
Enterprise VC @Work_Bench | We Lead Seed Rounds with $2-4M Investments | Organizer @NYETM, @KauffmanFellows 19 | My better half is @MichaelaLehr | 305 Native
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Joined March 2008
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🚨 Big news: We’ve raised $160M for @Work_Bench Fund IV to back Seed-stage founders with massive enterprise ambitions.
Enterprise is in our DNA and with Fund IV, we’re quadrupling down.👇
Jonathan Lehr retweeted
I always love a good MS-DOS analogy 😃
"How do you scale the work that your AI-pilled people have produced into the baseline for the whole company?" is a question every company is asking and Tiles is the answer. We at @Work_Bench couldn't be more thrilled to back them
Today @kannanlakshmi and I are launching Tiles to help leaders turn scattered AI wins into company-wide transformation.
We built its precursor at @CockroachDB, which quickly transformed the way the company worked. Within a few weeks, people from every department had created and shared thousands of apps, skills and agents, and made them part of how they worked every day.
Witnessing this rapid transformation at Cockroach Labs gave us the conviction that what’s holding companies back from reaching business outcomes with AI isn’t a newer, smarter model, but an environment where sharing, learning, and collaborating with colleagues is easy. Armed with the lessons from building that first version, we left our jobs — me after 10 years, and Lakshmi after 7 — to build Tiles.
Since June, we've talked to hundreds of enterprise AI leaders. Those leaders have described similar problems: how do you scale the work that your AI-pilled people have produced into the baseline for the whole company?
Tiles is our answer to that question, and it enables teams to turn one person's best agent, app or skill into the team standard: governed, permissioned, on any model and within a company's own cloud.
Tiles is for every employee: the most AI-forward people on your team, as well as the people who just want to get their jobs done. The current conversation about AI makes it easy to believe that the second group is destined to economic failure. We couldn't disagree more. Not everyone needs to keep up with every new model release and harness update just to stay afloat. They just need what their expert colleagues have already built.
AI at work is still in its MS-DOS era. Motivated adopters get incredible value, but how many people are still staring at a blinking text box waiting for someone to help them get started? Or being told to focus on AI by leadership, with no time to figure it out amidst looming, ordinary deadlines? The Windows moment for work AI hasn’t happened yet. But we think it’s coming fast.
We're grateful to be backed by @AmplifyPartners, @Work_Bench, @CockroachDB and a group of experienced angels including @petermattis, @georgebdavis, and @Nate_Stewart.
Sign up for early access on our website, tiles.ai
🙌
.@fendien plays the long game with people and for NYC🥰
So excited to back Jordan Lewis and Lakshmi Kannan as they build Tiles AI!
This is a very full circle moment since I've known Jordan Lewis for about a decade from his time at @CockroachDB since their earliest days scaling the company in our old @Work_Bench office. Jordan grew the ranks from being a member of the technical staff to becoming VP Engineering, and along the way became a highly trusted technical advisor for us at Work-Bench too. He not only groks frontier tech but also has a knack for contextualizing it in really productive ways when teaching others.
Through this process of Tiles I've had the pleasure of meeting Lakshmi too, and her incredible PM skills complement Jordan really well as they embark on Tiles AI's vision to turn scattered AI wins into company-wide transformation.
Read more from Jordan below! 👇
Today @kannanlakshmi and I are launching Tiles to help leaders turn scattered AI wins into company-wide transformation.
We built its precursor at @cockroachlabs, which quickly transformed the way the company worked. Within a few weeks, people from every department had created and shared thousands of apps, skills and agents, and made them part of how they worked every day.
Witnessing this rapid transformation at Cockroach Labs gave us the conviction that what’s holding companies back from reaching business outcomes with AI isn’t a newer, smarter model, but an environment where sharing, learning, and collaborating with colleagues is easy. Armed with the lessons from building that first version, we left our jobs — me after 10 years, and Lakshmi after 7 — to build Tiles.
Since June, we've talked to hundreds of enterprise AI leaders. Those leaders have described similar problems: how do you scale the work that your AI-pilled people have produced into the baseline for the whole company?
Tiles is our answer to that question, and it enables teams to turn one person's best agent, app or skill into the team standard: governed, permissioned, on any model and within a company's own cloud.
Tiles is for every employee: the most AI-forward people on your team, as well as the people who just want to get their jobs done. The current conversation about AI makes it easy to believe that the second group is destined to economic failure. We couldn't disagree more. Not everyone needs to keep up with every new model release and harness update just to stay afloat. They just need what their expert colleagues have already built.
AI at work is still in its MS-DOS era. Motivated adopters get incredible value, but how many people are still staring at a blinking text box waiting for someone to help them get started? Or being told to focus on AI by leadership, with no time to figure it out amidst looming, ordinary deadlines? The Windows moment for work AI hasn’t happened yet. But we think it’s coming fast.
We're grateful to be backed by @AmplifyPartners, @Work_Bench, @CockroachDB and a group of experienced angels including @petermattis, @georgebdavis, and @Nate_Stewart.
Sign up for early access on our website, tiles.ai
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Jonathan Lehr retweeted
Another great night of poker at the @Work_Bench office! Always a fun cohosting with @Somil_Agg. Fun bringing together great engineers from @DecagonAI, @OpenAI, @percepta, @SierraPlatform, and @DistSpectrum. Awesome convos on all things personal agents, SW factories, and more
Jonathan Lehr retweeted
BRAZE has now entered the pantheon of companies acquired by Salesforce, coming as the company's 5th largest acquisition to date, trailing only Slack / Tableau / Informatica / Mulesoft
Congrats to all involved! 👏👏 @Braze
We signed a definitive agreement to acquire @Braze, a leading customer engagement platform that helps marketers build deeper customer relationships by responding to customer behavior in real time and coordinating personalized experiences across channels.
Following close, Braze’s real-time engagement and AI decisioning capabilities are expected to complement all four layers of Salesforce’s architecture — Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce, and SIforce.
Learn more: sforce.co/4eKxONJ
Pretty cool when the big dogs are posting about @GoodfireAI's research 🔥
Jonathan Lehr retweeted
This might be the most important essay of 2026.
My conversations with Nick over the past few months about his research have given me great hope for the future. I'm so happy he is sharing these findings with the world.
AI presents extremely difficult problems. We can all assume these problems are intractable and that we are doomed, or we can try and solve for a positive future.
Personally, I choose optimism. There are many challenges ahead... let us build the tools to face them head on.
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Jonathan Lehr retweeted
There is so much to say about this, and I will, but WOW, congratulations to Nick and Goodfire. This may be one of the most important single days in deep learning history, and perhaps much more than that.
No matter what, this is a victory for the dogged pursuit of understanding.
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Fun to partner with Propellor, MongoDB, and Datadog on our NYC Infra Demo Night
Great demos by @JacobMoshenko of @authzed and @0xF390 of Bitbison
it’s been an enormous privilege and joy to watch @nickcammarata cook this up over the last year. week after week, experiment after experiment, he unraveled the tangled mess of our thinking about neural nets to reveal the truth.
i never knew quite what to expect on our weekly walks. each conversation brought a torrent of new theories about the nature of AI, some conjectures teetering on the brink of madness, and others that seemed to cut through years of confusion with a single sentence.
nick is one of the great scientists of our time. his intuition and research taste are out of this world, but what sets him apart is his unmatched ability to capture the essence of what something truly is, without being lost in the details. i would highly recommend you read his entire essay if you’re curious about AI. it’s long, but written beautifully.
nick’s research makes me far more optimistic about the future of AI alignment. i hope that it can inspire the same for you.
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Jonathan Lehr retweeted
I've always been long NYC tech, but this week I am more bullish than ever
On Tuesday, we at @Work_Bench hosted our NYC50 Operator Retreat. Our goal was to bring together the very best operators in NYC for a day in beautiful Cedar Lakes, and we were very lucky to be joined by incredible people from Clay, Crosby, Harvey, Abridge, Decagon, Hebbia, Sierra, Baseten, Rogo, EliseAI, Factory, Modal, Spring Health, Blacksmith, Basis, Listen Labs, Profound, LangChain, Socure, Aaru, GovWell, Fleet AI, Inc., Parallel Web Systems, Courier Health, Ramp, Petra Labs, WithCoverage, Descope, Cogent Security, and other phenomenal companies. The companies in attendance combined to a whopping $263B in enterprise value 🤯🤯 and I'd argue that everyone is still so early in their ascent. Great people love to be around great people, and it was awesome to see people bond over the shared experiences, journey, highs and lows of being at a high growth NYC B2B company in 2026. There was this shared feeling of everyone wanting to get better together, and that combination of ambition and positive sum thinking led to a certain hunger to learn and openness to share expressed by everyone there
I could say more, but wanted to share small snippet of a heartfelt note I wrote to our team after the event on Tues:
"There are so many different ways to practice the venture business. We are investment managers after all. But at the same time, we are so much more than that…we have the capacity (and responsibility) to serve, enable, uplift, and supercharge the entire NYC entrepreneurial community. This is something WB has been doing for a long time and I think we unlocked a new gear today
Whether we're invested in a company or not, we all have the shared experience of loving this thing called entrepreneurship and sharing the journey of enterprise software company creation IN NYC! To bond over that is so cool and is a reminder that we’re all one team in NYC"
What a day at Cedar Lakes 🌲
We brought together 80 of NYC's best operators for our @Work_Bench NYC50 Retreat – a day away from the city to meet each other, swap notes, and talk shop.
We had an incredible group of people joining us from Abridge, Baseten, Basis, Blacksmith, Clay, Decagon, Crosby, Factory, Harvey, Modal, Norm, Ramp, Rogo, Sierra, Socure, and so many more 🔥
I couldn't be prouder of how the day turned out. We had two fantastic keynote conversations from our CEO in Residence David Politis, who founded and scaled BetterCloud, and Aayush Shah, co-founder and CTO of Blacksmith, who shared tactical advice on his journey from operator to founder.
The rest of the day was built around unconference-style breakout sessions and activities, giving everyone the space to get into the real challenges of building and scaling companies. I got to co-lead a session with Proby Shandilya on Thinking about Thinking: The Mental Models that are Key in the Startup Journey, and he crushed it, sharing frameworks relevant in today's world based on his encyclopedic repertoire of business and software history spanning books, podcasts, blog posts, and more.
A big thank you to everyone who helped make the day special, and thank you to our partners at Cooley, Cushman & Wakefield, Stifel, AWS Startups, and Clay for making the day possible.
This is what the NYC tech community is all about, what Work-Bench has been building towards for 13 years. And this is just the beginning 🚀
let's go @GoodfireAI @eric_ho 💪
So thrilled to host our @Work_Bench NYC50 Retreat today!
We've brought together the best operators in town for a day in the woods to meet each other and talk shop over several unconference sessions and activities 🌲
We've got incredible folks here from Abridge, Baseten, Basis, Blacksmith, Clay, Decagon, Crosby, Factory, Harvey, Modal, Norm, Ramp, Rogo, Sierra, Socure, and so many more 🔥
@jerseejess bringing the energy to kick us off and @davepolitis leading our first keynote
Jonathan Lehr retweeted
The world demonizes Israel 365 days a year.
Perhaps, for just one day—October 7th—the critics of Israel could take a vacation from their hysterical hatred of the world’s only Jewish State and find it within themselves to express condolences for the thousands of Israelis murdered, maimed, mutilated, raped, and abducted at the hands of Hamas.
Proud for our @Work_Bench port co @artian_ai to be in great company presenting at the @BankofAmerica Annual Technology Summit
cc @prashantreddy
Agreed and @VmaxAI is pushing the edge of the frontier
there seem to be 3 categories data/RL companies are falling into now:
v1: pay for expert-labeled data (@HelloSurgeAI, @mercor, previously @scale_AI)
v2: pay for raw data (e.g Slack, Hubspot, etc.) from startups (many)
v3: simulation, self-play, AI task generation at the frontier (@VmaxAI, @scorecardai, etc.)
my bet is things continue to move v1 -> v3





































