I first met @gpuemi right after YC demo day – in the amazonian expanse of Plant Cafe Dogpatch. Over a pesto tofu scramble, I could see that Emi was clearly smart, talented, passionate, and driven – but it was clear his product - an inference optimization platform for the big inference companies - just wasn’t working. I could see the tension between belief and realism even as he pitched me on his original premise, and the breakout push that was just around the corner. My honest reaction was: I hope he works on something else. Turns out a breakout was around the corner. Emi was working on something else, deftly pivoting in April of this year to a new, more expansive and adjacent vision - making inference more accessible to the masses. In so doing, he leaned into the company’s competitive advantage - moving into an exciting and demand-laden, but yes highly competitive, market that many would have found way too daunting to tackle. Emi would need that passion and drive – which was blatantly obvious in that first meeting – in order to battle it out with much bigger incumbents in the wild west of a newly emerging market. One name change later, @wafer_ai was reborn as a real-time inference cloud – taking advantage of their agents that continuously tune their inference engine, custom kernels, and hardware to each company’s exact traffic, model and SLA – in the end delivering the best performance per dollar in the market (at 30 to 50% more tokens per dollar) and climbing to #1# on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard ( In the process, they became the first provider to make AMD GPUs competitive with NVIDIA’s – at a materially lower cost and shorter lead time. When Wafer posted their performance numbers, customers took notice; an engineer recently texted asking for eight figures worth of throughput “by the end of the week,” not a random ‘lead’ in Wafer’s funnel - but a soon-to-be live customer. Wafer already powers Vercel, Venice, Flip, Neon Health, Brilliant, and dozens of other fast-growing AI companies, servicing 2T+ tokens a month. And it’s not unusual for me to get a random text from a CEO or CTO sharing just how Wafer’s performance gains are speeding up the underlying performance of their products. So Emi and I kept meeting up and I'm thrilled that @chemistry is co-leading their $40M Series A alongside @MarathonMP, @ycombinator and many angels. Congrats @gpuemi, @gpusteve, and team. @kshenster, @Mark_Goldberg_, @loubohan and I are excited to be on team Wafer for the road ahead.

The venture market is increasingly bifurcating into two camps: massive consensus bets and contrarian companies as far from the heat as the dark side of the moon. There will be gems - and false gold - in both.

Getting to share the stage with my Dad at #HumanX# this week was a pretty special experience. We talked about the future of intelligence, AGI, and the ways humans and AI may evolve together, but the most exciting part for me was having my kids there in the audience to see it. Leo even stumped me by grabbing the mic during Q&A and asking: "what's one way you've used AI to raise your oldest son?" 🫠 It was one of those rare experiences where professional and personal comes together in a really meaningful way! (Thank you to @shiringhaffary for great moderating!)