Today, our team is excited to announce @InspiredCap Fund IV, $450M in new capital to back early-stage founders. There has never been a moment in history when more is possible. It takes just one person with exceptional ambition to take on the world’s problems and change billions of lives for the better.

Lots of VCs kindof sound like this: "Your basketball team doesn't have a moat, any healthy human can throw the ball into the basket thingy. " People who have not run companies before don't understand how much the team matters more than some imagined structural moat.

Show me an EB/BB/PE Summer ‘27 offer letter, and I will introduce you to meaningful and exciting startups (in your geo & industry of choice) who will still scratch the must-address prestige/logo itch. Seriously… I’ve been in your shoes. DM’s open.

Today @standinsurance announced $70M at a $1B valuation, led by @Saga_Ventures. A year ago, we insured $1B of property. Today it's $10B. Disasters follow the laws of physics. Insurance should too. Here's what our team is building:

This angle is perfection

Long Island is one of the most interesting places in the world. Smart, wealthy, hard-working people, most of whom have some real connection to NYC (work there, child lives there, ancestors there) but who hate it. Wonderful geography that is mostly wasted. Bizarre culture.

In 2016, on Tuesday, looking at data rolling in, I told the then-global head of rates at JPM that Trump would win. It was not, shall we say, a consensus call at the time. So I want to talk a little bit about what I'm seeing right now, since the timeline is going crazy. On a trading desk, it matters more to be right than to be popular, and it matters more to be right than to predict what you want to happen. I have the curse of being a mathematician by training. So I still have the muscles, even if I don't use them as much. Right now I would say this: 1 - Anyone who thinks they know anything with high confidence you should immediately discount in this election cycle. 2 - The error bars on races, especially the swing races in the Senate, are likely so large that polling may not be particularly predictive. 3 - There are conflicting cross factors that really are making a mess out of some of the traditional polling which is causing this. Namely, what I'm seeing is a few things that gives me major heartburn. First, non-response rates to polls are now so high I think it's impossible to know if we have a representative sample of any subgroup. We can 100% get the aggregate weighting correct to voter turnout, but when you model your R sample at 10% crossover votes and get 4%, or your I sample at mildly D leaning at +2% but instead get +10%, it means all your re-weighting was an exercise in false specificity. Second, we have major conflicts in the data. People are claiming they did not vote for Trump in 2024 when we are pretty sure they did, and we are getting R samples in some swing states where if the sample is correct about the sides voting in 2024, Harris would be president (she's not, if you've been in a coma). At the same time, we have young people looking maybe way more like they did in 2022 than 2026, and we know we are missing a large chunk of that sample because they never fucking answer the phone, so the net result is... ... ...? Yeah, nobody knows. Third, mutually combative forces. Anti-incumbency is a thing in mid-term elections, it's also a thing in American politics where "fuck the guy in charge I hate it here" seems to be stronger than partisanship in an increasing number of cases. This means that helps Dems in red states but hurts Dems in blue states? The reverse would be true for Republicans. These kinds of forces produce compression. Fourth, social media and Twitter are not the real world, but the distortionary forces here are influencing the polling landscape, where I would imagine the most media-connected people are also the ones taking polls, which leads to the invisible sample also being the ones in a different discourse bubble than the ones on here. The punch line is simple: take any error bar and triple it. Quadruple if you're in Maine or something. We don't know anything, and any confident prediction about Dems taking the Senate or Republicans holding the House are almost certainly wrong. Not in their specific outcome, but rather, in good process. All pigs are fish therefore 2+2 = 4 type thinking. Right now, depending on how you want to torture the data, you can see any outcome from R/R to D/D and any middle state. We've had large polling misses meaning we should be favoring Dems (NJ governor, anyone?), Rs being underweighted in the past meaning we should favor them (IA, anyone?), and just internal polling that was way off (El-Sayed way up in the primary, anyone?). Anyone giving you a confident hot take here, in short, is full of it. Even the early voting is not uniform, and while the information content there is not always high, there is usually not zero, and if you're looking at data from GA vs. OH, you aren't getting the exact same vibes, much less some other places. In short: national politics is getting weirder, polling is getting harder, the parties are fragmenting internally, and nobody knows shit yet. Good news, though: they'll all claim they were right after the fact. What you should do is track both predictions and process to see who is really worth listening to over time.

My current Grok @bot setup: Santa: Keeps a running gift list for friends and family and pings me when it finds a good deal. Also keeps a budget per person. Travel Agent: Finds and compares flights and rental cars for my trips, so I don't have to dig through ten different sites. I just give it dates and a few details and it will fill it out all the way to checkout. Vehicle Maintenance: Went through my email and receipts to build a full service history (brakes, oil, tires, etc). Invoice: Makes invoices in my template and drafts the email to send them. Tutor: Makes custom coloring books that teach my kids reading and math. I just print them off. Golf: Alerts me when my friends post rounds on GHIN. Also built a feature to track my strokes gained and help with course management. Interior Design: I upload photos of a room and try out new paint colors and furniture layouts. Garden: Built my seed planting calendar for my zone and keeps track of lessons learned, fertilizing, water use, and yields. Also mocks up landscaping ideas. Home Maintenance: A log of everything I do to the house, from custom cabinets to paint colors to filter changes. Any time I update or change something I log it. Weekender: Every Thursday evening it sends 10-15 things to do nearby for the upcoming weekend, from concerts to chili cook-offs to sports events, plus it creates a separate list for the kids. Woodworking: I upload a project idea (owl house, bookshelf, hanging garden beds) and get a cut list, a materials list, estimated cost, and step by step build instructions. Book & Movie Tracker: I log and review everything I finish. Eventually it'll recommend what's next. Accountant: Hooked up to my bank accounts so it fills in my income and expenses in a Google Sheet automatically. Sauna: Researching builds and reviews. Consolidator: Has it reviewing all of my emails that I get from teachers (multiple times a day) and automatically puts events on my calendar. Then at the end of the day it preps me for what events are the next day. This is just the tip of the iceberg. If anyone has any other ideas drop them in the comments.

Mark Zuckerberg becomes a viral meme after taking an awkward sip of Guinness. @jasongay on the Meta boss appearing to wrestle with the very simple human ritual of…taking a sip of beer. 🔗 on.wsj.com/4zr0jbc

How the fuck do people have a NEWBORN and a TODDLER at the same time. Thats fucking crazy bro thats legit insane

One of the worst predictors of founder success we've tracked is how well someone pitches; the correlation between pitch quality and outcome was often negative. Zuckerberg was so awkward in early investor meetings that VCs wondered if he could ever manage anyone, and Larry Page refused interviews and earnings calls for years. Bezos had to pitch 60 different investors to raise his initial $1 million. Highly articulate people are great with the 30min process of telling a story to strangers, but this is a pretty different skill to building a company. Founders who spend years optimising to be persuasive have often optimised away from the building skills that compound over the 10yrs of execution that come afterwards; it’s incredibly hard to do both well. The articulate founder will impress your partners but the awkward one will return your fund.