Wrote a post about fundraising for the incredible @lennysan. lennyrachitsky.com/p/a-playb…

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Investing in 2016: man I wish I had bought some Facebook or Amazon stock earlier but I’ll just buy some now and make money. Investing in 2026: buy a handful of Swatch AP Royal pops, sell them on eBay, dump the proceeds on a Kalshi parlay the Iran/ukraine wars continue into 2027

Today, we're announcing $30M in new funding to build the AI OS for Research. 2.5M researchers start their work with Consensus every month. Their work is the foundation that all progress is built upon. We could tell you our story. We'd rather they did👇

For years, we hit the same wall everyone else did. You automate a few steps. Then complexity wins. And your best people are back to doing work that should run itself. That's what we set out to fix - not for our customers first, but for ourselves. I'm proud to introduce Akai by Deel. Akai is an interconnected system of agents that learns your workflows, automates every step, and gets smarter with every run - auditably, on any system. Today, 100% of Deel's operations teams, across Finance, Tax, Treasury, Benefits, and HR, run on Akai. The results stopped us in our tracks: → 100,000 cases handled automatically every month → 8,000 hours of payment processing - now background tasks → Reconciliation that took 20 days - now done in minutes → 100% automation in areas we couldn't reach after years of coding → 91,000 manual hours saved every single month Now, every team is now building agents themselves. No developers. No IT tickets. Just the people who know the work, running it. That's the ceiling we broke. Now we're opening it up. With built-in voice, transactions across any payment method, and the ability to process and analyse any document or dataset - out of the box. Your first agents could be running by tomorrow! Get early access at akai.run

The last thing a startup should want to spend time on is HR! Now there is an agent for that too! Congrats to the @getdiana team on their launch!

After 4 years, we’re announcing Instant 1.0. Instant is the best backend for AI-coded apps. Let us tell you why.

Right now the Dow has dropped over 1,000 points. If that holds, it will be the 14th time in history it happened. Donald Trump was President 12 of those times.

US immigration officials picked up a blind Rohingya refugee last week in Buffalo, NY. Then, realizing they had no basis to deport him, they released him five miles from his home. He needed a walking stick and died trying to make his way back to his house: investigativepost.org/2026/0…

i have a lot to say about these ads but holy fucking shit… this might be the most tasteful & brutal takedown of a category leader i’ve ever seen. & during the fucking super bowl? insane. usually these things almost always fall flat (see: slack “welcoming” microsoft teams with a fucking newspaper ad & how cringe that was), but this one lands dead center. even normies will clock the subtlety. the capturing of chatgpt’s drift in personality, tone, & vibes is absolutely unreal. almost surgical. normal ppl i know make fun of how chatgpt talks. imo openai made themselves vulnerable here by simply trying to do so much (enterprise, codex, consumer, etc) & lacking a singular cohesive narrative other than they have 800m users. like even google is taking shots about openai being forced to run ads. anyway i’ll post more but this was an absolute master class (i have posted about how openai competitors should handle their ads play, & this is a great start). also i would not count anthropic out of the consumer race yet (they have a lot of room to grow & even potentially acquire small startups).

Jeffery Epstein the guy who ran a child sex slave empire said Trump is the worst person I've ever met “I HAVE MET SOME VERY BAD PEOPLE, NONE AS BAD AS TRUMP.”

So the Trump admin has gone from releasing the gestapo in Minnesota to silence news on the epstein files, to now releasing more epstein files to silence news on the gestapo.

imagine being such a loser that you’re asking to go to pedophile island at 6am on Christmas morning

My writing today in the @sfstandard: Too many Silicon Valley leaders have divested themselves of the responsibility to speak out against the Trump administration. We can’t shrink away and hope the crisis fades. It’s time for all of us in tech to do and say more.

I’ve been encouraged in recent days that more Silicon Valley leaders (@paulg & @vkhosla, just to name a few) have spoken out to condemn the Minneapolis killings and the policy choices that led to them. It’s a good start to something America needs much more of right now.

Somehow all the money in the world could help these people buy the integrity to acknowledge the current administration is a disaster, and that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered by a poorly conceived immigration strategy.

I don't think everyone needs to comment on every political issue - far from it. But with tech's most powerful largely (and vocally) aligned with Trump, without comments to the contrary, people will make assumptions. Grateful to those who've been inspired to speak out about ICE.