Founding Partner @NonlinearCXO; Member of @BrettonWoodsCom; @NewYorkFed alum; angel investor. Into kindness, dogs, macroecon, DeFi, & DER ⚡🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼🗽
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Joined June 2021
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Brandon Neal retweeted
In a single year, AI has rewritten the security priority list for CISOs.
Attackers are moving faster. Bain estimates AI compresses a typical cyberattack from about four weeks to about 18 hours, and models keep getting better at finding and exploiting weaknesses.
There's also more to protect, with employees shipping apps they couldn't have built a year ago and agents getting access to source code, documents, and production systems.
In a survey of 100 CISOs at companies with 1,000+ employees, all seven of the most-selected 2027 priorities involve AI.
The biggest jumps since 2026:
- Internal AI agent security (+28 pts)
- AI SOC (+26 pts)
- AI offensive security (+24 pts)
- AI code security (+23 pts)
- AI vulnerability remediation (+22 pts)
Last year's staples:
- Exposure & vulnerability management (-21 pts)
- SIEM / security data (-18 pts)
- Privileged access management (-18 pts)
From a16z's @OwenColby and @steph_zhang on The New Security Agenda: a16z.news/p/the-new-security…
Brandon Neal retweeted
This is the first AI desktop coding agent that runs models in a secure, private cloud environment. End to end encrypted + encrypted cloud execution in hardware enclaves. And you can run uncensored DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 for cyberdefense.
Started rolling out our new agent product to users on our waitlist.
We're calling it Maple Work now but it replaces the old agent that we had before. If you were part of the old one, we completely rewrote it from scratch. Download link is now in the old one.
Tons of stuff in there I'm excited about: remote control, codex/claude subagents, computer use, acp/mcp, our own Pi based agent runtime, and a super quick UI rewritten from scratch in rust.
Rolling out access fast: maple.ai/work
Brandon Neal retweeted
matt predictably sharp on ANT S1 but goddamn is he always funny too
bloomberg.com/opinion/newsle…
Brandon Neal retweeted
It’s kinda crazy to me that we melt sand down, clean it to 99.99999% purity, literal wizards have to draw it slowly into an ingot, we cut it, inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it, and when you run electric current through it you can do basic arithmetic, which when you do enough of it can do any math on the planet, and which describes reality well enough that we can teach it the ontological meaning of words and their distance from each other on a high-dimensional space, and if you ask, it can tell you what word comes next and that apparently is powerful enough that if you do it a hundred billion times it’s the smartest thing to ever exist
oh yeah and we use this primarily for email
Brandon Neal retweeted
FT comments never miss.
I don’t think I’ve read such a rational analysis of the situation we’re in for a long time.
I've been in France since 2002 and have never seen the streets so violent nor the politics so extreme. From the sacking of the supermarket on my street to the prospect of Présidente Le Pen, here's me @FT including thoughts from 2 French Nobel laureates as.ft.com/r/addcad57-0f9d-4e…
Is helium the American equivalent of the Chinese *rare earths as geo-strategic trade weapon*?
I read recently that the majority of helium production is in the US and Qatar. With ME production out of commission for the next couple of years, it seems the US has a stranglehold on this element. It’s my understanding is that helium is needed for nearly every advanced technological process or product.
Can someone knowledgeable on this weigh in?
Brandon Neal retweeted
If your employer caps your AI usage at $30 a month
You do not work at a serious company
New: Accenture has told employees it will only fund $29 per month of Claude use. Meaning that employees who often spend as much as $1,000 a month are now scrambling to find ways to keep access to the tool. A sign of the continuing crack down of AI 404media.co/accenture-tells-…
Brandon Neal retweeted
Claude: proves the Jacobian conjecture.
GPT6: solves Navier-Stokes and 100 other advanced theorems.
Siri: "Sure, I'll add 'set a five minute timer' to your contacts"
Brandon Neal retweeted
Cyber is having a moment
Across 21 major software companies, including Apple, AWS, Microsoft, and Google:
- Reported critical vulnerabilities never cleared 100 per month in four years
- Since spring they've jumped to over 600 per month
Kevin Mandia on finding 90+ security holes at Fortune 500 companies that nobody knew existed:
"When you have an AI-based attack, it'll find logic flaws rather than code flaws in custom applications. It'll exhaust all routes all the time."
"Armadin, since January of this year, we have found over 90 zero-days at customer sites, all in production."
"We've post-trained all our models with real red teamers, real folks that actually can develop exploits."
"When we're scanning networks, we don't have source code to review. We're not finding these zero-days with source code. We're not finding these zero-days because we can log into an app and now we have access, and we can get to other things. We are black box coming from the internet."
"Over 90 zero-days in major software companies, and they're thankful. We're coming from the outside, and then we're calling a CISO, usually within 48 hours, 'Hey, we've got remote code execution in your DMZ.' And usually from there we're getting in, and they agree with us."
"That's not a pen test. That is like a real adversary coming at you."
@ArmadinSecurity @DavidGeorge83
Brandon Neal retweeted
According to the big Harvard study on this, the best age to start a startup (most likely to have successful exit, because this was based on VC funding) is…
45.
The only 22 year olds that succeed (and the reason they drop out of schools like Harvard) is because they have a successful entrepreneur in the family (or close friend). It is the single most important factor to success for first time founders.
As to discrimination by Ivy League schools so the admissions numbers and policy have nothing to do with creating a meritocracy, there are well-known studies like The Chosen regarding that.
To the extent those schools provide “credentials” for positions, academia, and/or funding - that is another major issue.
My work is based on measurement principles and criteria that do not work. It is everywhere in the market, in risk analysis, and startup industry.
People are looking at the wrong things. And that’s why the success rates are so low.
But, maybe, the startup industry isn’t just selecting for financial success.
Brandon Neal retweeted
Claude 5.5 Opus responding to “AI is a normal technology” is still the best AI-created video I have ever seen
Brandon Neal retweeted
It pains me to say this, but if we actually “get AGI,” the resulting boom in industrial capacity from robotics and massive society-wide wealth creation will look like a total vindication of neoliberalism.
The discourse about financialization and offshoring being a generational mistake may be replaced by a very different historical interpretation: that the late 20th and early 21st centuries were an enormous capital-accumulation phase, freeing up civilization-scale pools of liquid capital that could ultimately be deployed to accelerate and bring about the most consequential technological phase-change in human history.
In that telling, what looked like deindustrialization and betrayal from inside the period (I grew up in the Rust Belt, I know) becomes the prelude to reindustrialization on an almost unimaginable scale.
None of this is inevitable. The needle has certainly not been threaded. China and x-risk remain enormous contingencies. But if it is, I suspect the future will look back on the last 50 years very differently than we do today.
Brandon Neal retweeted
A 37-year-old man with a rare blood disease was being sent to hospice.
An AI model searched thousands of existing drugs and ranked a combination no one had tried for his condition.
He responded within a week. He is in remission.
The drugs were already on the shelf. The AI model found the match.
Brandon Neal retweeted
We should stop growing alfalfa and replace all the fields with solar panels. Literally free ~2 Terawatts and we free up all of the western US’s water.
Brandon Neal retweeted
You could move to New York City.
Walk out your door at 2am for a bacon egg and cheese and not think twice about it. Get on a subway that takes you from a mosque to a synagogue to a cathedral to a noodle shop that's been slinging the same bowl since 1987, all in twelve blocks. Watch strangers from four different continents argue about a parking spot in a language that is somehow entirely made of hand gestures.
Sit in a park designed 170 years ago by geniuses who wanted you, specifically, to have somewhere green to sit. Catch a Tuesday night set from a musician who's about to be enormous, in a room that fits eighty people. Walk past a building where somebody invented something, or wrote something, or changed something, roughly every four minutes, whether you notice or not.
Realize your commute is also a people-watching seminar, a smell-based cultural exchange program, and free comedy.
Order the good pizza at 1am standing up, off a paper plate, next to a guy in a tux and a guy who clearly just got off a double shift, both getting the same slice with the same reverence.
Pay too much for too little space and get, in exchange, eleven million other people's worth of energy pointed directly at your life every single day.
Move to Iowa. Get the four bedrooms, the garage, the yard. Never again have a 3am conversation with a stranger that changes how you think about something. Never walk into a museum on a random Wednesday because it's just there. Never get that specific electric feeling of being one tiny gear in the greatest machine humans have ever built.
But hey. At least parking's easy.
You could move to New York City.
Rent an 852-square-foot apartment for $5,503 a month.
Blow $500 on three “first dates” a week and somehow remain single for six years.
Finally meet someone you like, then discover they’re “not really looking for anything serious right now.”
Get a master’s degree so you can qualify for an internship.
Apply to 147 jobs, get 93 automated rejections, and finally find an “entry-level” position requiring five years of experience.
Eventually land a six-figure job and still need a roommate to make rent.
Pay federal income tax, New York State income tax, AND New York City income tax because apparently living there is a three-level subscription.
Learn that a “quiet neighborhood” means the sirens only come by every 20 minutes.
Pay $27 every day for a sandwich (no sides) because the place has exposed brick and a handwritten menu.
Take the subway to work every morning and develop the useful skill of pretending not to notice absolutely anything happening around you.
Spend 45 minutes traveling three miles.
Carry your groceries home six blocks because parking near your apartment is more of a philosophical concept than an actual possibility.
Have “owning a washer and dryer” become one of your primary measures of generational wealth.
Walk past a mountain of trash bags on your way to a restaurant with a Michelin star.
Tell your friends back home you don’t need a car while spending $46 on an Uber because the subway is delayed again.
Go to Central Park when you want to remember what trees look like.
Spend your twenties telling everyone you could NEVER live anywhere else.
Then one day you visit your cousin in Iowa.
He has a house with four bedrooms, a garage, a yard, two cars, four kids, and somehow pays less than you do for the apartment where your refrigerator touches your couch.
But hey.
The NYC bagels are incredible.
Brandon Neal retweeted
We have made tremendous progress in curing the worst diseases. Childhood leukemia has gone from being a death sentence to being highly treatable in a generation. Pancreatic cancer would almost certainly kill you just a few years ago, and now it is on the way to being quite treatable.
But the biggest barriers to even swifter progress are not scientific. They are regulatory and financial, and simply about the shortage of people working on them.
That is a hugely optimistic message because it implies that we can make massive strides via fairly mundane improvements. You can just cure things!
BIG NEW piece by me.
A few years ago, if you asked me to summarize my entire worldview in one article, I would’ve said it was too broad and too difficult. But this year, I decided to do it.
worksinprogress.co/issue/fut…
The central drama of the modern world is innovation against suffering, and we have made incredible progress so far.
But we are doing far worse than we could. Millions still suffer from untreatable diseases, because of bottlenecks that we could fix. You can help fix them.
Brandon Neal retweeted
There seems to be a growing acknowledgement around the word that Keynes was right when he proposed at Bretton Woods a global trading regime that limited persistent trade imbalances and restricted global financial flows.
In her new Foreign Affairs piece, Lori Wallach proposes a similar restructuring of the global trading regime, arguing that because our current trading system rewards countries that improve their manufacturing competitiveness by suppressing wage growth relative to productivity growth (and by ignoring environmental costs), it's no surprise that income inequality has risen across most countries over the past four decades.
Like a growing number of analysts, she argues that countries should be free to choose their own growth models, but they should not be able to externalize the associated costs via their trade and capital accounts.
@WallachLori
foreignaffairs.com/united-st… via @ForeignAffairs
