As a career LP, I never fully appreciated how much awful LP behavior exists until we started raising our own fund. Clearly I was naive. Everyone knows about the usual stuff like ghosting, never-ending process loops, reneging on verbal commits (happens way more than you think). But my personal favorite: an LP reached out proactively, claiming to work at a large MFO. We had a great call, he seemed genuinely interested and asked for our data room. Right before hanging up he says “oh and by the way we charge a $100k non-refundable fee for get approved and shown to our clients with no guarantee of any investment. Would that be ok?” I told him no and suggested that’s probably something worth mentioning up front. He didn’t take the feedback particularly well. Raising a fund has made me much more sympathetic to GPs than 10 years of being an LP ever did.

If you can’t make your company interesting to a VC who is literally only in business to fund startups, how are you going to make it interesting to recruits and customers?

everyone is building an agent or a tool you don't want an agent or a tool, you want a reactor I've been working on something cool and I think you'll like it it's simple: an agent session DAG that keeps a declared world-model up to date in an efficient (memoized) render each render node is an agent session: you declare the desired state with OpenProse markdown files once invoked, each agent session acts as the provider. the agent session uses the open source openai-agents-sdk, extensible however you like with any model (I use with opus, sonnet, haiku) the facets of the world-state are memoized, so not every agent has to run on every event, saving you on inference if that sounds a lot like React or dataflow, that's because even in our brave new world the wisdom of the agents holds fast

I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A. 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30 minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going. I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital. You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious. It's a dance. And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious. If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird. No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there. It is weird.

Our second round was rough. I think I pitched every VC on the planet. Some of the weirder ones: - I arrive at a Chinese VC firm on Sand Hill Road. The building is locked, lights off, nobody inside. I wait 10 minutes after meeting time. A car pulls up. The partner emerges, she has a large pack of toilet paper under one arm. She unlocks the building, turns on the lights, leads me inside. She disappears into the toilets with her rolls of paper. Then, toilets attended to, we start the pitch. - Offices of a small deep tech investor. Receptionist greets me and leads me to the meeting room. I set up, wait, wait, wait. Eventually someone walks in, invites me to start. Something feels a bit off. It gradually dawns on me that I am pitching the receptionist. The partner had double-booked herself and apparently decided this was preferable to rescheduling. - Pitching a London VC. He tells me he likes me as a founder but my business will never work. I've never had someone say this before, usually VCs like to preserve optionality. But he's very explicit. "You might close this round, but you will just waste a year or two of your life and then fail, this idea can't work" A month later, I get a message from him. "I hear (big name) invested, can we get into your round?". Dude, seriously? - Another London VC. I'm chatting to the associate while we're waiting for the partner to arrive. He tells me about one of their portfolio cos that needs a bridge round, he's working on squeezing them as much as possible. He's quite direct about it. Eh.. thanks for the transparency I guess, you seem like a great firm. - The all time weirdest. A French VC with a London office. The associate meets me, as we're going up to the meeting he says something about how the partner can be a little unconventional. We start the pitch. "What did your father do?" the partner asks me in a thick French accent. OK, this is a new one. I say he trained as a theoretical physicist, but then went into business. "Aha! Your father was a failure!" "What did your mother do?" I say she was a biochemist and then became a school teacher. "Also a failure!" he exclaims. The associate is visibly dying inside. Is this some strange test, or is he just an asshole? I have a hundred employees and we need funding. "Would you like to hear about my company?" I ask him.

Friendly reminder that Microsoft has ~80 products or tools with the name “Copilot”. Tey Bannerman counted them up: “there are now Copilots inside Copilots, Copilots for other Copilots, and a physical Copilot key on your keyboard for summoning them.”

SF was over if not for OpenAI and Anthropic! Before that, it was over if not for Stripe, Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Salesforce, Visa, Gap... and if you go back a bir further - Levi's, Bank of California, Spreckels Sugar, Wells Fargo, Union Iron Works, Southern Pacific :) The city gets “saved” by the next boom every time. After the gold rush, there was silver, railroads, shipping, banks, sugar, utilities, Pacific trade, defense, semis, PCs, biotech, enterprise software, the internet, social, mobile, SaaS, fintech, crypto, and AI. I think that's just how it goes in this town.

"Senator Bernie Sanders says he will introduce legislation that would give the public a 50% ownership stake in major AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, arguing that because AI is built on humanity’s collective knowledge, its wealth should flow into a sovereign wealth fund that benefits ordinary Americans rather than a handful of tech billionaires" 🤯

The first @ycombinator SAFE created, drafted, and sent for signature on ChatGPT via the @AgreeHQ MCP!

Your invoice just got a major upgrade with the @AgreeHQ MCP inside of @claudeai. You can now create, send, and get paid all from a prompt. And, it doesn’t just generate an invoice, it pulls your customer contacts from @HubSpot, it connects your bank information around secure virtual account/routing numbers, embeds billing logic, and instantly sends for payment!

if you've been using OpenProse, you now have a bunch of dynamic workflows saved as code that lean on best practice classical engineering principles to build composable scalable dynamic workflows and all your programs got better and faster and cheaper for free model: opus-4.8 harness: claude code /workflow is rapidly approaching Prose Completeness

Left, Ferrari Luce $645k Right, Nissan Leaf $35k

Does anyone have any breakdowns or analysis for the SpaceX S-1 ?

One of the worst predictors of founder success we've tracked is how well someone pitches. The correlation between pitch quality and outcome was actually negative. Zuckerberg was so awkward in early investor meetings that VCs left wondering if he could manage anyone. Larry Page refused interviews and earnings calls for years. Jan Koum sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $19B as a Ukrainian immigrant whose English investors had initially struggled to follow. What polished people are good at is the meeting itself; the 1hr ritual of telling a story to strangers. It's a real skill, but it's separate from building a company. People who spent years optimising to be persuasive in a room have, on average, optimised away from the building skills that compound over the seven years of execution that follow. The pitch room is the one environment where smooth talkers have the structural advantage, but people mistake that single environment for general capability. Pay more attention to things like how they behave in the five minutes after the pitch when they think it's over. Or how they treat the most junior person in the room. None of those show up on a slide. The articulate founder will impress your partners. The awkward one will return your fund.

blatant copycatting! crazy!