
Investing in fintech and AI @acrewcapital. Co-Founder @assembliai @Perplexity_AI Fellow. @Penn @Wharton @HotchkissSchool. Building? [email protected]
San Francisco / New York
Joined January 2025
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Everyone loves to hop on the retrospective founder DMs trend when an amazing company announcement happens. Almost all of them are the sad "missed that generational opportunity" type. Well, I'm happy to say this is the ecstatic "start of an amazing partnership" type! I first learned about @tankots and @WisprFlow in May '25 when I was at a dinner and the AI Grant whatsapp group chat was lighting up nonstop - the entire dinner - after @natfriedman asked if anyone had tried this new thing called wisprflow. There was so much excitement about it. So much so that one AI grant founder said their office had "become a zoo where we all talk to our computers." Fast forward two months, Tanay presented it to the Perplexity fellowship and it blew my mind how seamless the product experience was. It truly "just worked." Fast forward a year, and I'm stoked to say that @AcrewCapital is fortunate enough to partner with Tanay for his $280M Series B at $2B valuation, led by our friends at @MenloVentures ! We're avid Wisprflow users - especially Tom Porter who must hold some kind of spoken words world record at this point - and love how much better we communicate because of it. The product is magical and the business is absolutely crushing it. We can't wait to see how this funding unlocks their next phase of growth!
My entire feed right now is convinced the grid will go down
Andrew McKinzie retweeted
Very weird Sunday
US pentagon 90 day resource stockpile, Brazil stolen election, UK power grid down, king tides in FL, full moon, Netanyahu tweeting out a nuclear bomb picture and Elon saying neoclouds to zero
Andrew McKinzie retweeted
VC is “get rich slow.”
We are living in a “get rich quick” market cycle, which also seems to be the greatest wealth creation period in human history.
This does two things when you game theory out a career:
1) If you don’t think you’re a top-tier investor, it’s better to leave ASAP while startups are still GRQ.
2) If you think you are [smart enough to be a] top-tier investor, you likely also think you’re smart enough to GRQ via startups with fewer blockers/less bureaucracy.
So — unless you think you are [smart enough to be a] a top-tier investor & you are not held back in your development such that you miss out on the economics in the greatest wealth creation period in human history while “paying your dues” — it makes perfect sense to join or start a startup.
This saddens me. Most junior VCs are gatekeepers (and pretty bad ones at that because they haven't had enough exposure to discern good from great so they overemphasize in what Claude thinks of the thesis).
But over the last few years I've some truly special analysts and associates who would turn into great partners in most firms but end up leaving too soon to join Cursor, Ramp, etc.
My read is that this happens for two reasons:
- If it's a small firm, you have exposure but no decision making. While you can influence decisions, seeing a partner pass on a deal you really believe in must really suck.
- If you are in a big firm, you might even get to write a few checks but you'll always have these lingering question: was it really you, or was it the firm that got the deal? How are you qualified to give advice you have never been an operator?
Wish more firms would invest in apprenticeship models and give younger VCs more shots on goal sooner.
Andrew McKinzie retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
As serious as it gets.
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
in just over a month, we've had
- flying cars
- AI solving a Millenium Math problem
- A new antibiotic discovered by AI lab
- 722 AI written Math papers released at once
- A solution to AI alignment
- Google reducing errors 40× in quantum computing, making it practical
- Opus 5 level AI running fully offline
- Opus 5.5 solving motion graphics and automations.
And that's just in the last 5 weeks. IYNYK.
Incredible time to be alive
Andrew McKinzie retweeted
BREAKING: White House is monitoring a suspected plague outbreak in Russia, per Axios
Andrew McKinzie retweeted
Stripe acquired OpenRouter. Ramp launched Router.
Both are leaning into stablecoins.
Cloud, mobile, and APIs are now table stakes, not an investable category.
The next era of finance is something else.
Absolutely incredible!
Chief Design Officer @jgebbia officially unveils America.gov, the new online home for the United States of America
Andrew McKinzie retweeted
We knew this tipping point would come but this is still a crazy moment for anybody who sweated over building 3-statement models in Excel from scratch
Today is the day that AI passed the "financial modeling Turing test" for me.
A "push button" build from scratch Skill that one-shotted a model on $MU that is indistinguishable (to me) from a model that a junior analyst would build from scratch. With full, impeccable adherence to all aspects of who i like to format, design & build models (took a few turns to dial it in).
Opus 5.5 is unbelievable.
I keep hearing from fintech founders right now that it’s a very confusing time to be building, that the bar for venture funding keeps being raised, and that it feels like the world around them is moving at warp speed with AI companies scaling to $100M ARR in the blink of an eye. They all ask me some form of the same question: “given this market environment, what do you think we should do?”
My answer is typically very simple: study the hypergrowth winner playbooks. This advice comes after: 1) always build something people love and 2) always keep your customer your top priority.
So, given I keep fielding these questions, I thought it made sense to make a post laying out the hyper growth winner playbooks, or as Tolstoy would put it, the architectural traits of the "happy families in fintech." These traits might appear incredibly obvious. I think that’s actually the point.
Andrew McKinzie retweeted
Our latest research paper explores the growing connection between AI and digital assets and explains why broad AI adoption may drive new demand, utility and applications across the digital asset economy. blackrock.com/us/individual/…































