Ford Johnstone

VC at @ChicagoVentures

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@matthuang Swarm surfer*

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@jordanbramble ⚛️🔋

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

Was part of some large neocloud GPU financings back in ‘23/‘24 and at least back then we had greatly overestimated how quickly GPU/hr pricing and GPU terminal/scrap value would deteriorate.

People were very wary of a bubble and underwriting was thoughtful and conservative. Hopefully that hasn’t changed…

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@jbahrdestefano @iamjakestream @pitdesi 😂

[Neuralink @neuralink]

Through the VOICE trial, Terry is using his Neuralink implant to help fine-tune a brain-to-voice interface for himself and others who can’t speak. He trained the algorithm first by miming speech as best he could, then by simply thinking the words and hearing them come out in his own natural voice.

Powered by Grok Voice from @spacexai

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@jbahrdestefano @meetgranola @WisprFlow Immediately deleted WisprFlow after this release

[Kahlil Lalji @bykahlil]

Natural Direct is now live.

Agents are becoming real participants in the economy. That means being able to move money as freely as people and businesses do.

With Direct, your agents can now pay anyone, any way they need to be paid: ACH, Wire, and Realtime (powered by RTP and FedNow) with mailed paper checks, international wire, and more coming soon.

Same @naturalpay wallets, same controls, the right rail programmatically chosen by your agent at runtime*

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

The best founders, or founding teams collectively, can do it all (yes I know a rather glib statement from a VC myself).

I would also argue that if you don’t have the raw intellectual genius but have the brand, you will end up faltering eventually even with funding.

Having a brand is also a form of genius 🤷‍♂️ sales and fundraising genius

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

I too have been waiting for this financial utopia… but it will be interesting to see how proactive AI agents change the overall fintech ecosystem given lots of traditional lending and rewards programs are built on less reliable borrowers subsidizing the rewards or benefits of more reliable borrowers.

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@lightspeedvp Uh @CrusoeAI ?

[Ilya Sukhar @ilyasu]

Chicago is an excellent city. Why isn't this more well known?

[Doc Zigga 🎱 @DocDurrDan]

@Tesla @microdose_vibes We got flying cars before gta 6

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@ben_glenney @BuyWithHoma @armanjava But they can give you a nice pen to sign the forms

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@fchollet TL;DR better models need more labeled training data for RL 😂

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

This is friggin' awesome @_chenglou. I can think of some potentially cool applications around gradient descent towards better design taste or unique parser edge cases (legaltech, fraud/KYB, fintech, etc.)

[Cheng Lou @_chenglou]

My dear friends, I’d like to show you my latest toy project

Introducing Handwired: turn your regular JavaScript code into a neural net!
- no training
- exact outputs vs the JS program
- fully differentiable

All runnable in a browser, without GPU

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@paulg @paulg I had this exact thought today and could not agree more… tried to have Instinct order more house supplies and came across the agent ban. Though “someone just build agent friendly amazon…”

[America @america]

Secretary of State Marco Rubio's full remarks from the Acropolis in Athens.

[Natural @naturalpay]

Natural Sandbox is live!

A full Natural environment to build and test agentic payment flows before real money moves. Create agents, link accounts, mint API keys, simulate payment requests end to end — dashboard, MCP, SDKs, or CLI.

Live now on https://t.co/RfitVGROJp

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@defyneric seems perfect for @naturalpay 😉

[Ford Johnstone @fordjohnstone]

@ben_glenney Better than most out there 🫡 #DPI