Maddie

Bringing people together @Neo | @Stanford + @StanfordDoerr

[Adam Khakhar @adamkhakhar]

Today we are finally coming out of stealth with a few announcements:
- Founding @thirdmomentres with my friend Jeffrey Yan: automatically improving inference endpoints (with focus on data research).
- Fundraise at $250M valuation earlier this Summer with investors including @neo (@apartovi ), @Mascobot , @adamdangelo and more.
- 0 -> 8 figures in revenue within ~6 months of founding the company. In just this past month, we won $10M+ in contracts.
- Hiring ~15 more engineers in the next 45 days. Currently based in SF, opening a NYC office soon.

Jeffrey and I are building Third Moment to do two things: (1) make it effortless for enterprises to deploy state-of-the-art AI tailored to their workflows, and (2) build best-in-class RL environments that push the frontier of model capabilities. The design of a reinforcement learning environment has an underappreciated impact on the resulting behaviors of the models trained on it.

If you are interested in pushing the frontier of ML systems and data research, reach out to us ([email protected]). Check out OpenAI’s blog post on some of our experiments in the comments.

[Maddie @maddiebernheim]

@neo Can’t wait to listen!

[Neo @neo]

🎙️ Watch now: podcast available on all platforms.

Episode 2. Dara Khosrowshahi on “Confession with Ali Partovi”

– Leaving Iran in the revolution with nothing but family
– The Priceline deal he failed to push through at Expedia
–"I lost confidence... I just backed off."
– Uber’s COVID layoffs and hitting rock bottom

… and much more with Uber CEO @Dkhos.

(0:00) “85% of our volume disappeared overnight”: COVID hits Uber
(3:23) “We lost everything the family had”: Leaving Iran to start over
(10:12) “We’re getting a second chance”: the grit to rebuild
(13:26) “It was ignorance and desperation”: rising to lead Expedia
(17:42) “Not a particularly good one”: Dara rates himself as CEO
(20:16) “But I lost confidence”: the missed opportunity that haunts him
(23:49) “I didn’t hire you to be average”: Barry Diller on taking risks
(27:06) “At first I said no”: Turning down the Uber job
(29:45) “Everyone has a bullshit meter”: Being honest with the team
(37:10) “I was trying to put off the decision”: dreading a layoff

[Neo @neo]

🎙️ Watch now: debut podcast available on all platforms.

Episode 1. Satya Nadella on “Confession with Ali Partovi”

– The interview question he still thinks about decades later
–"We won the browser war, only to lose the web"
– His son Zain and how his empathy journey began

… and much more with Microsoft CEO @satyanadella.

(0:00) “You need more empathy”: a job interview gone bad
(0:27) Welcome to Confession
(1:06) Growing up in India
(4:13) “See the world through his eyes”: the birth of his son Zain
(11:27) “I didn’t care. I didn’t listen”: failing as a manager
(16:07) “It haunts me”: lacking the courage to speak up
(19:50) “We didn’t understand that the economic value is all in search”
(26:19) Ali: “I was essentially fired… I’ve never told anyone”

[connor ling @conconconling]

https://t.co/C4qSCsGV7F

[Maddie @maddiebernheim]

Proud of @Moritz_Stephan today & every day !!

[Bloomberg @business]

Former OpenAI, Cognition staffers want AI agents running businesses https://t.co/FpyeRXAKhO

[Jessica Liu @jess_liu_]

What if every organization could access the operational leverage of a world-class internal engineering team, without having to build and maintain one for every function?

At Ramp, I saw firsthand how much leverage exceptional internal engineering teams can create. But that model has an important constraint: engineering talent is scarce, and its opportunity cost is enormous.

Every company building its own internal AI platform is probably not the Pareto-efficient equilibrium in the long run.

Companies have always faced a tradeoff: invest in internal infrastructure that improves operational efficiency, or invest in the core product, where returns can compound into durable competitive advantage.

Ideally, you do both. But not every company has the resources to do so, and even those that do need to consider where the marginal return on engineering effort is highest.

AI has the potential to fundamentally shift that production frontier.

What if the people closest to the problems, the domain experts who understand the business best — could directly shape, deploy, and improve the systems that solve them, without being bottlenecked by engineering capacity?

That's what we're building with Engines at Hone: AI that learns an organization's context, coordinates across people and systems, and continuously works toward measurable business outcomes.

The opportunity isn't just automating workflows. It's changing how organizations allocate scarce technical talent, while empowering the people who understand the problems to own their solutions.

Let engineers compound competitive advantage in the core product. Let domain experts drive the systems that improve how the business operates.

Making this possible requires a rare combination of frontier research, engineering, and deep operational expertise. That's what makes the team we're building at Hone so exciting.

We're hiring. Come build with us. DM me or learn more at https://t.co/VVFWFGT1RL

[Moritz Stephan @moritz_stephan]

As intelligence becomes less of a bottleneck, the real challenge is making a business outcome well specified so that it can be automatically hill climbed.

At Hone, that means turning production traces into replayable multi-turn evals, building high fidelity simulations of messy real world environments, and getting systems to robustly learn from their own experience.

We’re a team of Thiel Fellows, Jane Street quants, published researchers, and early engineers from Cognition, Mercor, Decagon, and Ramp.

If you want to work on AI that owns real outcomes at real companies, send me a DM or check out our careers page below.

https://t.co/LEjzldnfCW

[Maddie @maddiebernheim]

@hone Start your engines!! 🏎️

[Hone @hone]

Today Hone launches Engines: AI that owns business outcomes.

Chatbots give answers. Agents do tasks. Engines deliver outcomes, and we hold them responsible for creating real value, measured in actual dollars instead of tokens or vibes.

You point it at a business metric, and the Engine figures out the rest. It onboards itself, builds the necessary agents, skills, and memories, collaborates with the right people, and gets better with experience.

From AI leaders to global enterprises, our customers have already used Engines to:

• Uncover millions in procurement savings
• Optimize product funnels
• Manage credit risk
• Increase qualified pipeline in new territories
• Accelerate implementations and improve account management

To scale this impact across the economy, we’ve raised a $60M seed led by Benchmark and Index with participation from Elad Gil, Hanabi, Definition, Diffusion, Lux, SV Angel, and Align.

AI’s raw capabilities are far ahead of the value it creates in the real world, and Engines will help close the gap.

Here’s how they work…

[Maddie @maddiebernheim]

@apartovi Can’t wait!!

[Maddie @maddiebernheim]

Beyond excited for this!

[Ali Partovi @apartovi]

I'm starting a podcast, "Confession," where I invite tech veterans to share their painful lessons.

We all connect through shared pain. Hear founders & CEOs like Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), Luana Lopes Lara (Kalshi), and others share their stories and lessons learned.

Subscribe to Confession on...
✅ Spotify: https://t.co/ivOCa9wYK5
✅ Youtube: https://t.co/Ofo7boNWfg
✅ Apple: https://t.co/i8SFYF1CZC

@SatyaNadella @Dkhos @luanalopeslara

[Neo @neo]

Cognition’s $2B raise, 100x cheaper code search, & more | Neo & Noteworthy

Check out our September recap of learnings and announcements by Neo portfolio companies and community members 💙

https://t.co/7S902TTUnX

[Maddie @maddiebernheim]

We threw a bouquet party (+ tossed the extras out the window to strangers)

[Elaine Liu @elainexliu]

I built a wearable that predicts behaviors like nail biting, hair pulling, and skin picking before they occur.

I spun up a sensor rig, tested it on myself, and achieved an AUC of 0.868 using simple, standard white-label wearable sensors.

Full write-up and code below. I also wrote a separate, more personal post about what it's like to finally work on something you've put on The Pedestal for years.

(1/8)

[connor ling @conconconling]

one day you’re just super close friends. a few months later you’re cofounders.

and before you know it, you may go from hating large events with speakers to speaking at large events yourself 😌

[Cognition @cognition]

The world needs far more software than it can build. Cognition exists to change that.

We’ve just raised over $2B at a $48B valuation, led by a16z, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir.

Since our round in May, run-rate revenue has grown from $492 M to almost $900 M.

[Neo @neo]

Etched delivers, Wispr launches Notetaker, & more | Neo & Noteworthy

Check out our August recap of learnings and announcements by Neo portfolio companies and community members 💙

https://t.co/hiX02VlcdB

[Ron Nachum @RonNachum]

Sapien is the engine behind the world’s most important companies.

Today, we’re announcing our latest fundraise at a $180M valuation.

We build systems that learn how complex businesses work, enabling financial & operational optimization for the people who build everything else.

[Maddie @maddiebernheim]

My roommates & I turned our sf apartment into a cafe this past weekend :)