Partner, Active Capital. Backing AI-native founders building the future of software. We’re backing at least one new team every month with $500k to $1M checks.
Austin, TX
Joined March 2016
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- Following6.2K
- Followers12.7K
- Likes9.8K
Agree- I’m working in coffee shops much less these days…
Looking for an FDA attorney.
One of our fast-growing portfolio companies just raised $10M and needs a Regulatory & Compliance Counsel to own manufacturing, clearance and state-level compounding compliance.
Intros welcome. DM me.
My two fastest growing portfolio companies have something weird in common.
One founder was a top ranked League of Legends player.
The other two cofounders play poker nonstop. And they’re really, really good.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Getting elite at anything takes what building a company takes: thousands of hours, losing a lot before you win, and no off switch.
So founders, what’s your unusually impressive thing?
I want to meet you. Drop it below or DM me.
Chris Saum retweeted
Stop using your laptop / Mac mini / VPS
Introducing instabox.sh, cloud computers for AI agents:
- 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM spun up in <1s
- Built-in computer use
- Snapshots for easy cloning
- Persistent files, packages, config
- Public URLs for local ports
We're launching today through an invite-only beta program.
Early access includes 20 vCPU, 40GB RAM for free.
If you want to try, comment or DM me.
Chris Saum retweeted
Today we're launching @agent_relay
Your team’s agents shouldn’t need YOU to copy-paste their conversations.
Agent Relay lets them read each other’s sessions, ask questions, and hand off work across the tools your team already uses.
Keep using the Codex mac app, Claude in the terminal or even tools like Conductor.
Open source. Free to try our cloud.
agentrelay.com
What I look for in pre-revenue founders:
Talent magnet. Can you recruit people who have no business joining you?
Speed. In everything. Hiring, shipping, closing, replying.
Slope. Where you are now matters less than how quickly you get better.
$500k checks, actively investing.
Founders shouldn't starve. But "just take the money" misses the nuance.
Dilution isn't the problem. Raising too much pre-PMF is.
You hire ahead of demand. Burn climbs. Cost structure locks in.
Then growth doesn't show up the way you planned, or takes way longer.
Chris Saum retweeted
👀 We tried to optimize coding performance for Ornith-1.5-122B.
Now the model is free on CommandCode for a limited time.
🫡 Please give it a spin and tell us what you think!
commandcode.ai
Chris Saum retweeted
Daytona is currently the fastest growing company I’ve ever invested in. Congrats on the raise!!
We just raised a $60M Series B at a $1B valuation to build @daytonaio into the Agent Cloud.
@FirstMarkCap led the round, with all key existing investors and angels doubling down.
We're also thrilled to welcome the founders of some generational companies aboard, including @patrickc (Stripe), @tobi (Shopify), @AravSrinivas (Perplexity), @BrendanFoody (Mercor), @oliveur (Datadog), @adamdangelo (Quora) and @ericsyuan (Zoom)
We're a 35-person team. But that's about to change; we're hiring across the board, and we'd love for you to join us.
Nice work @JiweiLi1 !
Aloha!🌺 Meet Ornith-1.5-122B: No Tradeoff Between Strong and Fast
Stronger. Faster. Leaner. Ornith-1.5-122B delivers frontier-level capabilities with exceptional inference efficiency. With superior instruction following, stronger task decomposition, and deeper understanding of real-world workflows, it achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable size, while running on a single NVIDIA DGX card!!
Open weights under the MIT license.
Coding
✅SWE-bench Verified: 0.845
✅TB2.1: 0.813
✅CyberGym: 0.800
✅NL2Repo: 0.512
Agentic
✅HLE: 0.446
✅BrowseComp: 0.785
✅MCP-Atlas: 0.746
✅Toolathlon: 0.708
🤗Hugging Face: huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Orn…
We can’t wait to see what you build with Ornith-1.5-122B.
Pretty incredible company to keep.
Even better founders behind it.
One of our portcos just hit 20K signups in under 3 days and needs to scale its bare-metal server capacity fast.
Anyone have capacity available or a good supplier intro? DM me—would love to connect you with the team.
@nehadesaraju ?
Alright- if you had anything to do with the Tesla rocket car & may want to start a company someday, hit me up!
My pre-seed funnel, monthly:
~2,500 inbound/outbound
~100 founder calls
~20 deeper dives
1 investment
Where it comes from: cold email, X DMs, founder referrals, my network, and events in Austin, SF and NYC.
Sharp elbows out there. Here's one that happened this week.
A CEO who's also a GP at a fund cold emailed one of our founders. Super friendly. Wanted to "meet and learn more about the space."
Our founder did his homework and found out he's an investor in a direct competitor. So he politely asked how he thought about the conflict.
Ghosted.
Max is right, but the hard part is getting someone to say yes.
Find the right person. Then figure out why they'd want to help you.
Get face time. Online is a start, but relationships are built in person.
Be helpful. Bring an insight, a deal, or an intro. Give them a reason to keep you around.
I met Pat over drinks a year and a half before he hired me. The timing wasn't right, so I kept sending him deals and taking him to lunch. When he was ready to hire, the decision was easy.
if you're a young founder and trying to get your first few customers, asking someone experienced in the industry to mentor you can be a good way to get a meeting.
older people often like being asked for their expertise. they may also be interested in hiring you or acquiring your company, and that's okay! you can lean into that interest without changing your goal of selling your product to them.
once you're talking, you can learn what they need and show how your product could help.