Humbled to say I’ll be leading
@Initialized
alongside my friend
@jenhwolf
. We’re grateful to Garry and looking forward to what’s next for Initialized!
LLMs are poised to burn whatever commons are left for entirely cold outreach. Unless something comes from a known social graph or publicly verified identity it will be hard to assume it's not mass spam.
I've started to conceptualize the progression from seed to series a/b/c/d as a continuum from narrative based fundraises to spreadsheet based fundraises.
Fun (and often fair) to criticize VCs for inauthentically hopping on trends but feels like we're rapidly headed toward all tech investors needing some AI fluency regardless of their focus area.
We're excited to announce that Brett Gibson, Partner at Initialized Capital, will be joining the investment panel at
#BlockstackSummit2019
.
Listen to the discussion from 2017 & join us on Oct 23rd: .
@brettdg
@Initialized
Delighted to be working with
@_aj
,
@MiguelriosEN
and the
@ParchaHQ
team! I first met AJ during our S08 YC batch, I've always known him to move crazy fast, and have only seen more of the same from him and Miguel at Parcha.
Learnings:
- Raising money for your auction bid via public crowdfunding in a volatile asset is strategically disadvantageous
- Sotheby's thinks ETH is money
I finally bit on the LinkedIn premium free trial and I'm entirely at a loss about what is different. I feel like I've been assigned a research project to figure out why I'd want to pay them.
Very excited to be able to announce our investment in Hummingbot. Been talking to a few people lately about how disintermediation may have a fundamental relationship with fragmentation. If that’s true liquidity in the long tail is crucial.
Different era in that the entire internal dev team was just me for a bit, but writing software at YC was an amazing experience and important part of my career.
Few orgs that don't directly monetize software take it as seriously and have it as thoroughly engrained in their DNA.
(1/5) We’ve got 3 more full-stack eng positions open here
@ycombinator
. Being on this team and helping hire for YC has let me work alongside some of the brightest, kindest and most ambitious people I know – and that’s just YC employees! 🥰
I wonder how much R&D went into ensuring airpods explode out as far as possible when the case hits the ground. It's impressive and seems to get better each new model.
Seed stage valuations went down but the YC deal did not change. So the YC deal became an even better deal. This does not seem like a setup that would result in YC startup quality going down.
Intellectually I tend to entirely agree with all the arguments as to why value capture in generative AI will be difficult for startups. But I can't help also hearing Jeff Goldblum's voice in the back of my mind saying "life, uhh, finds a way".
Putting aside it clearly being some sort of political act, I am struck that putting cones on AVs because they then stop moving seems almost designed to demonstrate that a) AV operation is biased toward safety and b) humans often behave erratically.
1/ Today, we’re incredibly excited to share the news that Bison Trails will be joining
@Coinbase
as a standalone product line: the foundation of Coinbase’s infrastructure suite to advance the crypto ecosystem.
1) 📢 Announcing Alliance DAO 📢
DeFi Alliance and hundreds of other top builders are coming together to form Alliance, the world's first digital startup nation, to accelerate the best Web3 startups.
The classic view is actually make your own space and build your own culture.
Coworking spaces are generally with bad startups.
The median startup fails. You have to be a superlative startup. Don’t average yourself down to the median.
YC won’t infantilize founders.
We are thrilled to announce that the New DDEX platfrom is officially live! Try it now at
The New DDEX is a decentralized margin trading and lending platform. You can learn more here:
#DeFi
#Exchange
#DEX
#Eth
#Ethereum
Beyond the wanton inclusion of violence, what is weird about this is how mundane or is. If no one was left who thinks Bitcoin is valuable it would cease to be valuable. That’s true of... ...literally anything valuable.
Really interesting take. Thinking about it I'm mildly surprised that it now feels like we have line of sight to many crypto businesses not needing banks.
We are excited to announce our $9.3M Seed round to accelerate the world towards more accessible and useful NFTs!
Want to join us on this journey to build something special?
We are hiring across 🔧engineering, 📈growth, and ⚙️operations.
I talk to Joe and Aaron pretty often and still found this quite informative. If you're looking for a primer on the validator ecosystem for staking networks this is a good one.
Thrilled to announce our investment in
@automat_ai
.
@lucas0choa
and
@GautamBose18
’s background perfectly position them to redefine how repetitive work gets automated and they’ve already hit the ground running.
A common LP question that drives me crazy is what excites me (the investor) right now.
Completely the wrong question. The question should be what excites *founders* right now.
One of my favorite takes on this is from Peter Fenton:
“The world needs another venture capital fund” - Literally no one, 2009.
“The world needs another crypto fund” - Literally no one, 2023.
“The world needs another crypto fund” - DBA, 2023.
Shogun has raised a $35M Series B! Thanks to our amazing team, customers, partners & investors
@Accel
@Initialized
,
@vmg_partners
,
@ycombinator
!
These funds will allow us to continue innovating and helping brands build better online experiences.
The Hummingbot Foundation is excited to introduce the HBOT token, which lets the Hummingbot user base govern how the open source codebase and ecosystem evolves
can we switch back to our devices underlining words they don’t like in red instead of just making up random words they’d prefer we use to amuse themselves?
Reactions to this Balaji thing remind me of the old "proponents take him seriously but not literally, while opponents take him literally but not seriously"
Custom language models are a major trend that
@datasaurai
is specifically well positioned to deliver given their expertise in labeling and NLP broadly. So I've really been looking forward to the announcement of what they've been working on with Datasaur Dinamic.
@BraytonKey
@BoostVC
Also plenty of junior investors are the internal domain expert so there are scenarios where partners don't care unless they care first.
This attitude is huge. A common failing I see is mistaking low leverage work as unimportant because of "efficiency" or something. There's no rule that the most important thing at the moment isn't also tedious.
Super excited to be able to talk about what
@MetaworkCorp
is up to and our investment. As an alpha user I already wish I'd had this my entire programming career.
In our memos we've historically used "software margins" as a shortcut for "we can effectively ignore marginal costs". I'm starting to think generative AI will change this.
Thrilled to be working with
@dakshgup
@vaishaaant
@soohoonchoi
at
@greptileai
. We were struck immediately by their insights about how important code intelligence will be and how fast they'd figured out a better way to deliver it.
I’m not convinced this is a good filter for the goal, but I do appreciate the “we all pretend there are rules for this but actually there are no rules” aspect.
We did our Series A last April at a $350M valuation. Since then we've been inundated by investors who want to meet. We can't meet with everyone so to make sure you are serious and it's a good use of our time, we are requiring a $100 payment to meet. First come, first served.