Founders: what is one piece of tactical advice (I'm not talking "try hard" or "don't give up"... i mean a small, simple, tactical piece of advice) that can make a founder's life easier, even just slightly? I'll give a few popular examples:

The demand for clean, always-on power is exploding, and the grid can't keep up. The team at Endurance Energy is going after one of the biggest untapped sources on the planet: geothermal heat beneath the seafloor. They're building systems to deliver gigawatts of zero-emission power faster and cheaper than conventional sources. Today, they're announcing $54M Series A funding. At @firstround, we're excited to have backed Andrew Redd and the team since the pre-seed. Huge congrats!

Human biology matters. Scientists and AI need human data to understand health and disease. Crownlands is open sourcing Gateway 4M, the largest single-cell tissue dataset ever released from living humans, to advance research on brain aging and neurodegeneration.

There are few people in the world I've met who are as dedicated, intense, and ambitious as @SurbhiSarnaSF. I had the honor of first getting to know Surbhi when we were both working at YC, and it was so obvious from my very first interaction that she was someone who would leave a massively impactful mark on the world. Then you have @nateps -- one of the smartest, kindest, and most genuine people out there -- who also happens to be an EPIC builder. Put them together, and you get an unstoppable team. I am so thrilled for the entire Collate crew on this huge financing milestone. I know Collate customers have been loving the platform, and I can't wait for so many more people to experience it soon. forbes.com/sites/innovationr…

This has to be a top 3 most memorable startup video I’ve seen…

I remember first meeting @jakebolling & being 'wowd' by his desire to transform an otherwise overlooked industry. We knew we had to invest. 12 months later, Scotch launched. 3 months after that, pre-empted for their A. Now, Scotch has passed a $1B GPV run-rate. Scotch is quickly becoming the defacto operating system for liquor stores nationwide. Kudos to the entire Scotch team, and a big 🍻 to Jake — one of the best operators out there.

In just a few months @TownAI has transformed how I (and most of @firstrouhd) get work done. Congrats to the entire Town team on their $55M Series A!

One of @firstround's founders is hiring a Founder's Associate -- and it's one of the best front-row seats in tech right now. If you aspire to be a founder one day or are looking to break into tech, this role is one of the fastest ways to learn -- and an opportunity to drive real impact at the 0 to 1 stage. Work with a technical YC founder on AI infrastructure. SF, in-person. Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/firstround/…

Watch @CNN take a test flight on @MerlinAero's autonomous plane. The plane's AI pilot controls the plane from takeoff to landing -- and responds over the radio to air traffic controllers.

There are a small number of elite go to market leaders. Graham Moreno is one of them. He recently joined @p0 to help lead GTM. Before that, he was at Cognition, Grafana, and MongoDB. One of his core philosophies is that a great go to market system raises the floor and introduces predictability while still leaving space for exceptional people to use their judgment to delight the customer. “One of my favorite stories is, one of the best reps I’ve ever worked with, during the pandemic found out that the son of a champion at one of his companies had been taking guitar lessons and couldn’t anymore because of COVID. So he ended up teaching this guy’s kid guitar over Zoom during COVID. And he also didn’t tell anyone. No one found out about this for a long time. Then the champion at this account brought it up on a call with me six months later and was like, ‘Oh yeah, Isaac has been teaching my son how to play guitar.’ At no part in our process does it say, ‘teach someone guitar.’” This is one of my favorite deep dives on what it means to be an executional revenue leader in a post AI world. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Timestamps 00:32 Has the sales playbook changed in the AI era? 02:13 Why "showing up" beats letting the marketplace decide 06:50 Why great salespeople sell to engineers and executives in one motion 11:37 Selling to AI-native buyers who grew up on ChatGPT 13:49 Same seller, different tempo: 8 weeks vs. 8 business days 15:57 How AI-native buyers handle build vs. buy decisions 17:48 The rep who taught a champion's son guitar over Zoom 19:03 Raising the floor without capping the ceiling 22:09 Why too much process narrows the kind of seller you attract 25:46 The three pillars of GTM excellence 31:00 Building peers who are 80% aligned, not 100% 38:03 Whether AI is changing what good enablement looks like 41:35 Selling against direct and implied competitors at once 42:45 Instrumenting the funnel from stage zero to close 45:57 Why post-sales should always roll up to the revenue leader 48:19 The case for outsized commissions 52:02 The 96 hours of panic before Cognition acquired Windsurf 53:04 How far out should a GTM leader be planning? 57:53 What a normal week looks like in hypergrowth

The world’s oceans span roughly 140 million square miles and carry 80% of global trade, and yet most of that area is effectively unmonitored. All of the existing methods for ocean surveillance fall short: Satellites see broadly but inconsistently, often going dark for hours or days in between snapshots. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is effective but only works for honest actors, because it’s easy for a vessel that doesn’t want to be seen to turn it off. Fully autonomous vessels exist, but they’re insanely expensive and hard to scale. @SobinNeil has built both the hardware and software needed to tackle the massive scale of this physical-world problem. At Hivemapper, he went deep in hardware, creating a decentralized network of cars by mapping the world block by block. And at Scale AI he learned that any AI solution is only as good as the data it has. He’s applying both lessons with @quartermasterai, which just announced their $43M Series A, co-led by @firstround and @QuietCapital. Instead of building entirely new infrastructure, they’re installing hardware on existing fleets to collect live maritime data, and then feeding that data into a software layer to turn those raw feeds into actionable intelligence. They’ve already covered more than 10 million square miles of ocean, adding 2.8 million square miles in April alone, and they have over 600 active vessels across 25 countries and four continents. Couldn't be prouder to partner with Neil and the Quartermaster team. More on what they're up to below.

Inflation hits the West Village

New AI x Science research: Frontier models have gaps in their scientific knowledge. Our new eval tests how models recall significant published findings without tools, in Alzheimer’s disease. GPT-5.5 performed best among released models, but the benchmark remains far from saturated. Questions are based on prominent findings, often the central claims from highly cited papers, that were published before the models’ cutoff dates. Does it impact AI x Science discovery agents? In the topics that the LLMs have gaps in “parametric” knowledge, agents using the model overlook potential discoveries -- even with tools and internet search. The conclusion: training models more intensively on the latest scientific findings is a promising way to make scientific agents more useful! “More information can be pulled into context. More information should be pulled into context. But there will always be a marginal query that the agent does not run, and the shape of this frontier is determined by internal knowledge.” Link to research blog below:

Closed Q1 last week. Revenue is accelerating for the 7th straight quarter. AI now counts for 60% of our business. Cash flow positive. The transition from software to AI is not easy, but can be done! I am proud of our teams!

Beautiful work @firstround - thank you for featuring four @BoxGroup founders - very efficient… really a wonderful video @kareemamin @celinehalioua @martabralic @jakeserval -- and the one that got away @drinkzima…

My mom was a professional pool player. She spent 20 years on the Women's Pro Billiards Tour and founded and ran Pool & Billiards Magazine. If she imprinted one thing on me (besides my limited pool skills), it was that working as hard as you can to become the best at what you do was… what you do. It was normal. I'll always remember a tournament she took me to when I was very young. She lost that night, and I (rudely) asked her, "Mom, why did you lose?" She said, plainly: "She practiced more than I did." I've carried that lesson with me as a founder. Thanks to @firstround for letting me share her story (and for digging up a fun throwback of me modeling for one of her many books on pool). Happy Mothers Day!

Beginnings Matter. Who you are is a reflection of how you were raised. I am a reflection of how my parents raised me. And all of the founders I’ve been privileged to work with are a reflection of how they were molded by their parents. On Mother’s Day, @firstround thought we’d give some of our founders the opportunity to acknowledge the impact their mom had on them. @martabralic’s mom came to the US from Serbia without knowing anyone, learned English and programming languages to pick up new jobs to support the family. She gave Marta the confidence that she, too, could do hard things, like building @pomelocare. @kareemamin's mom modeled grace under pressure (even when Kareem once crashed her car). That’s probably why Kareem has an insane ability to remain calm under pressure, which he uses every day at @clay. @celinehalioua's mom pursued her PhD and instilled a love of research in Celine, which inspired her to start @loyalfordogs. Happy Mother's Day!