The dirty secret about consumer research? It’s overrun by fraud. Survey bots. People lying to qualify for interviews. Today, Pogo is launching the world’s only AI researcher that lets brands talk to verified buyers of any product - at scale, in hours. Backed by $32M to date. For 6 years, we’ve built the consumer network that makes research with real, verified buyers possible: • 3M opted-in U.S. consumers • Visibility into 1 in every 150 U.S. shopping trips • $470B in observed transactions • Ranked #1 Loyalty App in the U.S. by Newsweek, two years running Watch the full story 👇

"Men with two children had an estimated brain age that was 0.6 years younger than their childless peers had, and for men with three children, it was 0.7 years younger. That’s similar to the brain benefit associated with exercising 2.5 hours a week." nytimes.com/2026/06/06/opini…

We are now seeking a puzzle maker to help us create puzzles that LLMs can't yet solve.

This is a great thread, but don’t sell yourself short! I’d like to think our Team HUG plushies were the spiritual forerunners for your Townies 😘

NEW: Meta is reportedly scaling back its AI mouse-tracking tool after angry pushback from employees.

One of the nation's largest mortgage lenders has launched an athleisure clothing line. Rate (formerly Guaranteed Rate) has rolled out RateFit, "a wellness-driven lifestyle brand." They were the 7th largest mortgage lender in the country last year. (I'm as baffled as you are).

Today Reactor is coming out of stealth. We’ve raised $59M in Seed and Series A funding, led by @lightspeedvp, with participation from @AmplifyPartners, @wndrco, @Sky9Capital, and @FPVventures. Reactor is the platform for building in the World Model era: the infrastructure that lets developers build with them at global scale for the first time. Stream from a frontier World Model to your app, in real time, all in under 10 lines of code. World Models represent the next major shift in AI: pixels, audio and actions are generated on the fly, in real-time, in response to user inputs, and to the environment. Every time computing has made a shift from passive to interactive, entire industries appeared that didn't exist before. We're standing in front of such moment again. Over the last 6 months, we’ve assembled an all-star team with alumni from Apple, Meta, Google, Luma AI, Netflix, and Replicate. We're already partnering with some of the biggest names and labs in the world, and hundreds of developers are already building on Reactor. The World Model era starts now.

Introducing performance.dev! A new space where I explore how the best apps in the world are built. First piece: How's Linear is so fast? a technical breakdown. performance.dev/how-is-linea…

Socket, a cybersecurity startup that helps safeguard open-source code against hackers, is valued at $1 billion bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Today is a big day for @SocketSecurity. We just raised a $60M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @ThriveCapital with participation from @a16z, @AbstractVC, and @CapitalOne Ventures. Total funding is now $125M. Four years ago, we started Socket because open source dependencies were flowing into production faster than anyone could vet them. AI has massively accelerated that. Code is being written, shipped, and deployed before any human reads it. Security has to operate at that same speed. One data point from Thrive's diligence that I keep coming back to: they first discovered Socket because @cursor_ai, @OpenAI, and @AnthropicAI all independently told them it was the most important security tool they'd adopted for AI-driven development. Three of the most sophisticated AI companies converging on the same vendor unprompted. Since our Series B, Socket has grown to more than 20,000 organizations, protecting over 1.5 million repositories and blocking more than 1,000 supply chain attacks every week. The team is now over 100 people. Three out of five FAANG companies are Socket customers. So are the companies building the most ambitious AI products: @AnthropicAI, @cursor_ai, @xai, @figma, @vercel, @Replit, @scale_AI, @GustoHQ, @Mercadolibre, and @cribl_io, alongside Fortune 100s in financial services and global media. What we've shipped since the last round: • Socket Firewall blocks malicious packages at install time, before they reach a developer's laptop or CI pipeline. Free for everyone. • Reachability analysis via our acquisition of Coana, eliminating 50-80% of irrelevant vulnerability alerts by focusing only on CVEs that are actually exploitable. • Socket Certified Patches for remediating exploitable CVEs in seconds without waiting on upstream maintainers. • Coverage extending to browser extensions, editor extensions, MCP servers, and AI tools via our acquisition of @secureannex. When the Axios compromise hit, our detection systems flagged the malicious dependency within six minutes. Within 24 hours, more than 2,000 organizations onboarded to Socket to block it. Where the funding goes: deeper investment in Firewall, massively expanding Certified Patches, moving protection closer to every point of install across the developer toolchain, and new product launches pushing Socket into a category we haven't entered before. We're hiring across engineering, sales, customer success, and threat intel. ❤️ Thank you to our customers, investors, and the open-source community for your support. Together, we’re making software safer for everyone.

We raised $250M in Series C funding at a $2.2B valuation, led by a16z. Exa is a search lab organizing the web's data for agents.

Between this and statsig. We're really discovering how far in novel HALO structures labs will go to not be responsible for that pesky corporal corporate corpse blog.zulip.com/2026/05/15/an…

Fun fact: @ScottWu46 (while younger than me) was my first manager over a decade ago. While he is definitively the smartest person I've ever met, the piece really undersells how great Scott is as a human. And how much he loves sushi.