Team Facilitator & Exec Coach Founder @ https://nitter.gq/t.co/O03QTSDCe4 I ❤️ Human Excellence ... and Turtles 🐢
Bay Area, CA
Joined March 2019
- Tweets848
- Following1.4K
- Followers253
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Jon Low retweeted
Today @arjunmathur_ and I are introducing Dream.
We’re announcing $17M in seed funding from @a16z , @svangel , @xyz_vc , and @ziggcap.
@dreamhq is developing a new class of models trained to reason about physical space: its geometry, its constraints, and the relationships between objects and the spaces that contain them. With these models, AI can make a real impact in the $13 trillion architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry for the first time.
Jon Low retweeted
When markets are growing quickly, moats don't really matter. It doesn't make sense for leaders to invest in new spaces. And tons of whitespace gets created.
When markets slow down, most moats can't save you anyway.
Don't worry too much about moats.
Jon Low retweeted
i love writing. i never let agents write for me. whether it's docs, or tweets, or shitposts, or even prompts (okay maybe that one's harder as agents manage other agents)
there's a simple reason for that: i still strongly believe that writing is thinking. it's a skill i hope to never give up. it's also important to me that whatever i say is always authentic, mistakes and all. my favorite posts are the ones that i just full send without any editing
i suspect it also helps with prompting. being able to clearly express what i want, and knowing the vocabulary i need to be able to direct my agents does seem to make for more effective usage of agents. in the same way that engineers have an advantage when we prompt agents to write code, because we are intimately familiar with the words that make up the discipline
knowing the right word incantations to get an agent to produce a desired goal almost feels like spellcasting. as models get more capable, and that input box looks more and more like a magic box that can output anything, words become the interface between you and the genie
there may come a time when we give up the keyboard in exchange for brain-computer interfaces. but until then, i'm writing every word.
Jon Low retweeted
Alexandr Wang 说了一句让技术流创始人集体沉默的话。
“做技术的人习惯了数据说话，觉得东西更好、数字更漂亮，客户总会识货”
他直接点破：大公司不是这么运转的，政府更不是。
在那些客户眼里，感知比现实更真实。
真实的业务现状太难看了，没几个人愿意直面。
大家要的不是真相，是一套能让自己在系统里安全生存的叙事。
所以更好的产品照样被踢出局。
买方根本没在评测产品，谁掌控了感知，单子给谁。
他甚至点名 Palantir：表面是软件公司，底色是个剧团。新员工入职，真的会发一本戏剧表演书，发了整整好多年。
做企业级市场，改写现实只是一半的工作；
塑造一套客户愿意相信的说法，是另一半。
技术人最容易栽在这道坎上：
你的东西确实碾压竞品，但坐在对面签字盖章的人，自始至终连看都没看屏幕一眼。
Jon Low retweeted
One of the best bubble indicators from @pmarca -- where Harvard and Stanford MBAs go after graduation.
If they go into tech → market’s overblown.
If they go back to banking → great time to invest in startups.
Social status of MBAs is a good bubble indicator. Cool trivia!
Jon Low retweeted
JUST IN: Startups are increasingly building custom AI models using open-weight alternatives to cut costs & reduce dependence on OpenAI & Anthropic. — Bloomberg
Jon Low retweeted
A big problem with California is it tries to solve the worlds problems instead of focusing on the major problems at home
Jon Low retweeted
A common mistake I am seeing is pursuing an idea solely because it is defensible without considering whether it will be valuable.
Moats only matter if the castle is big enough to care about.
Jon Low retweeted
What a wild world we’re living through. I wrote about the Series A squeeze recently. Here’s what else I’m seeing from my seat on the investing side..
1) VC has effectively fully become vibes capital. The market reality at the early-mid stage is completely divorced from fundamentals. I can go longer with even a resemblance of a straight face predict what happens to a company when they go to fund raise.
Some rounds are insanely wild with nothing to show, some rounds that seem like a sure shot are struggling to raise the capital they need. If you’re the “in vogue sector”, you’ll be just fine. This has been happening for some while but it’s fully banana town now. And unlike most who think a correction happens I think this continues for 12-18 months (dry powder, AI tailwind) minimum. The most common phrase in VC land right now is “you gotta play the game on the field”. This is a spiral that continues to keep the volatility and prices high.
2) Whereas on the public markets it’s also equally bananas. It used to be in the meme stock era that you’d see daily swings of >5% (+\-). But now even trillion dollar stocks are not immune to swinging that much based on vibes and model releases. Memory and the KOSPI index are recent examples and this will happen to other sectors soon. Rotations are getting faster and faster.
In the long run, the same fundamentals of building a great company with control of your own destiny (profitable, clean cap table etc) will end up just working out fine. But in the short term, in this vortex of hyper competition where capital is needed as a weapon, you should make sure you understand what’s going on before you dip your toes in the capital markets.
No matter what it’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out when we look back in this era. Obligatory happy to chat if helpful!
Jon Low retweeted
That is flattering of her to say, but honestly I am an even bigger fan of Cyan! She’s becoming — and already is — legendary.
Cyan Banister (@cyantist) says the two people that inspire her the most are Peter Thiel and @pmarca:
"I always joke that I didn't go to university. I went to Peter Thiel University."
"I've never met anyone more tolerant, more open-minded. He gets such a bad rap for a lot of things. He's probably one of the most poorly understood people."
"He's operating 1,000 feet above everybody else. His mind is not like other minds. It's kinda like @elonmusk. You don't know what to do with it, so it's just easier to hate it."
" Marc Andreessen was my hero when I was a teenager. I used to see him on the cover of magazines."
"Netscape was his thing, and Netscape changed my world and changed the whole world."
"The two of them probably would not want to be in the same sentence together being heralded."
Jon Low retweeted
"You can tell the health of a nation by its ability to tolerate comedy and rap music."
— Cyan Banister (@cyantist)
"Two things have to exist for freedom: rap music and comedy. If either start to disappear, you're in trouble."
"Comedy started disappearing from our universities first."
"That should've been a warning sign to the whole nation that we were in trouble."
"And unfortunately, we didn't speak up for them."
"We have to fight for people's right to say uncomfortable things and things that you disagree with. That's something I care deeply about."
"A lot of what I do and what I invest in is for that purpose: I want to support free speech. It's my number one cause."
NEW: Cyan Banister's Legendary Track Record
Her first investment ever? SpaceX.
In 2007, she invested every dollar she had into SpaceX & never sold.
Combined, @cyantist & Scott Banister are easily the #1 angel investors in the world.
SpaceX. Anduril. Uber. PayPal. Affirm. Flexport. Postmates. Niantic. Opendoor. Carta. Together AI. Diamond Foundry. Crusoe. Flock Safety. Substrate. Brave. Depop. Calm. TrueMed. Turing. Crusoe
Cyan spent 4 years at Founders Fund, now Co-Founder & General Partner, @LongJourneyVC
Plus Founders Fund's Mafia, beating Phil Hellmuth in poker live, & free speech as her number one cause.
We cover
› The space between your values & your actions
› Human beings as why machines
› Why Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
› Peter Thiel University
› Nanotech & biotech
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Cyan Banister, Long Journey Ventures
(01:13) Inside Long Journey HQ
(02:17) The wild story behind the office mural
(05:32) What Cyan's actual house looks like
(07:18) The candle ritual
(08:08) What the Long Journey logo actually means
(10:41) Mafia's breakout stars
(14:45) Cyan's strategy
(16:30) What really happens off-camera at Mafia
(18:58) The blooper reel nobody's seen yet
(23:54) Brian Singerman x $40 /mo board game club
(29:10) Confessions of an accidental poker legend
(33:37) What relentless optimism reveals about people
(35:42) Why so many people are scared to be weird
(37:32) The daily ritual she prescribes to everyone
(43:56) The "why" behind her biggest investments
(50:49) Why sci-fi movies keep predicting the future
(53:37) Should you even go to college right now?
(59:58) Unconventional investing philosophy
(1:01:57) Full list of Cyan's investments
(1:04:28) All-in on SpaceX
(1:08:57) Why she never sold a single SpaceX share
(1:12:53) Top Bets: Becoming Bio + Substrate
(1:15:52) America's reindustrialization moment is now
(1:19:16) Cyan's mentors
(1:22:54) Manifesting Rick Rubin
(1:24:00) Real take on the Peter Thiel events
Jon Low retweeted
This is what’s causing Anthropic to aggressively beg for govt protection (see below). Customers are finding cheaper alternatives. Keeping employees requires continuing ultra-rich secondaries ($$$) that are dependent on revenue growth. When you can’t win on the field go to DC.
UBS says 60% of companies now watching AI budgets are moving to cheaper models and open-source Chinese models
The pressure is coming from extreme bills, including users spending up to $35K/month, teams exceeding quotas by 200%, and companies cutting internal AI tools from 5 to 2.
Companies are not abandoning AI, they are using model routing, which sends easy tasks to cheaper models and saves premium models for hard reasoning, code, and long-context work.
Chinese open-source models such as Qwen, DeepSeek, MiniMax, GLM, and Kimi now fit the enterprise cost curve because they can be run locally or used through cloud catalogs.
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news .futunn.com/en/post/75068082/ubs-group-finds-60-have-already-started-curbing-ai-spending?level=2&data_ticket=1780870170397383
Jon Low retweeted
We’ve automated every single thing we can @every with AI agents.
And yet there’s way more human work to do than ever. We’ve gone from 4 -> 30 human employees since GPT-3.
I wrote a report on the structural reasons: how AI makes expert competence cheap, why that drives up demand for experts, and why the dynamic only intensifies as we approach AGI.
After Automation: every.to/p/after-automation
Jon Low retweeted
If you needed a signal that VC has truly become consensus capital, then this is the sign..
If you are a founder for the sake of being a founder, then this will resonate since you NEED capital to run your business.
If you are obsessed and don't care what the world thinks, then you'll treat each rejection as potential learning - but NOT a verdict on why you shouldn't start that company.
If you talk to 100 seed funds and they won’t invest in your company you’re actually wrong.
Was reminded of this conversation I had with @eoghan.
Jon Low retweeted
"We're about to see the explosion of analog."
@garyvee wants to open a restaurant that makes you check your phone in at the door and seats you at communal tables.
"Extreme AI is creating extreme analog. I think it's a barbell."
"I could not be more interested in physical retail, event-driven businesses, in concerts and venues."
"There are a lot of interesting non-digital realities that are coming as a countermove to the insanity of AI advancements."
"We're literally within a half decade of not believing a single video that's on the internet. In 5 years, if we're having this interview, most of the audience is trying to figure out if we're real or not."
"That is very real, and has substantial counter-opportunities."
"Any real entrepreneur, they're not crying about AI killing them. They're curious about how AI at scale is going to create opportunity for them."
Jon Low retweeted
Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone.
No accreditation required, SEC-registered, and a very low $500 minimum.
Includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Crusoe, Legora, and Vercel. As USVC adds more companies, investors will own a piece of that too.
Liquidity typically comes when companies exit, but we’re aiming to let investors redeem up to 5% of the fund every quarter. This isn’t guaranteed, but if we can make it work, you won’t be locked up like in a traditional venture fund.
It runs on AngelList, which already supports $125 billion of investor capital.
And I’ve joined USVC as the Chairman of its Investment Committee.
—
Go back to the 1500s, you set sail for the new world to find tons of gold - that was adventure capital.
Early-stage technology is the modern version. It says we are going to create something new, and it’s risky. It’s daring.
But ordinary people can’t invest until it’s old, until it’s no longer interesting, until everybody has access to it. By the time a stock IPOs, most of the alpha is gone. The adventure is gone. Public market investors are literally last in line.
This problem has become farcical in the last decade. Startups are reaching trillion dollar valuations in the private markets while ordinary investors have their noses up to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in.
Investing in private markets isn’t easy. You need feet on the ground. You need judgment built over years. Most people don’t have the patience to wait ten or twenty years for an investment to come to fruition.
But there is no more productive, harder-working way to deploy a dollar than in true venture capital.
USVC enables you to invest in venture capital in a broad, accessible, professionally-managed way, through a single basket of innovation, focused on high-growth startups, at all stages.
It is how you bet on the future of tech: the smartest young people in the world, working insane hours, leveraged to the max, with code, hardware, capital, media, and community. Your dollar doesn’t work harder anywhere.
There is an old line - in the future, either you are telling a computer what to do, or a computer is telling you what to do. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that transaction.
USVC lets you buy the future, but you buy it now. Then you wait, and if you are right, you get paid.
Get access here:
usvc.com
Announcing: USVC
AngelList exists to power the innovation economy.
To date, we have powered $125 billion in assets, 25,000+ funds, and 13,000+ startups.
Today, we’re opening it for retail access.
@usvc_ is a regulated fund that holds stakes in promising private companies.
There are no accreditation requirements and anyone can get started with as little as $500.
Early portfolio includes xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Sierra, Vercel, Crusoe, and Legora.
Own a stake in the companies defining the future.
Learn more: usvc.com/
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The post may imply more direct access than the filings support. Per the fund’s own filings, liquidity is board-controlled, fees include up to 3% sales load + 1.00% management fee + acquired fund fees, and exposure may be via SPVs/VC funds, not direct stakes.
usvc.com/documents/USVC…
Jon Low retweeted
Introducing AgentQueue
Point it at your @linear backlog and it builds the tickets for you in parallel, with live previews, ready to review
1️⃣ Label any Linear issue "ai-task"
2️⃣ AgentQueue picks it up, writes the code in an isolated worktree and opens a PR with a live preview
3️⃣ Chat to iterate, then merge
Run 20+ agents at once. Switch between Claude, Codex, and Kimi on the same task.
Try it -> agentqueue.dev
Jon Low retweeted
Hot take: the bottleneck at most startups now isn’t engineering talent. It’s engineering bandwidth.
We solved ours. We built a system that takes a @linear ticket and returns a pull request with code written by various AI agents, tested in an isolated environments, with a live preview attached.
Our shipping velocity 10x’d. Our investors noticed before we even told them what changed.
It’s called AgentQueue. We’re opening it up soon. Comment AgentQueue if you want early access.
🤖 Made with AI