Isabela

I do go to market things, business angel, and pilot
Ex: Dropbox, Adobe, and co-founder of Pluvi (Acq. ’22)

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

The point of the corgi cafe isn’t the interior design, although that’s something we’re improving (and there’s a lot more coming soon with the cafe). The point of the corgi cafe is it’s the only place where I am 100% certain that there are billion dollar companies being founded, probably several per month. So many people have told me they met a vc who gave them a term sheet in the cafe, or applied to yc and got in there, or met their cofounder, or got their dream job, etc. Critiquing the aesthetics is missing the point, it’s like me saying youtube isn’t good because the like button design isn’t very pretty. The corgi cafe is a network effect product.

[Evan Wineland @evan_wineland]

Robots should be seen

Come see ours

We're technically at capacity, but we'll have overflow space into the evening

[Javi Palafox @palafoxjavi]

I lived 3 years in Mexico and I can’t be more excited about this return.

It’s going to be epic.

[Lauren Frailey @laurenfrailey1]

had someone from engineering team set up loops for recruiting function and i realized they also work for dating:

- meeting online: submitting a job application
- matchmaking service: hiring agency
- family intro: nepo hire
- intro through friends: employee referral
- asking out in person: outbound
- events: events
- dating a coworker: internal transfer

[Isabela @isabela_srt]

@laurenfrailey1 Getting back with an ex: Rehire

[Sasha de Marigny @sashadem]

The tenor and complexity of model launches have changed completely over the past few months. Fable 5 felt like a transition into an entirely new chapter of AI's story. And the quest to enable the strengths of these models while preventing their risks has never felt more urgent.

[Paul Murphy @paulbz]

We’re leaving Madrid & returning to London 🥹

What was meant to be 3-months somehow became nearly 3 years. We’ll miss Madrid deeply, but we’re excited for the next chapter back home in London.

As part of the move, we’re selling our flat.. link below!

[Todd Jackson @tjack]

In 2013 my cofounder and I pitched a mid-tier (but well-known, high AUM) firm. Will never forget it. Plush office in Palo Alto, lots of fancy decorations. Expensive gadgets around the office, all forgotten and out of batteries. Framed logos of great companies they had bought into at Series D/E. We were raising a seed.

Partner comes in 25 mins late. Listens to our pitch for 5 mins and then proceeds to lecture us about companies in wildly different spaces that were hot at the time but had zero relevance to us. Monologued for 20 minutes. My co-founder and I were just kind of looking at each other wondering what was happening.

Wouldn’t stop. So mid-sentence, we just got up and thanked him and walked out. Only VC meeting I’ve ever walked out of.

To this day I’ve told this story to hundreds of founders. These impressions stick. Your brand as a VC is what founders say about you when you’re not in the room.

[Ted Benson @edwardbenson]

First startup, flew out to Redmond.

Half way through meeting, the VP stopped me and said:

“Why am I talking to you? Who did you know that got this meeting on my calendar?”

And followed up with

“This won’t go anywhere but you have me for 15 more minutes. Do you want to just hang out? Where are you from?”

[Çağla Kaymaz @caglakaymaz]

I’m launching a podcast and the first episode is out.

Main Branch is a show about how leading AI startups actually get built, deployed, and scaled. Each episode I’ll go deep with AI founders and early adopters covering their tech stack, research bets, inflection points, key hires, and topics top of mind for me and the founders I talk to day-to-day.

For the first episode I sat down with Arvind Jain @jainarvind, founder and CEO of @glean. Arvind took an idea most people had written off, enterprise search, and built it into one of the fastest-growing AI platforms out there, past $300M in ARR. He is now on a mission to expand human potential to do extraordinary work.

We get into:
• The early operating playbook, including sending 100 cold LinkedIn DMs a day
• The product arc from a search box to an agentic coworker with enterprise context
• Why he thinks the AI market is still 100x undersupplied, and why crowded markets shouldn't scare founders
• His case for how to compete when the labs move up the stack
• How AI has changed hiring (hint: you can't pass some of Glean's interviews without it)

More builders coming soon. Full episode below 👇

[Toni Lopez @tonilopezmr]

Robotaxis are coming to Spain, I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me two years ago.

[steijnpelle @steijnpelle]

Today, we're introducing Lassie and $47M in funding led by a16z.

We're building AI that runs small businesses, starting with doctors' offices.

Lassie is already trusted by 700+ practices across the country, working autonomously to provide them with 30 hours of labor per month.

To get here, we first had to leave Robinhood and Superhuman to work in offices ourselves.

Here's how that went.

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

By making every business more profitable and efficient, AI is the biggest job creator on the planet.

[laura @lauradang0]

High signal people all have 2 things in common.

1) extremely opinionated
2) high agency

[Edgar Vicente @EdgarVisi]

southern europe tech is having its moment.

spain, italy, portugal are all building. but the ecosystems are at different stages of the same journey.

what they share is a first generation of category-defining companies being born right now. and those companies are doing something more important than building products, they’re recycling talent, capital, and ambition back into the ecosystem.

founders who watched this happen are now starting their own companies. knowing it’s possible changes everything.

the early-stage landscape splits in two:

there’s always been a long tail of solid, conservative founders. raising modest rounds from local VCs, building sustainable businesses, playing the slow game. nothing wrong with that. it works.

but a new cohort is emerging. fluent in english. comfortable in any room in the world. building from day 1 for global. raising from international VCs before they have product-market fit. thinking continental or nothing.

they’re still a minority. but they’re growing fast.

this second group doesn’t think of their mediterranean roots as a handicap. they’re proof that you can eat the world from barcelona, milan or lisbon.

that’s the bet Enzo makes. that group exists, it’s underserved, and it’s the future of southern europe tech.

not for everyone. exactly as it should be.

[Bercan @bercankilic]

We built a magic hat to capture the entire archive of human data.

[Ivan Landabaso @IvanLandabaso]

I moved to Barcelona 2 years ago and it reminds me a lot of California.

Context, I've lived in SF, London, Cambridge, Paris, Madrid, Brussels and Chapel Hill before (yes, random).

Here's why it has a ton of potential, fixing a couple things (very doable):

- Geography + climate: Perfect score. Ski and swim (and even surf, despite haters) on the same day.

- Gastronomy: Rivals Bilbao 😜.

- Talent: A growing mix of national and international expertise.

- Culture: amazing, enriched by diverse community bonds that I've not found elsewhere. Super welcoming, from day 1 in my experience (0 politics talk, despite haters).

- Security: Both legal and physical aspects are well-covered (despite what you might hear, look at serious crime rates vs cities mentioned above where I've lived SF, Paris, London, Paris).

- Education: Home to top-tier technical universities.

- Funding: Strong support from public entities boosts the ecosystem and investment opportunities.

- Tech ecosystem: blossoming with a number of successful startups that are producing repeat entrepreneurs and attracting more and more talent.

- International connection: direct flights to SF and London (cheap too).

If you are thinking of making a move, just do it 🤙

[Guli Moreno @GuliMoreno]

Slowly, then suddenly.

El talento español en SF está acelerando🔥🇪🇸

[Alberto Rosas @albertorosasg]

We just raised $7.5M to build the infrastructure for identity and fraud.

The round is backed by @ycombinator, Orange Collective, Rebel Fund, Pioneer Fund, and other incredible VCs and angels.

AI is making fraud incredibly cheap to create: fake identities, fake businesses, fake transactions, all generated at internet scale. We believe every app will soon need trust infrastructure the same way apps today rely on payments or cloud hosting.

The future of the internet is verified. Didit (@getdidit) is building it.

[Isabela @isabela_srt]

@jia_seed Lol this reminds me that two weeks ago, someone told me that I don’t know any straight people outside of work. I was like, “Yeah, I know…” and I stopped there for a moment until I finally named someone.