hey all - update for SR008: It's now the FINAL weekend to apply for our next residency in San Francisco. Applications close this Sunday, Nov 1 at 11:59 PM PT. Here's the link: How it works: - you apply - we review, reach out to get introduced, etc - if there's a fit, we handshake and sign - we wire our investment right away! - plus you get access to >$10M in credits right away - you'll onboard + start working with us immediately, have access to working out of our SF offices, etc The official residency starts Feb 2027 where we'll have speakers, office hours, and much more. I plan to be on site and look forward to meeting many of you You might ask- who's the best fit for this? We want to talk to you as early as possible, and that means: - no company yet - no deck - no huge insight tweet thread - sometimes not even fully committed yet You don't need the perfect idea. We can start working together when you're iterating and getting the idea off the ground. That's the whole point of speedrun - it's our way of backing you from Day 0. More official stuff below: - Deadline is this Sunday, Nov 1 at 11:59 PM PT (this weekend!) - SR008 runs Feb 1 through April 18, 2027 in San Francisco -- twelve weeks of firesides, office hours, and sessions, closing out with Demo Day on April 13 in front of thousands of investors - Capital: up to $1M with a two-week close target, plus $10M+ in credits from 200+ partners - Customers: SR Insiders gets you in front of 10,000+ buyers and operators, including 150+ C-suite execs, plus a full day of live demos at AI Faire - Talent: our Talent Network of 171,000+ engineers, designers, and product people. 230+ hires so far, $0 in fees. Plus visa, banking, and housing help if you're coming from abroad - A team of ~40 battle-tested investors and operators who help cover your gaps without adding headcount -- GTM, marketing, brand, talent, fundraising, and more - a16z speedrun is super selective -- fewer than 0.4% of applicants get in. You'll join a tight-knit community of founders from 20+ countries who stay involved as speakers, advisors, and often each other's first customers - Still in school or still finding your idea/team? Check out the alpha fellowship too -- up to $250K for students, recent grads, and dropouts

what are the new types of founders that might get unlocked in the post-AI era? - solo founders - non-technical founders - domain expert with no tech experience (ex: a dentist builds dental SaaS empire) - content creator whose new content is "apps" ... who else is on this list?

SPEEDRUN 008 APPLICATIONS NOW OPEN we are now taking intros/recos for founders we should be meeting for SR008 We have a new SF office where we’ll be hosting the residency, and I will personally be working with founders on growth/distribution/fundraising/more. Apply now for a Jan 2027 start And yes, we do invest up to $1M but we do lots of other things for you too :) more info: — SPEEDRUN 008 We invest up to $1M in your new startup. Applications for SR008, our next residency, are open now through November 1, 2026. SR008 runs February 1 to April 16, 2027, in San Francisco at our new offices in Jackson Square We help founders with capital, customers, and talent. When you join speedrun, you get: - Capital: Up to $1M, plus $10M+ in credits from 200+ partners through the speedrun Marketplace. When you’re ready to raise your next round, Demo Day puts you in front of a room full of investors. - Customers: Introductions to executives and customers through SR Insiders, our network of 150+ C-suite founding members and 1,000+ executives and operators. You’ll also get AI Faire and Tech Week to meet buyers in person, Launch Lab to get your product in front of people, and Brand Lab to shape how you show up from day one. - Talent: Access to the Talent Network of 171,000+ people, which our team is always growing, plus hiring and HR support as your team scales. You’ll also be building alongside a community of 1,000+ speedrun founders who support each other with customer introductions and product feedback.

some fun stats from SF Tech Week - the largest ever - with thousands of events and 50k+ attendees. We've more than doubled since we started hosting in SF Amazing to see FiDi emerge as a force! Used to be that tech was just in SOMA. Plus the Mission+Dogpatch as well

SF Tech Week kicks off today!! We’ll be hosting a bunch of events over the next few days, at our new Jackson Square office and for our massive Demo Day with 1000+ investors. Also sharing a couple fun stats/factoids 👇🏼 - SF TECH WEEK 2026 1,700+ events on the calendar, more than double (!!) in the past two years 1,266 hosts from 1,058 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceXAI, Stripe, Google, Vercel, Databricks, ŌURA, Mistral, Perplexity, Cerebras, Lovable, Ramp, Brex, Mercury, AWS, Adobe, Reddit and more 100+ events hosted by portfolio companies of Speedrun, a16z Fastest-growing themes: - Hardware: tripled, the strongest and most consistent growth of any theme - Cybersecurity: more than tripled from a small base, largely driven by AI security as companies deploy agents - Infrastructure: more than doubled, as compute and the AI stack draw more builders - Deep tech: doubled, with more science- and research-led startups on the calendar

ok great now I have 3 messy inboxes I have to check: - stuff my agents have done on scheduled loop that I need to review - bookmarked slack messages off Google Docs and slides to review - my actual email inbox lol

current homelab setup for local AI experimentation: - hermes box hosted on a Framework Desktop Mainboard AI Max+ 395 - 5090 eGPU running Qwen 3.8 27B for fast tok/s LLM use - sometimes 150+ tok/s - 2x DGX Spark: running Deepseek v4 Flash 0731 - better but slower model - pi 5 for monitoring - Mac mini as a dev box - use Herdr and ohmypi/codex/claude depending on the use case - housed in a 10" DeskPi mini rack (mostly) Hermes is defaulted to local AI but with a homegrown routing plugin hitting a small low TTFT model (Arch-Router) to decide whether to go local or upgrade to cloud/frontier. Trying to get to 100% local over time, but right now probably more like 60-70% The Sparks are for batch processing background runs (all the cron jobs, longer dev builds, etc) do you need all of this? Absolutely not lol. I started with the mac mini and couldn't help myself but to add over time! Also I regret getting the eGPU so I wouldn't recommend that to anyone

What Is To Be Done? I propose a simple plan: Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk. This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism. Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way. Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have. To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such. To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose. And that is how we use AI to save the world. It’s time to build.

hey all- for folks who are in town (SF) Oct 5-11, we're hosting a ton of events, including at our new offices in Jackson Square. details below. -- the SF/LA Tech Week calendar is LIVE 2,300+ events across the two weeks. more than a 50% increase from last year. some other cool stats: - 1,580 events in SF, 762 in LA - 14 tracks - fundraising, deep tech, AI agents, infra, devtools, hackathons, media, fintech and more - 883 events on fundraising & investing. more than all of LA Tech Week in 2024. - 80+ a16z and portcos hosting: deel, stripe, elevenlabs, pinecone, databricks, carta, fal, exa - spacex, erebor, anthropic, google, aws, ibm, fenwick, hsbc, fireworks, vercel, pwc, fin, adobe, atlassian, cloudflare, hyperagent all showing up congrats @roseajohnson @TracyMassaro_ @KatiaAmeri @filgran_ @johnsonjanellea and the whole Tech Week team for the awesome launch

I don't know, I think there are a lot of arguments against (the dubious political movement called) "AI Safetyism": - Bostrom - Gans - Belrose - Narayan/Kapoor - Drexler - Andreessen - Hanson - LeCun - Moravec - Deutsch - (even) Aschenbrenner It's thoughtful, interesting, and — because it's not as useful politically — less well-resourced and neglected. Most of the pro-AI people are just trying to make useful and safe AI that others want to pay for.