.@martin_casado: “I’d rather put soy sauce and salt grains in my eyeball and rub it in than do PE where you’re basically firing people for a living. I will never, ever, ever, ever do that…” “I’ve done almost 200 deals. I can’t think of a single deal that other people weren’t absolutely instrumental in, whether it’s closing the deal, sourcing, doing the picking, diligence.” (via @EricNewcomer)

Mortal Shell 2 is roasting players for their Steam playtime. Near the final boss, stone tablets reference your most-played games. One player with 16,062 hours in Destiny 2 was asked why they spent so much time there and whether they were “trapped.” That’s about 669 days of Destiny 2. Other players have seen references to games like Elden Ring, Counter-Strike 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3.

Marti's Co-Founder @cankut_durgun breaks down how they cracked the classic ride-hailing chicken-and-egg problem. Instead of building rider and driver bases from scratch simultaneously, they started as Türkiye's #1# micro-mobility app back in 2020, building a base of 4M+ riders across nearly 20 cities before ever launching ride-hailing in 2022. That let them skip half the cold start; they just had to build the driver side through online marketing and on-the-ground city launch teams. Paid advertising. Not investment advice.

.@martin_casado argues we've had the causality of private markets backwards: more capital actually grows the TAM "There's always been this weird meme in venture, which is it's kind of not much of an asset class. There's only a few companies. You can't deploy a lot of money in it. Which has often been very weird to me to have this zero-sum thinking from people whose entire job shouldn't be zero-sum thinking." "One thing we're learning is you actually can take large amounts of capital in private markets and deploy it and get the returns. Companies are staying private longer and accruing a lot of value that way. These models consume a lot of money, and they turn that money into growth." "There's two conclusions you can draw. One is there's a new technology wave that can consume more capital, and it's a result of a technology wave." "I happen to think causality goes the other way, which is if you put more money into private markets, it actually grows the TAM, and companies don't need to go public as quickly. Companies can do more privately." @a16z

.@martin_casado on the culture that makes Cursor iterate faster than any other AI company he's worked with: "A lot of these AI companies I work with are so research-heavy. If you're not working on a new model architecture, it's kind of hard to actually interest the core teams." "Cursor always kept the main thing the main thing, which is changing how you write software engineering. They believed fundamentally it was a product problem, not a model architecture problem." "They hired incredibly well. They set culture incredibly well. The founders probably spend 30, 40% of their time hiring and setting culture. They were very focused on engineering, not research and model architecture." "It's just wild in this space. There's actually not a lot of companies focused on product. They'll focus on services. A lot of the fine-tuning, post-training companies are more service-oriented. Neo labs are research companies. But Cursor said, we are a product company. That's actually a key differentiator in this era." @a16z @cursor_ai

.@martin_casado reveals sophisticated Chinese operations arbitraging OpenAI and Anthropic's $200 plans: drain all the tokens in 3 days, get a 27-day prorated refund, then resell access as a $20 service "There are these very sophisticated operations out of China that will use the single service tiers and arbitrage them. The way they do it is, they will sign up to a $200 plan." "They'll use all the tokens in three days, and then they'll cancel, and they'll get prorated for the 27 days even though they used all the tokens." "Then they'll use that to basically provide people with a service where they're arbitraging these. The market around laundering these plans is actually very, very sophisticated. We're seeing a lot of cat and mouse between the big labs." @a16z

.@martin_casado on the 7-year-early bet a16z made on AI: "We're one of the most tech-forward venture funds. I remember when OpenAI was still an experiment, and we had very legitimate conversations about should we be going all in on AI then, and this was seven years before GPT was actually pretty significant." "For this generative wave, we're one of the earliest that were very active in it. We did a lot of the early foundation model companies. We're in ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Cursor, Ideogram, BFL, Mistral." "Our conviction on technology waves tends to precede quite a bit the on-the-ground gains, which can sometimes work and sometimes not work, but in this case, it was actually quite prescient." @a16z

.@martin_casado calls this age of venture completely different from any before: "Some of these major model efforts were done with very, very small teams. One of the most popular multimodal models many people use was built with a team of about 20 people. The cost of that was probably $2 billion plus." "This is unheard of. In the history of humanity, in the history of engineering efforts, we've never been able to have 20 people productively use $2 billion. What does that even mean, to put that much money to work with that small of a team and that small of a timeline?" "One of the major stories of this wave is the fact that we're able to apply large amounts of money productively in short amount of times to whatever problem we're trying to solve." @a16z