James Kaplan

VC @NEA | Spend my time nerding out about USC/Saints football, Star Wars, RTS games, and obscure facets of the US economy

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@amytam01 @SpaceX @xai Congrats!!

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

Everything is a wrapper

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

In more good news for Amazon, Snowflake signs $6B deal with AWS for AI CPU chips https://t.co/igpVLhz48W

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

Excited to be a small supporter of Trajectory!

Today, most production agents for serious enterprise use cases require a deterministic harness that encodes edge cases or company-specific business processes. In this paradigm, to make agents better, companies make their deterministic tree / policy graph bigger and bigger since models can’t learn on their own.

Trajectory re-writes this paradigm. Their platform helps models learn from a company’s own product usage data, building the rails for specialized AGI.

And they hiring fast, DM if interested!

[Ronak Malde @rronak_]

Today, @MichaelElabd, @QuantumArjun, and I are excited to announce Trajectory.

We are a research lab and product company building the platform for Continual Learning.

Our platform unlocks the signal already sitting in product usage, so companies can continuously post-train large-scale agentic models that outperform the frontier. @trajectorylabs

We’ve raised $15M from @Conviction, @BessemerVP, @radicalvcfund, @jeffdean, @drfeifei and more.

We’re partnering with some of the best AI-native companies: @ClayRunHQ @Harvey, @DecagonAI, @mercor_ai, @RogoAI to power their agentic systems, some of which we are already in production with.

We’ve brought together a world class research team from DeepMind, OpenAI, Apple, Meta Superintelligence, Amazon AGI, Scale AI, and an elite product team from Stripe and Figma.

AI will never again start on day one. Every correction, every retry, every edit will make products smarter. This is Continual Learning.

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@luisocampox @AnthropicAI Congrats Luis!!!

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@rronak_ Excited for what’s next!

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@NeilTewari Super cool!

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

Excited to partner with Hilmar and the Fenris Games team as they become an independent game studio. And pumped for their new partnership with @GoogleDeepMind, who will be investing with us.

As someone who’s played thousands of lifetime hours of strategy games, this has been special!

[FC Hellmar @HilmarVeigar]

Great to be partnering again!

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@jpgg Congrats Jonathan!

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@maddiehfaulkner True, which is why many FDE roles are being called “Agent PM”

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@jurvistan @OpenAI Congrats Jurvis!!

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

Similar to looking at lines of code written, token spend isn’t necessarily indicative of productivity, but if the number is 0, you’re probably doing something wrong

[Cristina Cordova @cjc]

Ranking engineers by token spend is like me ranking my marketing team by who spent the most money.

We may not have hit our KPIs, but Joe spent $200k on a branded blimp that only flies over his own house, so he’s getting promoted to VP!

Don't mistake a high burn rate for a high success rate.

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@_WEEXIAO Super cool

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@harrygestetner1 Congrats Harry!

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@nakul Many companies don’t want agents navigating their UI. Marketplaces for example don’t want demand to be disaggregated (the somewhat flawed Citrini argument). Like Amazon blocking Perplexity shopping

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

Appreciate the way Neo helps high slope young teams. Excited to meet the new group!

[Neo @neo]

Today we unveiled Neo Residency, a new program for startups and high-agency student teams. 🎉

We’re replacing our best-known program, Neo Accelerator, with something even better and more selective. 🧵

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

Source: https://t.co/BpLccipwdJ

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

With the median cop in SF getting paid $289k, that’s a $145M unspent labor budget just in SF.

Departments across the country are facing a labor shortage and are looking to technology to supplement.

[Garrett Langley @glangley]

The San Francisco city government hasn’t gotten enough credit for the improvements in public safety last year — including a 125% clearance rate by the Homicide Unit.

Incredible results in any context, but also interesting to note that this was achieved despite ongoing labor shortages in law enforcement. I remember seeing something at the end of last year suggesting SFPD was short around 500 officers.

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

@maithra_raghu Won’t be any FCF even in post-scaling era if no moat given 0 switching costs to move between model providers

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

FCF continues to elude large model companies because:

-The threat of distillation forces Anthropic to keep running on the hamster wheel and disrupting themselves in short cycles (FCF comes the longer they are able to harvest the fruits of their previous model before they have to invest in the next one)
-The move to RL democratizes the frontier, which was previously a capital intensive game

Companies that own the user (the application layer) are best positioned since their usage data can be used for RL in this new paradigm

At the same time, while their LLM API may not be profitable, it may be a low margin loss leader to sell other high margin software products (Claude Code/Codex, enterprise deployments, etc). This is the playbook profitable supposedly “commodity” API businesses like Stripe and ElevenLabs have leveraged

[Maithra Raghu @maithra_raghu]

https://t.co/xaBoeAENzv

[James Kaplan @jamesekaplan]

Fascinating data on the challenges + growth areas of gaming:

It's harder than ever for new games to compete, with older/entrenched games holding or growing share of playtime across all platforms

Roblox dominates with kids and accounted for 2/3 of the entire industry's net new non-China growth...

…but once kids get old enough, spending shifts to social media and gambling (iGaming, sports betting, prediction markets, crypto)