Building at the frontier? Exploring what's worth building? Both are good reasons to apply to @southpkcommons. southparkcommons.com/apply

I "upgraded" from the iPhone 14 Pro to the iPhone 16 Pro. I literally cannot tell the difference. It took me 24 hours to set up the new phone properly etc. It just feels like a waste of time. And I do not understand where this "Apple Intelligence" is????

We are currently in the midst of the largest rightward-shift in Silicon Valley politics that I have seen in my 20 years here. Some of this is on the surface, a lot is below it.

1/ Weekly 1:1s with direct reports are a staple of Silicon Valley management. The idea is to check in, see how they're doing, and provide feedback. I did this for 10+ years at Facebook & Dropbox. Frankly, I hated it and found it useless. But it's what "good" managers did.

At Facebook (in the early days), the code paths required to make the site run for whales (>5000 friends) was quite distinct from the code paths for the average user (<300 friends). @elonmusk The twitter experience is over-fitting for your issues and degrading for others.

I have been using Waymo every day for 2 weeks now and before that used Uber ~every day for 10+ years. Some thoughts on this transition and on my own behavioral changes:

In the early days of Facebook, I would interview potential candidates and they would tell me that Facebook was just a simple CRUD interface on top of a database. Or that it was a glorified blog. Or a contact list. And yea, a blockchain is just a slow database. Probably nothing.

1/ One of the interesting and weird things about Silicon Valley is that no one really cares about what you did 10/20/30 years ago… unless you’re also doing something interesting today.

ANTI-patterns for startup engineering hiring. Finding amazing engineers has *always* been hard but now feels like it is harder than ever. I have spent a lot of time hiring engineers for Facebook, Dropbox and ~200 startups that we work with at @SouthPkCommons. 🧵👇

1/ I’m coming to understand it’s not actually possible to significantly inflect someone’s baseline ambition. You can sharpen it, bring it into focus, and harness it—but fundamentally changing how ambitious someone naturally is hard. My job is to recognize the hidden ambition

10/ There is no way we are going to use humans for driving cars in the future.

In unsurprising news -- computer science majors are finding it impossible to get software engineering internships Doesn't matter if you are at Stanford -- an AI coding agent is better at being an intern Totally tracks -- if I were a senior dev, I'd prefer an agent to a 20yr old

Show not tell. Ship, don't promise.

1/ I'm thrilled to share something close to my heart: I'm co-founding Bevel (@bevel_health) with @benjyang_ and @greynguyen. It's born from my personal journey to better health. Here's my story...

A lot of my ex-colleagues now work at OpenAI and other top-tier AI companies. When I ask them how things are going, without fail, they ALL mention how damn intense everything is. It's full-max pushing all the time. This is also borne out in my general conversations with founders. Everyone is intense and locked in. They are paranoid. And very very Hungry. I am used to intensity -- Facebook was a famously GSD culture. But this feels different. Higher stakes. A LOT more competitive. Companies are being built faster than ever. Revenue is blowing up exponentially. And founders realize that the window of opportunity is small. But the size of the prize is bigger than it ever has been. The era of 2016 --> 2022 feels bygone. A slower time. The stakes were lower. As an industry I think we forgot that startups are really intense and hard. So this current rotation feels positive. We will create a lot of value coming out of it. But it will be more of a rollercoaster than ever. Strap on and get in the arena.

It feels like there are two modalities of competition in Silicon Valley today. Both are valid and interesting and can lead to big outcomes. Modality 1: Work on something legible. Out execute the fuck out of everyone. --> This means that you are working on something that is future-facing but at this stage not a contrarian opinion --> You will likely have multiple competitors --> There will be an insane amount of noise in the ecosystem --> The path to victory here just means growing as fast as possible. --> This is a 100m dash.....for a long time. --> People will ask you about moats yada yada yada...and your answer should be: "Winning is the moat" A lot of successful AI companies (ala Luma, Gamma) are executing this playbook incredibly well. It's not for the faint hearted and requires peak-level performance for long periods of time. Modality 2: Work on something truly illegible and contrarian. --> It is CRITICAL that a lot of people laugh at your when you explain your idea (or at the very least, think your approach is dumb) --> You should not have many other people taking similar approaches --> You want to take your time in the early days and make sure you don't fall into the gravity well of Modality 1. Both of these modalities are valid approaches but you get into trouble when you fall in between. An issue I see often is when someone in Modality 1 but thinking they are in Modality 2. They are in a dogfight but don't realize it. They pay too much attention to the competition....get psyched out by funding rounds etc. If you are in this mode, the only thing to do is to put on blinders and work very very hard. Modality 2 is often more "fun".....but requires real creativity and being in the wilderness for a while. You must not care about a lot of the status games that Silicon Valley plays in the short run. Get in the Arena but make sure you know what game you are playing.

9/ It's really nice to have privacy in the car. You can make calls. Play your music. Do your thing. It feels like your own time+space. This part is pretty awesome and under-rated IMO.

1/ Every July 4th, I reflect on my American journey. From a small town in India to Silicon Valley, with just a couple hundred dollars in my pocket. No other country could have written this story.

San Francisco is cleaner and more pleasant than at any point over the last 5 years. Just went for a walk on Valencia and it was awesome. It’s nice to see elected officials delivering. 👏 @DanielLurie

It’s now been 9-10 months since LLMs really entered the larger consciousness of Silicon Valley. We went through the cycle of euphoria and are now catching ourselves for breath. At this juncture, there are many who believe that LLMs are interesting but ultimately are an extension of current mechanisms and products. Their key fallacy is to box LLMs into our understanding of existing technologies. The most mistaken analogy is to classify it as a new information retrieval (read: search engine) system. After all, it responds to queries with answers! This mistaken comparison brings forth comparisons like "indexing", "retrieval", "ranking". The more expansive (and poorly understood) view is to recognize that LLMs are actually reasoning engines. The abilities here are not deeply understood or appreciated yet. We are starting to see developers figure out what is possible by experimenting by throwing a lot of mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. This part isn’t always pretty but a necessary aspect of turning the technology over and over in our hands till we understand what it can do. This is particularly the case with technology like LLMs that demonstrate wild emergent properties. Agents, Planning, Reasoning etc. are all in their infancy but it is abundantly clear that we are still scratching the surface of what we can build with these new capabilities. The more time I spend looking at all this — the more I am deeply convinced that we are just at the beginning of a fundamentally new way of computing. I don’t claim to know where exactly the value will accrue etc. etc. but it’s crazy to me that anyone would believe that this isn’t the best time to build in a long long time.

1/ Nvidia's focus on "pain and suffering" as a key part of their philosophy is a stark contrast to the prevailing messaging we hear from most tech companies today. Jensen cannot stop talking about this. He brings it up over and over again!!

Technology right now and at this very instant is the worst it will ever be. It will only get better from here on out. The composability of software and the global idea sharing of the Internet makes it such that once someone has an idea, it is never going back into the bottle.

There is a common narrative that "India doesn't have world class AI companies". This is just false. Look at Maya AI out of SPC Bangalore. We have the ability in India -- we just need to believe it and build. Very proud of the team building this.

1/ web3 can often feel like a gold rush. It's a useful analogy, but not for the reason many people think. The key is what builders create for the long-term. More on why @southpkcommons & crew are focusing the latest Founder Fellowship on web3. 🧵 southparkcommons.medium.com/…

1/ We’re humbled to announce @southpkcommons Fund III: $275M to support exceptional founders from day -1. Since 2016, we’ve had a simple thesis: greatness is more likely to emerge when high talent density meets high curiosity. That's why we focus on -1 to 0.

In computer science, they teach to separate the data from the compute. It's very basic stuff. This is why LLMs slap you in the face as a software engineer. They go ahead and violate this principle maximally egregiously. An LLM isn't data—you can't query it like a database or index it like a filesystem. But it's not pure compute either—it doesn't execute instructions or follow explicit algorithms. Databases store data. Algorithms manipulate it. CPUs execute instructions. Memory holds state. The boundaries are clear, the abstractions are clean. This separation isn't arbitrary—it's what enables modularity, debugging, optimization, and reasoning about systems. You can swap your database, refactor your algorithms, upgrade your hardware. The interfaces between layers remain stable. When you prompt an LLM, you're not retrieving data or executing code. You're activating a strange kind of computational memory where the processing and the information are inextricably fused. We will figure out how to best use this alien technology. But it will require new paradigms -- not retrofitting old ones.

I hate it when someone says "That person used to work FOR me". Nah man, great people don't work for other people. They work for something they believe in. Something that is larger than any one person. I have managed large orgs. All of those people used to work WITH me. We built great things together. I played a role. They played a role. The beauty of Silicon Valley is that someone who used to work "FOR" you could end up being your BOSS. Don't ever forget that.

Why are AI researchers so hard to find? Why are they so highly paid? To try to answer this, let’s rewind back to something from the Carnegie Mellon PhD program. At Carnegie Mellon's PhD program, there's a legendary oral exam question that's deceptively simple: "What happens when you type google.com into a browser?" It's a masterpiece of pedagogical design. You can spend hours traversing the stack—from keypress interrupts to browser event loops, DNS resolution to TCP handshakes, TLS negotiation to HTTP parsing, CDN routing to datacenter load balancing, all the way down to electrons moving through silicon. The beauty is its fractal nature. Each layer reveals another universe of complexity. A strong engineer can navigate these depths, moving fluidly between abstraction levels. Now consider the equivalent question for our current moment: "What happens when you type a prompt into GPT-5?" I estimate fewer than 500 people globally can answer this with comparable depth. Think about what comprehensive understanding requires: transformer architecture internals, attention mechanisms at scale, distributed training orchestration across thousands of GPUs, RLHF implementation details, constitutional AI approaches, inference optimization, quantization trade-offs, not to mention the labyrinthine data pipelines and evaluation frameworks. Unlike traditional systems—which evolved over decades with extensive documentation, courses, and industry knowledge transfer—the modern LLM stack emerged in just a few years within a handful of organizations. The field is simultaneously too new and too vertically integrated. The people who truly understand these systems end-to-end are essentially the early engineers at a small set of frontier labs: OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta's FAIR, and a few others. This explains the talent market dynamics. When the total addressable pool of people who can architect and debug these systems is smaller than a single Bay Area high school, the economics become inevitable.

2/ I'm now convinced these regular 1:1s do more harm than good. The simple reason: they condition people to do spot checks on happiness and constantly be critical about things that aren't ideal. In practice, 1:1s descend into nitpicking sessions.

Unpopular Prediction: AI is going to massively *increase* demand for doctors, lawyers and teachers. I believe there is a tremendously high amount of *unmet* demand for human-in-the-loop heavy services. With highly intelligent AI capable of now providing the first layer of things like: - Legal advice - Medical diagnosis - Interactive 1-1 teaching We will see the demand for the 2nd layer of human-provided deep dives skyrocket. - AI can help you diagnose a medical condition but you will want to chat live with a doctor about it and potentially do some of intervention/procedure. - AI can teach you a bunch of concepts but you might still want to interact a teacher didactically. This will be a weird side-effect of AGI (at least in the 5-10 year horizon).

1/ The more I think about it, the more I realize that being an immigrant is a form of insanity. It's a decision to leave behind everything you've ever known and start from zero in a foreign land. It takes a special kind of crazy and delusional to make that leap.

A lot of people who are new to SF/Silicon Valley tell me they have impostors syndrome and feel like they are not smart/technical/accomplished enough. Here's the thing: *Everyone* in Silicon Valley has impostor's syndrome. It's because we look to the future, not the past. It's a feature, not a bug.

1/ It’s crazy to me that more founders don’t invest more into their personal AI toolchain. As an early-stage founder, one of the most exhilarating (and exhausting things) is to have to play all the roles at a company.

1/ Performance reviews are fundamentally broken. Instead of unlocking greatness, they've become exercises in mediocrity enforcement. The reason is that HR departments are secretly uncomfortable with the idea of an organization full of spiky, 10x performers.

Seriously, if you're building in AI, I want to help you build it. This stuff is wild.

The most common question I get from CEOs is to how to move and ship products faster. They ask me how Facebook famously created a culture that moved so fast (and broke things). Below are some memories from those days (1/9)

The original framing of A.I. was actually 'Augmented Intelligence' which is so much more appropriate to how AI will affect each and every one of us. Machines make us vastly more intelligent and capable. We are only just beginning to see human super-powers in every field.

VCs seem to have forgotten that they are in the risk-capital game.. We literally have to get back to funding the moonshots. No amount of private banking or private equity fancy excel modeling will take the away the fact that investing in early stage startups carries a massive amount of risk. The chances of success are infinitesimal. My request last week was for entrepreneurs to take bigger risks. The flip side of that is that VCs need to develop the appetite and courage to actually take the risk on these kinds of companies. The (small) asset class that VCs occupy in most people’s portfolios is NOT designed to return steady outcomes (there are many other asset classes for that!). The VC asset class is very much for massively outsized winners. This is true at every part of of the investment stack — from an individual company, to a portfolio, to a set of funds. Smart finance types have taken this to mean that they should find early-stage companies where a lot of things have been de-risked (product, tech, GTM etc.). This is not a crazy strategy but just an extremely low-yield one. It’s because you can give yourself the ILLUSION that you have de-risked a bunch of things but the reality is that risk is still enormously high (no matter what the models tell you). An alternative strategy is to maximize for the potential scale of the outcome. Don’t look for opportunities that have low-ten $$B in TAM but instead low-hundreds $$B in TAM. Fund companies that could reach 100M consumers — I guarantee those will be massively successful. VCs: Don’t spend your time trying to analyze all the risk factors. Instead spend your time figuring out just how big something could be. Be creative and optimistic about how the future could play out and get your head out of the narrow models that are so constraining.

1/ @moxie wrote a fantastic blog post about his observations on Web3 that really got me thinking about some underlying questions of centralization, protocols, platforms and lastly our ability to predict stuff in this space. 🧵

Mark Zuckerberg at @southpkcommons. The full, unedited talk. @rsanghvi and I got to ask Zuck about the future of open source AI, what he thinks matters when building a startup, when his official MMA match will be, and a lot more. Don't miss this one.

It’s wildly depressing to see wave after wave of smart founders just build more B2B SaaS software and hope that it works. Where are the builders tackling problems for actual end users and consumers? It is particularly depressing to see B2B SaaS software catered to the next platform shift (web3, AI etc.) The root issue is a craving for “low-risk” startups. B2B SaaS has become a comfort zone. It's well-understood, scalable, and seems like a safe bet, especially for those exiting big tech or the previous wave of unicorns. We've seen this pattern with web3, and now with AI. Bolt-on B2B SaaS for the latest platform shift. The problem with this approach is that timing is CRITICAL. You cannot front-run building out this capability and hope that the platform shift catches up. If you are too early (as was definitely the case with web3 and quite possibly the case with AI) then you are dead. This failure mode is particularly prevalent for smart engineers…which is a shame because they are the ones who have the capability to harness the biggest computing capability shift of our generation. Ultimately if we don't build enough functionality (on said platform) for the end user, then all this B2B SaaS software just doesn't matter. You can sit around and wait for someone else to build products for actual users.....or you can build it yourself.

1/ We're on the precipice of the most fundamental computing revolution I've seen in my life. You should have FOMO. Don't waste it in local maxima. The $1M @southpkcommons Founder Fellowship application is open. Here’s what it takes to build at venture-scale in the age of AI:

1/ The laziest question an investor can ask you is: Why can’t Google/Amazon/Apple/BigTech do XYZ? My response would be: Those companies can and will build everything. They are conglomerates. That’s why they exist. If you feel that way, you should stop investing.

1/ Two pervasive Indian cultural traits that we need to change to get more great founders in India: 1/ Default respect for one's "seniors" 2/ Default skepticism for your "juniors" You need to *flip* this. As I often say: Find a 19 year old to work for.

A story about @rsanghvi Today I met at 25 year old Indian kid who writes software that sends rockets to space (he is at SpaceX). I met him at SPC and he was pretty nervous to talk to me. Once he started going, he said that Ruchi was his idol and that she had inspired him to start coding (at the age of 13) and figure out a way to come to the United States. He said his father would print out stories about Ruchi and give it to him to inspire him that he too could build great things. I sometimes forget that our actions have long-reaching positive consequences. #proudhusbandmoment

One of the good/bad things to happen in Silicon Valley circa 2015 was that we got a folks coming into the ecosystem who were smart generalists who would otherwise have gone into finance, consulting, PE etc. They came to join later-stage companies, start companies and (of course) become VCs. This was actually pretty positive in the late-SaaS era because these folks are exceptional at crafting ways to allocate capital and to ensure that value is being appropriately priced/captured. They were able to bring a level of financial sophistication that is generally not Silicon Valley's forte. But now that we are firmly in the second/third innings of the AI era, it's been interesting to see how flat footed these folks seem. The AI era....is not logical from an immediate financial perspective. Early parts of the S curve rarely are. Exponentials don't really make sense in modeling. This is why so many these archetypes are still asking things like "Do foundation model companies make sense?", "AI value will only accrue to the big companies", "Will everything be a ChatGPT wrapper" yada yada yada We are in the era where it's much better to be a crazy optimist and to see everything that could go right. There was a time and place for the default pessimists/realists. Now is not the time. Right now, let a thousand flowers bloom. Let a lot of them wither too. That is the normal rhythm of Silicon Valley.

1/ @southpkcommons Founder Fellowship is the best way to start a company because -1 to 0 is when a company actually starts. Not at revenue or first product. Your company starts even before you have an idea—when ambition takes hold. And SPC is the only truly pre-idea program.

The single hardest question at the pre-seed and seed stage for a founder is knowing whether to persist on the current product or to move on to the next idea. (1/)

Kind of mind boggling that NONE of the companies that I have worked at (large cos like Meta, Dropbox, Flipkart) and hundreds of startups....have not generated a SINGLE dollar of revenue from China. Because we are blocked/inaccessible there. While Chinese cos have full access to our markets. Insane.

1/ Many founders confuse VC interest and investment as validation of their internal conviction. This is dangerously wrong.

Founders run out of emotional capital before they run out of money. This is the number one reason for startups shutting down at the early stages. Startups are BOTH a marathon and a sprint. That's why they are so hard.

There is a calmness amidst the intensity of Silicon Valley right now. It reminds me a lot of 2010/11. A couple of years after the Global Financial Crisis. Mobile had been around for a few years but people were now getting what could be done with the platform. Companies like Uber and AirBnB were starting. San Francisco also feels balanced. It is brimming with energy but not crazy full of people heedlessly running around trying to chase capital. The question is more “what are you building” not “how much are you raising”. That’s a good sign. It’s been an insane 3-4 years in tech. As an industry, we have navigated through the chaos of Covid, macro-economic turbulence, SVB, the rollercoaster of web3, and the whirlwind of AI's rise. But as we emerge from these tumultuous times, there's a palpable shift in the air. Gone is the frenetic, almost manic energy that defined our recent past. In its place is a steady and quietly optimistic rhythm. The current mindset isn't about overnight successes or chasing the next big hype. It's about the slow, rewarding work of building something great. I also love how the vibe is very much in harmony with that of SPC. Our goal has always been to focus on the great ideas instead of the good ones. To throw out the average stuff. To think very long-term. To focus on what can be built over a 10-year horizon instead of how much capital you can raise in 1 year. This is probably my favorite phase of the cycle.

Over the last 11 years at @microsoft @satyanadella has had one of the greatest runs of any CEO, ever. I'm thrilled to announce he will be joining us March 4th at @southpkcommons to tell us how – and share what he sees on the horizon.

So many who loudly left SF are now silently moving back. No shade here, just happy to have good people around.

Whenever I write code, I am struck by the fact that the network stack I am using contains bits written by someone 40 years ago 🤯. Code is both beautifully consistent and predictable yet can be light and dynamic. Teach your kids how to code -- this stuff is magic.

If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said that AI would make human-centric jobs more important and pertinent. HR would have been squarely in that bucket. Today, I think that AIs would actually be better than humans at HR. More empathetic, more objective, more consistent. And I think that humans would likely prefer to have a bunch of HR conversations with an AI. It's just easier. Less drama. Less pressure. We live in weird times.

1/ Startups are absurdly difficult. The stars must align for even a chance at success. The @southpkcommons Founder Fellowship gives founders the best chance possible. Applications are open for $1M and the -1 to 0 support that's produced 145 companies worth $35B.🧵

3/ I want my employees to be resilient. To understand that not every week or month will be happy and pleasant. I want them to deal with it without constantly feeling bad. Weekly 1:1s undermine this.

Under-explored aspect of the LLM landscape: Who has access to proprietary data to train models?? OpenAI, Anthropic --> Nothing Google --> Youtube Meta --> Facebook and IG public content Amazon, MSFT, Apple --> Nothing I suspect this will be a huge factor in the coming year

Too many founders get stuck climbing the wrong mountain. Not by accident, but because an investor pushed them onto the first hill in sight. This is the danger of commoditized capital and lean startup philosophy.

6/ A better model is to be generally available over email/Slack for questions. Then have deeper career development conversations over a meal once a quarter or so. This is a more effective cadence.

If you are crazy ambitious, technical, and ready to start building a multi billion dollar company, you should apply for the @southpkcommons Founder Fellowship. I want to work with you.

The thing about San Francisco is that it's always been a big Boom and Bust town. A gold rush town that goes big and then crashes and then goes big again. I have lived here for 20+ years (call me a native) I get the strong sense that we are in the early days of a big boom cycle.

High tolerance for chaos and ambiguity is a key component for being a founder. This tolerance seems to be set through innate wiring and also through life experiences. But I think it can also be Learnt successfully by putting yourself into uncomfortable and ambiguous zones.

I was having dinner with a very smart Wall Street investor last week. His general tone was that: "You Silicon Valley folks are overbuilding everything. Is this sustainable? Do we actually need all this compute?" This is much to think about qualitatively imo. Exponential curves (both in terms of expenditure and benefit) rarely make sense. So we went through this: --> He was using AI on a daily basis for both his job and personally (generating content, reviewing content, efficiency for mundane tasks, health related goals) --> How his kids were using AI (storytelling, homework, entertainment) --> How his parents are using AI As we went through this, we did the thought experiment for how much more demand each of them had. At the end, the question turned to: "How do we build more compute capacity quickly so that we stay in the lead relative to China?"

I have been traveling outside of Silicon Valley and as always am struck by two things: 1/ We take ourselves way too seriously in our industry town and tend to lose sight of the forest from the trees. 2/ The level of ambition in SV is insane and unparalleled. Contradictory?

I have had the same gmail account for 20 years now. There is so much life history, records, personal information, archival data etc. locked up in there. I would very much like a LLM interface to this data source!

Thoughts on the Windsurf acquihire: —> Anthropic has a big lead in coding models. More than people are realizing. —> Joining OAI as a UI layer on top of Anthropic’s coding model is a non-starter. —> It’s unclear if OAI has the time+energy to devote to building a competitive coding model Now the real question is this: Will Claude Code reach escape velocity as an end user product before Cursor gets their own competitive model?

Probably the best time in around 15 years to release a radically new take on a phone. I would have never considered switching away from an iPhone but it feels like using "old tech" right now. Wonder if anyone is going to step up to the plate to take a shot.

6/ The last 100 feet experience of getting in/out of the Waymo is TERRIBLE. It's super annoying that it stops in weird places. That you can't flag it down etc. It's not a deal breaker (I still use it) but it really sucks.

8/ I am OK being "rude" to a Waymo. 5-minute wait time? Sweet. I will use all of it. With a human driver, I want to be "nicer".

9/ I know I'm arguing against orthodoxy here. But I believe the relentless cadence of weekly 1:1s, while well-intentioned, has become counterproductive. It's time to break free of this flawed Silicon Valley management "best practice." Your team will thank you.

It's amazing to see CEOs of Indian heritage like @satyanadella, @sundarpichai and others lead some of the most important companies of our era. The larger story though is that immigration is one of our nation's biggest strengths (and opportunity). Congrats @paraga!

4/ The actual quality of the driving is around 75th percentile. The best human drivers are definitely smoother. But the Waymo is better than the average human driver.

A better way of visualizing the pre-seed to seed journey and where incubator/accelerator programs line up.

3/ The only comparable experiences I can think of are using the Internet for the first time (at the wee age of 12), using ChatGPT for the first time, using wifi on a plane for the first time, having a birthday party with 40+ people around the world over Zoom.

4/ This doesn't mean feedback isn't useful. But it should be given every 3-6 months, not weekly. This forces managers to identify patterns and provide holistic guidance, rather than doing weekly "spot checks."

I mean, I have also paid for a lot of goddamn charging cables over the years. I don't really care about more battery life.

Told you we wanted to see applications from Indian founders @southpkcommons. @rsanghvi and I are incredibly excited to work with @binnybansal to bring the -1 to 0 approach to India. More soon.

The Zuck effect is real. Founder Fellowship applications are spiking way past the previous record. Makes sense after he said he shares the @southpkcommons -1 to 0 philosophy. Lots of new people learning about SPC, so we're extending the deadline to 11:59pm PT this Sun Aug 11th.

As an early-stage VC, it's much more interesting to ask: "What if this works? What happens? Does everything change?" It's so damn boring to point out all the ways that something might not work. All startups are default dead. Being a cynic is the easiest way to *sound* smart.

2/ There is a certain viscerality to being in a self-driving 2-ton piece of metal that almost feels like a religious, transcendental experience.

Ok wow. o3 is crazy good. The ability to 1/ pick the right tool 2/ chain it together 3/ pick the right output format is incredible. Jeez.

The energy around Web3 @southpkcommons and the ecosystem more broadly is so infectious. This feeling has been missing for a while. Of being on the Frontier. Of being pirates. Of truly not knowing what the answers are. There are no playbooks here. Just time to play and build

1/ Why has web3 unleashed more widespread creative excitement than recent advances like Machine Learning/AI, SaaS or even Mobile Computing? Artists, Governments, Financial Organizations, Software Engineers to name a few domains are all jumping in and participating.

There seem to be two kinds of people in Silicon Valley. 1: Motivated by being *right* about their predictions of the world. They are often stubborn and slow to adjust priors. Always referring to old tweets. 2: Motivated by progress -- even if it means being wrong a bunch. Very fast to update models. The first type of person is insufferable in a fast moving world.

That one meeting you cancel could be the other person's most anticipated/important meeting of the day. No matter how busy or important or double booked you are -- it's on you to show up with presence and attention. Particularly important for all VCs, Founders and bigco execs.

Absolute privilege to host one of the GOATs at SPC today. He's been a mentor and personal inspiration for many years. Thank you @satyanadella.

So much of building a company is just not giving up. Keeping on going. Having insane grit and resilience. This is one dimension that founders from India excel on. They are able to keep on running through walls to build, build and build. It's very impressive.

1/ Here's a secret: you hear this a lot because it's true. Most incubator/accelerators and pre-seed VCs expect to see traction even when they say otherwise. If not revenue then at least user growth. Why the doublespeak?

5/ Using 1:1s to track what someone is working on is also archaic. There are plenty of modern methods to assess output across a range of functions. Wasting time on status updates is inefficient.

I am coming to realize that hardware founders are motivated by two things that are very odd: --> An insane desire to only do difficult things. --> Glory. From a recent SPC founder working on rockets: "If I wanted easy, I'd build software. But where's the *glory* in that?" Maybe the causality goes the other way? The only people who have the gumption to work on chips/drones/robots are the ones who are masochistic? Here's the recursive paradox: this personality trait is exactly what you need to succeed at it. You need someone who sees "98% will fail at this" as motivation, not warning. We need these people. Not despite their pathological relationship with difficulty, but because of it. Someone has to build the future's infrastructure. Thank god it's the people who find easy things boring. Thank god for having these insane folks in our ecosystem. They are pushing our world forward.

1/ The most misunderstood part of "Founder Mode" is that it applies only to the singular founder at a company. As an example, Zuck always drilled the notion "total ownership" into all of us in the early Facebook days.

I never deeply understood why people would want to attend a conference about buying....software. Dreamforce is in SF this week so this is top of mind for me. I never really understood Big E Enterprise Software till a couple of years ago. I was trained in a world of building technically amazing and beautiful software that people loved to use. And bought it over the Internet! No humans in the loop!! It made Zero sense to me that people would actually want to have a more complex buying process. Why introduce any friction? This changed when I became a SMB/Enterprise Buyer for the first time. We use a lot of software at SPC. Collaboration, Messaging, Storage, Cloud Compute etc. The bill for all of this is non-trivial. But more than that, I realized that I now want to think about things like: Is there someone to talk to in support when something stops working? Can someone help with customization? Where are the APIs to build on top of? Is there backwards compatibility? All Big E Enterprise software kind of concerns. I want to know if SPC folks are using the software! Am I getting value from it? I want a more customized price! I want to know that I am treated with respect as a buyer. It's weird. It's very hard to engineer empathy for the Buyer Persona unless you are one at scale.... But I think I finally get it. It's not just about software - it's about trust, relationships, and long-term value.

Modern India's values are a lot closer to my vision of America than I realized. India is optimistic, striving and has a deep desire to build. It believes the future will be better than the past. And that it is possible to get there with effort and grit.

My best piece of advice is this: Find the idea you want to work on and the people you want to work with so that years later you will ache for the time when you poured everything into building something incredible.

What is the job of a co-founder+CTO at an early-stage company? Some thoughts from my experiences at @Dropbox, @Meta, @Flipkart, @southpkcommons and Cove. Thread below 🧵

The most interesting people in Silicon Valley are those who have tasted success and it has made them even hungrier for doing more. It's like they have seen through the keyhole of generational impact and they are now going to go full max at building the future they want.

1/ The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. This applies across more vectors than you would imagine. I recently hosted two close friends from India and Singapore in SF. Their observations about the city were eye-opening.

Special day @southpkcommons yesterday. It was such a treat to host Zuck and learn from his experiences building Meta. Most important takeaway: Doing great things takes a long time so surround yourself with the people you love during the journey. This is why we built SPC.

There are lots of reasons to be bullish on India. The demographics, the Infrastructure buildout of the last decade and the easing of capital regulations to name a few. The single most compelling reason though is the sheer energy and entrepreneurial drive that you can viscerally feel when you spend time talking to founders there. You can feel it dripping in places like Bangalore. There is this pioneer spirit. An inherent impatience for the future, a collective ambition to not just anticipate but actively pull the future into the present. What I love is that the energy does not feel zero-sum. There is very much an early pioneering mindset of “there is a LOT left to build so let’s all get to it”. There isn’t a hoarding of information or resources. This collective attitude reminds me so so much of Silicon Valley. You can have entrepreneurial energy and a great ecosystem but you also need users and customers. India as a market has incredible tailwinds but the one I will single out is that every Indian wants and believes that a better future is possible. They embrace new technology and don’t reflexively push back against it. This attitude feels increasingly rare across much of the Western Hemisphere. We tend to under-estimate how much of a difference optimism can make. That doesn’t mean that building a company in India is easy. Pioneer environments are harsh and not for the faint hearted. But I think that is actually part of the charm. Doing great things should feel a bit hard. I have personally loved spending time in India helping companies and entrepreneurs there. Perhaps it's time to do more.