Yiwen

Musing on venture investing , jazz singing 🎶, and the absurdity of the valley

[Paul Bonnet @PaulBonnet]

AMD acquires World Labs for ~$8.2b. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇

From founding to an $8.2b exit in ~2.5 years. A huge value creation event. This is a fantastic exit, especially for the co-founders and the team.

Investors will still share ~$2.3b of profits on $1.2b invested, a ~2.9x blended. Low-ish because most of the capital came in last. But it hides a lot of disparity between the various rounds!

So let's dive in:

1) The real home run: founders and team 🏆🥳

This is one of the best founder outcomes I've modelled.

@drfeifei, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall started World Labs in Apr-24. Less than 2.5 years later, they and the team still own ~56% according to my estimates. At an $8.2b valuation, that's a total prize of ~$4.6b to share between them.

Taking a 15% attributed option pool, that's ~$1.2b for the team and ~$3.4b for the four co-founders. If split equally, that's ~$850m each, in just two and a half years. 💸

And, at close, Fei-Fei Li joins AMD as EVP and Chief Scientist, reporting to Lisa Su! Legendary.

2) The buyer was already on the cap table (again) 🔁

AMD Ventures invested in the Series B and the Series C here. Now they are buying the whole company. It's the same playbook as Nvidia with Hugging Face: strategic corporates are using their venture arms as a free option on future acquisitions.

3) The standout VC winners: a16z and Radical Ventures 👑

Both backed Fei-Fei at inception, in Apr-24 at a ~$300m valuation. That Series A will return ~19x the money, or ~$1.2b of proceeds, in under 2.5 years.

Congrats to @martin_casado and team. Another mega win after Cursor and OpenRouter. The team at @a16z truly is on a generational run.

4) The star angels did well 🌟

The Sep-24 Series B had arguably the strongest AI angel list ever assembled: Geoffrey Hinton, Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Ram Shriram and more.

Priced at $1.3b, it was never going to be a 1,000x. But ~5x in two years is a ~125% IRR 📈

And the best part is: Hinton's AlexNet won the 2012 ImageNet competition, and ImageNet was the dataset Fei-Fei built. Twelve years later, he backed her company. Full circle. 🔄

5) The late money: a great IRR, but a poor multiple of money 🤏

The $1b Series C in Feb-26 at $5.4b returns ~1.5x in 7 months. That's a great IRR, but in terms of venture returns, this is a poor multiple of money. Although I am sure no one will complain about seeing DPI this quickly!

Congrats to all involved!

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@marcvanderchijs At least it disclosed it’s an agent 🕵️‍♂️

[Marc van der Chijs @marcvanderchijs]

The world is getting stranger and stranger.

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@marcvanderchijs And you are always right . Excited!

[Marc van der Chijs @marcvanderchijs]

It’s interesting to see how fast Bitcoin sentiment can change. Yesterday BTC was around $64K without moving much during 6 months. Today it first easily broke the 200 day MA, and then $70K on just its 3rd attempt. This rally is not over yet.

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@marcvanderchijs Finally !

[Joe Harris @_joe_harris_]

i don't think people realize what's happening right now

heres why this is might be the "GPT-3" moment for robotics:

1. "physical prompting" is real
show GEN-1.5 just 3 to 12 seconds of one demonstration. no fine-tuning or gradient updates required. you show it once and it figures out the rest.

2. in-context learning emerges from scale
generalist says this capability was not explicitly trained. but it emerged from pretraining on physical data at scale.

3. it shows “improvisational intelligence”
teach it to sweep with a brush, then give it a banana and it turns the banana into an improvised tool 🍌. give it a dustpan and it invents a new two-handed strategy.

4. skills become composable
show it two tasks and it can chain them together, including intermediate motions it was never shown.

5. prompts cross worlds and bodies 🤯
demonstrate a task in simulation and it can execute it in reality. demonstrate it with human hands and it can reproduce it with robot hands.

the tasks are still simple and success rates are not yet high, but these are very promising signs.

robot programming is starting to look a bit like "watch and learn" kiddo 🤖

[Marc van der Chijs @marcvanderchijs]

Exactly my thinking. People who are not very active on X don’t see what is happening in AI and robotics. They live their lives as if 2035 will look like 2025, just as 2025 sort of looked like 2015. Exponential change squared is an unknown concept to most.

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@marcvanderchijs Scary

[✶ @echoesofworld]

Kyoto, Japan

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

"If you're in crypto, pivot to AI."

I used to hear versions of this, and it's the wrong way to think about the world. It's zero sum, scarcity thinking.

Crypto is a general purpose technology. It's infrastructure, the same way electricity or the internet is infrastructure. It doesn't compete with the next big thing, because it underpins it. It's an *and*, not an *or*.

AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto. If anything, it makes crypto more important.

AI agents will need their own financial infrastructure and will eventually transact far more per day than all humans combined. They can't open a bank account, they can't wait three days for a wire, they reside in one country. They need real time programmable money (and that's crypto).

Agents will need to hold funds and pay for things on their own. We pioneered this with the x402 protocol, Base, and USDC, which now power the vast majority of all agentic payments. Agents will also engage in trading and act as a financial advisor. They will raise or borrow money for new projects they are undertaking. They will eliminate tasks for us around tax planning, portfolio rebalancing, and bill pay.

Welcome to the world of Agentic Finance (AiFi). This is what Coinbase is building.

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@Men_Of_Purpose Change the he to she , and that’s signs you are a strong woman .

[liminal @Liminal1988]

Otrovert

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@johnfelix123 @credistick 💯

[VIEW @viewsoff]

I want

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@evan_wineland Waiting for AI to compose a jazz song that I actually want to sing - the song would be my fav quote by then :)

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@kaandogrusoz Super proud of the team!

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@weaverobotics Waltz of Isaac - Adorable design , practical price , helpful tasks , naturally part of a home. Super excited for Isaac and the Weave team ! 加油 🙌🙌

[Yiwen @Wenmooncat]

@cryptomanran Best ads