VC @Deviationcap, formerly @rtpvc, @OpenView & Head of Research at @MassChallenge. talking startups or complaining about Boston sports

New York, NY
Joined July 2011
A vc portfolio is basically one long parlay
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We’re going to see a bunch of neolab to neocloud pivots next year
Heard from a neolab friend: “Even if we fail to train the best model, we locked in GPU capacity early. H100/B200/B300 rental prices have since gone up 2–3x. We can just resell the compute and print money.” OK, so that’s the business model.
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There seems to be widespread understanding that the inference market is huge & growing but more limited understanding of how technically challenging it is to support low-latency, highly reliable inference at scale. Go rebuild k8s in a weekend; hope your coding agent had its coffee.
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This is funny, and reminds me to of course tease @nikhilvnamburi that he can’t guard me and @fendien that the Heat are doomed!
Lots of VCs kindof sound like this: "Your basketball team doesn't have a moat, any healthy human can throw the ball into the basket thingy. " People who have not run companies before don't understand how much the team matters more than some imagined structural moat.
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Joe Botsch retweeted
This is serious. I just saw with my very own eyes that even non-technical people can exploit CVEs like PHP2Shell using certain AI models and I am actually frightened. Once you figure it out, it is downright trivial to do. The digital infrastructure of the world is at risk.
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Joe Botsch retweeted
One of these does >$600m in EBITDA annually and holds dominant market share The other is a neocloud
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Joe Botsch retweeted
Inception just dropped Mercury 3, a model 4-8x faster than Luna / Haiku for the same price and benchmark performance. In real world use, OpenRouter shows that it’s effectively 2-4x faster and 2-4x cheaper effective price. The time for diffusion language models is finally here!
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Russ Hanneman is a prophet
should I be offended by this
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Joe Botsch retweeted
Notion AI lead @sarahmsachs argues that a lot of what runs on GPUs today should actually run on CPUs: "We have a strong perspective at Notion that a lot of things should be served on CPU that are served on GPU. There’s a lot of benefit and determinism in executed code." "Agents don’t need LLMs to reinvent that process every time, and that’s super token exhaustive, it’s super slow, and there’s no observability or determinism in it." "Giving the agent a local file system to store local thoughts, to write short Python scripts, that’s really important when there’s so much information. That has been probably one of the most important tools outside of edit and search that our internal agents rely on." @NotionHQ
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Joe Botsch retweeted
Oxide co-founder @bcantrill believes every VC wants to be contrarian, but most get cold feet when an actual contrarian bet is staring them in the face. "Everybody loves contrarian. But no one actually wants a zero."
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Adventure Capital
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That next Northrup board meeting is going to be a vibe…
Anduril is now worth more than Northrup Grumman.
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Oh great now we need a cornhole benchmark…winner gets to go to Volo Cornhole with me
Replying to @Google
In robotics, Gemini 4 Argon is speeding up real-world physical learning. We let Argon watch a video of a human playing cornhole. It mapped the environment, calculated whole-body joint movements, and autonomously built the simulation code to practice. When transferred to Apptronik’s Apollo humanoid, the robot sank seven straight shots in a real-world trial.
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@RonnyChatt is it a sign of RSI if we can’t beat a robot at lawn games?
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Joe Botsch retweeted
I animated the web of AI financing.
Here it is: the latest, expanded AI circular financing chart
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Just a fantastic vibe coding day
I made a game where you draft your All 22 Pokemon team from randomly rolled Regions and Pokemon Types and the goal is to finish the season 17-0 So far my best record is 10-7 lol all22pokemon.com
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🥹🥹🥹 the 01 season was special
Inside the Patriots locker room after the 2001 Snow Bowl 🤯
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barista: that'll be $6.39 VC: **frowning** that can't be right... barista: **sighs** that'll be $2,332.35 ARR VC: **smiling** yes!
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The OpenAI math results are wicked cool, but I am more curious about what they mean for the next R&D cost curve. Compute has changed experimentation before. SPICE let engineers test chip designs before fabrication. CFD let them test aircraft designs before the wind tunnel. If compute now starts making discovery itself cheaper, what do R&D teams attempt five years from now that sounds like science fiction today?
oh yeah btw guys we can do integer multiplication faster than n log n lol I was definitely very surprised when this one came in lol github.com/openai/math/tree/…
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Joe Botsch retweeted
What if AI models have just reached commodity status? In early 2025, we debated whether labs would become the airlines of the AI industry : high cost, low margin businesses with undifferentiated products. What’s the strategy in this environment?
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So when Ben Affleck talks about AI with a Boston Accent everyone cheers…but when I do it… maybe I need to get my own Batman costume
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models “I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that. “With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor. “You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something. “That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’ “I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
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