@matrixvc; technology/family/freedom
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Who designed the setup wherein the prime years of career leverage overlap with the most engaging years of having children? Very inconvenient. I’d like to speak to the manager.
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Not much to say except that Oct 8th in America changed my worldview more than Oct 7th in Israel. 🎗️
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“I have found people willing to tolerate any level of chronic pain in order to avoid acute pain. People would much rather lose slowly over five years than have the conversation that involves a dramatic change to stop losing.” h/t @pmarca
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new favorite example of the regulatory state: preschool is not allowed to remove bee stingers from kids. using tweezers is considered surgery.
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“Are you sure you want to raise venture capital?” is a question I find myself asking with greater and greater frequency.
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Almost everyone enamored with the productivity gains of AI note taking apps is dangerously naive about the risks they are taking. One day the people in the business of subpoenas and depositions will catch on.
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Never kill yourself, there are so so many post-Granola depositions to read in the next decade.
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JJ and I met at FB. When he sold his first startup, we had a conversation about money that I’ve had with dozens of acquired founders. It goes something like: “No, the wealth managers don’t have any big secrets. Just buy indices and chill.”
JJ’s second startup turns that notion into a product for everyone: customizable index investing, tax loss harvesting, and – importantly – no fees! Excited to be involved as both investor and customer.
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Going extinct: VC GPs in their 40s. Firms full of empty nesters and recent college grads.
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Whoa!
Story about PB. At the end of a meeting, he said follow me to the parking lot. Got in his M5, pulled a crumpled check out of his glovebox, filled in 100k+signature, told us to do the rest, and drove away. We had to pester him for docs later 😂
After 12+ years, 25 batches, and the privilege of advising >1,000+ startups, I’m transitioning to Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator.
YC changed my life. I’m grateful to the thousands of founders who trusted me with their journeys, my fellow YC partners and teammates, and to Paul, Jessica, Trevor, and Robert for creating this extraordinary institution.
Standard Capital is name of the AI-native Series A firm I’m co-founding with two of my favorite people: Paul Buchheit, my longtime colleague at YC, and Bryan Berg, the CTO of my previous startups.
AI is reshaping every aspect of our world. We aim to embed AI in every part of our business and back the AI disruptors of tomorrow.
Follow us at @Standard_Cap, you’ll be hearing more from us soon!
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me talking to a 21 year old: "yeah there was this thing called flow state. yeah if you got into it every day for long enough, you'd just be rich more or less by default."
programming side projects feel very different these days. used to make me miss being an engineer. not so much anymore. mostly just glad I was in my 20s at the time i was.
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This also makes it plainly evident that the norm of converting acquired CEOs into senior PMs in an otherwise functional organization is doomed to fail every time.
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Many talented hackers can leverage AI to get the autonomy and financial comfort they seek without pretending to want world domination and giving up optionality.
Also, the well funded "fine, not great" startup has no equilibrium these days. Lunches get eaten fast.
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dear god just one more and i’ll finally be happy
16 investors have led 2 Series A rounds that became $5B+ companies since 2012…
You can see a pattern:
• @Alfred_Lin → consumer marketplaces
• @andrewjmack → fintech
• @mamoonha → b2b work tools
• @mickymalka → fintech
• @mitchlasky → consumer social
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From my vantage point, there are *way* more companies with 1-2M ARR in the market for a Series A in Q1 '25 than any other time in my investing career.
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Thinking of writing up some lessons learned from angel investing now that all of mine are 10+ years old but remembered almost nobody does it with their own money anymore. So the lessons might be irrelevant?
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Ordering one for the office, need to go instantly horizontal after reading certain emails
Brian Roemmele
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ten years ago a lot of capital and energy was evaporated trying to emulate the self serve purity of Dropbox. seeing a lot of the same just with new heroes: lovable/bolt/etc.
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What VC has distributed the most cash without ever appearing on the Midas list? Need to set a new goal for myself.
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100% acceleration for everyone but the active founders. We went backwards and re-vested our vested. Glad someone remembers 😅❤️
Yes. We got news our startup was being acquired 5 days before my one year cliff. I thought I’d get nothing.
Our shares were accelerated to 100%. It was a life changing event and I’ll always appreciate that our founders did the right thing for us at Parse.
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the only actual difference between current "996" norms and how startups have always been is the abstinence, nothing else
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So is anyone going to attempt a defense of grifter pardons or is that just understood to be a new baseline of corruption?
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TJ has the zoom background of a billion dollar founder and the zoom acoustics of an airport bathroom stall
"We should get to a place where consumers choose drugs based on price alone, instead of having PBMs and other middlemen." - @tjparker (GP of @matrixvc)
"Let's assume Ozempic costs $200 at the pharmacy counter, and the consumers pay out-of-pocket instead of using their insurance."
"Pharma companies would compete on price to win the transaction. That's how net prices come down ultimately."
"This is what I'm focused on. From a practicality standpoint, the debate about R&D is kind of two clicks away from where we are today."
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Happy birthday YC! I owe so much to PG & Jessica. And, funny enough, I distinctly remember thinking that maybe I was too late to the party in 2011.
Y Combinator's 20th birthday is tomorrow. Here's what was happening on March 11, 2005: paulgraham.com/ycstart.html
(Yeah, I know this tweet will get hidden because it has a link in it, and that I'm supposed to put the link in a reply. But that's so stupid that I refuse to do it.)
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We’re going to hire a jr member on our investing team in the new year. See below and email scott@ / cc me if interested.
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solo trip with 7yo girl: wow, such a joy, can't believe we made this incredible human
solo trip with 5yo boy: ugh, never forgive never forget
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Starlink on Hawaiian Airlines is a revelation. Unfortunately I’ll use it to imbibe mental illnesses on here for five hours straight.
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One day I will fully appreciate the power law in startups but, even with 15+ years of data, it is still surprising me.
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🤔 where have I seen this before
Meta should launch an AWS-style cloud for AI.
It’s the smartest next step in consolidating mindshare around Llama + PyTorch by subsidizing compute and developer mindshare.
They will need a lot of heterogeneous silicon to do it properly. A mix of build and buy can get them there fast.
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“I also have some pretty good news about what’s happened with your stocks over the past two years.”
Absolute perfection. Avinatan Or’s boss at @nvidia writes to him, read till the end:
“Avinatan Or, I hope you have a good excuse for not showing up to work at NVIDIA for 738 days.
But every Sunday morning for two years, the head of NVIDIA Israel’s HR, Gideon Rosenberg, sent an email to all employees counting the days you were in captivity and calling everyone to join him for a reminder vigil in front of the Kirya gate, held every Sunday evening. Even the global CEO, Jensen Huang, mentioned your name in every quarterly internal meeting, telling 40,000 employees that their colleague was being held captive by Hamas. How wonderful that you’ve returned home. I heard you have an amazing girlfriend who’s eagerly waiting for you, loving parents, that you work at a place that cares for you, and I also have some pretty good news about what’s happened with your stocks over the past two years.”
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Of course NYT describes him as “frequent fox news commentator” instead of surgeon, professor at hopkins, or best selling author.
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Idea: sponsor a gold card for someone and get a guaranteed cut of their tax revenue. Sponsoree gets to come to the US, sponsor gets a return, US government gets a new high earning taxpayer.
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programming side projects feel very different these days. used to make me miss being an engineer. not so much anymore. mostly just glad I was in my 20s at the time i was.
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Single best parenting tip I have ever gotten is from @jdh who told me to do 1:1 trips. Magical.
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Agree. Not for the education primarily but for the societal blender. It is useful to live and party with friends who span the gamut of American life on almost all dimensions. I plan to encourage my kids to seek that out.
Don't drop out of college to start or work for a startup. There will be other (and probably better) startup opportunities, but you can't get your college years back.
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missing ingredient is very opinionated/innovative customer acquisition. product quality is necessary but far from sufficient. number of companies that look like dropbox or notion in terms of self serve dominance turned out minuscule.
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Apparently burning a CD is the most dependable way to transfer an X-ray between hospital systems in California. I wonder what year that will no longer be true.
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Imagine the world if it was socially acceptable to say “your EA is bad and getting in the way.”
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one weird thing about the current VC ecosystem is that a lot of investors have their carry allocated as a fixed dollar amount per fund or per time period. even some "GPs". probably an under appreciated source of incentive skew.
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This crew is having a ton of fun and ships like no other. You should join. 25 year old me definitely would.
Conductor is growing fast, and we want YOU to join us!
Conductor lets you run a bunch of coding agents in parallel. We’re used by engineers at YC, Linear, Vercel, Notion, Supabase, and many more.
There’s a ton to build. In the next few years, humans will shift focus from direct work (writing code) to orchestrating teams of AIs—and we're going to need entirely new interfaces to do it.
If you’re an engineer or product designer, send me a DM!
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Agentic interfaces really need domain specific primitives and integrations to reliably nail outcomes for non-technical users and go beyond demoware. We're going to see AI-first startups slogging to backfill those as aggressive pre-AI mid stage companies layer AI interfaces on top of years of deep engagement with customers.
Parabola is a perfect example of the latter and their new AI phase is here!
Most software has evolved. You describe what you want, and it just works.
But despite the promise of AI, operations teams have been totally left behind. Still exporting csv files, cleaning data by hand, and getting stuck running the same agonizingly manual workflows over and over.
We built the new @tryparabola for them.
Now, turning operational expertise into automated workflows is as simple as describing what you want.
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No, the empirical evidence would suggest that I understand that. I am just saying that many can now get to that discovery (or not) raising very little or in some cases no capital.
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Agree. Oakland has incredible strengths. Imagine what could be if we prioritized public safety!
I think Oakland is the Bay Area's best-kept secret.
- Incredible weather
- Amazing location
- Diverse, kind people who aren't defined by their work
- Fantastic food and drink
- Green, lush parks
- Eclectic, edgy, artsy culture
I truly love this place!
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Themes I am interested in:
- How do the later parts of the software development lifecycle need to change if humans barely recognize the code they "wrote"?
- What if generalized humanoid robotics falls short? Where can purpose-built hardware and new models be transformative?
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me: stop it!! you’re gonna run into each other again and get hurt. you already have a black eye from last time.
5yo: but I have *two* eyes
3yo: and look look I don’t have *any* black eyes
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Yep, totally right. Very important to find a set up that allows you to develop your own style.
Whoever thinks VC is an apprenticeship is grossly mistaken..
I have now spent many many hours with some of the best early stage venture investors of our time and they all the same thing:
1) They can’t (realistically) explain what makes a founder special. They can kind of give you some pointers on why but each of their brains have been fine-tuned over decades in a way that makes it hard to explain on why a founder is spiking to them. It’s a combination of many subjective factors along with a FEW objective things. The objective things are clear to share but not entirely useful to a new investor.
2) Their most common advice is to “be yourself”. They don’t want you to copy them because of the reasons above. And, the reason they hire you or spend time with you is because you bring something new to the table that they don’t have. And they keep reiterating that the best way to win is to find what you are exceptionally good at (aka your own zone of genius) and your own way of doing things.
That being said it’s obviously beneficial to spend time with the greats since you’ll learn a lot from osmosis. But, the problem ends up being is you start thinking like them or bringing deals they’ll like - since you need their approval to do it. And that’s exactly where you lose your edge.
Find a place that you’re able to maintain your edge and have a team of partners that trust you and make you better. But just like AI, it seems like being yourself is the greatest moat and you won’t learn by deferring your thinking to anyone else.
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The number of late stage SPVs into red hot famous companies that are widely solicited and open to anyone with $25k to chuck around is ... concerning.
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Every digital artifact can be expressed as code and code gen is coming to every digital product.
Preston and Eitan are building lightning fast models and infra for devs implementing coding agents.
Privileged to work with this supremely talented team alongside friends at a16z!
.@relace_ai has raised $23M to build the rails for AI code generation.
This round is led by @a16z, with participation from @matrixvc and @ycombinator.
LLMs have proven they can write code—but scaling that code into production still needs better infrastructure.
Relace is building exactly that: the infra layer where models and systems are co-optimized for code generation.
We’ve already shipped:
- The fastest apply model on OpenRouter (10k tok/s)
- State-of-the-art code reranking and embeddings models
These models have already processed tens of millions of requests from customers like Lovable, Magic Patterns, and Orchids.
Now, we’re taking it a step further: with Relace Repos, we’re working on a new source control system that’s built for the age of AI-generated code, with native retrieval and deep integration into our models.
If you're looking to build code generation into your product, please reach out!
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Promising… Dartmouth first out the gate with something more than just a statement of newfound neutrality from a president.
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Successfully bullied into using a mic
We asked @tjparker about his new company @generalmedco.
"Our belief is that you should be able to shop healthcare like you shop everything else."
"If you want lab tests, colonoscopy, or X-rays, just search, fill out forms, and consult with a clinician."
"You can see personalized insurance pricing for any provider before deciding where to get a service."
"The difference in price for my X-ray was $100 in Park City vs. $500 in Salt Lake with the same insurance co."
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