all things venture capital & tech
Joined December 2024
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the VC almanac retweeted
Such a pleasure working on launching a company that's going to redefine the LLM space.
Congrats team!
Introducing SubQ - a major breakthrough in LLM intelligence.
It is the first model built on a fully sub-quadratic sparse-attention architecture (SSA),
And the first frontier model with a 12 million token context window which is:
- 52x faster than FlashAttention at 1MM tokens
- Less than 5% the cost of Opus
Transformer-based LLMs waste compute by processing every possible relationship between words (standard attention).
Only a small fraction actually matter.
@subquadratic finds and focuses only on the ones that do.
That's nearly 1,000x less compute and a new way for LLMs to scale.
the VC almanac retweeted
@acenario and @abhijay_cloaked just raised $375M for @cloaked to fix the internet's biggest privacy problem.
In this episode, they take us back to the beginning and share the untold stories about everything it took to get here.
Episode 04 drops tomorrow.
the VC almanac retweeted
We've raised $6.5M to kill vector databases.
Every system today retrieves context the same way: vector search that stores everything as flat embeddings and returns whatever "feels" closest.
Similar, sure. Relevant? Almost never.
Embeddings can’t tell a Q3 renewal clause from a Q1 termination notice if the language is close enough.
A friend of mine asked his AI about a contract last week, and it returned a detailed, perfectly crafted answer pulled from a completely different client’s file.
Once you’re dealing with 10M+ documents, these mix-ups happen all the time.
VectorDB accuracy goes to shit.
We built @hydra_db for exactly this.
HydraDB builds an ontology-first context graph over your data, maps relationships between entities, understands the 'why' behind documents, and tracks how information evolves over time.
So when you ask about 'Apple,' it knows you mean the company you're serving as a customer. Not the fruit.
Even when a vector DB's similarity score says 0.94.
More below ⬇️
the VC almanac retweeted
One X article got me 6 discovery calls booked for Monday with companies that have upcoming launches & are looking for influencer amplification.
There was very slight influencer boost on the article itself. Model works. Calls booked. Bullish.
the VC almanac retweeted
We are entering the era of infinite code and humans can not review at this scale.
After a legendary run at @GitHub, @ashtom sits down with @guypod of @tessl_io to talk about this very interesting topic.
Love the conversation! If you’re a dev working with AI agents, go watch!
Infinite code doesn’t scale with human review.
On @ainativedev, @guypod and @ashtom, former CEO of @github , discuss why agent-to-agent collaboration is the natural next step and how review and trust must evolve with it.
On the docket:
• why AI innovation is happening simultaneously across incumbents, AI labs, and AI-native startups
• how agent-to-agent collaboration mirrors the way human teams already work
• which skills keep developers relevant in an agent driven workflow
Tune into the full episode now.
the VC almanac retweeted
Jack Zhang on why he said no to Stripe’s $1.2 billion offer to buy Airwallex
“In October 2018, Stripe reached out to buy us,” Airwallex co-founder Jack Zhang (@awxjack) begins.
Patrick Collison flew out to Shanghai to meet Jack and his co-founder, and they spent the day together. After the meeting, Patrick sent over a Google Doc that was 10-20 pages long and asked Jack to make comments.
“I was like, ‘Wow, the vision of the companies over the next decade is very much the same.’ We both wanted to build the AWS of financial services, and obviously Stripe was much further ahead of us. But this was before COVID. Stripe was like a $9 billion company — very similar to the scale of Airwallex today. I also really liked Patrick. It was like this guy is so smart.”
Asked what makes Patrick Collison so smart, Jack replies:
“He’s intellectually honest about everything, and he’s able to go deep in multiple dimensions.”
Eventually Stripe offered $1.2 billion for Airwallex, and according to Jack, he and his co-founders would’ve walked away with $350 million.
“I met with the whole team, and I was really impressed,” Jack recalls. “I basically said I think we’re going to do it.”
But when he flew back to Melbourne, Jack decided against it. And it was actually Patrick Collison who inspired him to reject the offer. Jack explains:
“So one of the things that really inspired me from talking and spending time with Patrick was I asked, ‘What’s the long-term thing for Stripe and yourself? Are you going to be here forever?’ And Patrick said to me that he’s going to build Stripe for the next 20-40 years. And I just never heard a founder tell me they will dedicate their entire life to building a business. And so that was inspiring to me, and I’m like that’s what I want to do.”
Today, Airwallex (@airwallex) is an $8B company, with more than $1B in ARR.
Video source: @twentyminutevc @HarryStebbings (2025)
the VC almanac retweeted
“Autonomous systems is the clearest thing.”
Emil Michael, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, US Department of War (DoW)
from @NoPriorsPod @Saranormous @EladGil @USWREMichael @DoWCTO
the VC almanac retweeted
Jack Zhang: “I'm taking on $70 million in debt to buy my own stock”
@airwallex CEO @awxjack is asked on the 20VC podcast about his conviction in the $8 billion fintech he built. His answer:
“I'm actually in the process of taking a debt of $70 million to buy Airwallex stock because I just have so much confidence in the company. My co-founders are doing the same. We're literally buying our own stock.”
Host @HarryStebbings was stunned:
“You're buying from early investors? Can I join?”
Jack continues:
“Of course you can. I thought that was a joke, but yes...of course you can.”
