Irvin Sha

Head of Corporate Development and Investor Relations

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

Ok, I might start using ChatGPT again.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Introducing GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human-AI interaction.

Rolling out in ChatGPT starting today.

You’ll want to turn the sound on for this one.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

Pretty sure everyone discovering @rosehorowitch’s Atlantic story on the End of Reading, on a platform where people compulsively doom scroll through character-limited posts, is the height of irony.

I’m willing to bet that the percentage of people who even read the article is <20%.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

The Atlantic’s new cover story by @rosehorowitch is absolutely definitive on the end of the age of reading in America—and the emergence of a new post-literate age in modern life

Some core facts and anecdotes:

1. Reading is shrinking. The share of Americans who read for pleasure declined by 43 percent between 2004 and 2023. While Americans might see more words than ever—between all those texts, posts, emails, and captions—less than half of Americans read books, anymore. The average sentence in NYT bestsellers are one-third shorter than a century ago.

2. Americans can swallow words and sentences, but they’re losing the ability to think deeply about writing that’s longer than an Instagram post. Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

3. It’s worse for the young. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent.

4. “Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read”: Most high-schoolers consider reading for pleasure an alien practice. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, says some students view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, it's as if “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

https://t.co/kk8qktY6fd

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

This is wild.

And the comments are even more wild. People get really agitated arguing about terms that are very hard to actually define.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.

Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.

We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

This sounds like a totally reasonable pricing strategy, until you realize that the gaming community has a sizable contingent of extremely vocal people, who won’t think twice about doing everything in their power to shred Rockstar’s brand and reputation. And they are extremely, extremely anti-corporate these days.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

The extremely frustrating thing about any conversation about taxes is that they almost always boil down to some sort of absolutist position of taxes being good or bad. But no one thinks we should have 100% or 0% tax rates. And so the real discussion should be about the right structure and *level* of taxation, which is really sparse and hard to find good discourse on.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

@TurnerNovak I don’t love the Chinese food in SF. It’s ok. Better options are found on the Peninsula. San Mateo, which isn’t super far, stands out as having a lot of really good options that are modern, a bit more authentic, and still quite accessible to all the white dudes out there

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

So much of what gets written for business marketing seems to be done by people who have no idea what they’re actually writing about (per the article you’re citing). And so all of the stuff that’s out there has no real content to it, it’s just a bunch of words, making things that are hard to understand completely impenetrable.

Eg, see any writing about wtf is going on with anything related to crypto.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

Don’t disagree. How we pay for all of that would be tricky, since there isn’t much appetite for tax hikes, and everyone has largely bought the idea that government spending is the government flushing money down the toilet.

To a certain extent, we need another Kennedy moment where our public leaders reinvigorate the idea that government service is a noble cause, one that elites in our society should aspire to join. The Reagan administration’s extremely effective dismantling of that narrative has made it so even if the pay was good, most people would think of civil service as a not hugely appealing career choice, regardless of the money.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

Don’t disagree. How we pay for all of that would be tricky, since there isn’t much appetite for tax hikes, and everyone has largely bought the idea that government spending is the government flushing money down the toilet.

To a certain extent, we need another Kennedy moment where our public leaders reinvigorate the idea that government service is a noble cause, one that elites in our society should aspire to join. The Reagan administration’s extremely effective dismantling of that narrative has made it so even if the pay was good, most people would think of civil service as a not hugely appealing career choice, regardless of the money.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

@RachaelRad My time half-listening to Acquired podcasts has taught me that sports leagues/culture doesn’t come from nowhere. Someone has to build it.

So this feels like it’s a function of the MLS not being very good at its job.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

@RachaelRad I also hate it, because it chips away at what little collective trust is out there.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

In the world of corporate communications, 100000%. So much of what gets put out is a total nothing burger that you have to look at with a microscope to find anything interesting.

In day-to-day life, finding common ground is a really valuable thing to do. It’s great to take strong positions to drive engagement and get yourself platformed. But you can also find yourself just preaching to people that are predisposed to agree with you, while turning off everyone that *thinks* they don’t agree with you.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

Quick amplification. Lance’s team is building some truly awesome stuff, and is always on the hunt for great talent (insert usual industry adjectives, “rockstar” blah blah blah).

Lance is also too modest to say it, but he’s an absolutely amazing leader building a product like a true founder. I feel very lucky to be able to work with him!

[Lance @lancectk]

Our team at @t0finance is growing.

We’re hiring for several roles in San Francisco:

→ Product Lead
→ Senior AI Engineer
→ Staff Product Designer
→ Staff Backend Engineer, AI
→ & more

We’re building a new kind of finance platform that understands how a business works, automates complex workflows end-to-end, and helps finance teams spend less time chasing numbers.

This is hard, high-stakes work across AI agents, orchestration, financial data, accounting logic, and production infrastructure.

If that sounds fun, we’d love to talk.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

@MatthieuGuibert @airwallex @t0finance Since I joined Airwallex, @MatthieuGuibert has been my closest colleague and most trusted partner. I couldn’t imagine having gotten through the last three(!) rounds without his tireless efforts. Congrats on getting another one over the line!

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

@mariogabriele @RachaelRad Thanks @mariogabriele, appreciate all the support. Super excited to be working with you guys!

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

@tbpn Is it really news if the photo isn’t of a super jacked dude?

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

@ahnchrisj @airwallex Thanks Chris, lfg!

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

This is our third raise in the last year and a half. In the last three rounds, we’ve raised $950mm. More importantly, we’ve transformed the perception of the business and the value we provide to our customers.

And now, as we launch our next wave of AI and agentic commerce capabilities, we’re excited to show the world the next wave of growth for the company.

So many thanks to everyone that’s supported us along this journey. My thanks to the teams at Addition, @BaillieGifford, @HummingbirdVC , @QEDInvestors, @TRowePrice, @HaunVentures, Hedosophia, Washington University in St Louis, and AmEx Ventures for backing us. Thanks to everyone at @airwallex for the countless hours to get all this done.

And on to the next one!

[Jack Zhang @awxjack]

We’ve raised $320M at an $11B valuation, led by Addition.

AI is changing how companies are built. Teams are smaller, global from day one, and using agents more. We’ve spent 10 years building the financial rails for that world.

We’re now building the intelligent layer on top.

[Irvin Sha @irvincsha]

I get asked a lot about what’s next for Airwallex, or what gets me excited. This is what I most frequently point to. An AI-native finance platform, built from the ground up in Silicon Valley.

So excited to see what @lancectk continues to build with us here at Airwallex!

[T:0 @t0finance]

Today, we're introducing T:0.

T:0 is an AI-native finance platform that replaces a fragmented stack of bookkeeping, reporting, revenue recognition, monthly close and finance ops with one always-on system.

Now available in private preview.