Today, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you. We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction. Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents. We think that’s backwards. The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you. Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so. All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time. Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.

BREAKING: Bitcoin falls below $70,000 for the first time since April 7th.

People on @whop earn ~$4B annually across 145 countries. Until now, spending those earnings meant withdrawing to a bank account. With Whop Cards, they can now spend instantly at 175M merchant locations worldwide. Stablecoin commerce is here.

Today, we dropped the price of enterprise AI by 80%. Same frontier AI. Same chat, cowork, and code experience. Just 5x more tokens for the same spend. Here’s how and why. 👇 Also, we made a video. Please enjoy.

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

One bearish sign of all the AI layoffs is that the companies couldn't figure out how to produce even more by keeping the people and adding AI. I'm not entirely sure how to think about this.

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

Today, I'm thrilled to share that @Garden_Intel is being acquired by SIM IP for $150m — creating the world's leading IP monetization and licensing platform. SIM IP started off as our customer, and as we spent more time with them among hundreds of other users, we realized that to truly change the market we operate in, we had to vertically integrate to build a one-of-one software enabled business. To say this journey has been surreal would be an understatement. I started Garden from my Stanford dorm room as a senior with a laptop and a thesis: reasoning models and better search could help average people understand patents. Little did I know the impact it would have in unlocking the trillions of dollars of untapped value sitting in patent portfolios around the world. I was a 22-year-old first-time founder who had never raised a dollar, never hired anyone full time, and if we’re being honest, had no idea what I was doing at some points. So many people took a bet on me when they had every reason not to. I will never forget that. To my team — you are the reason we're here. You believed in a weird idea about AI and patents before it was obvious. You worked nights, weekends, and through moments when the outcome was far from certain. We faced rejection over and over before our use case became obvious. This is your win. To our investors — thank you for backing a kid with a 5 page memo and a dream. Your conviction gave us the runway to build something real. We made a lot of pivots before we got to something tangible, so your raw conviction in our team is something I will never take for granted. To our customers — thank you for taking a bet on us and helping usher in the everyday use of reasoning models in patent litigation and prosecution. To our competitors - thank you for forcing us to be better everyday. As part of SIM IP, Garden becomes the technology engine behind a pure-play licensing and royalty company that is scaling nine-figures in revenue. We're not just analyzing patents anymore — we're building the infrastructure that will define how innovation is valued and monetized for decades to come. The mission hasn't changed. We're still obsessed with the same problem: less than 2% of patents ever generate revenue for their inventors. That's a market failure. And now, we have the scale, capital, and team to fix it. I'm eternally grateful for how far we've come — and even more excited for what's next.