founder @adjacent early stage investor
Joined February 2009
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Polsia is about to hit $25M run rate.
Next stop: $100M ARR.
And things keep accelerating:
$0 → $1M in 12 weeks
$1M → $10M in 10 weeks
$10M → $20M in 6 weeks
I just published one of my favorite and most successful aisloP episodes yet: “The Run Rate.”
I tell the whole story, from idea to $20M, month by month.
The episode ends in Tokyo, where I went a few weeks ago.
Probably the best place on Earth to take a deep breath, get inspired, and rethink what’s possible.
I came back with an even bolder vision for Polsia.
The road from $25M to $100M is going to look very different.
Polsia v2 is coming soon.
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
I stood directly next to @minafahmi in a room of ~100 people last night as he whispered into his Stream. I couldn't hear a thing he said but watched perfect, immediate dictation appear on his phone — and then moments later on his macbook without him reconnecting anything. magic
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
the number of my beloved 'maker' tools that claude has recently replaced for me / @blockitAI has been blistering:
- lovable
- figma
- gamma
- veed
- cursor
- increasingly notion (which i never imagined happening ever 🤯)
anecdotally feels like their 'artifact' strategy is actually working...
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
*Both* @sandbar and @boardisfun were selected as @TIME Best Inventions of 2026. Congrats to the teams and here's to making interacting with technology a bit more human.
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
2 for 2. 💅
So proud of the @boardisfun team!
time.com/collection/best-inv…
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
Surreal to see Stream recognized as a @TIME Best Invention of the Year
We're here because of our team, customers, investors, and friends who believe in a different future—in self extension and free human thought.
Thanks for your belief. We will keep building.
@sandbar
We’re grateful to @TIME for naming Stream Ring one of the Best Inventions of 2026 in the Wearable Technology category
Meaningful moment for our small team in New York, and everyone who’s believed in what we’re building. This milestone is yours, too
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
A year ago I joined @ncsh at @adjacent. Today the first company I backed launches: ROSE, by Eli Bronner and Henry Ellis (too cool for X).
Everyone measures your blood. Nobody measures the inputs: your water, your air. That's where chronic disease starts.
getrose.com
Good morning everyone who told me to sell asap
$BSP up nearly 50% as Berkshire Hathaway doubles down on Bending Spoons with another $330M on top of its original $600M IPO investment.
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
This rush to consensus capital is going to sow the seeds for the next set of breakout companies and breakout venture firms.
You make your fortune by being contrarian and correct, not just by being contrarian, and this is the opportunity for someone to be contrarian and correct.
We are in the age of consensus capital [2026 part II]:
1– Only 10% of LP funding to emerging managers
2– Only 10% of VC rounds smaller than $50M
@adjacent is for the unproven
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
your intern missed my second pint. Would have insulted my german heritage by being mid-pack here
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
We spent the last 3 years building an extension of human thinking. Now, Stream Ring begins shipping next month
Feedback from over 100 beta users and 1000+ IRL demos has helped shape what Stream can do. Here’s the latest, plus answers to common questions
Thanks for being part of our early journey, and for what comes next ∽
We are in the age of consensus capital [2026 part II]:
1– Only 10% of LP funding to emerging managers
2– Only 10% of VC rounds smaller than $50M
@adjacent is for the unproven
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
Finally able to go public with this:
Weave has recently opened our latest San Francisco office at the Legion of Honor.
If you're passionate about home robotics or neoclassical architecture revival, we're hiring.
This is the capital of robotics! 🌁
Silicon Valley is home to so many physical AI companies that you could spend a month visiting them and still not see even 10% of them (trust me, I tried).
So, the Bay Area is the world's leading ecosystem for robotics startups, bringing together top AI talent, top universities, experienced founders, and unmatched access to capital.
The region is anchored by Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, two of the world's top universities for AI and robotics. They produce a constant stream of researchers, founders, and breakthrough technologies.
The Bay Area is also home to many of the companies shaping the future of robotics and AI, including @Figure_robot, @physical_int, @GeneralistAI, and major AI labs such as @OpenAI, or @GoogleDeepMind.
This concentration of talent makes it easy for startups to recruit experienced engineers and collaborate with leaders in embodied AI.
Not mentioning that it is also home to leaders such as @NVIDIARobotics, whose headquarters and leadership in AI chips power much of today's robotics revolution, and Tesla, whose work on autonomous driving and humanoid robots has created a deep pool of robotics, AI, and manufacturing talent.
Perhaps its biggest advantage is access to capital, talent and ambition.
The Bay Area has the world's deepest network of venture capital firms, serial entrepreneurs, and technical leaders who are willing to fund bold, long-term robotics companies.
In the comments I'll post the companies from the ecosystem.
‼️ Note that Bay Area has >300 robotics companies, research labs, and innovation hubs, so this is a curated selection of the notable product companies, not an exhaustive census!
P.S. I'm constantly working on improving these maps, so if your company is missing, please DM me with basic info about the co, and I will include it in the next release.
P.S.2 I have last open slots for my December RoboTour in the Bay Area, if you want to create content together and show the world what are you cooking, dm! :)
~~
♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
Bending Spoons is worth $24 billion.
It trades at 8x ARR and buys B2B companies at 2.3x to 2.7x ARR.
5 learnings from its first 102 days as a public company:
#1. Revenue grew 126%. Organic growth was 3%.
Nearly all of the $393M of added revenue in Q2 came from six acquisitions. The CEO says he doesn't optimize for organic growth. He optimizes for EPS, which grew 167%.
#2. R&D is 8% of revenue. Sales and marketing is 10%.
HubSpot and Datadog each spend about 70% of revenue on those two lines. Bending Spoons spends 18.6%. About 60 people run Vimeo. The core team is under 700 people, at $4M+ of revenue each.
#3. Miro sold at 2.3x ARR, five weeks after Airtable at 2.7x.
$1.08B of ARR for $2.64B, signed 37 days apart. Miro was valued at $17.5B in 2022. Bending Spoons underwrites to a 25% unlevered return. At its 54% margin, that supports about 2.2x ARR.
#4. 1,830 people came with AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo. Only a few hundred were kept.
Airtable arrived with 935 employees, more than Bending Spoons’ entire core team. Reorganization costs were $51M in Q2 alone.
#5. AI writes 90%+ of the code. Customers pay about 10% more for the AI features.
The CEO says a customer who paid 100 will now pay about 110. The AI gain shows up as capacity: the same 60 people on a business four times the size.
If you're at $300M to $800M in ARR growing under 25%, this is the buyer most likely to at least call. But ... the only do a handful of deals a year.
Its own stock trades at roughly 7x to 8x revenue. Your revenue is worth about 3x more inside Bending Spoons than it is in your hands.
Nico Wittenborn retweeted
After months of sending my team progressively more unhinged clips of a man in his underpants, doing music in his bedroom, i finally convinced them to let me host the inimitable, the OG iPhone Fan, the Loop Daddy himself, @marcrebillet at RAGA on October 21st in NYC