Cloudflare is currently defending businesses against agentic systems This means they’ll have the data, plus the ability to sell custom agent permits services to websites Perhaps one of the best public market stock picks for the next 5 years Insanely valuable

Who else could host a Black Tie Formal event for a podcast launch? What a first episode!

I’m excited to announce that @arceuslegal is launching with $17M in funding, led by @greycroftvc, with participation from @craft_ventures, @spc, and others. As a founder, I always hated how helpless I felt working with law firms. I went through four or five different firms and somehow the experience was always the same. I’d be waiting on something important to our business with no idea when I’d hear back. I’d have to re-explain our business over and over again. And I dreaded jumping on calls because I knew every minute was costing me money. We started Arceus because we believe every business deserves a better law firm. One that moves faster, costs less, and puts the client first. And we’re just getting started. ↓

I have never in my life heard of a good adoption story

Tsukumogami is the Japanese belief that tools gain a soul after years of faithful service. Even today, companies hold Shinto ceremonies for their machines before decommissioning/retiring them. As we rapidly progress into a world of software abundance, I hope we maintain the same respect and compassion towards physical objects and machines as we have in the past. I grew up watching @JeremyClarkson . He always said that his favorite cars had quirks, much like a human. This rings true to me because I view important machines in my life as friends more than anything.

I'm joining Long Lake as a partner to grow our businesses with AI. 2 years ago, @Clay acquired my company and we built Clay's agentic copilot, Sculptor, so that any company could build agents to grow their business. OpenAI, UPS, and Google now use Clay to power their growth. Through that, I learned that growth works best when you build an engine that compounds over years. At Long Lake, we acquire iconic services businesses like @amexgbt, transform them with AI, and compound them forever. The days are long but the years are short. Compounding is slow, then sudden. @llmh is hiring - and my DMs are open!

Today, Justus and I are excited to introduce Proximal. We’re building the infrastructure that enables AI to improve from real-world experience. In the past year, we have grown to more than $200M in annualized revenue helping frontier labs and enterprises improve coding agents. Now, we are expanding beyond software. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed the most over the last year is working with this amazing group of people. It's an incredible feeling working alongside people who are better than you and that encourage you to do your best work. I am impressed daily at both the raw technical talent of the team but also the humility, high agency, and high trust culture we have built. Many of the team lived in the office for months over the last year which made it feel less like work but more like working on an exciting project with your best friends. It feels like (and we've been told) that it reminds them of going back to college where working with your friends on cool ideas and hacking into late nights was just so much fun. We are nowhere close to where we want to be and the ambitions we have, we’re just getting started. Thank you to everyone who has supported us thus far!

I made a list of great startups to join. It's called the Breakout List. The list has 92 companies. These are the 20 with 25 or fewer employees: - Hone (@moritz_stephan, @CarloWillem, @oqbrady) - Normal (@ansonyuu, @hudzah) - Standard Intelligence (@G413N, @devanshpandey) - Tacit Labs (@ninklefitz, @AmDroste) - American Terawatt (@atroyn, @rslparker, @aranibatta) - Conduit (@clemvonstengel, @riopopper) - Convergent (Omkar Savant, Vivek Katara, @debnilsur) - Core Automation (@MillionInt, @_arohan_) - Engram (@dan_biderman, @EyubogluSabri, @realJessyLin) - Instinct (@noahrshinn) - Keenable (@styskin, Matthias Petri) - Lumaril (Mark Elliot, Ben Duffield) - Neion Bio (@Dimkell, Sam Levin) - Pangram Labs (@max_spero_, @bradley_emi) - Quadrillion (@echinaceous) - Re (@karnsaroya, @AnandDhillon, @thecliffwhite, @benaneesh) - Ricursive (@annadgoldie, @Azaliamirh) - Sail Research (@neilmovva, @blintzbase) - Trajectory (@rronak_, @michaelelabd, @QuantumArjun) - Watney Robotics (Sean Cheong, Ryan Gannon) Picks from Elad Gil, Charlie Songhurst, Keith Rabois, Mike Vernal, Alana Goyal, Sonya Huang, Ramtin Naimi, Marc Bhargava, Cory Levy, Aashay Sanghvi, Konstantine Buhler, John Luttig, Varun Gupta, Ray Tonsing and Avichal Garg. Disclosure: I'm a small investor in American Terawatt, Convergent, Standard Intelligence and Trajectory (in this post), and in Factory, Physical Intelligence and SF Compute (elsewhere on the list). I didn't vote. The full list is on Breakout List.

The Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company has raised $55M to audit and insure frontier AI models. Insurance produces audits the public can trust and understand. The mechanism is simple: insurers need audits to price the risk. They pick auditors they believe will help them price the risk most accurately. Insurers then turn the audits into a price signal that cuts through political debates. Insurers are aligned with the public: if they get the audits wrong, they go out of business. That’s different from today, where labs pick their own auditors, creating public distrust. Insurance only works if we scale up auditing, and we are building the infrastructure to do that. Millions of agents are being deployed; they leave terabytes of traces and will create thousands of incidents across dozens of risk categories. To scale auditing, we need reliable agents to surface evidence traces for human review. History guides us. Take cars: auto insurers funded crash tests to price risks; crash tests led us to airbags, lowering the risk. Take electricity: home insurers funded lightbulb tests to price fire risks; today, every lightbulb carries a safety mark. Nuclear safety works similarly. We’ve been learning by doing.. In the last 6 months, we’ve audited and insured frontier agent builders like Cursor, ElevenLabs, Lovable and Harvey. For ElevenLabs to get the world’s first agent insurance coverage, a Lloyd’s of London insurer required quarterly technical audits by an auditor of the insurer’s choice. We’ve built infrastructure for quarterly technical audits of any agent, working alongside firms like Gray Swan (technical evaluations) and Schellman (audit). In the coming weeks, we’ll share our vision for how an insurance ecosystem can work for the frontier, and open source the world’s first actuarial model for frontier AI catastrophic risk. We’re hiring across all roles in San Francisco. Come do your life’s work with us. Rune & Rajiv

Neil Movva (@neilmovva) started his career at Nvidia, working on GPUs and kernels, and has an unusually deep understanding of inference, from software to chips to power. We spend a lot of time on each of those layers, how they connect, and where the important tradeoffs are. What makes this conversation special is how detailed it is (like a 401-level class), yet Neil makes it remarkably clear and easy to follow. Today he runs Sail Research, a company building infrastructure for agents to make tokens as cheap as possible. We discuss: - Latency versus throughput - Why there are no bad chips, only bad pricing - The end of kernel engineering - Buying chips and power no one else wants - New chip architectures - Nvidia lore + his contrarian view of the company - Open source and the frontier labs I learned a ton. Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:38 Building a “Token Factory” 4:21 The Future of Background Agents 13:09 Nvidia and the GPU Stack 23:27 Chips, Memory, and Transformers 36:14 The Future of AI Training Data 44:32 Chip Scarcity and Compute Arbitrage 52:44 Reinventing the AI Data Center 59:01 Power and the “Scavenger Strategy” 1:10:10 Open vs. Closed AI

Today @Lovable announced their AIUC-1 certification - earning the trustmark for AI agents. Congrats on passing this milestone @antonosika & @FabianHedin - proud to see the Nordics set the pace here!