Partner @ExpandingCap (growth investor in Databricks, Canva, ClickHouse, Skydio). Co-founded @Humin (acq by Tinder). Can't believe this app is free.
Joined February 2009
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- Followers 1,276
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306 Photos and videos
May 13
We're making drugs in space.
Congrats @zebulgar & @VardaSpace
Today's Varda news is that we're making space drugs with United Therapeutics ($25b in market cap)
First time a public company has dedicated their balance sheet to making a physical product in space
Ba-boom
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May 13
Congrats to @Gedmark and the entire @Astranis Space Technologies team. Astranis just closed a $450M Series E — we're so excited to be an investor at Expanding Capital.
Astranis builds advanced satellites for high orbits — providing dedicated, secure connectivity to the world's most sophisticated customers: large enterprises, sovereign governments, and the US military.
Astranis invented MicroGEO, which is a smaller, faster-to-build satellite that gives a single customer (a country, a telco, an oil company) their own dedicated network.
Just like chip fabs, rare earth supply chains, and renewed US manufacturing — satellite infrastructure is also re-nationalizing.
Taiwan bought an Astranis satellite after Chinese vessels cut their undersea cables, Oman just signed, the US Space Force selected Astranis as a prime contractor on multiple Programs of Record.
Fewer than 20 nations currently operate sovereign satellites. I suspect every major government will announce sovereign space plans soon. And they will all use Astranis. Really excited to be onboard.
And a personal thank you to @Gaurab for the warm reconnection that made this happen.
It’s time for scale: Astranis adds $450 million in new capital to meet surging demand for advanced high-orbit spacecraft.
Dedicated communications infrastructure is no longer optional. Demand is spiking from countries and governments that are moving away from aging, shared GEO communications satellites. They require dedicated satellites and networks they control, which is something that can only be provided from GEO.
This capital enhances our ability to meet demand from our commercial customer base around the world, and importantly we are now spooling up to support multiple US Government programs of record simultaneously.
We’ve now been selected as Prime for the initial phase of 3 separate Programs of Record— PTS-G, Resilient GPS, and RG-XX/Andromeda.
And we’re just getting started. More in the comments.
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May 5
Last week, @SkydioHQ announced its Series F at a $4.4B valuation. I caught up with Skydio's CEO @adampbry & CMO Macario Namie about where the business is headed next.
My biggest takeaway from the conversation:
Skydio is America's Drone Prime 🇺🇸
Skydio has built a dominant position across commercial, public safety, and defense drone markets — with 4,000 customers, 60,000 units shipped, and 10M first-responder calls processed through its DFR (that means, drone as first responder) Command platform.
On the defense side, Skydio just landed a $52M Army order (the largest single-vendor tactical drone order in Army history) and Skydio earned a spot on am elite $151B U.S. military approved vendor list, alongside the other top defense primes.
Now, with $3.5B committed to U.S. manufacturing, Skydio is positioning itself as America's Drone Prime.
As AI eats software, Skydio's flying AI robot infrastructure operates in the physical world, where is long-term subscription contracts (often 10 years) that compound like critical infrastructure, not SaaS.
Excited to be a small investor here. Deep dive below...
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Jonathan Shriftman retweeted
$NBIS' ClickHouse platform is starting to look like the CUDA of data analytics, a foundational infrastructure layer that more and more data-heavy AI businesses rely on – including OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and Meta.
"Every company in the world is rearchitecting around AI. But ClickHouse is what AI is architecting around."
Apr 28
What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, Cloudflare, Meta, Canva, Shopify, Harvey, & Ramp all have in common? They're all built on @ClickHouseDB.
Here's the simplest way I can explain what ClickHouse does: imagine asking a question about every transaction your company has ever processed and getting the answer before you finish reading this sentence. That's ClickHouse.
I sat down with CEO @ceo_clickhouse and VP of Product @tbragin to tell the ClickHouse story... because once you understand what they've built, the opportunity becomes impossible to ignore. I believe this is a generational company that will (continue to) power the leading AI businesses.
My biggest takeaway from my conversation w/ Aaron & Tanya:
Every company in the world is rearchitecting around AI. But ClickHouse is what AI is architecting around.
As Aaron put it: "Most infrastructure companies were designed before the emergence of agentic systems. These legacy platforms simply weren't designed to meet the volume, concurrency, and dynamic load these AI workloads demand. ClickHouse was designed for this moment."
I've been an investor since the Series C, and I wanted to write a piece that explains the massive opportunity ahead — and what they've actually built — in plain English.
In this piece, I'll cover how:
→ ClickHouse built the world's fastest analytical database — milliseconds where it used to take hours, at 50-70% lower cost than the tools it replaces.
→ ClickHouse is consolidating the entire data stack — replacing five or more separate vendors: Snowflake, Datadog, Elasticsearch, Pinecone, and Postgres.
→ ClickHouse has built the "Agentic Data Stack" — connecting AI agents directly to real-time data so teams can query, reason, and act instantly.
→ ClickHouse has a credible path to $100Billion — with a trillion-dollar addressable market and a consumption model that scales with every agent deployed. There's a reason ARR has grown 250% YoY with no SDRs, and enterprise customers have grown from 3,000 to 4,000 in just three months 🤯
Thanks for letting me tell this story, Aaron & Tanya.
Let's Click into it…
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Jonathan Shriftman retweeted
Amazing write up about Clickhouse one of the stakes in Nebius Group (~25%).
When I started investing in Nebius Jan25 I saw clickhouse as the most promising subsidiary. Since that moment I can’t wait for an IPO of Clickhouse and feel like 2027 will be the year. Long Nebius🚀
Apr 28
What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, Cloudflare, Meta, Canva, Shopify, Harvey, & Ramp all have in common? They're all built on @ClickHouseDB.
Here's the simplest way I can explain what ClickHouse does: imagine asking a question about every transaction your company has ever processed and getting the answer before you finish reading this sentence. That's ClickHouse.
I sat down with CEO @ceo_clickhouse and VP of Product @tbragin to tell the ClickHouse story... because once you understand what they've built, the opportunity becomes impossible to ignore. I believe this is a generational company that will (continue to) power the leading AI businesses.
My biggest takeaway from my conversation w/ Aaron & Tanya:
Every company in the world is rearchitecting around AI. But ClickHouse is what AI is architecting around.
As Aaron put it: "Most infrastructure companies were designed before the emergence of agentic systems. These legacy platforms simply weren't designed to meet the volume, concurrency, and dynamic load these AI workloads demand. ClickHouse was designed for this moment."
I've been an investor since the Series C, and I wanted to write a piece that explains the massive opportunity ahead — and what they've actually built — in plain English.
In this piece, I'll cover how:
→ ClickHouse built the world's fastest analytical database — milliseconds where it used to take hours, at 50-70% lower cost than the tools it replaces.
→ ClickHouse is consolidating the entire data stack — replacing five or more separate vendors: Snowflake, Datadog, Elasticsearch, Pinecone, and Postgres.
→ ClickHouse has built the "Agentic Data Stack" — connecting AI agents directly to real-time data so teams can query, reason, and act instantly.
→ ClickHouse has a credible path to $100Billion — with a trillion-dollar addressable market and a consumption model that scales with every agent deployed. There's a reason ARR has grown 250% YoY with no SDRs, and enterprise customers have grown from 3,000 to 4,000 in just three months 🤯
Thanks for letting me tell this story, Aaron & Tanya.
Let's Click into it…
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Apr 28
What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, Cloudflare, Meta, Canva, Shopify, Harvey, & Ramp all have in common? They're all built on @ClickHouseDB.
Here's the simplest way I can explain what ClickHouse does: imagine asking a question about every transaction your company has ever processed and getting the answer before you finish reading this sentence. That's ClickHouse.
I sat down with CEO @ceo_clickhouse and VP of Product @tbragin to tell the ClickHouse story... because once you understand what they've built, the opportunity becomes impossible to ignore. I believe this is a generational company that will (continue to) power the leading AI businesses.
My biggest takeaway from my conversation w/ Aaron & Tanya:
Every company in the world is rearchitecting around AI. But ClickHouse is what AI is architecting around.
As Aaron put it: "Most infrastructure companies were designed before the emergence of agentic systems. These legacy platforms simply weren't designed to meet the volume, concurrency, and dynamic load these AI workloads demand. ClickHouse was designed for this moment."
I've been an investor since the Series C, and I wanted to write a piece that explains the massive opportunity ahead — and what they've actually built — in plain English.
In this piece, I'll cover how:
→ ClickHouse built the world's fastest analytical database — milliseconds where it used to take hours, at 50-70% lower cost than the tools it replaces.
→ ClickHouse is consolidating the entire data stack — replacing five or more separate vendors: Snowflake, Datadog, Elasticsearch, Pinecone, and Postgres.
→ ClickHouse has built the "Agentic Data Stack" — connecting AI agents directly to real-time data so teams can query, reason, and act instantly.
→ ClickHouse has a credible path to $100Billion — with a trillion-dollar addressable market and a consumption model that scales with every agent deployed. There's a reason ARR has grown 250% YoY with no SDRs, and enterprise customers have grown from 3,000 to 4,000 in just three months 🤯
Thanks for letting me tell this story, Aaron & Tanya.
Let's Click into it…
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Apr 14
I sat down with @cliffobrecht, Canva's Co-Founder & COO, for a sneak preview of what they're launching at Canva Create this week.
As an investor in @canva, I've never been more excited about where this company is going.
$4B in ARR. 265M monthly active users. 95% of the Fortune 500. Enterprise revenue growing 100% YoY. AI tools used 27 billion times — tripling year over year.
And today, for the first time, I'm sharing an exclusive: Canva's newest business tier has hit $350M ARR in just five months 🤯
Cliff put the strategic shift simply:
"People don't wake up saying 'I want to create a presentation.' They wake up saying 'I want to grow my business.'"
That's the whole game. Canva is moving from helping you create assets to helping you achieve outcomes.
Watching him demo unreleased products, one frame kept coming back to me:
Canva is becoming your CMO.
But its more than that. It's also your graphic designer, your copywriter, your media buyer, your brand strategist, your performance marketer, your email marketing manager, your market researcher, and your campaign analyst.
One platform. Starting at $10 a month.
In this interview, I go deep into Canva's proprietary AI models, their full productivity suite, agentic tools & evolving business model.
So excited for Canva Create this week!
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Apr 6
Every year since 2019, @Wing_VC has surveyed ~100 of the top venture capitalists in enterprise tech... partners at firms like @sequoia, @a16z, @BessemerVP, @lightspeedvp etc…. and asked them to rank the most promising private companies.
The result is the Enterprise Tech 30 broken into Early, Mid (as in the category, not the Gen-Z insult though the name choice is funny), Late, and Giga stages by capital raised. It's one of the few institutional, peer-reviewed snapshots of what the best investors actually believe at any given moment. I always love this list and it’s amazing they put this together for the tech ecosystem.
The 2026 edition dropped last week (link in post)
Time flies in the AI era and I was curious: What does this list look like over time? How has the composition shifted since 2019? What happened in the last 2-3 years as AI rewrote everything? Which companies stuck, which vanished. Maybe most importantly, can I use this to predict future outsized returns?
So I pulled every ET30 report going back to the first edition, built a database of every company across all 8 years (Thank you Claude), and tracked every appearance, stage transition, and disappearance.
At the end of this research, I highlight a framework to pick the companies that have the highest chance to become Giga.
TY for this incredible research @EricNewcomer, @peter_wagner, @rajeevchand, @chriszeoli, @tanayj!
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Apr 1
Last night a group of us kicked off something new in NYC: West Street – a small, recurring salon for people building and funding the next wave of AI.
The name is a nod to the original Bell Labs on West Street in Manhattan. The idea is simple: get a small, consistent group of operators, researchers, and investors in a room, and go deeper than the usual work dinner. We'll meet at least 4 times in the next 3 months.
Our first cohort includes AI leaders from Thrive Capital, Anthropic, Peregrine, IBM Research, Scale AI, Meta, & Crosby AI.
The format: this was the first one to get to know each other, then each session, everyone teaches something – a technical stack, a policy problem, a go-to-market approach, a thesis, even how to use AI to go viral on social media. We bring in outside experts when the questions get big enough.
A few threads from night one that stuck with me:
• What remains uniquely human when intelligence becomes abundant and cheap?
• We've spent 30 years making the world of bits magical and almost no time upgrading the world of atoms. Will AI change that?
• Most of the jobs we glorify today didn't exist a hundred years ago. There's no reason to think this is the final form of "work."
• We’re all talking about productivity, but the thing we actually want is more presence.
• How do you empower everyone to ship with AI without turning your codebase into chaos?
It's early, but cool format.
If you're building at this frontier in NYC and want to be part of the next cohort, DM me – we're planning Cohort 2 in about 3 months.
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Mar 30
The question I keep asking: beyond the 'Private Mag7' (SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks, Anduril, and xAI...... where is the next greatest opportunity in private markets right now?
I put together a quick 2-question survey for investors & operators:
1) Which growth-stage company feels like a 'must-own' to you right now, regardless of entry price?
2) Which next seven private companies would you pick to generate a 3x over the next five years?
Takes 2 minutes. I'll publish the aggregated results as a blog post next week — curious what this community thinks.
lnkd.in/eM7nvFf7
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Mar 23
If you work at a startup in New York, this affects you directly.
Right now, idiots in Albany are quietly trying to pass a bill.... literally a line item buried in the state budget...that would create a surprise tax bill for startup founders, early employees, and investors who hold company stock.
When you found or join a startup early, your equity is worth almost nothing. You take a risk! You grind for years, I've done this many times. Its brutal.
If your company succeeds and you sell your shares, there's a federal law that says you don't owe taxes on those gains, meaning your bet on the company paid off, and the government rewards that risk-taking.
New York has always honored that same rule at the state level (Until now)
The New York State Senate just proposed a bill that would make New York the ONLY major startup hub in America to tax those gains even though the federal government says they're tax-free.
Specifically, people who already sold shares this year, thinking they knew the rules, could suddenly owe millions they never planned for.
Florida: no tax. Texas: no tax. New Jersey just changed their law to match the federal rule. New York wants to go the opposite direction.
Pls read @michaelxbloch's post below & sign this letter.
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Mar 23
It’s official: Hadrian’s Factory of the Future 4 in Cherokee, Alabama is open.
Under the leadership of @POTUS and @SECWAR, we heard remarks from @SECNAV, @SenKatieBritt, @SenTuberville, @SenatorWicker, @RepMikeRogersAL, @Robert_Aderholt, and VADM Gaucher.
Thank you to the 4,000 Alabamians who joined us and showed what’s possible when we build in America again.
This partnership marks the start of Hadrian, the Navy, and the @DeptofWar’s reindustrialization campaign in support of the President’s Restoring Maritime Dominance EO, Peace Through Strength agenda, and the Golden Fleet.
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The @USArmy just made its largest single-vendor sUAS order in history: $52M for nearly 3,000 Skydio X10Ds - high precision, day/night, GPS-denied and EW resilient, super reliable ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance). This kind of capability used to cost $ M per drone. Now it’s 100x cheaper thanks to $ MMM of self-funded R&D by @SkydioHQ, combined with our civilian market scale in the tens of thousands of units per year, where we compete - and win - versus Chinese drones (the same drones that our adversaries will be using in every modern conflict).
X10D was sharpened by hard lessons in Ukraine and close iterative feedback with our soldiers through initiatives like the Army’s Transformation in Contact. It is the perfect “hunter” to find targets for “killer” one-way attack drones and other munitions to strike, a tactic we’ve already seen in Ukraine.
Congratulations to the @PAE_ManeuverAir on listening to their end users and doubling down on what's working. We are proud to bring world-leading drones to our warfighters and committed to doing so with unmatched value.
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Mar 23
Fired up to be an investor in a team defining what U.S. defense industrial capacity & "Made in USA" looks like 🇺🇸
Skydio, America's Drone Prime, just landed the largest sUAS procurement in U.S. Army history... 2,500 drones, $52M , bid to award in under 72 hours.
Congratulations @adampbry, Ye Lu, @JamesLaCamp , and the entire @SkydioHQ team!
BREAKING NEWS: The @USArmy just placed a $52M order for over 2,500 Skydio X10D drones.
This is the largest single-vendor tactical sUAS order in Army history and went from bid to award in under 72 hours.
Full story: skydio.com/blog/u-s-army-usd…
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Jonathan Shriftman retweeted
Mar 16
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Mar 16
I was catching up with an investor friend & we got into a conversation, admittedly about some companies we've missed as investments. Hindsight is easy, of course, but the conversation kept circling back to the same theme...
Did we overthink ourselves out of some obvious investments?
The honest answer, at least for a few names? Yes. Probably.
So I tried to build a framework for not doing that again. Wrote about it below, including a few companies that are the next obvious inevitable breakthroughs. ie: @armada_ai @Astranis @HadrianInc @peregrine_ps @SkydioHQ @basepowerco
Would love to know what's on your list...
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