In pursuit of intentionality @PaceCap
New York, NY
- Tweets 3,770
- Following 1,273
- Followers 19,388
- Likes 5,906
When elite universities uploaded all of their courses online for public consumption, we collectively realized that the limiting reagent for global intelligence is not access to information, it's motivation.
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A troubling paradox: iconic aesthetics from artists like Hayao Miyazaki & Studio Ghibli, crafted over decades, are now commodified into quick, consumable, even vapid content.
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The End of Software
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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Real estate in the metaverse will not be a thing. Real estate is valuable because there is a non-zero cost to move from point A to point B in the real world. There is no such cost in a digital world, negating all value of the analogous concept.
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Similarly, many of these "What will you build today?" products will go through a painful lesson that the limiting reagent in global product innovation is not access to tooling, but human ingenuity.
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An open letter to Brian Chesky:
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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Cursor's Problem
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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This commodification turns meaningful, handcrafted narratives—filled with emotional depth and human struggle—into hollow memes, diluting their artistic significance.
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Unrealized gains shouldn’t be taxed, but using those assets as collateral to borrow money should be taxed and then credited against any capital gains upon sale.
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I’ve been evaluating people using my @diabrowser /skill.
It’s called /graham and It’s scary good.
Watch me test it on a few victims live (incl. @nikitabier )
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Incredible rebrands:
Patagonian toothfish ➡️ Chilean Sea Bass
Mayonnaise ➡️ Aioli
Pleather ➡️ Vegan Leather
What else?
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To those of you watching at home, this is your canary in the coal mine to let you know that the next wave of consumer apps is incoming. No surprise that iPad is the first wedge given the intersection of M chip and AppStore distribution.
I turned my iPad into Tom Riddle’s diary with Apple’s new Foundation Models, an LLM built into iOS. It’s lightning fast!
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It’s only called open source if it comes from the Silicon Valley region of the United States. Otherwise it’s national security risk.
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ARR in 2015: Annual recurring revenue
“ARR” in 2025: Annualized revenue run-rate
These are wildly different and the heuristic is dangerous when applied sloppily. Retention and margin are not remotely close to being the same.
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Studying Yourself
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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Ironically, this AI-driven appropriation of personal art styles mirrors socialist ideals of collective ownership, yet it thrives in tech sectors that are vocally pro-capitalist.
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Part of the social contract in NYC is that the city is your real dining room and living room, which is what has made the past year particularly challenging—being relegated to a bedroom and a bathroom. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel feels like waking from a fever dream.
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The End of Cloud Inference
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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NYC is bussin rn:
💦Fountain is on in Wash Sq Park
🚖Taxis are cheaper than Uber/Lyft
💉Vaccines readily available
🍽Restaurants/bars back in full swing
🍷Relaxed open container
🕺Midnight curfew ending this month
🗽No tourists
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It's easier to turn attention into capital than it is to turn capital into attention.
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I regret to inform you that an agentic browser will not be a thing. Two reasons:
1. The browser is a labor AND leisure tool
2. Cost and willingness to pay
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Wrapping a commodity makes you a landlord.
Wrapping a monopoly makes you a tenant.
What makes a wrapper play defensible vs fragile? We asked Chris Paik (@cpaik) to break it down.
“Wrapper strategies work best when the underlying infrastructure is purely commoditized.”
If you can hop between models or clouds, you keep the leverage and vendors fight to be your base layer. That’s why Snowflake spread from AWS to Azure and Google: “Its vendors were competing to be their underlying customer base.”
Flip the scenario and the math inverts. When you’re “building on top of a monopoly and that landlord just keeps rent-seeking,” the wrapper “doesn’t work.” The platform will slowly eat away every bit of margin you thought was yours.
Wrappers work when the layer underneath is cheap and replaceable. But if one giant owns the ground, they’ll charge rent and you’ll pay it.
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To everyone worried about AI job displacement, might I remind you that we, humans, have actively created jobs to absorb our historical increase in leisure hours. Athletes, celebrities, influencers, streamers, chefs, tattoo artists, designers, you name it. Way, way more to come...
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What NFTs would still be collected if they could never be sold for a profit?
That’s where there is the most exciting potential.
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Why We Want Robots at Work but Humans in Art
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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The leading cause of death for many careers in VC over this next decade won’t be companies failing. It will be multiple contraction.
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"Majoring in computer science today will be like majoring in journalism in the late 90’s."
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If history has taught me anything, the tech VC twitter bandwagon has confirmed that Trump is not going to win the election.
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I realized that the main reason I don't publish as much content online is that I prefer to iterate my thinking continuously, making the bar to "publish" something extraordinarily high. A workaround is shipping an "alpha" version of a thought.
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The Browser Company is redefining the way that we interact with the internet. We’re thrilled to deepen our partnership with them. docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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When someone says, "I hate corporate politics," unfortunately this just means that they were bad at the politics of their prior company.
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In case you missed it last week, I wrote an essay wondering aloud hard questions about product market fit and perhaps more importantly, business model product fit.
This essay has been somewhat disingenuously cast as a “cliché”d critique of gross margins and a general pessimistic view. This couldn’t be further from the truth!
I am wildly energized by new companies. I see beauty in value creation and innovation, so much so that I hope that the companies responsible will endure as long as possible! I consider myself an investor whose preferred hold period is “forever.” If that is your hold period, you try to understand long term defensibility as intimately and nuanced as possible. Fun fact: Mark Stevens, the partner at Sequoia who did NVIDIA still holds his carried interest shares. He has served on the board since 1998.
When I led an investment in @Twitch while I was at Thrive, the company was burning LOTS of money. CDN bills were expensive (on top of existing data centers). We struggled acquiring advertising revenue due to live content being scary and unknown for media buyers. We knew we had a great product, we just had to find the right business model!
I’ll never forget the moment that the team invented subscriptions (“subs”). It was the perfect alignment of incentives on the platform between viewers, streamers, and the platform itself. Years after finding Product Market Fit, the company had found Business Model Product Fit!
The road to business model product fit is not always straightforward, but necessary to enduring the market transitioning from voting machine to weighing machine.
Google invented auction-based ads. Robinhood eschewed trade fees for payment for order flow. Facebook itself was dramatically under-monetized before the transition to mobile with native mobile advertising.
Personally, I think that the journey to business model product fit is as challenging and invigorating as the journey to product market fit. It’s what allows companies to be truly durable.
If you are a founder who has Product Market Fit and would like a sounding board on how to find Business Model Product Fit, I would love to jam with you.
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"Mod" culture in gaming is an incredibly powerful, creative force that is responsible for nearly all popular games today. It allows non-technical users to tinker, create, and distribute to an engaged, pre-installed user base. A list of notable examples: (1/7)
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Everyone is focusing on the wrong things re: Apple. This is the single most important announcement of WWDC yesterday. To developers, paid vs. free inference is as transformative as B.C./A.D. Get ready for the next wave of consumer applications!
We have two awesome new videos on MLX at #WWDC25 this year.
- Learn all about MLX.
- Learn all about running LLMs locally with MLX.
@angeloskath, @shshnkp, myself, and others worked super hard to make these. Check them out and hope you find them useful!
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Here's my happiness podcast series:
Live near your friends
Talk to your family regularly
<40 minute commute one-way
Committed relationship
Exercise regularly
Eat healthy
No debt (exc. mortgage)
That's it, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Stop bikeshedding your happiness.
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A capitalistic stance that aligns with respect for art demands proportional reward and genuine dialogue about authenticity, fairness, and the deeper value of creativity, but perhaps we lack the collective courage to face that music.
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To excel in life, it helps to be properly calibrated on what excellence looks like. Living in a dense city exposes you to the best practitioners across fields—performing arts, finance, media, food, medicine, technology. And you get to meet them every day!
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Tech-driven redistribution invites the ethical question: Are artists like Miyazaki fairly compensated, or is the placation of "additional fame" merely a superficial justification and appeal to perceived virtue?
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Something’s rotten in startup land. When did we become orthodox? We used to celebrate mavericks. Now we only accept founders and startups from Innovation™️ University.
We used to be pirates—now we’re the Port Authority.
Stop gatekeeping disruption and raise the black flag! 🏴☠️
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VC firm performance ranked by hand soap in bathrooms:
Top quartile: Loewe, Softsoap
Upper quartile: Byredo
Lower quartile: Mrs. Meyer’s
Bottom quartile: Aesop
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You either die a podcast guest or live long enough to see yourself become a podcaster
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Venture capital is rocket fuel.
Useful only if you're building a rocket.
Put it in a car and it blows the engine.
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All good things must come to an end
$ARFUR — a gift for the timeline.
CA: DKSHjHgWVDNBmMSr3Z31rZmiHhbCtVD3C4sZryeypump
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Three Brothers
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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Does everyone know that Whatnot is just unregulated gambling disguised as e-commerce? Feels like someone needs to write a deep dive on this..
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The Dawn of Infinite Code
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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My brain is still processing these first few hours with the Vision Pro, but one thing is clear:
The next platform shift has arrived.
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This is actually just how VC works: something becomes possible, money and talent flood the market, then the invisible hand compresses and the opportunity goes away. This is working as intended.
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NYC Roll Call:
If you just moved to NYC or are coming this summer and want to connect with others, drop your info! (If someone has a better solution to this, I'm all ears)
docs.google.com/spreadsheets…
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Bearing witness to the incredible heroics of @joshm and @hursh inspired me to write something reflecting on our industry:
Creating Something from Nothing
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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just @ me next time
It's been open season critiquing AI app margins
Fixating on margins...and ignoring a company's value to its customers, retention and ease of acquisition completely misses the mark
@martin_casado & I address what critics get wrong + what really matters👇a16z.com/questioning-margins…
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Excited for @browsercompany to continue their mission transforming the way we interact with the internet. Here @PaceCap, it’s been a privilege to partner with @joshm @hursh and the wildly talented team of missionaries that have joined the org.
Venture is the business of backing exceptional teams with true visions. The Browser Company of New York is no exception.
They have shipped multiple, transformational products with rabid fanbases. They have set the tempo that many others now follow. None of that will change, they just have a bigger stage now ❤️
The @browsercompany just signed a merger agreement to be acquired. We will remain independent. Our focus is Dia.
I’ve written and rewritten this post more times than I’d like to admit, but what I keep coming back to is simple: the work continues, and we’re grateful for this moment.
The work continues because when I stop by the coffee shop near our office, nobody is using Dia yet. Our “internet computer” vision hasn’t been realized. Dia hasn’t yet changed how you work on a Tuesday morning. This deal is about giving us the resources, distribution, and monetization muscle to get there.
At the same time, it feels disingenuous not to pause and briefly celebrate this milestone. It reflects our team’s craftsmanship and relentlessness, the support of our coaches, board members, and advisors, and the incredible effort from our deal team: Ryan Purcell from Gunderson, Nancy Peretsman and Leah Schwartz from Allen & Co., and Clare, Abby, Eissra, Rebecca, Cory, Nash, and Hursh from The Browser Company.
Most of all, we’re grateful for what this means for Dia. It means we can hire faster, ship faster, and bring Dia to more people. We can now invest in cross-platform support and secure syncing, train custom AI models designed specifically for Dia, and turn ambitious ideas about “computer use” and “memory” into reality.
To everyone who’s filed a bug, sent feedback, or shared a kind word: thank you. We haven’t always gotten it right, but we’ve always cared deeply. That will never change.
Dia isn’t going anywhere. We’ll be here for the long haul, with the same team just a new partner helping us push further. We’ll take a breath this weekend, and then get back to work. Big launch next month.
In the meantime...
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Do what you love.
If you're constantly improving at your job when you're not on the clock, you'll thrive. (tinkering, play, hobbies, indulging curiosity)
Imagine the impossibility of competing against someone who, when they weren't working, was *just getting better*
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What's Missing Says More
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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We Were the Pirates, Now We’re the Port Authority
I knew something had curdled in startup-land when my feed lit up with dunk-tweets about @im_roy_lee and @cluely. Here is a young, hungry, ambitious hacker who is unafraid to push social and technological boundaries and ultimately assembles a team and aggregates capital to do just that. Everyone here recoiled as if some cosmic line had been crossed and a taboo had been broken. The judgment wasn’t the typical, ignorant condemnation outsiders used to hurl at us; it was tech patrolling its own fiefdom, insisting that this kind of weirdness shouldn’t be allowed past the gate. The calls were coming from inside the house.
This reaction would have astonished the founders we once idolized. The companies of yesteryear all pushed boundaries to the point of being seen as heretical. What bound those heretics together was a willingness to be misunderstood, and a community that, even if skeptical, still rooted for the possibility they might be right.
But success metastasizes. Two decades of bull markets and the movie The Social Network later, the pirates now own and police the ports. Some of this is inevitable. Institutions accumulate scar tissue; they remember Icarus.
If we keep on this path, we run the risk of snuffing out the flames of ambition. We’ll force true innovators into speakeasy corners instead of on parade floats where they belong. The frontier will reboot elsewhere, and we’ll be puzzled why we missed it. We cannot allow the Paradox of Tolerance to worm its way into humanity’s brightest shining beacon. We must celebrate the crazy ones, the rebels, the troublemakers, because they are the ones who end up changing the world.
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Starlink is the final infinity stone in the off-grid gauntlet. Purified well water, leach fields, solar panels, home batteries, and now internet—proximity to municipal infrastructure no longer matters. What will this frontier look like?
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The output of humanity is inspiring. As beautiful as nature is, to me, it does not compare to:
Art, architecture, cuisine, culture, dance, design, drama, film, furniture, music, performing arts, technology, science, etc.
Humans are incredible
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Why do so many breakthrough ideas appear at the same time in different places?
It's not a coincidence. It's speed.
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Success Is The Best Revenge
docs.google.com/document/d/1…?
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Free NFT ideas (from anime):
-NFTs that "evolve" after X transactions, Y price, Z time held. Can evolve multiple times
-"Exodia" type NFTs that are only collectable after acquiring a full set (and burning)
-NFTs that are airdropped to certain conditions (i.e. geo)
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It was a real treat chatting with @patrick_oshag, thank you for the opportunity to think out loud!!
Please listen to this episode so Patrick isn’t forced to change mine to be called Invest Like Most.
My conversation with @cpaik
Chris sees the world in really interesting ways
I love his take on the new Apple Vision as an example of what new platforms enable and why the question “why now” is always so important for new companies
Enjoy!
joincolossus.com/episodes/44…
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Minimum Viable Infrastructure
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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We’re so back
Personal update:
I'm returning to @PaceCap to develop and invest in pre-consensus ideas.
See you on the frontier.
pace-announcement.vercel.app
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This dynamic will persist until inference moves on device and marginal cost of a prompt is zero. Only then will the AI app ecosystem bloom
My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers.
App functionality will be added to the foundational models' offerings, because the big players aren't slow incumbents (it is wrong to apply the analogy of "fast startup, slow incumbent" here), they are just big. Far more so than with any other prior new technology, there is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoletes every new app almost as fast as it can be invented. There is almost no time to build a company and scale it.
There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money:
- Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash (my estimate is that you have about 12-18 months cashflow generation)
- Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity
The situation is highly unstable - we don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational supercompany (baseline odds are low to begin with).
The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms (hardware or world-related) data and not software/finance.
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Strong Winds, Big Sails: Why Cline Wins
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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Top Down and Bottom Up Companies:
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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Every headline-shocking acquisition is a Rorschach test. Miss the picture early, and you’ll spend the next decade explaining why you couldn’t see the frame. Instead of judging and assuming irrationality, seek to understand what information makes it rational.
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It's More Fun to be a Pirate Than to Join the Navy
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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Venture returns = (Δ entry multiple vs exit multiple) x growth
Consensus investments experience multiple contraction and require enormous growth to overcome paying forward (few do, most don’t).
Non-consensus investments enjoy multiple expansion AND growth. A sight to behold!
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Top Down and Bottom Up Companies
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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The right way to be non-consensus is to be avant-garde enough that there simply isn't consensus yet.
The wrong way to be non-consensus is to think there is merit in being contrarian.
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Here is an experimental alpha version of my frameworks, lessons learned, pattern matching, aphorisms, theories, and general worldview with respect to venture capital. It's only a start, but I hope to update it over time as my own thinking improves and I challenge my assumptions.
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Top Down and Bottom Up Investors
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
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