We've raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, led by @AltimeterCap, Dragoneer, @Greenoaks, and @sequoia.
This investment will help us advance our research and expand our capacity to meet growing demand for Claude.
This kinda ties into the "you're competing with non-tech people now" from the tweet yday about the Indonesian girl getting to $800 MRR within a month
It's all about your idea plugged into the cultural zeitgeist and then your style of execution which is based on who you are a s person
Every little thing you experienced influences the choices you make when building a product too, small tiny details that you do different that are unmeasurable but turn out to be a big reason why users like your product over others
For me the easiest way to get more life experience always has been to just go travel, even better travel for loooong times, live in foreign places by yourself for months (maybe years), preferrably solo, something happens to you that changes you as a person
You wanna do this in your 20s/30s but you can do it any age, it's just that if you're not single anymore, your style of travel usually changes into more normie patterns but you can still do it
Go to places where few other people go, I always talk about China because so few people visit it, yet it's a world leader now in so many things, you'll learn so many things just being there
For me it started when I studied abroad in 2009 in Korea, it reset my mind and identity is such a fundamental way that everything that came after for me (like going nomad in 2013, building startups, becoming a perpetual immigrant away from my home country forever) can kinda be lead to that moment
Fly somewhere far for months, by yourself, if you can, and you'll get those life experiences that will change you forever, make you a better person and also help you make better products!
It should be pretty obvious at this point that AI is a "force multiplier" not a "labor substitute".
It helps experts be better at things they are already good at. It doesn't let beginners match experts.
If you can't write, anything you write with AI will be unmitigated slop.
If you aren't a software engineer, anything you vibecode with AI will have security holes and won't be able to scale past a toy demo.
If you blindly trust AI to deliver on a research task without knowing the subject matter, you won't be able to fact-check it.
There's this weird misconception of AI as something that completely levels the playing field. I don't see it that way at all. There are mathematicians deriving novel lemmas with off-the-shelf models. Normal people can't do that.
AI is a tool that makes experts better. It doesn't make everyone into an expert.
prediction:
we'll soon view coding the way we view using spreadsheets today - a commonplace skill that every white collar worker is expected to have. Knowing how to code will sit alongside email, making slides, word processing, etc etc. It'll be <18 months before this is widespread in every job description
Customer-facing employees will code as well as sell/market/support, so that they convert their domain expertise into repeatable workflows and software. We'll have an explosion of internal bespoke apps. But to complement all of this coding happening at the edges, we'll also have centrally expert teams of agentic coders who build infrastructure, make it secure/scalable, and create canonical software. These central teams will help scale agentic engineering.
There's a spreadsheet metaphor here too -- yes, if you are an expert at spreadsheets, you write macros, build huge models, etc., we'll put you in a group of your own. It's called Finance. :) We'll have the same central teams to help manage the widespread use of coding tools throughout the org.
You might ask, won't this be a mess? What happens in a world where everyone has many many variations of bespoke software? (It's already happening) Maybe! But I think it'll be fine, in the same way that it's fine to make a copy of a spreadsheet or deck. Making it easy to fork makes it easy to participate. But you might want an "official" forecast maintained by an official finance person, in the same way that there will be variations of canonical and bespoke software
excited for the Gdrive of many many forks of disposable apps made and shared by my co-workers!!! 😂
BREAKING: WHOOP RAISES $575M AT $10.1B VALUATION
I am pleased to announce that we’ve raised $575M at a $10.1B valuation to accelerate our mission of unlocking human performance and healthspan globally.
This round was led by Collaborative Fund with participation from 2PointZero Group, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Mubadala Investment Company, Abbott, Mayo Clinic, Macquarie Capital, Glade Brook, B-Flexion, IVP, Foundry, Accomplice, Affinity Partners, Promus Ventures, and Bullhound Capital alongside a group of individual investors including Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Rory McIlroy, Virgil van Dijk, and Mathieu van der Poel.
This investor group and this moment reflect a powerful evolution underway for Whoop and the broader healthcare market.
Whoop was born in performance - trusted by the best athletes in the world to train, recover, and compete at the highest level. That foundation remains core to who we are. You see that in the iconic athlete investors joining this round.
But it also represents our push into broader health.
In the past 12 months, WHOOP has received medical clearances, launched blood testing, and created a platform that has saved lives. Abbott and Mayo Clinic - two of the most respected and influential institutions in global healthcare - are now investors in Whoop. These are organizations that have shaped modern medicine. Their decision to partner with us is a clear validation of where our technology is headed.
Healthcare systems around the world are reactive. For too long, they have waited for people to get sick, then intervene. Chronic disease is rising and costs continue to climb.
At Whoop, we believe the future looks fundamentally different. We are building the most powerful, personal, preventive health platform in the world - powered by continuous biometric data, advanced analytics, and AI to help people understand their bodies and improve their health in real time.
I am grateful to our team, our members, and our partners for believing in this vision. I’ve been building this company for 14 years and I’ve never been more excited for the future.
Marc severely underestimates the amount of time Alexander the Great spent reflecting on his conquests. He conquered 30+ kingdoms in 16 years. That left an average of 4-5 months on horseback as he marched to the next kingdom he was compelled to defeat. Plenty of time for introspection.
@levelsio Many coworking spots also optimize form over function - e.g. get chairs and tables based on what some random interior designer told them looks pretty instead of ergonomics.
People get high on abstraction too early. They want the system before they’ve earned the insight.
But the good abstractions are never designed. They’re discovered. You do the stupid manual thing enough times and the real bottleneck just emerges. Your initial agency might be driven by a hunch you had in the shower, but that moment won’t get you all the way to making something people want. The right way to make anything is forced on you by reality: what are the real jobs to be done? And what sequence?
This is why “do things that don’t scale” still hits, especially now when AI makes it trivially easy to scale things that probably shouldn’t be scaled yet. PG’s point was never about suffering. It was about contact. When you’re the one manually doing the loop, you see the edge cases. The weird user behavior. The failure modes nobody designed for. The hidden dependencies that only show up at 2am when some flow or intermediate step breaks in a way you didn’t anticipate. If you automate before you have that contact, you just scale your misunderstanding faster.
When the machines can help you vibe code perfection it gives you a false sense of power. I love that feeling as much as you do. But fuck perfection. Do it live. Be the loop.
Feel every friction point. Notice what’s actually true every single time versus what just looked true because you hadn’t seen enough cases yet. Formalize that. Build the recursive version. Then keep checking that your abstraction is still attached to real humans and their needs. Because reality drifts. Your users drift. The ground truth changes under you. You may think you understand but no plan survives contact with the real users and what they want. You find those body blows in analytics and user feedback and we call them the roadmap.
Humans left with not enough data hallucinate too. But just like the LLMs with enough data you unlock real transcendence. Real utility. Prosperity for humans in real life.
The abstraction is a tool, not a destination. The moment you forget that, you’re cooked.
Life is amazing:
-gyms exist
-Coke Zero exists
-hot girls outnumber even moderately put-together dudes 2000 to 1
-every food item in the world has been hunted and gathered for you (grocery stores)
-you and your wife can drink 4 bottles of wine then smash all night without a condom
-you and your friends can hit the gym then smoke a joint at a John Mayer concert
-you could be working 16 hour days in a coal mine in a third world country breaking your lower back for less than $1
There’s kids who live in wheelchairs. There’s kids born with disabilities. No Prom, no Shoulder Presses, no sleepovers with their best friends staying up until 2AM watching Interstellar.
And you’re not SMASHING the gym like a grateful SAVAGE!? Eating healthy 90% of the time, calling your friends for no reason, CRUSHING it in your career, asking for the promotion, asking out your crush making her your girlfriend then your wife!?
You’re spinning on a sphere in an infinite universe and the fact you’re alive is a 1 in 500 trillion MIRACLE. You’re so lucky it’s absurd and you have nothing to lose :)