Mao Du

Founder at CoHome | Workforce Housing | ex Google

[WSJ Markets @WSJmarkets]

Vinod Khosla, billionaire venture capitalist, tells The WSJ Money Interview about his take on Silicon Valley leaning toward President Trump and how AI might change our world https://t.co/nuJLqXHxDU

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

One of interesting companies we’re working with is modular data center.

They’re 20 feet ( Roughly 2 parking spaces) long, can be placed in basement, parking lot that generate income for apartments, universities or homeowners to improve housing affordability.

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

Berah has been a leading real estate developer managing $2B pension fund. Some impactful institutional projects throughout California includes @Google Moffett Park Cloud Campus and @NASA research center and numerous workforce housings throughout the SF Bay. Today at our SF office, we’ve discussed innovative ways to partner with universities to create affordable workforce housing nationwide.

#workforcehousing #universities

[Xiaoyin Qu @quxiaoyin]

My bet: @thinkymachines will soon make more money than @AnthropicAI. Not by winning the race to build one standardized frontier model. By becoming the Palantir FDE for enterprise custom models.

The playbook:
1. Release the best American open-weight model.
2. Drive widespread enterprise adoption.
3. Charge the largest companies 7–9 figures to post-train and run custom models behind their own firewall.

The model rests on three bets:
1. Large enterprises will increasingly demand their own models with their own data, and this is how they differentiate and win.
2. Enterprises won’t need just one model. They’ll continuously need new models for different workflows, departments, and proprietary datasets. That creates extremely sticky, recurring revenue.
3. Autoresearch will make custom model development increasingly scalable. Tinker can become the interface enterprises use to post-train their own models—with @thinkymachines providing the expertise and infrastructure behind it. FDE, infra, everything, huge contracts.
4. Eventually, maybe everyone wants their OWN model, and autoresearch and training inside tinker on top of @thinkymachines's base model will make it happen.

Meanwhile, Henry-ford-styled, standardized models will makes no margins. OpenAI and Anthropic will have their API margins squeezed by Deepseek/GLM/Grok/Meta etc, and their consumer subscriptions are loss centers.

The fat margin will move to customization: proprietary data, post-training, evals, deployment, and infrastructure.

If this thesis is right, @thinkymachines isn’t building just another frontier lab. It’s building the highest-value layer between frontier research and enterprise model ownership.

Turns out, the best business model for enterprise is NOT to sell commodity API access. Sell them their own models.

I’m extremely bullish on this approach.
@miramurati may be the most commercially savvy frontier-lab leader. I have to admit it.

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

Well said. “In AI era, the advantage moves to the founders who can read the market better.”

[Alex. Delivet @alexd]

Startups used to survive for years as zombies. Some revenue, no real traction, never quite dying.

AI might be ending that.

Been thinking about this a lot lately, so I wrote it up: https://t.co/wyA50LJ7e6

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

@reformation love this piece! 🍃

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

World Cup ⚽️ Watch party

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

While @BuffyWicks gave us an update at @WellsFargo innovation center around affordable housing bills on government subsidies for lower income, @cohome_co solves the gap for the “missing middle” people that have been strong workforce for employers. The down payment assistance fund requires to be incentivized and securitized and scaled by employers in order to increase liquidity and sustainbility. https://t.co/zUpKQZy9WP

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

https://t.co/puLXpatHvd

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

For humanity.

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

🤞🏿

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

We know the affordability is to do with price and affordable amount. So we’re raising $100m debt fund as down payment assistant to share equity of home for future appreciation. And we are helping and pilot with UC campuses to help distribute the program and technology to their workforce, excited to go more broad among anchor institutions to help them talent retention and recruiting strategy.

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

AI is commoditizing expertise. In the past, CFO understood finance, the COO understood operation and the CEO accumulated decades of experience. Today, much of that expertise is available on demand. When hard skills become easier to replicate, the differentiating qualities of leadership shift. Empathy, curiously, learning ability and integrity and self awareness become more important. These traits are harder to automate and more valuable in coordinating humans with machines.

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

@elonmusk Btw I have a girl who’d like to have your children…

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

@elonmusk Elon, if we want to fix the birth rate crisis, we have to fix the economics of parenthood. Right now, for men marriage look like a bad gamble. What if we implemented a 'bachelor tax' or a massive tax credit for married fathers to heavily incentivize family stability?

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

Starting to share thoughts as Fintech founder in San Francisco.

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

@ludogranger @ycombinator @LeadbayAI @milstan Does it qualify retail consumers?

[Mao Du @MaoDu9]

Taking in the views and the insights at the SF Playground! 🌉There’s nothing like a San Francisco skyline to remind you that the sky is actually the limit. Amazing panel today—feeling investor-backed and crowd-powered!