Offline Ventures

Build different.

[Brit Morin 🦞 @brit]

We’ve backed hundreds of great companies at @offlineventures, but the sheer operational excellence by founder @petervoell and industry demand/PMF (in only the first six months) for this one is off the charts. From zero to a top consumer of Apple hardware globally. 🤯

Excited we can finally talk about it and psyched for the journey to come!

[Offline Ventures @offlineventures]

The @juliusai release of the DeepFinance benchmark will help finance teams learn how models preform at valuations, due diligence, underwriting, and financial modeling.

[rahul @0interestrates]

Today we're releasing DeepFinance, the first ultra-long horizon benchmark for high finance work.

A set of 21 problems that reflect work at top PE and IB firms, DeepFinance is built using real deal data.

Problems are constructed by experts with backgrounds from top firms like Evercore, JPM and UBS, and institutions like HBS and Wharton. Problems represent work that would take human professionals 20-40 hours to complete.

Can AI really diligence a $100M+ deal? Finance benchmarks today are limited to evaluating agents on QA on financial docs or grading the numerical correctness of simple financial models. However, real world high finance work is full of assumptions and conflicting evidence. We built DeepFinance to realistically evaluate agents on those end-to-end finance workflows.

DeepFinance leaderboard: https://t.co/E3dQzOH55v

[Bitrig @bitrig]

Lights, camera, simulator! 🎬

Now you can record polished demos right in Bitrig. Your apps deserve an audience.

[Arc @ArcBoats]

Our first electric tug moved under her own power this week. She has 4,000 hp and a 6 MWh battery and runs on the same powertrain we built for Arc Sport.

Seven more are on the way soon.

[Brit Morin 🦞 @brit]

I used to ask health founders how their product works. Now I ask how much effort it takes.

Here are 6 areas where that effort is collapsing, from GLP-1 like pills for wakefulness to a 30-second voice test for your biological age. https://t.co/B4nQybT2y8

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

@bingfish was there at the founding of Electronic Arts in 1982, spent 18 years at Kleiner Perkins, and sat on Amazon's board for 15.

He was also on Zynga's board, which is why it lands when he says players felt relief when they quit Farmville while retention and revenue were still climbing.

So where's the line between good game design and gaming your users? His answer takes in TikTok doom scrolling, WhatsApp as the rare product nobody complains about overusing, the sponsored products Amazon still shows Prime members, and ChatGPT ending every answer with one more question.

Then @davemorin asks what the agent era keeps circling: what gets worse if your AI wins for you?

"Friction is what makes pearls. If you don't get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster." And the next frictions, he says, come from edge conditions nobody tested for.

Plus the wow/WTF scale he used to judge EA's Hall of Fame games, and the bet-your-job letter he kept in a drawer.

@brit hosts. New episode out now.

Topics:

01:02 No Lessins this week: Brit and Dave bring in Bing Gordon
02:42 Amazon's board, Prime, and 18 years at Kleiner Perkins
05:03 Disneyland inside the computer
06:51 The classroom question that led to Electronic Arts
09:44 Raising $2M in 1982, then Atari collapsed
10:56 Vision, and why people think you're stupid
11:37 Bathroom OKRs and why goals beat perfection
13:13 Word of mouth, and why coin-operated hires leave
14:44 "Can a computer make you cry?" and hiring on mission
16:53 Why games retain: where everybody knows your name
17:34 Which social network did it best?
18:36 LinkedIn endorsements and getting people to come back
20:19 Farmville: players felt relief when they quit
21:18 Growth hacking is human growth hormone
23:04 Amazon, TikTok, ChatGPT: who's gaming their users today?
24:21 What gets worse if your AI agent wins for you
25:03 Friction is what makes pearls
26:30 Hugging Face, Cruise, and the edge conditions nobody tests
29:04 Writing Everybody Wins with his daughter Chloe
32:19 The visionary and the operator
33:20 The wow/WTF scale, and how to manufacture a wow
36:08 Wow moments in games, Facebook, Instagram and Amazon
38:42 Creating wow moments as a parent
41:28 The bet your job moment
42:23 You only got fired for blaming someone else
43:19 Good risk vs bad risk
43:53 Invest and express: Twitch, chat, and kids' art on the wall
45:59 Dave's favorite Bing-ism: the airplane aisle test
47:30 The best retention hack ever made is a wedding ring
48:01 Session economics, novelty, and leveling up
51:51 How to gamify a board meeting
54:03 Why a founder who loses the board twice gets replaced
55:23 Family board meetings and the vice president of fun
56:17 Lightning round: books, heroes, best investment
58:41 Bing's p(doom): doomers are gonna doom
59:36 The three things that make a good day
1:01:59 Dave's iPhone Duo verdic

[Cowboy Space Corp. @CowboySpaceCorp]

What you’ve been waiting for: Big Iron. Our rocket.

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

Elon tells investors SpaceX and Tesla should merge. @lessin has a theory he says nobody else has floated: there’s an enormous SpaceX lockup cliff coming in the spring, and folding Tesla’s retail shareholders into the denominator makes all that supply much easier to absorb.

@davemorin thinks the rocket-powered car demo was timed to justify the deal. Sam thinks two engineers got told to bolt rockets onto a car. 83% of respondents in @Jessicalessin’s new Polls app say it’s mostly about Musk control.

Then the PHP vulnerability, and Sam’s conclusion is blunt. All your regional banks will be hacked. The labs are centralizing profits while externalizing the risk, and they should be carrying hundred billion dollar insurance policies.

Plus Google informing Jess she’s liable for everything her agents do, Netflix’s content shakeup, Dave’s theory of priority slop, and @brit’s second week with no back pain.

Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.

Topics:

00:00 Intro
01:04 Dave’s back, and the nasal rinse discourse
02:06 A web-wide PHP vulnerability
03:12 Sam: all your regional banks will be hacked
04:16 The zero days the labs are sitting on
04:56 Dave on the gap between frontier models and the public ones
06:29 Why labs should ban their own teams from the frontier
07:17 Pearl, Coinbase, and Bitcoin as a byproduct of compute
08:32 Can you even build a cybersecurity company in 2026?
09:16 Cold storage: your documents in a mine near the North Pole
10:22 Sam: the labs need $100 billion liability policies
11:30 Google says you’re liable for everything your agents do
13:55 How many Teslas have the Morins owned?
15:05 Sam’s Mazda dealership is living in the future
16:32 The two futures of car buying
17:14 SpaceX and Tesla are going to merge
18:01 The rocket car demo was a stunt to justify the deal
19:24 Elon doesn’t control Tesla, and that’s the point
21:09 Why the merger needs a narrative
22:25 The Information launches Polls: 83% say it’s about control
23:09 Sam’s lockup theory that nobody else has said
25:36 Will shareholders approve it, and the SXSI joke
27:29 Brit: Teslas are becoming entertainment vehicles
28:17 Dave on the Cyber Cab experience
30:12 Jess’s enthusiasm falls back to earth, and the Waymo bug
32:33 Netflix: content shakeup and what they should actually make
35:32 Dave’s viral take: content slop vs priority slop
38:05 Sam let his bot write the entire AGM deck
39:28 Dave’s broadsheet newspaper for Offline
40:19 Internships for teenagers, run by bots
41:30 Meta’s new voting stock and the end of capitalism
42:08 The wealth tax debate
44:36 The Elizabeth Holmes movie and the surprise Q&A
49:28 Peptide check-in, and a necessary disclaimer

[Ben Cera @Bencera]

Polsia is about to hit $25M run rate.
Next stop: $100M ARR.

And things keep accelerating:

$0 → $1M in 12 weeks
$1M → $10M in 10 weeks
$10M → $20M in 6 weeks

I just published one of my favorite and most successful aisloP episodes yet: “The Run Rate.”

I tell the whole story, from idea to $20M, month by month.

The episode ends in Tokyo, where I went a few weeks ago.

Probably the best place on Earth to take a deep breath, get inspired, and rethink what’s possible.

I came back with an even bolder vision for Polsia.

The road from $25M to $100M is going to look very different.

Polsia v2 is coming soon.

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

Today on the pod:

@Jessicalessin went full send on Muse and reports that about 70% of the use cases she was excited about have stopped working. Not because the model got worse. Good Eggs wants her to check out in the app, her kid's school portal refuses the login, and JP Morgan and Amazon are blocking agents outright.

@davemorin's version is worse. Instinct booked a dinner reservation in LA instead of San Francisco. He's out.

@lessin has seen this movie. He and Andrew Kortina ran Fin ten years ago and shut it down once they worked out that you become liable for every provider down the chain with no margin to cover your own mistakes. His call now is the death of the web, plus APIs that negotiate access back and forth like Hollywood agents.

Meanwhile Anthropic is meeting investors behind closed doors while they tape, the market's getting hammered, and @brit's three years of hip pain vanished in six days on peptides. Sam insists it's placebo.

Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.

Topics:

01:09 Jess is back, Dave's birthday, and the October cold
03:04 Nasal rinses and fall immunity
04:02 Brit's peptide results: three years of pain gone in six days
06:43 Anthropic is meeting investors while we tape
07:34 The market is getting hammered: VIX, private credit, Apollo
08:16 Infrastructure IPOs stall and Nvidia becomes the last investor
10:01 Slowing revenue, CFOs cracking down, tokens moving to open models
10:36 Sam: would you rather be rich or right?
11:11 The models are a commodity and there is no lock-in
12:15 Brit won't give Muse her whole computer
13:41 Why Sam trusts Meta more than OpenAI or Anthropic
15:16 Jess: 70% of my Muse use cases don't work anymore
16:54 Dave: Instinct booked the restaurant in the wrong city
18:18 Sam on Fin, the assistant company he ran ten years ago
20:30 Why the economics of mistakes break agent services
22:31 Sam: what's inevitable is the death of the web
23:09 APIs as constant negotiation, and agents with reputations
24:51 Agent credit scores: FICO for bots
25:56 Amazon's Rufus still works, and other branding crimes
27:13 The seesaw: built up and torn down intraday
28:41 Gen Z media, Muse memes, and punk rock by another name
32:53 Is the punk rock thing just marketing?
34:37 Every company now needs a Gen Z meme lord
36:14 The truth subculture and who actually pays for it
37:32 Jess is interviewing Bari Weiss at WTF
40:20 Bumble goes private at $1.3B
43:07 Dave on seven years of Hinge and why dating is so hard
46:41 Apple's home hub and keeping screens away from kids
49:04 Everyone is going to see the Elizabeth Holmes movie

[Matt Van Horn @mvanhorn]

𝗗𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗻 (@davemorin), 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘄 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝘆 𝗯𝗼𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝘄𝗶𝗰𝗲, 𝗷𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 @slashlast30days 𝗽𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁.

First was my boss at Apple when I was 19, then at Path. He made Apple's page the first group on Facebook, group ID 1.

Path had no users, no revenue, and an office in Sean Fanning's apartment when Google came calling. Dave finally pulled out his phone and showed Larry Page the beta. Larry shrugged and talked about robot cars driving around Palo Alto. In 2010.

Then our ask to Google: $200M, the Path icon replacing the camera icon on every Android phone, and our balcony brought up to code. "They laughed at me, but they gave a real offer."

→ 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗴𝗹𝗲'𝘀 $𝟭𝟬𝟬𝗠 𝗯𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝗵 𝗵𝗮𝗱 𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱
"I know now what I did not know then, which is how rare a huge win of that magnitude is. I've always been a bigger fan of go on the journey. I guess I still am."

→ 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝟮𝟰 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗺 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘄
"Within 24 hours, I had the same feeling that I had when I first installed Facebook. I felt like I could make anything."

→ 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘁𝟯𝟬𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝗯𝗼𝗱𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗼
"Most of what's going on in the ecosystem right now is individual personal agents that I use one on one. What we are working on at OpenClaw is multiplayer agents."

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

Meta and Microsoft have roughly halved how much their own employees use Claude, weeks out from the IPO. @davemorin’s read isn’t about price or benchmarks. Claude got over-tuned for parasocial relationships, people fell into something unhealthy with it, and organizations are now backing out.

@lessin runs Claude as core infrastructure and says switching off would be a one line change he’d never think about again.

Then it gets strange. A dinner where only the lab researchers raised their hands when asked whether one company would be left standing. A lab that believes the machine god will go back in time and simulate hell for anyone who didn’t help build it. And Sam’s case that the Valley caught zero-and-infinity thinking from crypto and broke its own spreadsheets.

@brit’s moderating. Jess is at an offsite, so it’s three VCs and no journalist.

Topics:

00:00 Trailer
00:51 Brit moderates: three VCs and no journalist
03:43 Peptide protocols, the Wolverine stack, and a Dexa scan
07:42 Sam on the Nathan Fielder movie
09:30 Meta and Microsoft halve their internal Claude usage
10:13 Dave: Claude was over-tuned for parasocial relationships
11:19 Sam: switching off Claude is a one line change
11:50 Silicon Valley is great at tech and bad at business
13:46 Zero, infinity, and what crypto taught the Valley
17:53 The dinner where only the lab people raised their hands
19:41 The lab that believes in the machine god
20:01 Lab leaks, infinite liability, and what a real framework looks like
21:56 The personal agent protocol: Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe
23:01 Sam: nobody should care about MCP
24:03 Hilton traps Sam’s agent in a doom loop
26:30 If you ran Hilton, would you let the bots in?
27:15 Facebook Connect, Open Graph, and the missing value trade
29:41 Dave: building agents vs building agency
33:53 The social media era already ran this experiment
37:02 The Agent Treaty Framework is born
38:16 Why standards are over and treaties are next
41:28 Megalith and the market for unexercised pro rata
42:32 Sam’s pro rata war story
45:53 64% of LPs now want co-invest rights
48:03 What hedge fund letters say that VCs don’t
49:20 Main Street says it hates AI, then uses it
53:27 Plug of the week: the Mill

[Offline Ventures @offlineventures]

Congrats to the @MeckaAI on your $60M Series B!

Let's build the data & deployment layer for physical AI!

[Josh @joshavata]

Today @MeckaAI is announcing a $60M Series B from @sequoia to accelerate the advent of general purpose robotics

This brings our total funding to over $120M to become the data and deployment layer for physical AI

Read more below 🧵

[Cowboy Space Corp. @CowboySpaceCorp]

Our first mission, Reason-1, has launched.

This is a huge moment for the Cowboy team as we hope to demonstrate power beaming from orbit, with the first commercial kilowatt-class laser in space.

The team is watching live from San Carlos and Seattle today, after years of hard work to get Reason-1 to this moment.

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

Anthropic's S-1 leaked and the numbers don't match the narrative. Revenue flatlining as token prices fall, SaaS investors posting memes welcoming them to the no-growth table. @Jessicalessin still puts it at 60% they get out in November, which looks brave in a week when Oura pulled its own IPO and blamed market conditions.

@lessin's problem with the core business is simpler than any of that. Claude is the center of his infrastructure. "If I woke up tomorrow and Claude was gone, I would care for about one second."

Full house plus @adrianaoun, who drops in to argue there's no moat left unless you own the infrastructure, the data, or the algorithms.

Also: @brit's agent started coordinating date night with @davemorin's agent, and she stopped texting her husband for a day.

Recorded live from the X boardroom. Watch here or wherever you get your pods.

Topics:

00:00 Trailer
01:04 Live from X HQ, and a 39 degree cold plunge
02:57 Dunbar's number, but for bots
05:48 Anthropic's leaked S-1 and the flatlining revenue
07:37 Oura pulls its IPO and the LPs get stuck
09:36 What's actually happening in the markets
10:41 Wall Street and Silicon Valley split on AI's price tag
12:45 World Labs sells for $8B: the barbell strategy
14:11 Half a trillion in contracts, and who's really making money
14:54 What happens if OpenAI and Anthropic don't work out?
16:11 Priced for a growth rate bigger than the US economy
18:04 Open models pass closed models on the charts
18:51 Sam: if Claude vanished tomorrow, I'd care for one second
19:43 The forward deployed bet and the luxury token problem
22:16 Adrian drops in: 300 startups, 40 unicorns, and a plane
24:39 Jess goes full Muse
26:28 The bot AGI challenge: after-school plans and the mom index
28:23 OpenAI rebrands Codex as Dots
30:30 Adrian on the moat: winner take some
31:38 Brit's agent starts talking to Dave's agent
33:51 No switching costs, so BD deals are the only lock-in
36:13 Dave: Instinct is the new Kayak
36:57 Maybe it's the beginning of times, not the end
38:47 Adrian's opposite thesis: we go further into the screens
43:39 Who has agency, you or the technology?
44:22 Offline is the new luxury
46:31 Everyone is building personal apps now
47:54 Book rec: Ari Emanuel's Roll the Calls
50:44 Adrian's parting shot: infrastructure, data, or algorithms
53:02 Sam's Middle Ages 2.0: castles, moats, and hoarding

[Offline Ventures @offlineventures]

Congrats to team @lunaroute_ai on the launch!

LunaRoute is the best way to work with open-weight models and avoid per-token charges.

[LunaRoute @lunaroute_ai]

Today we’re officially launching LunaRoute 🚀🌕

https://t.co/CQeG6FUywm

We built LunaRoute to change how people use AI - fixed monthly pricing, concurrency instead of tokens, and the freedom to build without constantly thinking about usage or the meter.

Our first users have told us how different that feels, and we want more people to experience it.
So we’re launching with a referral program for every user:

Give $200, get $200.

Refer as many people as you want and keep earning credits with every qualifying referral.

Read more on our introduction post:
https://t.co/r5rOuIMdhe

[Brit Morin 🦞 @brit]

Have been playing with this one for months now and it's pretty amazing how much context it instantly picks up about you, simply from your photos. Way better than any AI assistant out of the box. Congrats to @marissamayer and team!

[MORE OR LESS @MoreorLessPod]

Today on the pod:

@lessin would rather send his kids to the military than to Andreessen Horowitz's new $35M school, @Jessicalessin agrees on air, and @davemorin ends up defending the thing he opened the segment by calling a marketing play.

Full house this week: Dave, @brit, Jessica and Sam, plus @Mazzeo of NoHo Labs, who spends most of the hour asking why none of them can be optimistic about anything.

Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.

Topics:
00:00 Cold Open
01:14 Matt Mazzeo joins: peptides, CAA, and 15 years of Harvard connections
05:19 a16z puts $35M into a school: marketing play or higher ed reform?
06:20 Brit on every billionaire starting a university
08:21 Jess on Alpha School and who should be in charge of education
10:20 Sam: I'd rather send my kids to the military
12:19 Grit, great books, and learning to wrangle horses
16:40 Claude discovers a new enzyme system with 10,000 agents
18:01 Anthropic's IPO slips, and the liability problem
20:29 The story flip: from only we can be trusted to we can't afford the risk
21:14 Matt's maximalist take: long frontier, long open source
23:14 Massive demand, unclear profit, and the railroad pattern
24:40 Blackstone on who pays for the data center debt: we don't know
25:45 The Saint Petersburg paradox and pricing an infinite payout
27:56 Brockman redefines AGI, three years too late
31:11 Infinite demand doesn't mean infinite sustainability
32:20 Amazon blocks Muse: the first of many arms treaties?
35:37 Agents are quietly vaporizing the internet's breakage model
36:49 It's still 1982 for agents
37:42 Sam wants to spend thousands a month on CPU, not GPU
40:12 Does your agent represent you or the lab that made it?
42:16 When your agent does something bad, who is liable?
43:50 Peptides 101: what they actually are
46:30 GLP-1 revenue is rivaling AI revenue
48:20 How Matt went from 250 pounds to sub-12% body fat
50:29 The FDA is moving peptides back into compounding pharmacies
53:32 What a peptide protocol costs and how to start safely
57:17 Taylor Swift, girl dads, and a code for listeners

[Offline Ventures @offlineventures]

Congrats to the @hubble_network team on your Series C! 🛰️

[hubblenetwork @hubble_network]

Cellular covers about 15% of Earth's landmass. Everything past that has meant hardware too expensive to justify tracking.

Today, we're opening satellite coverage to Bluetooth devices, plus a $200M Series C, crossing unicorn valuation.

@sana_pashankar at @Bloomberg has more.

[Offline Ventures @offlineventures]

Congrats to @firecrawl on its $75M Series B + the launch of Alexandria!

Models need the right source material and Alexandria gives AI agents the ability to find it from data providers, specialized indexes & the live web.

https://t.co/AgWkAl5Jlb