Emphasis on purpose - purpose breeds hope, hope breeds optimism, and optimism promotes good habits. @CoachDanGo nailed it.

The oldest people on Earth don't have complicated morning routines, do ice baths, or sleep in hyperbaric oxygen chambers. They wake up every day with purpose, walk a lot, eat home cooked meals, and in their free time they hang out with friends.

If anyone is creating a company that helps companies that pulls companies up these levels, I'd love to meet. Particularly around legibility and/or non-engineer usage of AI

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

We have raised a $61M Series A to automate customer operations. The world’s leading companies like DoorDash trust Giga to supercharge customer experience with AI.

We just led the Epiminds round @lightspeedvp! I’ve spent $100M on performance marketing as a founder. Agencies are essential and AI changes everything. Excited for Epiminds to power the world’s top performance agencies.

CREDENTIALS DON’T MATTER Over the last few months, I’ve seen several A execs and operators flounder and fail at AI startups, while young “inexperienced” builders have crushed execution and performed superbly. It’s the biggest discontinuity in talent evaluation I’ve seen in my 25 years in technology. All of one’s prior experiences, credentials, and traditional markers of success have become nearly irrelevant when the fundamental rules of the game have changed so dramatically. The shift to AI represents such a paradigm break that institutional knowledge often becomes institutional baggage. The executive who masterfully navigated enterprise sales cycles finds themselves lost when the product builds itself. The operator who optimized for predictable growth metrics struggles when the core capability improves exponentially overnight. Meanwhile, the 22-year-old who’s been fine-tuning models in their dorm room intuitively understands token economics, reasoning patterns, and capability scaling in ways that no MBA program ever taught. These “inexperienced” builders don’t carry the weight of how things “should” work. They don’t waste time trying to force AI capabilities into traditional product frameworks or business models. And so, they win. If you’re an executive wanting to find a role at an AI company, be humble. Put in the work. Use the tools and create a personal AI stack. Train yourself to think differently - probabilistically, not deterministically. Be open to an IC role if needed. It’s not magic, but it will take real work. If you’re an AI company founder, ensure your hiring process is not blinded by credentials. What matters is raw building ability (in EVERY role, not just Eng/Product/Design), comfort with uncertainty, and the ability to iterate and experiment exceptionally fast. It’s a new era.

Proud to co-lead @reflection_ai Series A as they emerge from stealth with $130M in funding. Huge congrats to Co-Founders @MishaLaskin and @real_ioannis, and the incredible team they’ve built—one of the strongest Reinforcement Learning (RL) research teams in the world. Misha and Ioannis bring unparalleled expertise from their time at @GoogleDeepMind, where they contributed to groundbreaking advancements in AI, particularly in reinforcement learning and decision-making. AI-driven code generation is far more than just copilots—it’s about building autonomous systems that can truly reason, iterate, and debug like a software engineer. Reflection AI is tackling this challenge head-on, applying RL to train AI models capable of solving complex programming tasks end-to-end. Their system is designed to write, optimize, and debug code autonomously, changing how software development is approached. Excited for what’s ahead! Read more: lsvp.com/stories/towards-sup… Cc: @lightspeedvp @JamesAlcorn94

Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) is the CPO of @AnthropicAI ($10B raised) and the co-founder of Instagram, which he sold to Meta for $1B. Here's the full video of my recent conversation with him. Mike has one of the AI industry's most interesting jobs. He shared with me how he and his team craft product strategy for the company that's leading the charge on AI in the enterprise. Specifically, we discussed how frontier model innovations both drive product and vice versa (how product ideas inform AI research). We also talk about the long term defensibility of models (inspired by the emergence of DeepSeek), and how Mike believes that not only will individual models have specific strengths over others (such as in areas like coding, science, etc), but that a model's "vibes" will also be a major factor for driving customers' choice. Mike also shared his view on how AI will reinvent media and the business model of advertising on the internet, drawn heavily from his work building one of the most successful ad products ever built (Instagram) and his work on Artifact, an AI news product he also co-founded. Lastly, Mike dove deep into what it's like building for the Enterprise for the first time in his career, and how lessons from Instagram and Meta inform not only product development, but how Anthropic thinks about scaling its team in this period of hypergrowth. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:54 Mike Krieger's Journey to Anthropic 03:17 Building Product Strategy at Anthropic 07:43 Rapid Iteration and Safety 10:58 Differentiating AI Models and User Experience 17:57 Impact of AI on Consumer Products and Business Models 24:39 Enterprise vs. Consumer Product Strategy 29:19 AI in Personal Life Management 30:15 Open Source and Claude Integrations 33:09 AI-Assisted Product Development 37:13 Scaling Teams and Processes at Anthropic 42:17 Reflections on AI and Future Prospects

A lot of legitimately awesome science happening at @arcinstitute. (Including some coming later this month.)

Not that @hubermanlab needs me to validate that he doesn’t get paid to endorse anyone, but I have been following (and…literally following, the advice of, that is) @FitFounder for a long time and his advice is accessible, concise and effective. It has helped me personally and others I send it to

It doesn't matter if you're 25 or 75, but if you are 45 just DO IT. Makes a huge difference. Mobility matters. #themoreyouknow

It doesn't matter if you're 25 or 75, do these 12 exercises for the rest of your life:

Each year @AtlanticoPart outdoes itself with LATAM Digital Transformation Report. This year is no different! If you want to understand the opportunity in Central and South America, I highly recommend it. Congrats to my friend @JulioV and the Atlantico team! Well done! 👇👇

lightspeed just became the top series a investor for consumer companies

We're thrilled to announce that we are co-leading @spaceandtime’s Series A round!

The AI boom has been building for over a decade through foundational research breakthroughs. These research findings have been the foundation of some of today’s top AI companies and new innovation ecosystems. At Lightspeed, we have been close observers of AI research over the past decade and backed pioneering startups built upon the research findings, such as @MistralAI, @SnorkelAI, and @SkildAI. Our latest blog identifies the most impactful AI research of the past 15 years and its role in shaping today's startup landscape. We found four key research waves that have laid the groundwork for the AI boom of today: → Model Architecture Advances → Developer Productivity Enhancements → Task Execution Innovations → Compute Efficiency Optimizations For a deep dive into the historical arc of AI research and to learn about the next wave of innovative startups, explore our latest insights here: lsvp.com/research-to-reality…

The world is facing a massive global labor shortage, particularly in industries like construction and healthcare, and many more. There are not enough people to fill the jobs, and more importantly, there are so many jobs that are not suitable for humans. While AI has the potential to bridge this gap, building AI that drives machines in the physical world has been incredibly difficult so far. Now, with breakthroughs from @SkildAI, we are on the verge of seeing a ChatGPT moment for robots.

Some exciting leadership changes at @Faire_Wholesale this morning. Congrats to @laurenbcl and Jason Lee on your promotions to President and CFO, respectively. Thrilled to partner with you in your new roles! news.faire.com/2024/07/01/ex…

The @suno_ai_ team has built an AI music model and creation product unlike anything the world has seen before, with the potential to change how we all experience music. We at @lightspeedvp have been so impressed by not only their execution, but also their thoughtfulness: Suno is on a mission to both lower the barrier for aspiring musicians while also increasing opportunity and raising the ceiling of what’s possible for existing musicians, too. We're thrilled to be leading their Series B alongside existing investors @natfriedman, @danielgross, @matrixvc, @fcollective, @levie, @demi_guo_, @AravSrinivas, and a bunch more from AI, startups, and music. With this round, the team has now raised a total of $125M. The level of talent on this team is mind boggling: if you want to join them, check out the link in their blog post below. Also, of course we had to make a Suno song about Suno to go with this post. cc @lisabethhan