👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Jason Calacanis breaks down the viral 60 Minutes clip of Elizabeth Holmes and says her exact words were “people at Hopkins, not Hopkins.” He predicts the new Nathan Fielder doc will convince half its viewers she was railroaded. Misleading, fraud, or both? @Jason @twistartups
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky says most VCs are like cheerleaders trying to play on the field:
“These people basically think that because of them, the company was created because they gave money, and that they are entitled to a large part of its success.”
“My advice to entrepreneurs would be: even if you raise money from VCs, pay a lot of attention to shareholder agreement.”
“Ensure that they’re purely financial players, with no voting rights and no seat at the table in decision-making.”
“If something goes wrong, you effectively have cheerleaders who look at the match, and then try to play the match instead of professional players. That’s always a disaster.”
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Doug Leone names the error every venture investor makes letting go of the winners too soon.
“We owned 20% of Nvidia and sold.”
“We were the first investor in Apple and sold.”
“We owned 10% of Google and sold.”
“If we hadn’t sold Google that would be half a trillion dollars.”
“We owned a quarter of Cisco and sold.”
“Those are big ownership in very big companies.”
“The great companies compounded 20+ years after the IPO. If you had a little sniffer that this thing has essentially an unbounded market for many years, you should never sell a share.”
“You can make way more money holding those. If you're compounding a $5 billion gain that can turn into a $50 billion gain.”
“But we all made that mistake.”
If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
NYC showed up!
Together AI × NVIDIA × Reflection. A full room of builders, great conversations, and a shared excitement for what’s next in open AI.
Thanks to everyone who joined us tonight.
Berlin and San Francisco up next. This community keeps growing, and we’re just getting started.
Find your city. Come build with us: luma.com/user/together_ai
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Lessons from @elonmusk and Mark Zuckerberg and Napoleon:
“Elon has demonstrated that if you have a small, incredibly cracked, highly technical team, that's very flat, you can accomplish a lot very quickly.”
“Mark has internalized that failure doesn't matter. It just matters when you win, how big you win.”
“That concept enables Mark to operate without fear because he’s just very comfortable taking lots of risk.”
“Mark has this great quote that says: The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that's changing the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
“In the book The Mind of Napoleon, Napoleon repeats that hesitation is fatal. Napoleon says before you engage in a course of action you should deliberate thoroughly. He'd study from every angle to make sure he's making the right decision. But once he’s sure he’s on the right path, he goes all in. I feel there's an echo with the way Mark operates. Once Mark knows what he wants to do, he empties the clip.”
This guy and his team are single handily killing JIRA
Linear CEO @karrisaarinen: "Making products produces two things: the product, and the learning.
The effort you put into building and designing things teaches you something about what the problem is, what the customers want.
We're in this time now that there's this danger of losing that direct connection with the learning."
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
President Trump presents the National Medal of Science to Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and Lisa Su, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Michael Dell and Satya Ndella.
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang on why his college friends, not experienced engineers, were the right people to build Scale AI's early team:
When Alexandr started Scale AI, his first hires didn't come from the San Francisco talent market.
"I mostly hired people I knew from school."
When Shawn Ryan suggests that was because he could trust them, Alexandr turns it around. It was about whether they could trust him:
"I think more that they could trust me."
Experienced engineers had no reason to. He explains:
"If I went to like a, a 25 year old engineer in San Francisco, I was like, hey, we should, we should work together. I had no credibility."
@alexandr_wang describes how those pitches usually ended:
"I would get coffee with these people and I would say like, yeah, this is what we're working on. Super cool. You should join us. And then they would all just be like, okay, cool, I guess I'm going to go back to my job now."
His college friends were different. They already knew him, and that relationship gave him the credibility that strangers wouldn't:
"So early on, I had no credibility, except for with people I went to college with who we were just like friends and we liked each other. And so I managed to recruit a bunch of them over."
Some of those friends dropped out to join him. Others were seniors who finished school first and then came on board.
"It was a mix. And that was like the early nucleus of the team."
That group of college friends carried Scale AI until the company had something stronger than a coffee pitch to offer: real customers.
"Then we started picking up momentum because we're starting to work with large automotive companies, were starting to work with, you know, these very futuristic autonomous driving companies."
Only then did the team expand beyond that first circle:
"And then as momentum started to pick up, like, you know, we were able to grow and build up the team over time."
The lesson is that your earliest hires are rarely the most experienced people you can find. They are the people who already believe in you. Before you have traction, a relationship can do the work that a track record can't.
If you're building something new with no credibility yet, look first at the people who already know you. They may be the only ones willing to bet on you before anyone else will.
🚀🚀🚀
Together is the #1 provider by volume of tokens (across closed and open endpoints) on @OpenRouter
openrouter.ai/providers
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Together is the #1 provider by volume of tokens (across closed and open endpoints) on @OpenRouter
openrouter.ai/providers
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Sam Altman's most underrated observation on talent:
"Thinking about what to work on is a higher impact thing most of the time" than how hard you execute on it.
This cuts against how most ambitious people are wired. We're trained to optimize execution — ship faster, iterate harder, grind longer. The question of *what* to work on gets treated as settled after the first decision.
But Altman's point has a mechanism: if you're on the wrong problem, execution excellence is just a faster path to the wrong place. Compounding works both ways — and working on the wrong thing for years compounds against you just as hard as working on the right thing compounds for you.
His nuance matters too. He's not saying never execute. He says "at some point you actually have to go." The trap isn't pausing to reconsider — it's never reopening the question at all.
The best founders don't treat "what to work on" as a one-time decision. They treat it as a recurring audit. And they're willing to pause execution to reopen it — which is the part most people never give themselves permission to do.
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Congrats to the Reflection team on Beam 🎉
Be sure to join us next week at our NYC meet-up with the Reflection team and NVIDIA
luma.com/TAIxNvidiaxReflecti…
Introducing Beam: a highly efficient agentic open model with 501B total parameters and 23B active.
- Frontier reasoning efficiency
- Advances the Western open frontier on coding & agentic tasks
- Trained end-to-end from scratch
Full weights release this month.
Learn more about Beam: reflection.ai/beam
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Alexandr Wang — Scale AI founder, now Meta's Chief AI Officer — says Palantir's real growth weapon isn't the software.
It's the deployment model.
The strategy: embed engineers directly inside client operations until the product becomes load-bearing infrastructure. By the time anyone reviews the contract, the switching cost is already existential.
Most enterprise SaaS sells access. Palantir sells operational dependency — deliberately, structurally, at the process layer.
Wang's framing is worth taking seriously. This is someone who built a company on the hard side of enterprise AI sales, now running AI infrastructure at Meta. When he calls out a commercial strategy as unusually ruthless, he's seen the comparison set.
What makes Palantir's model durable: the moat isn't the product, it's the integration depth. You can't rip out something that runs your ops without rebuilding the ops. That's a different category of lock-in than a SaaS password.
The valuation debate around Palantir misses this. You're not pricing a software multiple. You're pricing an irreversibility premium.
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Dana White talks about making his sons work CONSTRUCTION and manual jobs so they understand what REAL WORK looks like, while saying the experience and connections you build by actually showing up to work are why he believes you CAN’T build a truly successful business from home 👀🔥
“This younger generation thinks you can work from home and build a successful business. It’s impossible… A lot of good ideas come from everybody being at work.”
👨🏿💻Byron retweeted
Adam Neumann on first principles for founders: ask why until nobody can answer, then ask again.
"It's our second WeWork building. We need to do the floor. We only had ninety thousand dollars."
"I said, 'How much is the floor?' Everybody's like, 'The floor is between thirty to forty-five thousand.' I said, 'Why?' They said, 'What do you mean why? These are the quotes.'"
"I said, 'Can you break down the quotes for me? How many pieces of floor? How many nails? How much glue? How many hours of work per person? How much does each person cost?' No one could answer."
"I called the top three guys and said, 'I would like you to earn fifteen percent above the cost. I think that's a fair margin. Do you agree?' All three of them said yes."
"Very quickly, that first floor, instead of thirty to forty-five thousand, was twelve thousand."
"You can call it first principles. You can call it asking every question. But if you're the entrepreneur, or if you're an employee or a partner, ask why."
@AdamNeumann w/ @StevenBartlett