More background on how this happened and why Silicon Valley is so magical: -I had the privilege of working with Jean-Denis (@jgreze) at Plaid for many years -After running in the SF Marathon in 2024, I "ran" into him at In-N-Out in Daly City and we talked about what he was doing next... -SMB tax...! -Meanwhile, my partner Justine Moore (@venturetwins) was off trying every single consumer and enterprise productivity agent...and Town had pivoted -She concluded Town was the best, which caused @bhorowitz to start using Town -I then re-heard of Town and was like...the SMB Tax tool? :) -I reached back out to Jean-Denis and told him about his mega fan and suggested having dinner with Ben and me This also shows why venture is a team sport. This investment would have never happened without Justine, and probably without Ben as well! And maybe without the SF Marathon! And likely not without Plaid / @zachperret!

More bangers. Going down as the most important day in the history of combinatorics: --Erdos reciprocal sum for Szemeredi --Inverse Goldbach --Hindman's sum product --off-diagonal Ramsey ...

A common misconception is that if you are super rich, you can get unlimited access to the world's best doctor/lawyer/creative-professional etc. The reality is that the world's leading cancer doctor will still see you for 20-30min if you have cancer no matter how much money you have. This is why AI is so crazy. It both democratizes access AND it makes the amount of time available unlimited for every individual. This is the practical effect of intelligence too cheap to meter.

Every single day in this role I think to @arampell: The battle between a startup and an incumbent is a race to see whether the startup achieves scale and distribution before the established company replicates or acquires its innovation. The race is on.

Today we establish that AI is as good as expert human tutors for immediate GRE learning gains (p=.015, n=2,383 students, study conducted July-Sep 2026). One hour with an expert GRE tutor: $75. One equivalent hour with an AI tutor: 7 cents . 918x cheaper, equivalent learning (p=.044, n = 140). In 5 of 7 academic topics, the top AI tutor beat the expert human tutors on average. How we measured it: pre-test -> 1 hour with (AI or human or no) tutor -> post-test. There are no LLM judges. Learning gains are post-pre. Everything is real students. Why we did this: > 1 trillion USD is being spent per year on machines making machines better. StudentBench shows us how to shift these resources so machines also make humans better. Why I did this: I grew up in rural Kentucky. My dad, grandad, and great grandad were all mailmen. Getting into a good college changed my life. Now we have done a rigorous study to help AI labs evaluate LLMs and help show how bright AI can be for students of all incomes. I believe in good science that leads to the democratization of opportunity. The research paper behind StudentBench: Data, code, details: in this thread If you're wondering what I'm selling, sorry to disappoint: we released all study data for free on Hugging Face, and made free to use. Enjoy. lots more in the video / thread!!

Coupons used to neatly divide people who cared about money from those who cared about time You had to CLIP the coupons from the Sunday paper. The toil was the point, and the assurance that grocers and CPG companies weren’t just cannibalizing existing sales. AI agents change that!

new summation pod with @arampell, general partner at a16z who runs their $2.7 billion Apps practice and led early bets on Plaid, Mercury, and Opendoor. we get into why Visa is the purest network effect business on earth, why the best companies have hostages not customers, and what was once payroll becoming payments.

Databricks' @alighodsi says "Right now the existential risk is close to zero." Why he thinks the public doom talk is irresponsible: "Leaders have responsibility to not freak people out unnecessarily unless there's really, really good reason." "Talking about these kind of existential risks and scenarios where all of humanity's gonna be wiped out, I think is irresponsible. It can tip a lot of people over, and it can cause a lot of mental health issues." "If there is an actual reason for it, that's a different story. But I think that right now the existential risk is close to zero. So why freak everybody out? It's not actually needed. There are risks. We'll get into it. That's probably where we disagree." "First and foremost, I think leaders should not freak everyone out." "If there's technical nuances in how we're doing AI research, researchers can discuss that. You don't need to every time go on TV and blast on Twitter to millions of people that 'I think there's like this 10% risk that all humanity is gonna be wiped out.'" "I think it causes a lot of harm for a lot of folks who get stressed out and actually are not in the nuances of all of this stuff and what it means." @alighodsi @sarahdingwang @martin_casado

How many things in the world are as they are because of friction and inertia? A lot! What happens when “the marginal cost of arguing” goes down to zero? Bad news for shitty companies providing shitty service. They have no idea what kind of storm is going to hit them.