“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” -Richard Feynman (1966) feynman.com/science/what-is-…

Cute theory, let's play it out. A monkey hoards a trillion bananas. The troop, enraged, beats him to death. They gather around the pile to feast at last. But... oh wait, there is no pile. It turns out the "bananas" were shares in a banana-launching company the dead monkey founded. The shares were worth a trillion because he was alive to run it. Now he is dead and the stock is worth $0. The retarded monkeys have clubbed their way into a recession. But it gets worse. Half the "bananas" were tied up in a rocket that supplies bananas to monkeys on the far mountain who had no bananas at all. Another chunk was tied up in a little satellite dish that beamed banana coordinates to the troop after a flood took out their trees. So now they realized they beat to death the only monkey who knew how the dish worked. So the monkeys sit there. No bananas. No rockets. No coordinates to get more banananas. Just a dead body and a powerful sense of fairness as they all now became infinitely poorer. OH And somewhere a smaller monkey watches the whole thing and quietly decides he will never build anything in front of these animals again.

No, you don't get it. He does not have $1 trillion sitting in cash, it is 99% stock in his companies. To make that wealth liquid would mean selling all that stock which would swiftly destroy *both* the companies (Tesla, SpaceX, others) and the wealth. If he sold it all, he'd end up with maybe $100b max, several hundred thousand people would be out of work, the companies ruined and many of their suppliers also ruined. Okay, but now Elon has $100b in cash, and can "solve the world's problems". $100b divided by the world's 8 billion people is $12 If you were in charge, several of the most innovative industrial companies in the world would be destroyed, hundreds of thousands out of work, and space would again close to human civilization for another generation. But everyone on earth could have one nice meal and you could revel in your altruism.

Timely reminder of how IPOs *actually* work and how to actually improve them, from me and @skupor a16z.com/in-defense-of-the-i…

The biggest problem holding back AI right now: cost is exploding, and almost none of it is tied to business outcomes. We all know SOMETHING great is happening. Nobody's quite sure what. Today we fix that — introducing Larridin Token Spend & Insights. larridin.com/blog/token-spen…

Same! @arampell passed on Bond Street back in 2016 (and likes to remind me that it was a very nice note 😆) - it was fwiw! And then several years later recruited me to @a16z / now we’re partners. Careers are long and you never know how life re-intersects! 💫

Six years ago today. This was real. This was policy. This is how we found ourselves living in ANIMAL FARM.

Small businesses have been overlooked. There is a great AI company to be built.

We’re thrilled to lead Lassie’s Series A. Most small businesses are run by reluctant operators. Owners set out to serve their customers and communities but end up buried in back-office work. Dental practices are a perfect example. Dentists train to care for patients, but much of their time is consumed by insurance claims, payment reconciliation, staffing, and cash flow. Lassie is building AI that runs small businesses, starting with dental practices. Before writing a line of code, Cofounders Steijn Pelle and Frédéric Renken spent months working inside a dental office, processing payments by hand to deeply understand the workflow. Lassie is not a copilot that creates more work for the practice to review. It does the work. We’re excited to partner with @steijnpelle, @fredericrenken, and the @lassieai team as they build toward the small business that runs itself. By @arampell and @omooretweets

Announcing @a16z's investment in Town 🎉 It's an AI assistant that truly knows you. Since I joined Town a few months ago, it's run my work life - emails, to-do lists, meeting prep, reminders. It can actually DO things for you and has full context. x.com/jgreze/status/20621786…

EXCLUSIVE: Lassie's AI agent helps dentists save hours of busywork. Now it's raised $35M from a16z. It started when CEO @steijnpelle heard his own dentist complain about a sea of paperwork -- then embedded in his practice to learn first-hand. My @UpstartsMediaCo exclusive 👀

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.

Imagine telling someone in 1990, when McDonald's finally opened in the USSR (w/ 50% ownership by Soviets): “The Soviet Union will collapse, China will embrace markets, and an American senator will propose confiscating 50% of the country’s most important technology companies.”

This strain of communism is so common They think Elon just discovered a mine of Teslas in California (why it was founded here) and just pulls them out of the mine The mine was already filled with Teslas waiting to be extracted And if he goes ANYONE can just extract them

What he said! @jackiereses is incredible

University of California STEM professors want standardized tests back due to severe math deficiencies among students: “We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics” “The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”

My partner @davidu is a superstar and always has been. So privileged to work with him.

Wild that an LLM autonomously disproved the unit-distance conjecture 🤯 But it’s also striking to me that, almost immediately after seeing the construction, a human mathematician was able to improve it further. Speaks to the potential of human–AI collaboration in math, QED 🔲

Do. not. stop. Thoreau

The key point here is really important to answer why Socialism keeps coming back....despite 100% fail rate. Because socialism has never been a theory. It is an emotion dressed up as a theory. Nietzsche saw it: it is resentment seeking a vocabulary. And resentment does not die because you show it charts. It does not die because you open archives to it. It does not die because a hundred million corpses wave to it from the mass graves. It dies only on the morning when the one who carries it decides that they prefer to build rather than punish.