Gil Dibner

Trying to help the few do the impossible; building @angularventures. Early stage. Enterprise. Deep tech. EU+IL. 🇮🇱🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇸

[Noam Tenne 🏜️ @NoamTenne]

Back in 2008, I was a fresh-faced kid, really just happy to finally get a job in software, when the founders of @jfrog took a bet on me.

Too young and inexperienced to have any opinions of my own, I helped build one of the seminal companies in the CI/CD/DevOps movement. CI wasn't my idea, I got it secondhand from the visionary founders. Borrowed conviction that wasn't mine until it was.

But here's one that is mine: the software and its entire state machine will rebuild itself per person. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves, the way we built software until today was driven by technological and budget constraints, not by the best experience. rather than taste.

We now finally have the opportunity to move from the least-worst version for everyone to the best version for anyone.

When I pitched this to @gdibner , he immediately knew that this wasn't going to be easy, but he batted for us in the firm. With support from @betaworks , @RafaelCorrales , Rule 30, and angels, @AngularVentures has led a $2M pre-seed round for Sky Valley Ambient Computing to build Adaptive Software, starting with @getdiffer.

In 5 years, shipping single-version software will feel like shipping without CI.

[Gil Dibner @gdibner]

"Remember when broadband came around? That was in the late 1990s, and it was magical. I had a DSL connection in my East Village apartment. By 2020 I was part of the gigabit society. Speed had faded from the foreground. We just kept consuming the internet, its joys and jolts, without thinking about speeds."

https://t.co/9RPU89eLHM

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

The Three Humans Left in a VC Firm

Fred Wilson, co-founder, Union Square Ventures, interviewed by Michael Mignano (USV)

[I post one executive summary daily of an interview I enjoyed and learnt from. I loved this interview that @mignano did with @fredwilson, who I've learnt a tremendous amount from on the board of Coinbase. Tons of great nuggets for founders and investors.]

Summary: After 40 years in venture, Wilson has rebuilt USV around a single conviction. Only three things in the firm still need a human: picking the thesis, building relationships with founders working in that thesis, and supporting them after the check. Everything else, including sourcing, diligence, term sheets, and CRM, is being handed to agents. The interview is a working sketch of what a venture firm looks like when the back half of its job becomes software, and a clear read on what stays human-only and why.

1. The Three Humans Left. A year ago Wilson wrote a memo to his partners saying that if he were starting USV from scratch today, only three jobs would stay with humans: high-level thesis development, building relationships with founders inside that thesis, and supporting them after the check. Everything else gets handed to agents. USV is now executing on that memo, not theorizing about it. For founders raising, this is the new operating profile of the firm sitting across the table.

2. Agents Love Data Rooms. "I hate data rooms. Agents love data rooms." USV no longer asks a junior associate to scrub the data room before a term sheet. An agent reads the room and answers questions in conversation: cap table, vesting, founder ownership, anything in the corpus. The effect on partner time is direct, with less work on the parts of the job no one enjoys and more time with founders.

3. Term Sheets Without Lawyers. USV's term sheets are now written by an agent, with no outside counsel stamp at the term-sheet stage. The firm seeded the agent with standard term sheets by sector and by stage, then partners shape each document in conversation with the agent. Wilson does not yet trust an agent to write long-form definitive docs. The implication for founders: term sheets land faster, with less round-trip friction, and the cost structure of the next-generation venture firm starts to drop.

4. The Kill Zone Test. Wilson ran a sample contract through a legal-AI startup and through raw Claude Code, side by side, and Claude's markup was better. "All of legal AI is in the kill zone." The test is portable to almost any AI vendor pitch. If a wrapper company cannot outperform the raw model on the thing it sells, the wrapper is paying for the privilege of being disrupted. Operators should run the same test before signing a multi-year contract.

5. No Wrappers Allowed. To survive the kill zone you cannot wrap a model. You have to rebuild the business model from scratch around the new economics. Cursor is the example Wilson reaches for: it has been hugely successful, but more developers are dropping back to raw Claude Code, and nothing stops Anthropic from shipping an IDE. A defensible AI company redesigns the workflow itself, so the foundation lab would have to abandon its current pricing model to copy.

6. Energy Is the AI Trade. About a third of USV's deployment now goes to energy, because no matter which model wins, the winner needs power. The firm has backed a decentralized model-training network and a company that turns each grid-scale solar and wind plant into a mini data center selling inference tokens. The trade is indexed to AI without forcing USV to pick the model. Builders hunting for a less crowded adjacent market should read the same memo, because the picks and shovels of AI run through electricity.

7. Sellers, Not Coders. The skill USV now overweights in founders is selling: recruiting, fundraising, convincing customers, inspiring teams. Forty years has taught Wilson that the founder who can tell the story and bring it to life wins more often than the founder who can write the code. The corollary is uncomfortable for technical founders. "Actually being able to write code is probably not a big deal anymore," though enough technical vision to see three moves ahead still matters. If you are a CEO who cannot recruit, that is now your constraint.

8. The 80–90% Open Source Window. Open-source models, especially the ones shipping out of Asia, are running at 80 to 90 percent of the quality of the closed frontier models. Right now the closed labs are subsidizing usage, so price does not force the comparison. When the labs have to charge a real margin, open source becomes a serious value alternative and the playing field levels. Wilson is not betting the firm on this outcome, but he is hedging into the quadrant where open source wins.

9. Founders Still Want Humans. Founders do not want to raise money from an agent. They want to know the human they are getting in business with, and that is why Wilson does not see VC automating itself out of a job in the short term. The firm can automate the back half of the workflow. The front half, sitting across from a founder at 11 p.m. when they have had a horrible day, stays human.

10. Don't Pass on Price. The biggest regrets of Wilson's career are deals he passed on because the price was too high. The market-clearing valuation will almost always feel uncomfortable a year later, and the right answer is to find a way in, even if that means buying secondary instead of leading the round. Saying no on price is a defensive move masquerading as discipline. Founders raising can use the line in negotiation, because a firm that walks on price is telling you it has not adjusted to the current market.

11. Offense Over Defense. Wilson lost $25 million in six months in 2001 and learned that getting it wrong is a byproduct of the job, not a verdict on the investor. He spent his first 15 years scared of losing money and only got good at venture once he stopped playing defense. The advice is harder to apply for someone breaking in, because the first checks really do matter, but the directive holds at every level. For operators, the analog is the founder who refuses to ship until the product is perfect, because you cannot win a game you are not playing.

12. The Relationship Is the Moat. After 40 years and an AI rebuild of the firm, Wilson's one-line summary of the venture business is the same as it was on day one. The relationship between the investor and the founder is the secret sauce. Everything else, including the work USV used to staff up to do, gets compressed by technology. Find great founders, build real relationships with them, and help them build great companies. If your venture pitch to LPs does not lead with that, you are pitching the wrong business.

[Gil Dibner @gdibner]

"In a quiet action with none of his usual fanfare, Trump issued an executive order Tuesday that seeks to address the potentially catastrophic cybersecurity threats posed by artificial intelligence. But the directive calls for less-advanced government scrutiny than the White House had been set to impose last month — the AI industry’s latest victory in its push to avert heavier federal oversight."

[Gil Dibner @gdibner]

"US tech giant Motorola Solutions announced Monday that it will buy Israeli drone defense startup D-Fend for $1.5 billion, as governments and critical infrastructure ​operators worldwide rush to defend against the growing threat of rogue ‌drones."

https://t.co/4MzTDPm8o6

[Gil Dibner @gdibner]

“You can’t ignore San Francisco right now, particularly around AI infrastructure, developer tooling and frontier model ecosystems,” said Jonathan Lehr, co-founder and general partner at New York venture firm Work-Bench.

https://t.co/TZ604iBBsT

[Gil Dibner @gdibner]

Berlin-founded Contentful snapped up by Salesforce

[Gil Dibner @gdibner]

OpenAI Could Release Internal Tool That Would Weaken Nvidia’s Software Advantage

[CTech @Calcalistech]

Nvidia, Google in talks with Israel over dollar-based tax payments.

The move could reduce pressure from the strong shekel while helping the government service foreign-currency debt.
https://t.co/c96wfd2npD

[Joel Hansen @joelshansen]

if you haven't already picked up a copy of @ericries' new book, go do that today.

a group of founder friends and I got to sit in on an early reading edition with him a few months back, and we all fell in love with it

incorruptible is a killer read. more by @FortuneMagazine on that here: https://t.co/JRbX5ZyUN0

[immad @immad]

You can work 5 days a week and succeed as a startup.

Mercury has done that from day 0 and we are valued @ $5.2bn 7 years after launch.

I have been an entrepreneur for 20 years and raised 3 kids while doing it.

The point of success is to have a great life not just a startup 😊

[Dan Gray @credistick]

You would be forgiven for thinking that the companies which raise the most from VCs are surely the most important and promising of their generation.

Unfortunately, most are failures.

A portfolio of the top 10 would be at –120.5% today, relative to the S&P 500.

The more capital a firm manages, the more it selects for scalability and market signals, rather than any deeper qualities or outlier potential.

This is a result of the top-down incentives from their own investors; careerist allocators who only really care about reliable IRR on large pools of capital.

Fundamentally, the goal is no longer to "back great founders", but to find the most dramatically scalable vessels to consume allocation.

So, growth is pulled from public markets, where fees are a mere 0.05-0.7%, into private markets where they are a more lucrative 2%. This much larger fee layer essentially becomes a tax on innovation.

The 5 largest VC firms extract more than 10x the management fees they used to, despite a clear weakening of the venture market over that period.

None of this improves until the market realises it's clearly dumb to apply the same compensation structure to radically different scales and strategies.

[Arfur Rock @ArfurRock]

Mach is really flying.

They've ~$200M of booked YTD, tracking to ~$550M+ for '26, up from effectively $0 '25.

Wouldn't be surprised if there's another large round before EOY.

Congrats to @Mach_Industries!

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Funny how the pendulum shifts

1. "GPT wrappers are worthless" → the value acrues to application layer

2. "AI will eliminate white collar jobs" → someone needs to manage all these AI agents and everyone is now saying white collar workers will rise due to AI

3. "Open source will never catch up" → Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of tasks

4. "I only use Claude Code, Codex is mid" → Codex is becoming a super app. Coding, docs, browser, computer use, automations, all in one surface.

4. "You need to pick a model and go deep" → model loyalty is dead, the best founders swap weekly based on the task

5. "SaaS is dead" → This was mostly true but for some SaaS margins actually improve when agents pay for their own tokens and need their own seats

6. "AutoGPT is the future" → AutoGPT died. Then agents actually got good 2 years later with Hermes, OpenClaw, and managed agents. The idea was right. The timing was wrong.

7. "Prompt engineering is a career" → lasted about 18 months as a job title. Workflow engineering replaced it.

8. "Computer use is a gimmick" → "sent from computer use/ai agent will be the new sent from iphone

9. "AI design looks generic" → the generic look is a taste problem not a technology problem. The founders feeding their agents references from Japanese packaging, brutalist architecture, and 1960s print are getting beautiful output.

10. "Fine-tuning is the moat" → a well-structured Obsidian vault with good markdown files outperforms fine-tuning for most use cases and costs nothing.

11. "Benchmarks tell you which model to use" → benchmarks tell you which model won a test. I think we're all waking up to this lol.

12. "AI will consolidate into 2-3 winners" → AI is fragmenting into thousands of vertical applications built on commodity models. The consolidation is at the model layer. The explosion is at the application layer. Both are happening simultaneously.

13. "The hard part is building" → the hard part is choosing what to build. Building takes a weekend. Choosing the right thing to build takes taste, domain knowledge, and customer conversations. thats why i built https://t.co/a5ARFnvky2 to make it easier for you.

14. "The terminal is the future" → desktop apps just ate the terminal. Claude Code desktop, Codex app, both shipped GUI versions in the same month. The next 100 million agent users will never open a terminal (thank god).

I guarantee you I'm holding at least 2-3 beliefs right now that will look stupid by Christmas. I just don't know which ones. Neither do you. No one does. Build anyway.

Keep moving because this is the greatest time to be building.

I'm rooting for you.

[Mike Vernal @mvernal]

https://t.co/n7pVVA3uXu

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

There is always the questions what is the hard work doing. Outside of productivity (which may or may not be higher), what else is it for.

Is the passion and hard work your internal need filling something in you, or is it a passion to give something to someone else?

Businesses, in my mind, are about the customers. You give value to them. The work you do is first for your customer, maybe secondly for yourself or the company.

The simple message around hard work is instead of saying “we work 7 days a week” is to say “we do everything we can to provide a good experience for our customers.” Then you actually focus doing that.

This doesn't require telling everyone in the company work 997, but creating an expectation that we care for the customers and try to serve them well. And sometimes that responsibility might land in weekend or evenings or when you need to build something.

But my experience with a lot of grindslop farms is that the customer experience is never good, considered, reliable, correct or even responsive relative to the amount to claim to work.

The grind propels endlessly forward like a shark, never stopping, never caring for pieces are left in the wake.

The long hours and hard work are performative or internally driven, but actually don’t do much for the customer.

It might increase your metrics, your valuation, your goals but doesn't often create benefits for the others.

[CTech @Calcalistech]

Rafael and Elron unveil $300 million acquisition war chest.

Partners aim to buy controlling stakes in dual-use technology companies as defense spending surges worldwide.
https://t.co/xv1CUvr6cU

[The Times of Israel @TimesofIsrael]

After record year, Israeli tech brain drain raises fears for future growth – report https://t.co/K405PW81i2

[CTech @Calcalistech]

SolarEdge CEO Shuki Nir: “We don’t just want to survive, we want to thrive.”

After a 95% collapse in value, the solar tech company’s chief outlines a sweeping turnaround, and bets on profitability, discipline and new growth engines.
https://t.co/vkpewijh9q

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

Bill Gurley: Anthropic Thinks It’s Building God

@Jason: It is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.

@bgurley:

“Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never, ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do.

And my initial theory was the regulatory capture theory. Quite frankly, I think they're very close to achieving that.

But then they just got so loud that I've literally, in the past 30 days, read everything I can about Anthropic, and I've come up with a new theory.

I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory.

The more I dig, I've met people who, I dare say, think it's their responsibility, and they're excited about, building a species that's superior to humans.

Dario wrote this blog post called ‘Machines of Loving Grace.’ It was based on a poem.

The last stanza of the poem says, ‘I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors, and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.’

Sounds like an overlord to me.

And then in Dario's post, he says, ‘It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans…’

So I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here.”

Jason:

“These are delusions of grandeur. Let's call it what it is.

They believe that they're so powerful, these individuals, that they can create God, and that by creating God, they are like this Prometheus kind of species.

It literally is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.”