Kathy Lam

Copilot launch crew · ex-Sentry · Left the machine for the mess · Messaging + minds · 🎙️?

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

What do you know that I don't know, that I wouldn't know to ask?
- Jim Pyle

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

Chinese founders/investors read all they can about leading US founders. Good practice to do the same in reverse. Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek) is one to watch.

Recent moves:

https://t.co/JBugU9bmb7

Translation of earlier long-form interviews:

https://t.co/a505Z8JzhW

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@fortelabs Do you want to change?

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@Nicolascole77 Social

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@weezerOSINT @clairevo

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

Such a great post.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

"So You Want to be a VC"

Im enjoying this week in Boston visiting students promoting my new book - Runnin Down a Dream. Not surprisingly, many ask me about trying to break into venture capital. I wrote a letter answering this question 15 years ago. I would send it out when people inquired. I'm making it public for the first time - with zero modifications.

1) I think it holds up well
2) make sure and read my new book also
3) I probably can't help with followups (as suggested in the letter)

Hope you find it useful. Good luck!

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

Work hard (if possible)

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

Don't sign on to a job just because of the company. Find out which team you'll be working on first.
Lessons from #cs230 l9

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@ShaanVP what's your 1st YT channel?

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@saranormous Who doesn’t want to be more powerful?

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Cursor is raising at a $50 billion valuation on the claim that its “in-house models generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world.” Less than 24 hours after launching Composer 2, a developer found the model ID in the API response: kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast.

That’s Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5 with reinforcement learning appended. A developer named Fynn was testing Cursor’s OpenAI-compatible base URL when the identifier leaked through the response headers. Moonshot’s head of pretraining, Yulun Du, confirmed on X that the tokenizer is identical to Kimi’s and questioned Cursor’s license compliance. Two other Moonshot employees posted confirmations. All three posts have since been deleted.

This is the second time. When Cursor launched Composer 1 in October 2025, users across multiple countries reported the model spontaneously switching its inner monologue to Chinese mid-session. Kenneth Auchenberg, a partner at Alley Corp, posted a screenshot calling it a smoking gun. KR-Asia and 36Kr confirmed both Cursor and Windsurf were running fine-tuned Chinese open-weight models underneath. Cursor never disclosed what Composer 1 was built on. They shipped Composer 1.5 in February and moved on.

The pattern: take a Chinese open-weight model, run RL on coding tasks, ship it as a proprietary breakthrough, publish a cost-performance chart comparing yourself against Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 without disclosing that your base model was free, then raise another round.

That chart from the Composer 2 announcement deserves its own paragraph. Cursor plotted Composer 2 against frontier models on a price-vs-quality axis to argue they’d hit a superior tradeoff. What the chart doesn’t show is that Anthropic and OpenAI trained their models from scratch. Cursor took an open-weight model that Moonshot spent hundreds of millions developing, ran RL on top, and presented the output as evidence of in-house research. That’s margin arbitrage on someone else’s R&D dressed up as a benchmark slide.

The license makes this more than an attribution oversight. Kimi K2.5 ships under a Modified MIT License with one clause designed for exactly this scenario: if your product exceeds $20 million in monthly revenue, you must prominently display “Kimi K2.5” on the user interface. Cursor’s ARR crossed $2 billion in February. That’s roughly $167 million per month, 8x the threshold. The clause covers derivative works explicitly.

Cursor is valued at $29.3 billion and raising at $50 billion. Moonshot’s last reported valuation was $4.3 billion. The company worth 12x more took the smaller company’s model and shipped it as proprietary technology to justify a valuation built on the frontier lab narrative.

Three Composer releases in five months. Composer 1 caught speaking Chinese. Composer 2 caught with a Kimi model ID in the API. A P0 incident this year. And a benchmark chart that compares an RL fine-tune against models requiring billions in training compute without disclosing the base was free.

The question for investors in the $50 billion round: what exactly are you buying? A VS Code fork with strong distribution, or a frontier research lab? The model ID in the API answers that.

If Moonshot doesn’t enforce this license against a company generating $2 billion annually from a derivative of their model, the attribution clause becomes decoration for every future open-weight release. Every AI lab watching this is running the same math: why open-source your model if companies with better distribution can strip attribution, call it proprietary, and raise at 12x your valuation?

kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast is the most expensive model ID leak in the history of AI licensing.

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

If you’re a parent, watch this.

It will stick with you forever.

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@swyx any chance you're record some of the sessions?

[swyx @swyx]

there are not enough good devrels so i am making more.

if you or someone you work with want to work on the craft in person w me and like minds, SIGN UP NOW (its free BUT you HAVE to attend in person) https://t.co/i2Ma8yPNGN

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@JulianGoldieSEO n8n

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@tomcrawshaw01 Guide

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@Zephyr_hg News

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@scaling_shields Leads

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@kashyechuri @ericzakariasson Checkout https://t.co/okXRw9OCEL, built by @dkurian

[Atal Agarwal 💜🚐🌍 @atalovesyou]

🚨 MICROSOFT'S INTERNAL H-1B GUIDANCE JUST LEAKED

Microsoft tells employees:

- If in US: "Remain in the U.S. for the foreseeable future" to "avoid being denied reentry"
- H-4 dependents: Also stay in US (even though proclamation doesn't mention them)
- If abroad: "Strongly recommend you return to the U.S. tomorrow before the deadline"
- Extensions/Status changes: Likely unaffected if you're currently in the US

Microsoft setting up individual tracking for employees outside US and admits "there isn't much time to make sudden travel arrangements"

Translation:

Even Microsoft with unlimited legal resources is telling H-1B workers to avoid international travel entirely.

If Microsoft is this cautious, everyone should be.

When Big Tech says "don't travel" - listen. RT to warn others.

[Kathy Lam @kathlam]

@thesamparr ;)