asana's co-founder will likely make more from seed investment than all of sand hill road combined. anthropic’s fundraising journey deserves its own netflix series.

Anthropic's financial obligations by company $ANT

NASCAR slowed its cars down to make them safer, and that's the reason 15 of them piled into each other at once on Sunday. The fastest lap in NASCAR history was back in 1987. Bill Elliott went 212.809 mph at Talladega, and nobody has come close since, because NASCAR won't let them. Three days after that lap, Bobby Allison blew a tire in the race at over 200 mph. His car took off like a plane and ripped out a chunk of the fence right in front of the grandstand, and flying debris hurt fans in the stands. That's about as close as the sport has ever come to a crowd disaster. So for 1988 NASCAR bolted a metal plate under the carburetor at Daytona and Talladega to strangle the engine's air. Elliott's car had been making about 625 horsepower. The new ones made around 410, and speeds dropped under 200 and stayed there. Here's where it backfired. At 190 mph the car in front punches a hole in the air, and whoever's tucked in behind rides in that pocket, so two cars nose to tail go faster than either one alone. Now give everybody the same weak engine. Nobody can pull away by themselves, so the only way to go fast is to ride a few feet off somebody's bumper, two and three wide, with the whole field jammed up behind you. Somebody bumps the wrong guy at the wrong angle and there's nowhere for anyone to go. Fans even have a name for it, the Big One, and you can pretty much count on seeing it every time they race there. That's what you're watching here. Sunday's race, five laps to go, and the whole pack comes apart right on the start-finish line. One of the drivers said afterward he just got "a little push in the wrong spot." At Talladega that's all it ever takes. Watch it all the way to the last car. What NASCAR did next was go to work on the crash itself. Drivers had to start wearing HANS head-and-neck restraints after Dale Earnhardt died on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, one of these exact restricted races. Soft walls started going up the next year. The plates turned into tapered spacers in 2019, and today's car still runs about 510 horsepower at Talladega, 160 less than the same engine makes at most other tracks. So Elliott's 212.809 is still sitting in the record book, and keeping it there costs a wreck like this one about twice a year.

Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…

Isaiah, after everything we’ve been through together I’m surprised that you would publicize our disagreement in this fashion. But since you have created public interest in this, it is important that people should hear both sides of the story. Day One has been a major investor in Valar from the beginning, and we have never wavered in our belief that the company will be a success. This faith and support in our founders is why fourteen Day One founders have become limited partners in Day One’s most recent fund. In 2024, Day One invested in Valar’s seed round. Later that year, Valar required a seed extension after miscalculations by management regarding the capital needs of the business. Day One stepped in to provide this seed extension, saving the company in a difficult time. When it came time to raise a Series A, Valar spent several weeks on the market without success. At Valar’s request, Day One then offered the first term sheet and co-led the Series A, again saving the company during a time when deep tech startups in highly regulated industries were a difficult sell in venture capital. Then when Valar needed a Series A extension, Isaiah asked that Day One waive our pro rata rights so as to make a tenuous financing deal work out. We agreed for the good of the company. As part of these transactions, Valar agreed that, if their long-shot effort to build nuclear energy as a startup did succeed, Day One would have rights to participate in future rounds that could not be eliminated without Day One’s consent. This was a fair bargain at a time when Day One took extraordinary risks by betting against the market when Valar’s future appeared highly uncertain. Following the achievement of criticality on June 18th, our faith has been validated. Valar went from being an obscure company to a hot startup. We congratulate the Valar team on their hard won success! Of course, when it came time for Valar to raise a Series B after achieving such success, Day One expected to participate in that round – as both parties had agreed. But at this point the normally positive communications between Day One and Valar took a negative turn. Valar insisted that Day One give up all of its future pro rata rights despite the parties’ agreements, and despite four out of six major investors participating in the Series B round without waiving. This went against both the letter and the spirit of our deal, so we did not agree. In decades of investing we have waived pro-rata rights dozens of times, but no other company has ever demanded that we give up all of our rights for all future rounds. We told Isaiah we would give up a majority of our pro-rata in the Series B round so as to not make his life difficult, to which he responded “You cannot make my life difficult, I can make your life difficult.” It was at this point that we sought representation with Quinn Emanuel to protect the firm and the interests of our limited partners. Day One has since learned of a significant secondary equity sale by Isaiah from which we were excluded. Our attempts to gain insights into this through our information rights have been stymied by Valar management, who have refused to produce material documents requested by Day One. After weeks of delay on these documents, Valar management alerted us this Wednesday that they intend to pursue legal action against Day One unless we waive our legal rights forever. We have always pursued positive and mutually beneficial relationships with all of our portfolio companies. We have neither taken nor threatened legal action against Valar, and in fact we told them explicitly that we have no interest in doing so. Valar voluntarily entered into a contract with Day One, then violated that contract, and is now suing Day One. We are deeply disappointed by this recent erratic turn, but are still proud of our early and continued support of Valar. We look forward to the clarity from the courts that Valar’s management is seeking.