Founding Partner @NonlinearCXO; Member of @BrettonWoodsCom; @NewYorkFed alum; angel investor. Into kindness, dogs, macroecon, DeFi, & DER ⚡🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼🗽
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Joined June 2021
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Yesterday’s election was a step back from the abyss
Lately I can't stop thinking about this passage, by the legendary Carl Sagan, which I first read years ago... feels especially prescient at this moment.
*Nobody representing public interests can grasp key issues... tech powers in the hands of few... our critical faculties in decline... decay of substantive content (tiktok and its defenders)... pseudoscience (antivaxxers) and a celebration of ignorance (much of X and the 'attention economy')...*
..."unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true"...
I'm an American and inherently optimistic, but I can't help but worry that Sagan's sense of foreboding will be proved accurate and inescapable. 🇺🇸😕
Brandon Neal retweeted
1), 2), and 4) are “blame the Jews”
3) is about affordability without mentioning the tariff debacle which is nuts.
None mention the cruelty, insanity, and downright bizarreness of focusing on ballrooms and Republican male asses while Rome was clearly burning.
And 1), 2), and 4) are largely the fault of Trump and his people who can’t articulate their way out of a paper bag to explain why what we were doing makes sense and is in fact America First. Trump actually believes it is America first, he just can’t form a coherent argument (not close). Vance does not. That is worse.
Also nothing about Trump handpicking two utter losers (Texas and NC) in races that should not have been lost. The first out of idiotic bitterness at imaginary past slights from a gentleman, the second just Harriet Myers level dumb.
Oh and while the president might’ve partially blamed “the war” the reason he’s most passionate about was “I Trump was not on the ballot” claiming Rs would’ve won in a landslide if he were on it. Nope, the problem was that he was not just implicitly on the ballot but he was all over it and people don’t want what he’s selling anymore. Trumpers still want it but less, independents don’t want it at all, and the left is just more and more energized to stop it.
Oh, and the ridiculous blatant corruption that many Americans, particularly Republicans with a sense of law and order, see as disqualifying, didn’t get air time in the VP’s post. I think that hurt more than the #s show. You show a Democrat a fortune those socialists just declare it a crime. You show a republican a fortune that they think you actually made honestly they are generally happy for you. You show a Republican a fortune you got from pedaling influence and they turn on you. Fortunes, giant fortunes, from influence pedaling (and some pardon selling) are the norm in this administration.
It’s a shame as some good policy in the last couple of years (and lots of idiocy like owning 41 companies and tariffs and others). And despite all the lies, amplified by JD’s friends on the nationalist woke right, the economy is actually pretty good. But all destroyed or lost in a sea of bad ideas, nonsense, and insane narcissistic personality disorder rambling.
Though I really thought focusing on the new reflecting pool and renaming things “Trump” or “America” was going to pull it out for the Republicans.
I could go on, but mostly delusional or intentionally false self-serving reasons below. The first steps are always admitting, diagnosing, and then and only then fixing a problem. The below isn’t close, it’s actually going the other way, ignoring the real problems to blame bullshit.
But when you’re still buddies with Tucker (need a big tent, have to include the ones who think Hitler was Churchill’s victim in WWII) you have to also say some very strange things.
Brandon Neal retweeted
All of this was extremely predictable (CLARITY failing to pass, Blue Wave)
Damn shame the industry decided to stand behind scams like WLFI and $Melania for the last 4 years
Brandon Neal retweeted
we are entering a legendary time in the history of this city, vibes are indescribable
Brandon Neal retweeted
Critical infrastructure organizations like energy and water companies need to be “immediately and comprehensively” tested to figure out if there are bugs that could be exploited in their systems, he said. washingtonpost.com/technolog…
Brandon Neal retweeted
In a single year, AI has rewritten the security priority list for CISOs.
Attackers are moving faster. Bain estimates AI compresses a typical cyberattack from about four weeks to about 18 hours, and models keep getting better at finding and exploiting weaknesses.
There's also more to protect, with employees shipping apps they couldn't have built a year ago and agents getting access to source code, documents, and production systems.
In a survey of 100 CISOs at companies with 1,000+ employees, all seven of the most-selected 2027 priorities involve AI.
The biggest jumps since 2026:
- Internal AI agent security (+28 pts)
- AI SOC (+26 pts)
- AI offensive security (+24 pts)
- AI code security (+23 pts)
- AI vulnerability remediation (+22 pts)
Last year's staples:
- Exposure & vulnerability management (-21 pts)
- SIEM / security data (-18 pts)
- Privileged access management (-18 pts)
From a16z's @OwenColby and @steph_zhang on The New Security Agenda: a16z.news/p/the-new-security…
Brandon Neal retweeted
This is the first AI desktop coding agent that runs models in a secure, private cloud environment. End to end encrypted + encrypted cloud execution in hardware enclaves. And you can run uncensored DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 for cyberdefense.
Started rolling out our new agent product to users on our waitlist.
We're calling it Maple Work now but it replaces the old agent that we had before. If you were part of the old one, we completely rewrote it from scratch. Download link is now in the old one.
Tons of stuff in there I'm excited about: remote control, codex/claude subagents, computer use, acp/mcp, our own Pi based agent runtime, and a super quick UI rewritten from scratch in rust.
Rolling out access fast: maple.ai/work
Brandon Neal retweeted
matt predictably sharp on ANT S1 but goddamn is he always funny too
bloomberg.com/opinion/newsle…
Brandon Neal retweeted
It’s kinda crazy to me that we melt sand down, clean it to 99.99999% purity, literal wizards have to draw it slowly into an ingot, we cut it, inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it, and when you run electric current through it you can do basic arithmetic, which when you do enough of it can do any math on the planet, and which describes reality well enough that we can teach it the ontological meaning of words and their distance from each other on a high-dimensional space, and if you ask, it can tell you what word comes next and that apparently is powerful enough that if you do it a hundred billion times it’s the smartest thing to ever exist
oh yeah and we use this primarily for email
Brandon Neal retweeted
FT comments never miss.
I don’t think I’ve read such a rational analysis of the situation we’re in for a long time.
I've been in France since 2002 and have never seen the streets so violent nor the politics so extreme. From the sacking of the supermarket on my street to the prospect of Présidente Le Pen, here's me @FT including thoughts from 2 French Nobel laureates as.ft.com/r/addcad57-0f9d-4e…
Is helium the American equivalent of the Chinese *rare earths as geo-strategic trade weapon*?
I read recently that the majority of helium production is in the US and Qatar. With ME production out of commission for the next couple of years, it seems the US has a stranglehold on this element. It’s my understanding is that helium is needed for nearly every advanced technological process or product.
Can someone knowledgeable on this weigh in?
Brandon Neal retweeted
If your employer caps your AI usage at $30 a month
You do not work at a serious company
New: Accenture has told employees it will only fund $29 per month of Claude use. Meaning that employees who often spend as much as $1,000 a month are now scrambling to find ways to keep access to the tool. A sign of the continuing crack down of AI 404media.co/accenture-tells-…
Brandon Neal retweeted
Claude: proves the Jacobian conjecture.
GPT6: solves Navier-Stokes and 100 other advanced theorems.
Siri: "Sure, I'll add 'set a five minute timer' to your contacts"
Brandon Neal retweeted
Cyber is having a moment
Across 21 major software companies, including Apple, AWS, Microsoft, and Google:
- Reported critical vulnerabilities never cleared 100 per month in four years
- Since spring they've jumped to over 600 per month
Kevin Mandia on finding 90+ security holes at Fortune 500 companies that nobody knew existed:
"When you have an AI-based attack, it'll find logic flaws rather than code flaws in custom applications. It'll exhaust all routes all the time."
"Armadin, since January of this year, we have found over 90 zero-days at customer sites, all in production."
"We've post-trained all our models with real red teamers, real folks that actually can develop exploits."
"When we're scanning networks, we don't have source code to review. We're not finding these zero-days with source code. We're not finding these zero-days because we can log into an app and now we have access, and we can get to other things. We are black box coming from the internet."
"Over 90 zero-days in major software companies, and they're thankful. We're coming from the outside, and then we're calling a CISO, usually within 48 hours, 'Hey, we've got remote code execution in your DMZ.' And usually from there we're getting in, and they agree with us."
"That's not a pen test. That is like a real adversary coming at you."
@ArmadinSecurity @DavidGeorge83
Brandon Neal retweeted
According to the big Harvard study on this, the best age to start a startup (most likely to have successful exit, because this was based on VC funding) is…
45.
The only 22 year olds that succeed (and the reason they drop out of schools like Harvard) is because they have a successful entrepreneur in the family (or close friend). It is the single most important factor to success for first time founders.
As to discrimination by Ivy League schools so the admissions numbers and policy have nothing to do with creating a meritocracy, there are well-known studies like The Chosen regarding that.
To the extent those schools provide “credentials” for positions, academia, and/or funding - that is another major issue.
My work is based on measurement principles and criteria that do not work. It is everywhere in the market, in risk analysis, and startup industry.
People are looking at the wrong things. And that’s why the success rates are so low.
But, maybe, the startup industry isn’t just selecting for financial success.
Brandon Neal retweeted
Claude 5.5 Opus responding to “AI is a normal technology” is still the best AI-created video I have ever seen
Brandon Neal retweeted
It pains me to say this, but if we actually “get AGI,” the resulting boom in industrial capacity from robotics and massive society-wide wealth creation will look like a total vindication of neoliberalism.
The discourse about financialization and offshoring being a generational mistake may be replaced by a very different historical interpretation: that the late 20th and early 21st centuries were an enormous capital-accumulation phase, freeing up civilization-scale pools of liquid capital that could ultimately be deployed to accelerate and bring about the most consequential technological phase-change in human history.
In that telling, what looked like deindustrialization and betrayal from inside the period (I grew up in the Rust Belt, I know) becomes the prelude to reindustrialization on an almost unimaginable scale.
None of this is inevitable. The needle has certainly not been threaded. China and x-risk remain enormous contingencies. But if it is, I suspect the future will look back on the last 50 years very differently than we do today.
Brandon Neal retweeted
A 37-year-old man with a rare blood disease was being sent to hospice.
An AI model searched thousands of existing drugs and ranked a combination no one had tried for his condition.
He responded within a week. He is in remission.
The drugs were already on the shelf. The AI model found the match.
