What if you could change device behaviour, just by talking to it? Create an app. Change it. Edit it. Add personal context. Then completely reinvent what the device is for. WORKS is our limited release of the first ever Promptable Products - physical devices inhabited by AI agents that understand what you want and do what you mean. WORKS launch in November 2026. This is a demo (using a ESP32 device from @M5Stack) showing one possible experience you can create. We’re building @inanimate_tech in public. Jump in, it's gonna be weird.

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.

I've watched a few really good founders raise big seed rounds this year, then struggle to raise their A, even as the business kept making progress. The seed valuation had set a bar they weren't ready to clear yet. And with everyone excited about the term sheet, it was easy to put off what they'd need to show at the next round. One of them had about as strong a resume as you'll see in AI, and a team to match. Sub-$1M ARR would have been a fine A story at a normal seed price. At theirs it wasn't. (For what it's worth, I write both seed and A checks, so I sit on both sides of this.) The top of the seed market is a bit wild right now. Carta's 95th percentile seed valuation was about $72M in Q2 last year. This Q2 it was $200M. Meanwhile the share of seed companies that get to a Series A within two years has roughly halved since 2018. During a raise almost all the attention goes to how much and at what valuation. The question I wish more founders asked is whether the company is actually set up to hit the growth the next round will expect. If you're planning on a 2-3x step-up at the A, here's what that means. A $25M post means pitching a $50-75M A, which a company with real traction can get to. A $100M post means $200-300M, and at that price the A partner is comparing you to the handful of companies growing faster than almost anyone. The bar right now is brutal. In the A conversations I'm in, a $15M seed (usually a $75-100M post today) means $2M+ ARR, growing 5-6x over the last year, with a believable path to another 5x. None of this means raise less. Before you sign, work backward: what will we need to show at the A, and does this money and ~24 months get us there? If it does and the terms are good, take it. If the honest answer is "only if everything goes right", that's worth knowing now rather than in month 20. A big seed buys you runway and a higher bar. Most founders only count the runway.

Reminder not having a long commute is one of the biggest life upgrades. You never normalize against this, like you would a very good or very bad event (the commuting paradox, described in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics). Moving closer to work or going remote is worth it

Do a kickflip!

This might be the first time I’ve ever watched an Apple ad that made me actively not want to buy the product

Introducing The Cheeky Pint Benchmark. We made our intern watch every episode of Cheeky Pint to bring you this breakdown of pints drank by guests to the nearest sixth. Congratulations to @elonmusk who is currently in the lead with three full pints of Guinness.

📣📣 We are launching Calibration 🎉🎉 Calibration is an operator VC bridging the gap between the most ambitious founders and the best technical builders of Europe. My mission has always been to help create a new generation of global technology companies from Europe.  What makes or breaks a company isn’t capital, It’s the people building it. And that’s exactly where Europe has a structural disadvantage. Europe’s technology ecosystem is distributed. And with that distribution comes a lack of visibility, for both founders and the engineers looking to join them. Engineers lack visibility into which companies are worth joining, and founders struggle to find exceptional people before they become obvious to everyone. Through {Tech: Europe}, with our hackathons, conference, media formats and the strongest talent team in Europe we have a view of both sides that no one else in Europe has. Quietly we have already been operating like this for the last 12 months. We’ve been working with some of the most ambitious companies in Europe on talent, helped many of the most driven engineers across Europe to choose a new company to join and have been investing in some of the companies along the way. (Thanks for trusting our value proposition early to Marius, Magnus, Seb, Erik and many more) Calibration is the logical next step in this journey, putting more resources behind this ambition. I am not building Calibration alone, but together with Levin as my co-founder, who was an early investor in companies like Canva, has >10 years of experience in venture and is the best partner I could wish for on this journey.  Thanks to everyone who trusted in me and us early on ❤️ (A little) More on calibration.vc

NON COMPETES BANNED Today, the PM has announced that his Government will legislate to functionally ban non-compete agreements for startups and scaleups in the UK or as he called it - the Bosman ruling for ruling for the innovation sector' 😂 At the @StartupCltn been working on this for months and we think it’s a huge potential unlock for our tech ecosystem. Here’s what you need to know… - Measures to functionally ban non-competes for startups and scaleups in the UK are going to be set out. - There will also be consultation on a wider set of restrictive practices including gardening leave. - More detail on these plans at the budget in a few weeks (Wednesday 28th October) including a timetable for consultation with a view to legislation in the coming months. We think this is a huge move and so do lots of friends including so many of the great founders that signed the letter with Inherent just the other week. Why? Because talent matters and mobile talent means startups can build. The Valley was built on free-flowing talent. In the UK, we’re now seeing our own versions of this story with companies being built from alumni of both homegrown firms like Revolut and beyond. But we need that to move faster. Hiring and building faster means British startups and scaleups can grow faster. Barriers to that slow our ecosystem down. We won’t pretend it will be perfect, and people (including some of our friends but also lots of fairly vested interests too) will have a right to disagree. But we think that startups will thrive and win in a faster paced Britain. So we are delighted with the progress today - as part of a strong speech by the PM outlining his ambition for building the world’s leading innovation nation including more on tax, growing companies outside London and more. But this is the start, not the end of the process. The announcement launches a consultation. It doesn't mean the issue is settled. How far reform goes, and what it looks like on the ground, is still to be decided. The Prime Minister today has done something that can materially impact the trajectory of the UK tech ecosystem and with it our economy - but only if we make sure it’s delivered. So, the real work starts now.

Here's the new tinybox I've been using all summer for tinygrad development. G5/192/4TB with a 4090, a 7900 XTX, and a 9070 XT. I promise it's a great computer, and I'm happy you can now get one too.