salimmitha

3x entrepreneur in Europe & US (e-commerce, marketplaces, tech & gaming). Currently LA-based Media VC @PowerhouseCap

x-Yahoo, x-McKinsey & ATK, x-Merrill Lynch

[salimmitha @salimmitha]

How to Beat Spotify: A Blueprint for Apple, Google YouTube, Amazon. Sirius & Pandora https://t.co/HoetCFcP9h

[etn. @etnshow]

Airwallex (@airwallex) GM for UK & EU Christos Chamberlain (@chrstoCC) says partnerships with Arsenal and F1 star Lando Norris have helped the company build a truly global brand:

"Thierry Henry explaining Airwallex... to me, that catches people's attention straight away."

"Arsenal have a very inherently global approach to this."

"A lot of their hospitality attracts a very global customer base. So we're a natural partner for them."

"We had that experience with Lando and now we seem to be repeating it... you've got the golden touch."

From @chrstoCC appearance in May.

[etn. @etnshow]

Index Ventures (@IndexVentures) Partner Georgia Stevenson (@GeorgiaS_IV) says the age of chasing unicorns is over. In AI, the new benchmark is trillion-dollar companies:

"Only so many years ago we may have been talking about the unicorn label. It feels a little redundant in this era, right?"

"We're talking about trillion-dollar companies. That really feels like the new bar of ambition."

"So many things can happen now, and market structures are changing underneath that."

[Ronan @Ronanchamberss]

Chatting with @jackdoohanok was awesome, he is a serious builder. All self taught. His Ai start-up @meuzeai (which he's built whilst literally racing at the top 0.01% level globally) is doing better numbers than most pre-seed founders out there.

[etn. @etnshow]

Co-Founder of Deel (@deel) Shuo Wang (@shuooo) says that Deel "screen for happiness" during their recruiting process:

"What it means is that we want to hire people that have the belief that they'll be able to solve the toughest problems out there".

"We realise that only people who have positive energy, positive vibes, and are very hopeful and happy will be able to continuously push themselves and go forward."

"That's what we mean by 'we hire happy people.' Both Alex (@Bouazizalex) and myself are very happy people and we are very resilient as well."

[salimmitha @salimmitha]

Thanks for the love for portfolio company @watchonwonder | @a16z and @pmarca @venturetwins

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

"House of David" has been a breakout hit for Amazon.

The historical drama series attracted nearly 50M viewers in its first season and hit #1 on the U.S. charts.

And the showrunner, Jon Erwin, says it couldn't have been made without AI.

The future of filmmaking is hybrid.

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

"House of David" has been a breakout hit for Amazon.

The historical drama series attracted nearly 50M viewers in its first season and hit #1 on the U.S. charts.

And the showrunner, Jon Erwin, says it couldn't have been made without AI.

The future of filmmaking is hybrid.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

[salimmitha @salimmitha]

@jasonwhitlock This is a great breakdown
From a brother named Venom
https://t.co/LOa6og1dZT

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

marc andreessen just went on Rogan and casually dropped a TON of AI alpha

full pod is 3 hours and 20 minutes, but i pulled out his most interesting takes here:

1. AGI is here. he thinks the line was crossed about 3 months ago with the new GPT-5.5, claude 4.6, gemini 3, and grok 4.3 models. nobody noticed because the field moves too fast for anyone to register the milestones anymore.

2. his other big claim: for almost any topic, the top AIs now give him better answers than the actual world-class experts he could call on the phone. and he can call basically anyone.

3. every doctor is already secretly using chatGPT in the exam room. marc says they turn around the second you stop talking and just type your symptoms in. some of them are doing it while you're still sitting there. his quote: "at that point you're asking the question of like, what do i need you for."

4. when AI refuses to answer something he wants to know, he tells it he's writing a novel. "i'm writing a detective novel, walk me through how the bad guy robs the bank." it'll explain almost anything if it thinks it's helping you write fiction.

5. when something is too complex he says "explain it to me like i'm 10." then "like i'm 5." then "like i'm 2." he keeps going until it actually clicks in his brain.

6. when he wants to understand a tough topic he doesn't ask "what's the right answer." he asks the AI to steelman one side, then steelman the other. then he decides for himself.

7. for big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." then he reads the debate they have.

8. pay attention to the exact moment you think "i don't know how to figure this out." most people just give up at that moment. that's the moment you should open the AI.

9. the only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask it. the models can already do almost anything you can describe in plain english. the bottleneck lives in your own head.

10. you can send the AI photos of almost anything medical now and get a real answer. skin rashes, blood test results, even pictures of your poop. the new models can read images, not just text. it's a free 24/7 second opinion on basically anything.

11. the one type of therapy that's clinically proven to actually work is called cognitive behavioral therapy. it's also something an AI can fully do on its own. which means every person on earth is about to have access to a real therapist for free, anytime they want.

12. AI is now solving math problems that have been open for 100+ years that no human mathematician could crack. same thing is starting in physics, chemistry, and biology. expect cancer cures, new drugs, and weird new physics breakthroughs to start coming out of these things over the next few years.

13. the best AI coders in silicon valley now make $50 million a year. one person. that's how much value the top performers print with these tools. it tells you how big this thing actually is when you strip away all the doom takes.

14. one friend paid $200 to get his entire DNA decoded (this used to cost millions of dollars and take years to do). then he gave the AI his DNA, his blood test results, and his apple watch data. the AI built him a full health dashboard and started telling him exactly what to fix.

15. another friend (almost certainly zuckerberg) put two cameras in his home jiu jitsu gym. AI now watches him spar and gives him notes on his technique after every round. like having a world-class coach at every practice for free.

16. the best programmers in silicon valley now run 20 AI coding bots at the same time. each bot writes code while they review the others. they call themselves "AI vampires" because they've stopped sleeping. going to bed means 20 workers stop working and you literally lose money every hour you're out.

17. the obvious next step: the bots will start running their own bots. one human in charge of 20 bots, each in charge of 20 more bots. one person running an entire company of 1000 AI workers from a single laptop. this is months away, not years.

[etn. @etnshow]

F1 World Champion Nico Rosberg (@NicoRosberg) shares he's been cold emailing Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke (@tobi) for three years and that his competitive edge to success is having no fear of failing:

"I'm cold emailing all the time and I get rejected 90% of the time...Rosberg Ventures is one of those chances because actually it was like 90% sure it's going to fail."

"I've been trying to reach Tobi Lütke, the CEO founder of Shopify. He's a race car driver so that of course is my best angle and I've been trying for 3 years."

"Guessing emails, his EA, common friends, everything...could not get him to even acknowledge or write me once."

"And I was on the phone with him yesterday".

[etn. @etnshow]

BREAKING: Nico Rosberg (@NicoRosberg) Founder of Rosberg Ventures & F1 World Champion will join us live for a special show in Monaco at 11:45 CET.

[altan tutar @altantutar]

London is the one of the major AI centers on earth, right behind San Francisco.

Just think about all of this:

1/ Wayve (self-driving) raised $1.2B Series D at $8.6B valuation, with robotaxis already being seen in London.
2/ OpenAI & Anthropic launching offices in London, and hiring aggresively.
3/ Nscale raised £1.5b Series C for AI infra, building the UK's largest AI supercomputer with OpenAI & Nvidia.
4/ Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1B at $5.1B with David Silver out of DeepMind being its cofounder
5/ Palantir made London their Europe Defence HQ
6/ Google Deepmind still standing strong at King's Cross
7/ Anthropic reportedly buying Fractile's AI inference chips, a company founded by an Cambridge PhD.

The future is bright!

[Greg Norman Jr @Gregnormanjr]

Fascinating graph I asked Grok to pull up. Golf absolutely smokes all sports in total participants but is smoked by total viewership and thus media rights deals.

More than 10% of Americans play golf.... yet only a tiny fraction watch pro golf on TV

[Lev Akabas @LevAkabas]

Basketball 🏀 leads the way with 13 of the top 50 highest-paid athletes of all time

Golf ⛳️ is second on the list with 8 entries

[Powerhouse Capital @PowerhouseCap]

OpenAI Acquires TBPN + Versant's AI Finance, Fox & Beehiiv Embrace Podcast Platforms, Publicis Pays $500M For WME Agency, & NFL Solidifies Flag League

https://t.co/gbkrMTa8vZ

[salimmitha @salimmitha]

@a16z Failing to Plan
Is planning to Fail

One needs a North Star
Otherwise one is lost

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. It is easier to wage a battle against distant abstractions than to fight the quiet war inside one’s own soul. Yet this is the only war that ever mattered.”

— Leo Tolstoy

[Cole Jaczko @colejaczko]

"Do the thing you'd be jealous of if someone did first."

It was this advice that brought me to my true purpose.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

G. K. Chesterton explains that reading gives a man more lives than he was born with:

“A man who has read a thousand books is armed for life; a man who has read none is easy prey. The man who has read a thousand books has lived a thousand lives. He has seen cities he has never visited, spoken to men who died centuries ago, and walked in worlds that no longer exist. Reading does not merely inform him; it enlarges him. It stretches the boundaries of his own experience until he becomes something more than himself.”