the inception fund. helping the bold start. first check for technical founders. Cybersecurity, AI infrastructure, physical AI, agents, the weird. since 2010

Miami, Boston, SF, NY
Joined September 2010
boldstart ventures retweeted
this is the new era of cybersecurity 🤯 mass scale that's only going to get worse, and zero if not negative time to defend millions of attempts in a couple hours, some before disclosure even happened... no human SOC keeps up with that, defense has to be agents + compute running 24/7
Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
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boldstart ventures retweeted
Big news! 🚀 Systalyze has been selected for multi-million dollar NSF award to make AI infrastructure dramatically more efficient! Super proud of our team. Here's the NSF announcement: nsf.gov/tip/updates/nsf-anno… 🔥
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Finding vulns is easy. Shipping a fix that actually merges is the hard part. Love that @snyksec built VulnBump to measure exactly that: a fix only counts if the build and tests still pass. LLMs alone hit 59.6%. Evo's Remediation Agent takes it to 90%. xitter.cf/snyksec/status/2112652…
Finding vulnerabilities was never the hard part. Getting a fix your team will actually merge is. We built VulnBump to measure exactly that: real vulnerabilities from real projects, and a fix only counts if the build and tests still pass. LLMs alone: 59.6%. Evo Remediation Agent: 90%. Check the numbers at vulnbump.com
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New from port co @netpreme: 2–3× peak decode throughput vs. host DRAM in its XM-Sparse pilot testbed. The bigger idea is scaling memory independently of compute so GPUs can serve more agents with longer context. Exciting progress toward that future. xitter.cf/netpreme/status/211234…
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boldstart ventures retweeted
feel for @opencode exactly what we discussed a couple of days ago... attackers have agents running 24/7. defenders can't afford to wait to deploy their own. defense needs more compute, running continuously. human teams alone can't keep pace. time to make the leap even though some things may break
fun panel yesterday to kick off @AISecSummit in SF, an unfiltered look at what's happening hacking is democratized, and only way for defenders to keep up is with more compute but so much has to be built to make it work some things at inception i'm thinking about - the physical frontier - who's securing the data centers and neoclouds, and the next headache will be billions of new intelligent devices coming online 👀 thanks @dee_bosa for moderating with @mnair1 @snyksec @JohnHultquist + Michael D'Angelo @OpenAI
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boldstart ventures retweeted
Most VC content is eye roll inducing but Ed’s series sets itself apart with a regular cadence of sharp insights. Would recommend.
Celebrating a major milestone - 10 years of What's 🔥 - haven’t missed a week! 520 issues! What started out as notes to myself and a way for me to process the week that was, has turned into a labor of love since i do enjoy writing... 🙏🏻 for reading, sending notes, and being on this journey with me… For #520, back from a whirlwind week in SF and @AISecSummit with a few thoughts: → fight agent swarms with agent swarms—we don’t have the luxury of waiting → the agents can’t hold their own keys → AI is going physical…who secures the robots and drones? → who secures the neoclouds powering all of this? Plus a look at where I’m investing next 👀 whatshot.vc/p/whats-in-aiinf…
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boldstart ventures retweeted
Awesome pod! Great to see @jadtnaous @grepr_ai with @martin_casado diving deep as AI generates more telemetry than we’ve ever seen And great answer @martin_casado on why AI won’t replace VCs or at least the ones who do the work - people and relationships will matter even more as world becomes more transactional but I hope the other way around and that it frees up to spend more time on the founder and people side And yes I’m pumped about what’s ahead for @grepr_ai
Engineering leaders told Grepr founder and CEO Jad Naous they spend 5 to 20% of their infrastructure budget on observability, and it's buying less and less reliability. Jad, a former a16z partner, joins a16z's Martin Casado to discuss whether AI can run production systems as well as it writes code. Grepr sits in a company's log stream, can scan a petabyte of logs a day, cuts observability costs by about 90%, and is building AI agents that use those signals to troubleshoot production issues. How AI is changing engineering at Jad's 10-person company: - A data lake feature that once took one engineer about six months took Jad 10 days - The gap between okay and great engineers on his team "just multiplied 10X" - He runs 3-4 agent sessions at once, with a "tech lead" agent reviewing every PR Why running live systems is a harder problem for AI: - Jad: AI can almost tune databases, but can't yet keep servers running on its own - Martin: every bit of code doubles the ways a program can behave, which is why humans still own systems - The real world is messier than AI's training data, self-driving took 20 years and $170B 0:55 From Stanford to a16z to Grepr 7:00 Why observability spend stopped paying off 11:00 From autocomplete to AI that trains engineers 13:10 Why AI widens the engineer skill gap 14:55 Syntax vs semantics 18:00 Inside Jad's AI workflow 22:55 Six months of work in 10 days 24:50 Can AI reason about how systems really run? 30:10 Why AI SRE tools start in the wrong place 32:30 Can AI run a distributed cluster yet? 37:35 Why engineers buy extra capacity over predicting 39:15 How AI could trace failures in production 43:45 Why AI for ops is harder than for code 49:55 Can AI do a VC's job? 52:05 Why self-driving took 20 years and $170B 57:05 Customers skipped the AI pitch for the 90% savings YouTube: youtu.be/blkIGLlZePg @jadtnaous @grepr_ai @martin_casado
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boldstart ventures retweeted
this is what we do, inception, nothing better than waiting for the company to incorporate and for founders to get their 83b elections set! we are seeing so many amazing opportunities at the moment - what a time to be building 🏗️ LFG
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congrats @edsim!
Celebrating a major milestone - 10 years of What's 🔥 - haven’t missed a week! 520 issues! What started out as notes to myself and a way for me to process the week that was, has turned into a labor of love since i do enjoy writing... 🙏🏻 for reading, sending notes, and being on this journey with me… For #520, back from a whirlwind week in SF and @AISecSummit with a few thoughts: → fight agent swarms with agent swarms—we don’t have the luxury of waiting → the agents can’t hold their own keys → AI is going physical…who secures the robots and drones? → who secures the neoclouds powering all of this? Plus a look at where I’m investing next 👀 whatshot.vc/p/whats-in-aiinf…
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Hacking is democratized. The only way defenders keep up is more compute and their own agent swarms, and so much still has to be built to make that work. @edsim kicking off @AISecSummit in SF with an unfiltered look at what's happening. xitter.cf/edsim/status/211073004…
fun panel yesterday to kick off @AISecSummit in SF, an unfiltered look at what's happening hacking is democratized, and only way for defenders to keep up is with more compute but so much has to be built to make it work some things at inception i'm thinking about - the physical frontier - who's securing the data centers and neoclouds, and the next headache will be billions of new intelligent devices coming online 👀 thanks @dee_bosa for moderating with @mnair1 @snyksec @JohnHultquist + Michael D'Angelo @OpenAI
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boldstart ventures retweeted
SF mornings ☕️ talking software factories, agent identity and intent with @guypod @ianlivingstone
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boldstart ventures retweeted
and exactly what we discussed on The AI Security Summit panel yesterday evening... The only way for defenders to keep up with hackers is with compute and their own agentic swarms. To that end, huge release from @snyksec today - Snyk's Evo is a team of security agents that finds, fixes and blocks vulns as fast as coding agents write them. 90% mergeable fixes vs 59.6% for general LLMs, with 61% fewer tokens The key is every fix is checked independently of the agent that wrote it Snyk basically invented developer-first security, and now they're making it agent-first. congrats Ken MacAskill, Manoj Nair + Snyk team
fun panel yesterday to kick off @AISecSummit in SF, an unfiltered look at what's happening hacking is democratized, and only way for defenders to keep up is with more compute but so much has to be built to make it work some things at inception i'm thinking about - the physical frontier - who's securing the data centers and neoclouds, and the next headache will be billions of new intelligent devices coming online 👀 thanks @dee_bosa for moderating with @mnair1 @snyksec @JohnHultquist + Michael D'Angelo @OpenAI
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boldstart ventures retweeted
🎯 every agent action has to map to intent… biggest problem as agents proliferate in every system an agent found a stray token and deleted a prod database + backups in 9 seconds the token worked exactly as designed… it just had no idea what the agent was actually trying to do auth for agents has to know who it's acting for, what the task needs, and give access that expires when the job's done must read from @ianlivingstone @keycardai xitter.cf/ianlivingstone/status/…
We've spent a lot of time at @KeycardAI thinking about how authentication and authorization need to evolve as agents take on more work. API keys and OAuth scopes were never designed to account for tasks, delegation between agents, or agents acting on their own. I wrote about how we're approaching this and what we think needs to change. keycard.ai/blog/defining-aut…
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boldstart ventures retweeted
fun panel yesterday to kick off @AISecSummit in SF, an unfiltered look at what's happening hacking is democratized, and only way for defenders to keep up is with more compute but so much has to be built to make it work some things at inception i'm thinking about - the physical frontier - who's securing the data centers and neoclouds, and the next headache will be billions of new intelligent devices coming online 👀 thanks @dee_bosa for moderating with @mnair1 @snyksec @JohnHultquist + Michael D'Angelo @OpenAI
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The memory wall is the AI bottleneck you can't buy your way past with more GPUs. Tonight at #OCPSummit26, @RakeshCheerla of @netpreme joins @nebiusai, @dMatrix_AI, @cerebras and Napatech to dig in. At OCP? Be in that room. xitter.cf/netpreme/status/210975…
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LFG
Our mid-term vision is a world w/ billions of robots. Some will be humanoid, but we believe there will be a Cambrian explosion of form factors. These robots will be run by thousands of startups & businesses in every industry. All powered by a @GeneralistAI brain. It starts today
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boldstart ventures retweeted
agents deleting prod databases in 9 seconds 👀 @satyanadella nailed why: "separate the supply of intelligence from the authority over it" @keycardai +along with @Docker, @Barclays and @SocketSecurity just dropped an open reference architecture for securing autonomous software factories… sandbox, network, supply chain, identity, go add your feedback @ianlivingstone and team have been building the underlying infra for agent identity and dynamic real time access and authorization for the last 2 years… great to see the rest of the world catching up and ready 🔥
Today we're publishing the first draft of the Agent Baseline Software Factory Reference Architecture! An opinionated blueprint for securing increasingly autonomous software factories, built with folks across the community. It's open for feedback and contributions! agentbaseline.org/reference-…
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Agents will make mistakes at machine speed. The fix isn't trusting them more, it's being able to pull their access the instant something goes wrong. @ianlivingstone and @KeycardAI are building that kill switch. xitter.cf/insecureagents/status/…
"That ability to immediately revoke an agent's access or kill its ability to perform an action is fundamental." - @ianlivingstone CEO @KeycardAI Tomorrow: the Software Factory Reference Architecture drops, built on 6 Agent Baseline outcomes including Respond.
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Every agent is an identity, and every identity has a blast radius. Access tells you who gets in; @bigidsecure shows you what they can actually reach. That's the question every CISO should be asking about their AI right now. xitter.cf/bigidsecure/status/210…
Your AI has access. But to what, exactly? 🤖 Users, apps, and AI agents can reach more sensitive data than ever. BigID connects identity, access, and the data itself, so you can see exactly what they can reach and where exposure exists. Access tells you who gets in. BigID shows you what they can get to. See the difference: bit.ly/4xDPIZj
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boldstart ventures retweeted
Satya Nadella is right. The most trustworthy system is the one that lets you trust the model the least. In January I wrote that by the end of 2026 AI agents would overtake humans as the top source of insider-style risk, not because they are malicious, but because they can be manipulated or misconfigured at scale. That is the operating reality now. The same principle has to hold where agents are writing the code in software factories. Traditional AppSec was built to ration scarce human attention. The backlog was the residue of that rationing. Agents removed the scarcity of labor. The only scarce thing left is human judgment, and it belongs on setting the bar and governing the system, not sitting inside every decision. Controls that decide what an agent can see, what tools or skills it can use, and what actions it can take have to sit outside the model. The generator cannot be the validator. Independent verification, including testing the running result the way an attacker would, is what keeps this from becoming nested black boxes. Separate the supply of intelligence from the authority over it. That is the work.
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