Hannah Chelkowski

Brit in the bay. Founding & investing @blank_vc

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Be your self, not someone you were assigned to be!

Bezos won on time horizon, not AWS or 1-Click.

If your bets have to work in 3 years, you compete with everyone. Every smart, funded team is chasing the same 3-year problems. Short horizon, crowded field.

Stretch to 7 and the field collapses. Investors want returns, employees want vesting, founders want proof. Almost nobody can sit in a bet that doesn't pay for most of a decade. The patience is the moat, and it costs you, that's why it works.

But you can't fake a 7-year horizon on a problem you don't actually care about. Pick the users and the problem Moloch assigned you, the safe ones, the fundable ones, and you'll bail the first hard year. Pick the ones that are actually yours and you'll still be there when everyone else has quit.

So the real prerequisite isn't discipline. It's knowing yourself well enough to choose a problem and a set of people you care about that you'll serve them for decades.

[Terrence Rohan @tmrohan]

The bull market makes excessive fundraising look healthy. It’s not.

[Hannah Chelkowski @hchelkowski]

KYC creep has arrived.

[Michael Roddan @MichaelRoddan]

🇷🇺 NEW 🇷🇺

In Russia or Iran, making bets on Polymarket isn’t permitted by the prediction market’s rules. But that hasn't stopped traders or influencers from sending thousands of compatriots to the site.

Now, Polymarket is coaxing some users to self-ID

https://t.co/lULoBX2m5D

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

https://t.co/cRwIIexCa9

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models.

What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text.

"We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience."

"We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease."

These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours.

And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve.

Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large."

The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Agentic commerce isn't just payment or discovery. It's a whole chain of events that lead up to the payment.

Each of those moments in the lifecycle is becoming more agent-driven over time.

This post maps the 5 levels of agentic commerce across the 8 steps of the flow:

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

At I/O @Google announced the universal cart.

Add a product.

And the agent goes to work in the background, finding the best price, alerting you when an item is back in stock.

Shop across many merchants from search.

Hugely disruptive to e-commerce!

Agentic carts are here.

[Kriti Gupta @kriti_kg]

Shein is acquiring Everlane.
Luckin Coffee is acquiring Blue Bottle.
Anta Sports acquired controlling stake in Puma, Arcteryx, Salomon.

Chinese consumer brands have quietly become global.

[David Ulevitch 🇺🇸 @davidu]

At least once a week I talk to an entrepreneur about some BS they are dealing with and all I can think about is how smart @bhorowitz was to call his second book "What You Do Is Who You Are" because in these moments, WHAT YOU DO IS WHO YOU ARE!

[Hannah Chelkowski @hchelkowski]

what does significance mean if the significant change only erodes the core humanness of it all?

[Michael Dempsey @mhdempsey]

(New Essay) On Humanity & Human Beings

How close are we to AGI?
Is the current model already training the next one?
Do all models converge?
Where does the energy come from?
What are the other bottlenecks?
Is China actually behind?
Are we already at war?
Is cancer actually solved?
Are humanoids real?
Is it a bubble?
Will we nationalize the labs?
Could we even?
What happens to college?
Universal basic income?
Should I sell my AI exposure?
Should I buy a doomsday compound?
Should I just sell to a lab?
Why can’t I sleep?
Will I still have a job?
What should I tell my kids to study?
Should I have a kid?
When was the last time you had a conversation that was not about this?
Is this a religion?
Do we really think we’re building a new god?
Will I be okay?
Will any of us?

[Hannah Chelkowski @hchelkowski]

Congratulations on your Series A @maxekane & team @withnovella!

AI is changing how risk is underwritten, and Novella is building the new broker engine to accelerate the change!

[Max Kane @maxekane]

Novella raised $21M to give insurance brokers super-powers.

We’ve spent the last two years working with insurance brokers and carriers to answer their one question - how will AI impact my job?

Today, we’re sharing the answer:

[Abhi @Abhinavtiwari]

Interoperability, distributed issuance/acceptance networks & treasury tools layered on to curated licensing is becoming the foundation of stablecoin M&A.

The killer app in stablecoins isn’t a token. It’s the platform that consolidates the distribution and license map.

[Hannah Chelkowski @hchelkowski]

90%+ of stablecoins are USD-denominated today. Non-USD stables feel inevitable. Sovereignty and FX flows will eventually demand it.

[Max Kane @maxekane]

https://t.co/pI1Oj4w44G

[Bilal Zuberi @bznotes]

VC job can be hyper-stimulating - overload of information with constant need to 'respond'. Emails, texts, DMs, social media, papers, articles, podcasts and more...

I am reading up more on "acquired attention deficit" or "situationally induced attentional dysfunction." Constant interruptions - emails, pings, deal flow, social media - fragment attention in ways that can become habitual. Your brain essentially gets trained to expect and seek novelty, making sustained deep focus harder over time. From dopamine dysregulation to cognitive overload, negative effects of hypervigilence can be draining...and ultimately non-productive.

Just like robots, we need to work on System 1 and System 2 thinking.

[marty.com @martymadrid]

Today, we're excited to launch the next version of the https://t.co/CCWaCIEcQJ website that better showcases our agentic-first revenue stack from Contract → Invoice → Billing → Payments → Collections/Recovery — All-in-one.

Over the past 12-months, we've built the fastest contract-to-cash platform on the market. We've been doubling the invoice volume every 6-to-8 weeks, we just surpassed +100,000 users, we've raised over $10M, and have had many of the biggest silicon valley and Fortune 100 brands in the industry signing and paying on platform.

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Can't stop staring at this image and thinking about what it means for the future

[Hannah Chelkowski @hchelkowski]

Selling to banks is less a sales motion
and more a test of emotional durability. The ultimate test of patience.

[Hannah Chelkowski @hchelkowski]

@venturetwins Reasonable