Jon Chu
@jonchu
Partner @ KV, 2x founder, OG @ PLTR, OPEN, Docker, ML @ Meta // Investor in Sakana, Databricks, Anthropic, Bun, Runlayer, Iceguard, Coframe++
560 Following 11.1K Followers
This might be one of the top 3 pieces of advice you'll get as an employee in today's env.
“Liquidity for more than a chosen few”
If I were a top talent looking at private companies to join, that would be amongst my most important criteria. Employees have gotten the short end of the private company liquidity stick for too long.
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This will probably get me a lot of hate, especially here.
I miss the days when HN was the watering hole where technical folks hung out.
TIL: There's a class of researchers today that have a hard time understanding why it's hard to convince a customer to fork over $1 million.
Their comp and these round sizes make them think it's a trivial amount for a customer to pay
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Based off these yc launches I'm seeing, seems like YC batches are normalizing to pre 2023 quality and there's novel and innovative entrepreneurs coming out of the accelerator doing work on real needs and problems
Great work @ycombinator on this one
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One of the "Vinodisms" that's often repeated in the office
Whose judgement to trust on what topic is the hardest decision an entrepreneur makes. Very hard problem.
It's an interesting thought experiment for why hard work has become such a badge in this era.
The startups today don't work any harder than early Facebook or the serious ones that came after. It was just kind of the baseline if you were doing it.
Thoughts on why?
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It's very strange watching the frenzy occurring in Silicon Valley right now.
Everyone's caught in a vicious cycle of hyperproductivity: you see someone else working 996 and talking about how hard they're working.
So then you need to too.
You see someone else raise a monster round and talk about "how successful they are".
So then you feel the need to too.
It's a mix of megalomania and fear.
90% of people are burned out, recognizing that they're working at an unsustainable rate.
But capitalism waits for no one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One day we'll all wake up and realize that things we actually wanted...
We could have had for free all along:
Being Human. Family. Being in Nature. Community.
It'll all just be financialized by then... with a data center built on top 🫠
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Always a great start to the week when a seed investment tells you they're closing their second 9 figure contract!
Please don't be hallucinating from the post surgery drugs 😛
Very excited to have @khoslaventures be a part of this. It's impossibly hard to convince one luminary to join a company. A company full of industry shaking giants will inevitably be earth changing 🙂
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Announcing Discovery Loop!
I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
♾
Learn more at:
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When @nikitabase wrote the first check into @cognition from Khosla Ventures, a massive part of that underwriting was his belief that @ScottWu46 had the ability to assemble the avengers.
He was right. And thank you cog for letting me do that DD years ago. Was fun.
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Welcome to Cognition, Art!
Always calling it as you see it is hard because the negativity only wins friends years later in hindsight.
This is why @HarryStebbings should be commended for speaking his experience about new startup metrics. This certainly does impact (not all) but a certain shape of co
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If you want one take-away from the Airtable deal
It isn't:
- Don't Raise Too Much (Last round investors get 1x back)
- Embrace AI (Airtable did)
- Move faster (Airtable stepped it up)
- VCs are evil (They agreed to the deal)
- Get profitable (Important, but didn't help per se when Airtable got there)
It is:
- Grow or Die. That's 2026.
20% growth (and presumably, not accelerating) at $500m ARR = 2.5x-4x ARR
That's it
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Are extremely fast vibe shifts in tech like we've seen in the last few years an indicator of worsening group think and echo chamber effects?
Glad to partner with @DeltaCommunityX on this and was a great way to get to deeper discussions!
🎉 We hosted a retreat at Jeju Island during ICML 2026!!
Huge thanks to the ~50 attendees who took 2 days out of their schedule to join us. Activities included a private yacht tour at Jeju Island, visit to the Saryeoni Forest, visit to the Osulloc Tea Museum, Korean BBQ dinner, exploring an immersive media art exhibition, and more.
Huge thanks to our co-host @SukoneHong and our sponsors, including @RicursiveAI, @KhoslaVentures, @AfterQuery, @Sky9Capital, @Abundant_Labs, and @BainCapVC, for believing in our mission.
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It's a privilege for me to work with and invest in Joe and the team on a critical mission.
Freedom isn't free and AI has completely changed the landscape of cyber warfare. America needs a cyber prime. And that neoprime is Twenty.
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1) Brilliant people do math puzzles for fun. We did at early PLTR. Stripe and Dropbox did too
2) There are tons of fundraising gimmicks like this today. Another is lying to a reporter about a fake high valuation round you're turning down to create FOMO for a real one.
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"There is no they. There is only we, and we usually don't know what the fuck we're doing."
- Lindsay Graham
Something clicks in high slope founders when they realize this. And it usually unlocks an inflection point
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Overheard at ICML:
Anthropic researcher: “We invited them to our recruiting dinner. That’s a privilege. If they picked OAI's event instead because kpop, they’re not serious about AGI and probably not a culture fit.”
Meanwhile...
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guys I just cancelled my Claude plan I don’t know what happened
Excited to see Ollama continue in OSS world and grateful to be a preseed investor.
Big day for Ollama! When we started, open models and the open source AI ecosystem were in their early days with few believers.
Our belief in open source has never wavered.
With today's fundraising announcement and our 9M+ active builders, we’re ready to scale open models into AI that you can own.
All aboard open models!
🧵
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You know none of these AI companies actually do FDE right? It's just solutions eng in the old traditional enterprise sense.
Nobody knows what Palantir does and nobody knows what FDE is.
Shocking
