Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…

Isaiah, after everything we’ve been through together I’m surprised that you would publicize our disagreement in this fashion. But since you have created public interest in this, it is important that people should hear both sides of the story. Day One has been a major investor in Valar from the beginning, and we have never wavered in our belief that the company will be a success. This faith and support in our founders is why fourteen Day One founders have become limited partners in Day One’s most recent fund. In 2024, Day One invested in Valar’s seed round. Later that year, Valar required a seed extension after miscalculations by management regarding the capital needs of the business. Day One stepped in to provide this seed extension, saving the company in a difficult time. When it came time to raise a Series A, Valar spent several weeks on the market without success. At Valar’s request, Day One then offered the first term sheet and co-led the Series A, again saving the company during a time when deep tech startups in highly regulated industries were a difficult sell in venture capital. Then when Valar needed a Series A extension, Isaiah asked that Day One waive our pro rata rights so as to make a tenuous financing deal work out. We agreed for the good of the company. As part of these transactions, Valar agreed that, if their long-shot effort to build nuclear energy as a startup did succeed, Day One would have rights to participate in future rounds that could not be eliminated without Day One’s consent. This was a fair bargain at a time when Day One took extraordinary risks by betting against the market when Valar’s future appeared highly uncertain. Following the achievement of criticality on June 18th, our faith has been validated. Valar went from being an obscure company to a hot startup. We congratulate the Valar team on their hard won success! Of course, when it came time for Valar to raise a Series B after achieving such success, Day One expected to participate in that round – as both parties had agreed. But at this point the normally positive communications between Day One and Valar took a negative turn. Valar insisted that Day One give up all of its future pro rata rights despite the parties’ agreements, and despite four out of six major investors participating in the Series B round without waiving. This went against both the letter and the spirit of our deal, so we did not agree. In decades of investing we have waived pro-rata rights dozens of times, but no other company has ever demanded that we give up all of our rights for all future rounds. We told Isaiah we would give up a majority of our pro-rata in the Series B round so as to not make his life difficult, to which he responded “You cannot make my life difficult, I can make your life difficult.” It was at this point that we sought representation with Quinn Emanuel to protect the firm and the interests of our limited partners. Day One has since learned of a significant secondary equity sale by Isaiah from which we were excluded. Our attempts to gain insights into this through our information rights have been stymied by Valar management, who have refused to produce material documents requested by Day One. After weeks of delay on these documents, Valar management alerted us this Wednesday that they intend to pursue legal action against Day One unless we waive our legal rights forever. We have always pursued positive and mutually beneficial relationships with all of our portfolio companies. We have neither taken nor threatened legal action against Valar, and in fact we told them explicitly that we have no interest in doing so. Valar voluntarily entered into a contract with Day One, then violated that contract, and is now suing Day One. We are deeply disappointed by this recent erratic turn, but are still proud of our early and continued support of Valar. We look forward to the clarity from the courts that Valar’s management is seeking.

Fascinating. Chief Economist at Apollo: agents could cause a bank run by sweeping household cash into accounts paying 3-5% instead of the 0.1% national average, causing banks to lose a large share of their cheap deposits.

Some data we recently assembled on entrepreneurship/compute in Europe: eudata.vercel.app. We hope that one of the useful roles that Stripe can play is in collecting and publishing empirical data pertaining to entrepreneurship and industry in Europe. There's growing appetite to get Europe on a better footing, and cross-sectional comparisons can often shine light on where opportunities lie. If you're interested in this kind of thing, we publish more at stripeeconomics.substack.com.