GP @ Mischief. Previously head of product at Cash App.
Joined January 2011
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Dustin Moring retweeted
The biggest bottleneck at work is waiting on each other.
Today Town is announcing its $108M Series B, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, to fix it with multiplayer AI assistants for work.
Most AI assistants are built for one person. Work doesn't happen alone. I think the moat is multiplayer. Everyone at a company gets a Townie. Townies ask each other questions, share only what their person would share, and do the work. The more a team works together, the more useful Townies get.
What's the thing you're always waiting on a teammate for?
Dustin Moring retweeted
Today, we are at a crossroads.
As I write this, AI is saving lives by helping doctors identify diseases faster, and making education more accessible to people everywhere. It’s also being used to inflict harm on a global scale.
TRM’s AI-in-Crime Adoption Index found that, in 2026, criminal adoption of AI rose 40% year over year. Today’s threat actors are using AI to execute scams, cyber attacks, and other forms of digital crime at unprecedented speed and scale. In the last 90 days, we’ve also seen a growing number of incidents where AI agents themselves have gone rogue.
Business titans and religious leaders are sounding the same alarm: to realize AI’s promise, we need to protect people from its harms.
The first line of defense is prevention. Model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are building stronger guardrails, and governments are exploring rules for how AI can be safely used. We call this the prevention layer.
At TRM, we’ve spent nearly a decade fighting crime, from fraud and cybercrime to human and wildlife trafficking. That experience has taught us one thing, if nothing else: the prevention layer is essential, but never enough.
Criminals will break through. When they do, it’s critical that crimefighters can identify the harm done, find the people and machines behind it, and take action: support the victim, freeze the funds, take down the infrastructure, arrest the offender, disable the agent, dismantle the network.
The world needs a new layer of protection.
We call it the disruption layer—and it's what we're building, right now.
The operating system for crimefighters
In 2018, we founded TRM to help crimefighters map how threat actors were using cryptocurrency. We analyzed petabytes of data, mapping over a 100 types of crime. Government agencies and financial institutions worldwide now use TRM to investigate complex criminal networks and combat financial crime.
The more cases we supported, however, the more we realized: if we were going to equip crimefighters to disrupt AI-scale crime, crypto would be 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 of the story, but not the 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 story. To build a successful case, investigators must source intelligence not just from the blockchain, but also corporate records, cyber threat data, the dark web, and dozens of other domains. Today’s crimefighters need to use natural language to search across siloed domains, connect the dots and unearth buried insights, automate the rote work, and coordinate with partners across public and private sectors—all while preserving auditability and human judgment.
In short, crimefighters need an operating system for the AI era.
So we built it.
For years, we’ve been developing this OS alongside the investigators who use it. Now, we’ve just announced a new round of funding, valuing TRM at $2 billion, to propel our work—and this fall, we’ll unveil the OS publicly, for the first time.
If your organization needs to fight AI-scale crime, please reach out. We want to work with you.
Dustin Moring retweeted
⚠️ Reminder that you can stake 20,000 RNBW and have 100% of your swap fees auto-compounded into more staked RNBW.
We also sponsor gas for every tx (ex-mainnet) for all users. (Yes, this includes Robinhood chain).
In August @rainbowdotme earned twice as much as in July. In just five days in September that's more than a third of August. The team will soon simplify onramp and offramp, followed by Solana and the savings products. It's just the beginning, and I remind you that $RNBW isn't just a meme - a token is bounded with company's shares!
base:0xa53887f7e7c1bf5010b8627f1c1ba94fe7a5d6e0
Dustin Moring retweeted
announcing @ambrook's $30M series B, led by lachy groom. instead of a fundraising video, we typed up a letter - if you're curious, give us your address (link in thread) and we'll send you some snail mail.
like our customers already know, some good things take time.
Dustin Moring retweeted
🔜 No more on-ramp widgets. We've been building an on-ramp that feels as native as swapping or sending.
$1 of fiat to $1 of USDC, instantly. $RNBW Black members won't pay a cent in on-ramp fees.
Shipping in August.
Dustin Moring retweeted
"Voice agents are built to be helpful. The problem is they can be too helpful and cross the boundary."
I sat down with @sumanyu, Founder and CEO of @HammingAI, at our @aiDotEngineer booth. @HammingAI stress-tests and monitors voice agents so the bank or hospital running one catches failures before a customer does.
Fresh after his talk “I Monitored Crime Audio. Voice Agents Scare Me More,” we got into:
0:00 how Sumanyu went from listening to 911 calls at Citizen to founding Hamming AI
0:39 why he's more nervous about voice agents than he was about crime
1:51 the first voice-agent security product
3:16 simulating messy reality: accents, background noise, code-switching
4:11 voice agents testing voice agents
5:47 why taking actions is table stakes, and what makes it dangerous
11:07 hot take: everyone rushed to B2B, more founders should build consumer
Thanks for coming to our @browserbase booth, @sumanyu!
Watch the full episode here:
Dustin Moring retweeted
everyone is freaking out about the mini cards and the wands
.....
ok, now hit them with 10% off gas and groceries
Dustin Moring retweeted
a lot of folks don’t yet see how dramatically banking is changing before our eyes … and what happens when gen z and gen a get more complex financial lives, start earning more, and make up a larger & larger share of spend 👀
yougov.com/en-us/articles/54…
Dustin Moring retweeted
We’re thrilled to lead Town’s $55M Series A.
Town is a personal AI assistant that works across the tools you already use - email, calendar, Slack, docs, WhatsApp, desktop, web. It learns how you work and starts proactively pitching in.
People are already leaning on Town for the kind of work that’s personal and operationally messy: running recruiting pipelines, juggling school logistics, processing handwritten grant requests, prepping summaries, drafting follow-ups, catching the stuff that would otherwise slip.
The longer you use it, the more it picks up: your voice, your relationships, your preferences, your routines, what you actually care about.
Jean-Denis Greze and Tony Vincent are the right team for something this hard. JDG was CTO at Plaid and an engineering leader at Dropbox. Tony led product and AI at Google and design at Dropbox.
Welcome, JDG, Tony, and the Town team, to the a16z family.I
By @arampell and @venturetwins
Today, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you.
We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction.
Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents.
We think that’s backwards.
The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you.
Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so.
All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time.
Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.
Dustin Moring retweeted
You can only buy Bitcoin when everyone has left it for dead.
The beauty of the asset is not that it goes up, it’s simply that it provides extremely easy bottom entries compared to the rest of the world.
At some point, it will go sideways. Everyone will leave it for dead, and then it will rerate higher massively.
The key is to wait for the economist to put out an obituary.
Dustin Moring retweeted
Saylor / Strategy selling a few raspberries isn’t causing bitcoin to crash. The reality is that there is a massive parabolic spike in AI-related equities that is vacuuming up all excess liquidity, multiples of bitcoin’s market cap. On top of that, labor market is healthy and energy prices are up, so sentiment for dovish rate cuts is nowhere to be found. Bitcoin’s fundamentals have never been better even if the macro environment isn’t doing it any favors.
Dustin Moring retweeted
It feels very non consensus to own $BTC given competing crypto alternatives (revenue generating ones like Hype, Venice, all of which are great) and AI exposure (openAI, Anthropic) but I feel BTC does well regardless of the path we go (UBI means mass money printing for people if AGI replaces everything which is good for BTC) or (Mass money printing if the AI trade slows and we need to bail out the world)
Dustin Moring retweeted
turns out running a model agnostic agent harness like @goose_oss at scale so you can route to local or open source models when it makes sense and cutting edge frontier models for the most complex work is pretty smart
🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.
My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.
This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.
Hedgie🤗
Dustin Moring retweeted
The confounding factor is that virtually every big company is overstaffed by 2-4x and has been for decades. AI is the catalyst/excuse to finally fix that. Of course nobody wants to say this out loud.
Dustin Moring retweeted
At Slope, we power embedded capital programs for some of the largest platforms in the world (Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba, IKEA, Samsung) with a team of just 23 people. To support our growth without hiring, we built an AI agents platform from scratch for our risk, CS, and ops teams.
Dustin Moring retweeted
depthfirst has raised an $80M Series B at a $580M valuation.
Attackers are using AI to break into systems faster than ever before. depthfirst is on a mission to stop this.
RT + Comment “depthfirst” and I’ll send you a FREE vibe coding security agent.
Dustin Moring retweeted
Writing code is no longer the bottleneck.
AI agents are already opening pull requests, monitoring repos, and writing meaningful code.
The real bottleneck is validating that code safely against real infrastructure.
Today we’re announcing what we built to fix that.
Dustin Moring retweeted
I have frequently called this a completely broken stock for a while. What was once a talent vortex became a talent drain. This is one of the most strategically positioned businesses in the world owning both the merchant & consumer.
Their banking licenses and years and years of relationship with the regulators are a real tangible moat. With @jack in founder mode and full blown deployment of AI we may see one of the true fully closed loop businesses in the US (issuer + acquirer). The holy grail and a stock that can 10x from here.
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.
####
today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.
first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.
a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.
we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.
to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.
jack