Pedro Torres-Mackie

Founder @qventures @eldiario | Board member @UpstateFilms

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@jcspinell @stewart @aunder @iamcal @BradleyArmstr10 @collabfund congrats!!

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Applications for the YC Winter 2027 batch are now open!

Apply by November 2: https://t.co/OnqI05W53Z

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

Go see it, it’s a wild ride. One of the best films I’ve ever seen of any kind.

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

The comedian-documentarian crafts a fractured, innovative film about the infamous Theranos fraudster before and during her time in federal prison https://t.co/qg4Kqj2Ukn

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

Great overview of where AI is right now, opportunities, etc

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.

My observations:

1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.

2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.

3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.

4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.

5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.

6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.

They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.

7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.

8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.

Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.

9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.

10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!

11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.

12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.

13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.

14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.

15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.

16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.

17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?

18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.

19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.

20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.

21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.

Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.

Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.

Happy to be home and locked in.

Until next time!

[Thomas Templeton @TempletonThomas]

we made a kiosk. we made it really smart. you can talk to it if you want. and it looks pretty good too. 

https://t.co/zQ5Fb7b0wF

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@VeroRuizdelVizo no me lo puedo ni imaginar 🥹

[Lloyd Blankfein @lloydblankfein]

Risk management 101—every exposure should have a limit, even when you’re sure nothing could go wrong. After all, the Titanic sank and AAA mortgage bonds went to zero. I worry about the market’s (and the economy’s) unlimited appetite for exposure to the positive AI revenue story.

[joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @JoshuaSteinman]

Here’s an idea for @sama @DarioAmodei et al:

- buy the books
- scan the books
- employ the best book binders and book restorers in the world to re-bind the books
- enlist @mspringut to build a gorgeous, classical stone and glass library whose mere edifice stands as a testament to human knowledge, never mind its contents
- and its contents are all the rare books in the world, preserved for our posterity
- put them in the library
- require (free) membership to visit (now it’s non-public, members only, might get you around the legal stuff)
>> new human library of Alexandria

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@jamesoniam @drivewithchip this is so cool 🙌🏼

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@tomas_salvo22 so cool! where can I pre-order a self build kit? 🧐

[dev3pack @dev3pack]

Build4Venezuela 🇻🇪

Humanitarian hackathon to support Venezuela after the earthquake, until June 28 🙏🏼

👥 Verified directories

🗺️ Maps to report needs by area

🤖 Whatsapp bot to guide families

🛠️ Tools for coordination

📣 Translate critical information

🤝 Tracking systems

🔗 https://t.co/m6oidkmJFH

[Ada Ferrer @Adita_Ferrer]

Help Venezuela From Abroad: Cash Donations Matter Most Right Now | Caracas Chronicles https://t.co/EaMNhoGtSP

[gabriel @gabriel1]

we're hiring! for onsites we fly people to sweden until our US visas are done

you'll enjoy working with us if you always have work top of mind, enjoy rational product dicussions, and want to build/sell/market something amazing

reach out through a mutual or otherwise dms!

[a16z @a16z]

The mission statement SpaceX adopted when it absorbed xAI in February reads: "scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars."

This is, depending on how you read it, either the most ridiculous thing a serious company has ever put on its mission page or the most honest. We think it’s the latter.

If you squint at the org chart, SpaceX is a launch provider with an internet subsidiary and a recently-acquired AI lab.

If you squint at the technology roadmap, it’s the only company on Earth assembling the full prerequisite stack for the post-scarcity transition.

If you squint at the mission statement, it’s a serious attempt by one of the most operationally capable founders of our time to push humanity through the bottleneck that ends with us either as an interplanetary species sharing the cosmos with intelligent machines we built, or as a footnote on one rocky planet that didn’t make the leap.

SpaceX & the Sentient Sun, by @mikemcg0 and @pmarca: https://t.co/0CkG3Dvyi6

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

Elite level book marketing

[Axios @axios]

SCOOP: Top White House officials believe NYT reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their new book.

Such a taped leak would be a shocking breach of one of the most secure settings on Earth. https://t.co/9gglgVCO1n

[Just Another Pod Guy @TMTLongShort]

What comes next:

The govt will rollout an emergency citizenship program for any foreign-born employee working in a lab contingent on them immediately moving to the U.S.

Everyone will be heavily vetted via the same screening construct already utilized by the defense primes.

Google will have to move the entirety of DeepMind to the U.S. and fire whoever refuses to relocate.

People will gleefully assume Demis will just start his own UK lab instead before realizing the next step is the US is about to gut foreign “unmonitored” access to compute.

You can pull a LeCun but you won’t have sufficient compute to do shit.

Greencards will be given to family members too.

Foreign govts will freak out when they realize what is happening. We are gatekeeping and hoarding intelligence preemptively.

Why? Because by GPT 7 France will be like “oh you just destroyed our services sector we are going to tax the labs to pay for the necessary benefits to prevent riots” and it’s a lot easier to do that if labs have critical employees based in Paris. Ditto for every other foreign nation.

Anyone acting like this is surprising is simply incapable of thinking four steps ahead.

We are going to see industries nuked over night. There will be civil unrest. The only way to navigate that is to tax and gatekeep. The only way you can tax something is if it lives in your borders. We are repatriating exposure points preemptively.

Compute gatekeeping comes next.

🫡

[Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross @alexwg]

https://t.co/56Lcgh1nb6

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@signulll the selling point being an entirely tech-bro free dining experience?

[Pedro Torres-Mackie @pedro]

@tallsnail I took my daughter to see the Starship launch last week in TX. During the day we visited a sea turtle sanctuary and saw dolphins on a boat tour.

On the flight back home I asked what her favorite part was. She said it was the hotel pool.

We have a pool at home.