Robert Mathur

European bonds trading. Finnish, based in Paris.

[Robert Mathur @MathurRobert]

Thanks to the @FTWeekend editors for publishing my letter.

Proud to have sneaked art and wine into the paper!

https://t.co/Fu7PuL4yxo

[Andrew Lynch @andrewglynch]

if a toddler puts a sticker on you, that’s a sign of great respect in their culture

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

Finnishmaxxing for Midsummer.

I’ve probably spent every Midsummer of my life in Finland. The midsummer tradition goes back thousands of years, and I regularly decline other invitations for what I jokingly call “religious” reasons.

The celebration usually happens at a remote lake/seaside cottage: swimming, sauna, a wood-fired hot tub, birch sauna whacke, bonfires, flower crowns, and old folk spells.

The sun barely sets, and for a few days the whole country seems to disappear into the woods.

The last 2 pictures are from midnight.

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

Has enough time passed for people to admit that the Google Glasses were cool as hell now?

[Lulu Cheng Meservey @lulumeservey]

Satya wrote this article himself, in contrast to a lot of the AI-generated responses

Dario’s essays, roon’s tweets, Noam Brown’s posts, all slop-free too

A counterintuitive measure of AI fluency is knowing how not to overrely on it

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Five dimensional chess doesn’t exist. Everyone is furiously improvising all the time. The future is utterly uncertain.

[Chase Passive Income @chasedownleads]

Elon Musk didn’t become a trillionaire until age 54

Relax, you still have time

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Often I find myself in a (European) airport with between 5 & 10 books in my carry-on, yet feel compelled to buy a book at the poorly stocked bookstore and only read the one I just bought.

[Arjun Tandon @iarjuntandon]

This is the power of compounding.

The first 200 years are the hardest.

[Zain @NotZainAgain]

A friend of mine has two tickets for game 4 of the nba finals. They are courtside seats plus airfare and hotel accommodations. He didn't realize when he bought them that this is the same day as his wedding - so he can't go.

If you're interested and want to go instead of him, it's at St. Peter's Church in New York City at 5 PM. Her name is Donna. She will be the one in the white dress.

[Football Tweet ⚽ @Footballtweet]

🔎 This is the level of detail on Matvéi Safónov's cheat-sheet for Arsenal's penalties.

📸 @francoisdenat

[2008-17 capitals survivor @averagecapsfan]

Decking two guys after scoring a golden goal goes unbelievably hard

[Omne Europa @neolatyno]

The battle of Hogwarts in Paris as we speak

[Robert Mathur @MathurRobert]

Live scenes from the Champs-Élysées. Terrifying.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Problems in Paris

[Phil Hoyeck @PAHoyeck]

This is from a book by Nietzsche, a pretty famous philosopher. Very disappointing to say the least.

[Apple Design @TheAppleDesign]

POV: You’re charging your new Ferrari Luce

[Robert Mathur @MathurRobert]

Great overview on the latest SF AI convos and terms such as ”agent debt”

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

Never forget that YOU are a data center. Drink some water!!

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

How to avoid tons of life problems:

go to bed on time.

[Tree @ATree_Official]

Sometimes i regret giving oxygen to humans