woke up today to find their database credentials are public records..
> The trust boundaries in the AI dev stack are drawn with marker. And it's raining.
If your stack ever touched a vibe coding platform, rotate everything tonight. Check the chat logs for what you forgot you typed.
AI is here. And we’re f*cked.
@mcagney Perhaps an optional DID layer at the protocol/transfer‑agent level: KYC’d users can get settlement holds, conditional reversibility, and clawback rights. Risk‑managed reversibility for those who want it without breaking decentralization for those who don’t.