Luke

Privacy @Coinbase | DYOR

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

.@nikitabier thoughts?

[Conno🅡 Boundy @cboundy22]

In March, we put 60 founders and investors in an arcade and told them to go play. We circled back with a few to see what came of it.

The updates were better than expected: New board members appointed, multiple new clients onboarded, several new strategic partnerships formed, and investors still actively exploring deals with teams they met over a Skee-Ball lane.

We keep coming back to the same belief: Chicago doesn't have a talent problem or a capital problem. It has a connection problem.

Building Bridges was our first swing at fixing it, and as you can tell, it won't be our last. On July 21, during TechChicago Week, we're running it back and going deeper.

Building Bridges 2: Investors Meeting Investors brings active investors from across Chicago and the Midwest together for a premium cocktail experience, built on one idea: our region's funds should share dealflow with each other, not watch their best founders raise somewhere else.

This time, the room is for the funders. If you're an active investor and want in, apply below, we are curating carefully and keeping it small.

Presented by Atlantis Capital, LLC, co-hosted with one of Chicago's best connectors, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan of @StartupGrind Chicago and Startup Hypeman. Thank you to J.P. Morgan for partnering with us again to show up for the Midwest ecosystem.

Apply here: https://t.co/WIEi5WdBUu

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

The crypto market structure bill has PASSED the Senate Banking Committee with a bi-partisan vote!

Historic day for crypto and for the future of digital assets in America. Grateful for the countless hours from lawmakers and staff to strengthen this legislation. Big improvement from where we were in January on rewards, tokenization, DeFi, and CFTC authority. I'm proud we stood up for our customers in that moment, and the bill is better because of it.

Looking forward to a bipartisan law that cements the US as the world's crypto capital. Let's get CLARITY done.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

https://t.co/zB1WgXzFAz

[lincoln.base.eth @MurrLincoln]

AWS 🤝 x402 & Coinbase

what makes me optimistic that agentic payments are here to stay is how quickly some of the biggest companies in the world are jumping onboard.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

The truth is there are probably ONLY 1,000 truly AI-native companies on earth making $5 million ARR or more.

What does truly AI-native actually mean?

It means everything in the business is structured so agents can consume it. Every customer record. Every SOP. Every email template. Every pricing rule. All of it indexable. All of it readable by an agent.

Agents do the support. Agents do the outreach. Agents do the research. Agents draft the contracts. Agents process the claims. Humans review, approve, and steer.

And there are only about 1,000 of them. On the entire planet. If that doesn't make you want to go build one right now, I don't know what will.

Most people think they're AI-native because they use ChatGPT at work. That's like saying you're a chef because you own a microwave.

There's so much opportunity in actually being AI-native because almost nobody is doing it yet. 1,000 companies out of millions.

Despite what you read....the field is empty.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

POV: claude traveled 6 months into the future and told you exactly how your next move failed.

it's called a premortem.

daniel kahneman (nobel prize-winning psychologist behind "thinking fast and slow") called it his single most valuable decision-making technique.

google, goldman sachs, and procter & gamble all use it before major launches.

here's the problem it solves.

when you ask claude "is this a good plan?" it finds all the reasons to say yes.

that's what it was trained to do. so you walk away feeling confident.

you execute, and spend weeks / months building on top of that plan.

then it blows up.

and you realize the problem was obvious in hindsight, you just never stress-tested it because claude told you it was solid.

a premortem fixes this by flipping the frame.

instead of asking "what could go wrong?" you tell claude "it's 6 months from now and this is already dead. tell me how it died."

that shift turns off claude's optimism because there's nothing to be optimistic about. the premise already says it failed.

so claude stops looking for reasons your plan will work and starts explaining how it fell apart.

claude comes back with every way your plan could die, each one with a full failure story and the early warning signs to watch for.

then a synthesis pulls it all together:

> which failure is most likely
> which failure is most dangerous
> the single biggest hidden assumption you're making (often the most valuable part)
> a revised version of your plan with the gaps closed

you say "premortem this" and give it your plan. the skill handles the rest.

[Conno🅡 Boundy @cboundy22]

The best founders we met in Silicon Valley this week weren't building AI agents.

At @StartupGrind 2026, they were reinventing steam power for data centers, building food systems for space, and creating materials that sound like science fiction.

The "I'm building an AI that..." pitch has hit a wall. Not because AI isn't transformative, but because too many teams are chasing vitamin-level problems with new CRMs, random automations, and content creation tools. The breakthroughs are happening much deeper.

The pre-seed investing thesis is shifting, too. The best early-stage teams we met weren't just looking for checks; they wanted operators building with them and introductions that will change trajectories. That's what we do best.

What keeps us coming back is the community. Startup Grind is one of the most genuine ecosystems in the world. No egos. No velvet rope. Just builders meeting the people who believe in what they're building.

To every founder who shared their vision with us, thank you. We're reviewing everything and following up. If we met you this week, drop a comment or DM us.

[Conno🅡 Boundy @cboundy22]

3 years ago we stopped at the @ekkobar_ai booth at @StartupGrind and met Rhys. Our team invested.

Last night, he walked on stage in a kilt and won Startup of the Year at the 2026 TechPoint Mira Awards.

I could not be more proud of this team and all they have accomplished 🚀

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 SEC officially approves ending Pattern Day Trader rule, eliminating the $25,000 minimum for day trading.

[lincoln.base.eth @MurrLincoln]

for a long time i thought agentic trading was dumb and meant "@grok make me money, make no mistakes"

but now i realize it's a spectrum, where what makes the most sense (for now) is humans outsourcing automation and execution of high-level ideas and strategies to agents

[John @market_sleuth]

This is absolutely the best moving average to pounce on. It’s held that way for decades. 💯

[Luke @ljpill]

@MurrLincoln So. Awesome. 👏

[Prince Canuma @Prince_Canuma]

mlx-vlm v0.4.3 is here 🚀

Day-0 support:
🔥 Gemma 4 (vision, audio, MoE) by @GoogleDeepMind
🦅 Falcon-OCR + Falcon Perception by @TIIuae
🪨 Granite Vision 4.0 by @IBMResearch

New models:
🎯 SAM 3.1 with Object Multiplex by @facebook
🔍 RF-DETR detection & segmentation by @roboflow

Infra:
⚡ TurboQuant (KV cache compression)
🖥️ CUDA support for vision models (Sam and RF-DETR)

Get started today:

> uv pip install -U mlx-vlm

Leave us a star ⭐️
https://t.co/7BvnEuzKvj

[Conno🅡 Boundy @cboundy22]

Last night we put 60+ founders and investors in an arcade and told them to go play.

No hotel ballroom. No awkward small talk. Just Skee-Ball, Pop-A-Shot, and Mortal Kombat, with curated 1-on-1 pairings between founders and the investors we thought they should know.

The best relationships don't start in a conference room. They start when you're trash-talking someone over a Skee-Ball lane and realize you're both obsessed with the same problem. We wanted to build that moment on purpose.

It worked. Less than 24 hours later, pairings are already scheduling follow-ups: investment explorations, partnership conversations, intros that wouldn't have happened in a traditional format.

At Atlantis Capital, we keep coming back to the same belief: Chicago doesn't have a talent problem or a capital problem. It has a connection problem.

Building Bridges is one way we're working to fix it. This was our first one. It won't be the last. If you're a founder or investor who wants to be in the room next time, DM us.

Huge thanks to J.P. Morgan for sponsoring the evening and for their continued commitment to the Midwest ecosystem. Their team showed up with real energy and helped make the night what it was. And thank you to every founder and investor who competed, connected, and made it a night to remember.

[Luke @ljpill]

@MurrLincoln 👀🥵 can’t wait!!

[Olivia Moore @omooretweets]

We are unprepared for how quickly the world is going to shift from marketing to people -> marketing to AI agents

[🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo]

wow.

this is insane, just put this on a loop and you’ll be getting much better roi on your intelligence tokens.

bookmark this. read this. use this. give this to your digital agents.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

New on the Anthropic Engineering Blog:

How we use a multi-agent harness to push Claude further in frontend design and long-running autonomous software engineering.

Read more: https://t.co/HWvmXk1ykn

[hoeem @hooeem]

https://t.co/xhFqyYE7RD