Much taller IRL
Salt Lake City, UT
Joined May 2007
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Friday night in the neighborhood. 20 boys lined up to hit this jump.
Despite the doomer headlines, the kids are alright…
Bryce Roberts retweeted
I just spoke with @BenWilsonTweets and he said the response to the episode has been “life-affirming”. Since it was released he’s received introductions to other people who have beaten advanced cancer and so far you have helped raise over $800,000 for Ben and his family. Ben’s doctor originally gave him a year to live. With the new medication Ben is on (that’s working!) the goal is to push that out to 2 to 3 years and then with new therapies push 2 to 3 to 10, and then 10 to 25, and 25 to 50 and Ben gets to see his 4 small children grow up. Even today someone offered to make an introduction to Ben for a promising new therapy.
I’d like to ask you to keep helping spread the word about Ben. Someone out there that doesn’t know about Ben (yet) could have information that could save his life. And if you’d like to donate you can do that here. Every little bit matters: gofundme.com/f/help-ben-figh…
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5.
I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38.
He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations.
0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders.
55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
Stealing this for when people ask me why I’m still doing this:
“Work is something you do because you have to provide for your family. I don't have to do it. So of course it's not work. It's just what I love to do.”
I asked @orenzeev what his calendar looks like:
"Many VCs, once you start measuring it, optimize for whatever you measure. You want to show LPs broad deal flow. We saw 8,000 deals this year. And you did one of them. I try to see as few as possible.
Let me check my week. Monday, 7:30 yoga, 9am a board meeting. That's it. Tuesday, a couple calls and a board, and in between I went to the ocean and surfed.
So my days are really empty. Which is exactly what lets me be responsive. Every day five or six founders message me, and I reply within minutes, sometimes seconds.
People say it sounds like I'm not doing any real work. They're right. Two meetings a day, of course it's not work. It's a hobby. Work is something you do because you have to provide for your family. I don't have to do it. So of course it's not work. It's just what I love to do."
Presented w/o comment other than…
True story- the Vail board members I met had never heard of Instinct, let alone the other personal agents, at a time that it was growing 10% a day w/ 50%+ of its usage being travel and hospitality.
Bryce Roberts retweeted
First of Kind: The @rauchg interview
Season 3 starts now. I sat down with Guillermo in San Francisco to talk about layout shift, random acts of AI, and a dragon painted in a single stroke.
00:00 Human Effort Is Still Underrated
00:44 Chief Executive, Chief Designer
02:33 Two Bets: Software and English
05:15 Gmail Was My Siren Call
11:06 Exposure Hours
14:49 Layout Shift / One Stroke Dragon
17:10 No Random Acts of AI
25:17 Can Agents Have Taste?
30:15 Software Factories and Manufacturing Agent Customers
34:59 Everything Is Communication
38:04 A New American Story
41:52 Lifemaxxing
Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of @vercel. Growing up in Argentina, he taught himself English in order to teach himself programming, then went on to create @nextjs and other foundational technology for the real-time web.
In our conversation, Guillermo explains why he designed Vercel’s first command line before writing any code, why layout shift erodes trust, and why his company won’t commit any “random acts of AI.”
G is not just a chief executive. He’s a chief designer.
—
Guillermo Rauch: One Stroke Dragon
First of Kind, S3:E01 @firstofkind
Hosted by @soleio and produced with @room3nyc
Powered by our sponsors:
@framer @noondesign @bot @tryramp @vercel @meetgranola @profound
Bryce Roberts retweeted
loved foursquare a ton but this an example of death by capital stack.
- more than 1x liquidation stacks
- $400M+ raised including debt
acquisition price is not high debt gets paid first, nothing left so preferred gets canceled, common gets canceled.
the danger of over-raising, not just the latest valuation you have the clear, but the size capital stack you're creating along the way
Linear is profitable and the assets are more than we have raised. At this point if shut down the company investors would actually make money just from the cash assets.
Cofounder of Foursquare on its recent acquisition:
"I was heartbroken by this ending"
Appreciate the retro, @dens.
teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
I think about this graph every day.
A Rorschach test if there ever was one…
$81/month - that’s the median AI spend per employee at venture-backed companies, according to @tryramp’s AI Index. That’s at least 10x everyone else!
When you spend every day surrounded by founders building with AI, it’s easy to assume the rest of the economy spends the way their companies do. Ramp’s data says otherwise.
Of course, PE-backed and traditional companies are moving too. Their spend more than 2x’d over the past year. But they’re starting from a few dollars a month, about the price of a large cup of coffee.
Those of us in venture work inside a bubble of early adopters. For anyone selling into the token path, that’s good news: most of the market hasn’t started spending in earnest.
Bryce Roberts retweeted
Many (most?) investors disagree with me on this, but they are wrong. Gross margins on token spend, *at full utilization,* is the single most important metric for AI application companies. It's the purest measure of your value-add on underlying intelligence. 2/
Bryce Roberts retweeted
Also destroys outcomes for many founders who build big successful companies and who also over raised, leaving themselves underwater on their cap table
Equivocating ambition w/ massive funding rounds is the cancer of an entire generation of founders and a magnet for scam artists.
Invest in founders with a level of ambition that makes you uncomfortable.
I’ve sat at the table with a number of entrepreneurs who are raising seemingly back-to-back mega rounds every 3 months in the last year.
I’m an extraordinarily aggressive risk-taker, but in all these meetings I’ve felt physically uncomfortable.
To the point when I noticed I was gripping the chair in a meeting with a founder.
This is what it takes to win big and be truly venture-backable today.
As an OG, it’s still absolutely wild to me that every fundraising announcement discloses the valuation.
Bryce Roberts retweeted
Your security team is not a video production studio 🎬 Stop making them act like one.
Policy PDF, prompt, or this morning’s threat advisory in. Branded, company-wide training out, same day.
Content Studio:
Just did a video on this for our IG page.
Agree/Disagree on these tiers?
The #1 thing founders get wrong about fundraising is underestimating the importance of who makes the intro. For many VCs, the source is 50%+ of the decision-making.
Spend way more time than you think you should figuring this part out.
Goal of the 1st meeting is always to get the 2nd meeting
Bryce Roberts retweeted
$ firstofkind s3
✓ loaded firstofkind.com now live
Sign up for merch drop and E01 release.
