Partner @A16Z - started @speedrun, prev @Initialized, 2X founder - acquired @Farmville, then AI startup 13yrs ago, here to tell you the secrets of seed VC
Joined March 2008
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my fave takes:
31:42 @tkexpress11 “AI is not enough to be your why now”
09:01 @kenanhsaleh “not hot spaces”
27:45 @emilybenn12 “incredible arrogance”
10:36 @seeamshahidnoor “A tiny little feature can end up being a big company”
Andrew Lee retweeted
NEW: INVESTOR ADVICE FOR APPLYING TO SPEEDRUN (SR008 EDITION)
Every cohort we sit down with our investors to hear what’s top of mind. This time @ndrewlee got in the booth with @kenanhsaleh, @emilybenn12, @seeamshahidnoor, and @tkexpress11 to talk about:
00:00 - what’s changed in apps this cycle
04:15 - team vs. market vs. traction: how we weigh them
08:14 - hot markets vs. ones that feel inevitable
10:36 - spotting the gaps the frontier models leave
13:35 - where speedrun fits in your founder journey
22:26 - how to make your application stand out
30:05 - common mistakes (AI is not your “why now”)
38:46 - the 10-min interview + co-founder dynamics
45:41 - what you get working with speedrun
SR008 apps close Nov 1. Watch the full roundtable here 👇
Me: 40 tabs open. Plausible human behavior
AI: 40 tabs open. @fabserafini "Do better"
We spent decades putting business processes into software. But what connects those systems is still a person with 20 browser tabs open, copying and pasting.
A human API.
My request for startups: computer use agents that actually finish the job. Agents that companies can trust to do real work at scale, and that work in the software companies already use.
If you're building this, we want to hear from you!
More below.
cc @a16z @speedrun
anyone who is anti-AI is anti-humans going to the stars. You can't have BOTH
reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/commen…
Andrew Lee retweeted
Great morning yesterday with deep tech investors at our #SFTechWeek breakfast with @a16z @speedrun, @ndrewlee and team.
Thank you to everyone who came out!
Andrew Lee retweeted
Introducing Kardashev-0.7, the world’s first trained swarm made of 32 distinct models
Trained with RL for Population Scaling (RLPS), 32 models organically develop specialization & complementary capabilities, delivering frontier performance at:
- 0.007x ~ 0.02x of the inference cost
- 0.03x of the required memory
Civilization advances through different minds specializing and working together. We’re bringing that principle into AI
@BanburyRoadAI, we’re scaling intelligence by model count, toward civilizations of models that learn to build on one another
I grew up in Colorado where we talked a lot about Rocky Flats and it's still being talked about years later. Brightest minds on the toughest problems - excited for Colmez
Today, we're officially launching Colmez, backed by a16z @speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's early-stage fund.
The $248bn hazardous waste industry is broken. After Stanford and quant trading at SIG, I left to fix it.
We just launched our private beta two weeks ago and are already working with 5 of the top 7 operators in the industry, including the largest environmental services companies in the world.
Thank you to my incredible team, @brianxmeng1 and @numairarazzak , our speedrun partner, @JoshLu, and the @StartX community. If you want to build the backbone of America’s industrial infrastructure, we’re hiring.
asked claude to find a prompt i wrote in chatgpt
claude: "I can't see your ChatGPT history; I only have your Claude chats."
now i know what it feels like to get caught with lipstick on my collar
Death to the billable hour! @hanhanhan_kim @af_gao are the leaders we need to make every idea a reality - EVERYONE should use this
Today, we're killing the billable hour for patent work.
Fearn Legal (@fearnlegal ) is a modern patent firm built from the ground up on our own operating system, FearnOS.
What that means:
→ Flat fees, not hourly billing
→ Drafts in days, not months
→ Experienced patent attorneys reviewing every application
→ One platform for your entire portfolio, with permissions you control
If you're building something worth protecting, we'd love to help.
if the dog was technology and the bus was every industry on the planet - if you see charts like this you know you're in for a cambrian explosion
must read by @jkhamehl
this man has been in the wilderness and found himself back at the beginning... I feel like this is happening for every single founder in the past few years
Congrats @blader!
introducing
═══════════ 𝚌𝚏𝚘.𝚊𝚒 ═════════════
tl;dr
1/ runway is now cfo.ai
2/ you can hire @arithecfo and he can start TODAY
3/ you can give @arithecfo a test drive by replying to this thread with any ridiculous thing you want him to model for you, and he'll come back to you with a beautiful, detailed, fully wired financial model
... in 30 minutes or less
now, story time:
🧵 1/n
Full-circle moment: @sama of @OpenAI stopped by @speedrun yesterday to answer questions from our founders. Sam and I met nearly 20 years ago at H Cafe in SF. He has given me advice ever since - on startups (“unless you have a burning desire to solve a problem, take a break”), work ("it's a tough lesson to learn to give something up to someone who will get the job done but not how you would do it") and on life ("you prob don't need this, but read the Dale Carnegie book").
What struck me most about the former Loopt founder: he is still fundamentally the same person he was then.
Everyone begins as an unknown - future founder, investor, or star employee. The world has not yet caught up to what you may become. Don’t let the smallness of your current role define the size of your ambition.
A few takeaways from the conversation:
- model capability is accelerating faster than adoption.
- the future is proactive agents, not chatbots.
- AI will make individual contributors more productive - and force them to become better managers of systems.
- AI is not the moat. Customer love, distribution, brand, and switching costs still matter.
- The rules of business have not changed.
Huge thanks to @DavidGeorge83 for his expert moderation and for our founders for being inquisitive
"I'm not an agent harness engineer but I may have played one on television"
- what every investor says
Thanks for making cameo’s in our new video @_CallMeMacy and @emilybenn12 and @ndrewlee .
You are all ⭐️ s
RIP @DollyParton - I'm just so grateful she created @dollyslibrary . There's unequivocal evidence that kids before age five benefit from reading esp from parents. The streets of heaven have an angel returning to them today
