Oppression always has two sides to it. The one who does it. And the one who silently watches it. Don't be on either side.
Society, Philosophy, tech in pinned!
Our second round was rough. I think I pitched every VC on the planet. Some of the weirder ones:
- I arrive at a Chinese VC firm on Sand Hill Road. The building is locked, lights off, nobody inside. I wait 10 minutes after meeting time. A car pulls up. The partner emerges, she has a large pack of toilet paper under one arm. She unlocks the building, turns on the lights, leads me inside. She disappears into the toilets with her rolls of paper. Then, toilets attended to, we start the pitch.
- Offices of a small deep tech investor. Receptionist greets me and leads me to the meeting room. I set up, wait, wait, wait. Eventually someone walks in, invites me to start. Something feels a bit off. It gradually dawns on me that I am pitching the receptionist. The partner had double-booked herself and apparently decided this was preferable to rescheduling.
- Pitching a London VC. He tells me he likes me as a founder but my business will never work. I've never had someone say this before, usually VCs like to preserve optionality. But he's very explicit. "You might close this round, but you will just waste a year or two of your life and then fail, this idea can't work"
A month later, I get a message from him. "I hear (big name) invested, can we get into your round?". Dude, seriously?
- Another London VC. I'm chatting to the associate while we're waiting for the partner to arrive. He tells me about one of their portfolio cos that needs a bridge round, he's working on squeezing them as much as possible. He's quite direct about it. Eh.. thanks for the transparency I guess, you seem like a great firm.
- The all time weirdest. A French VC with a London office. The associate meets me, as we're going up to the meeting he says something about how the partner can be a little unconventional. We start the pitch.
"What did your father do?" the partner asks me in a thick French accent. OK, this is a new one. I say he trained as a theoretical physicist, but then went into business. "Aha! Your father was a failure!"
"What did your mother do?" I say she was a biochemist and then became a school teacher. "Also a failure!" he exclaims. The associate is visibly dying inside. Is this some strange test, or is he just an asshole? I have a hundred employees and we need funding. "Would you like to hear about my company?" I ask him.
openai's model disproved an 80-year-old erdős conjecture last week and the takes are already racing to "ai is creative now."
the mathematicians who reviewed the proof said the approach was, in hindsight, straightforward. the tools to find it had existed for decades. nobody had pointed them at this exact corner.
one of them basically said the model got lucky, it stumbled into a case where experts had tried and missed something simple,
that's a real result. it disproved a conjecture humans couldn't crack in eight decades. i'm not minimizing it.
but the story being told about it is wrong. the model didn't invent a new branch of reasoning. it brute-forced a search through a space humans had under-searched, using techniques humans already built, and surfaced a counterexample we'd walked past.
closer to a metal detector on a beach where a coin happened to be sitting. further from a sculptor pulling a shape out of marble.
ai is now fast enough and patient enough to comb corners of the literature humans skipped. that alone changes science.
TIL: You can optimize any agent (cli) with GEPA to automatically optimize your prompts.
GEPA accepts any `(str) -> str` callable, it works with your own custom CLI, local models, or API agents. Wrap your agent in a python function and let it self-optimize.
I have always wondered how one can be dumbest of minds and yet keep fooling public for decades with their stupid takes.
SpaceX was always a scam. It never made money. In. 25 yrs rocket landing was the gimmick that was done- no moon mission nothing.
$15B rev is from failed xAI
I like Kristen (very affable person), but will take a bet of $1k for any charity of choice, that this thing isn't going anywhere with consumers.
The fundamental problem with tech ppl in Valley is they live in their own cocoon w/o understanding what normal consumer thinks.
I can count on one hand the number of times a product has stopped me in my tracks like Town.
Everyone on our team remembers the week I learned of Town—not just because it was all-systems-go to invest, but because we all switched all our workflows. Today, all of @ForerunnerVC runs on @TownAI.
If you are selling a GTM AI product and you have to resort to showing ad flying above where no one actually cares, you clearly have a product problem not an impressions problem.
This startup isn't going far with this level of strategy. Only in SF you can see ppl burning money
The Monaco Plane: Economics and Impact.
If you've been in SF over the last 10 days, you've likely seen the Monaco Plane flying around. I'm receiving countless messages asking about how expensive it is and if it's working.
So here are those answers:
Goldman Sachs warns investors that businesses are losing more money implementing Ai now than 2 years ago as buildout costs rise substantially.
Higher build out costs
Higher pass through costs
Higher hyperscaler losses
Low endpoint return.
Absolute disaster
$soxx $dram
First huge kudos to raising money. Congrats!
Now the main part:
@TownAI will not go anywhere in its current form
Most consumers won't use it.
It is going the @wabi route (which will be dead EOY).
cc @kirstenagreen@arampell
I am rarely wrong:
https://t.co/IsvQI65QMT
It's rare to have a magic moment when testing a new product that is still in beta -- @TownAI was that for me. I hooked up the basic email/calendar APIs - and just like that, Leo came into my life and is now my most trusted partner. He got my voice, relationships, priorities, needs ... just became an extension of myself. He's not perfect (who is) but he has definitely 10x-ed my ability to show up day to day at my best.
Wanting to make an investment is one thing -- NEEDING to make the investment is another. @kirstenagreen and our whole team @ForerunnerVC couldn't live without @TownAI. So we just had to be part of it.
Thanks to @jgreze and @tonydevincenzi and the whole @TownAI team for building with such intention and care for all of us users. It's clear you are building with human experience in mind, and that is what's making you irreplaceable in our lives.
Cheers!
Important problem to use agents for, BUT NEVER and I repeat again.. NEVER EVER Build a feature for someone else's platform.
Most consumers aren't comfortable sharing their emails, calendar and messages to anyone outside Google and Apple.
They are the best to build this.
AI can now make you a great parent.
Introducing Ollie: the world’s first AI family assistant that manages your family life better than any human.
Here’s how it works: