I was on teams at Shopify subject to this—it was tough, but more often than not, @tobi ended up being correct. Now, as a founder, I get why Tobi did this more than I ever understood at the time. It is not the easy path. I have the luxury of our company still being smaller (40-50 headcount), so it's easier for me to intervene early. I am continually learning to find the best place during a project to insert myself, but sometimes, it ends up being late and painful; that just plain sucks. But, long-term it is much worse to ship things that are sub-par. The job of a leader is to pull pain forward.

" A great board member is demanding in good times and supportive in tough times." "In success, you can level up to the next area. You can get the next amazing recruit. You have the capacity to walk into a room with a customer that maybe you shouldn't be the one serving." "Simultaneously, when things are not working, that founder has thought about all the ways it's not working, all the pain of it not working, way more than we ever will."

Dialectic 56: Miles Grimshaw @milesgrimshaw is an investor at @ThriveCapital. He has spent his life hunting change: from "adventure racing" to finding and working with the world's most ambitious companies. His favorite part: getting to go back down the mountain and begin again. I talked to Miles about playing infinite games, seeing greatness up close, and the biggest change he's seen so far: After a career of software investing, all of the underlying assumptions for venture-backed software startups are in question. What moats will persist? Is software over? We also discuss: - Impatient patience: flying to Ottawa for dinner with @Sirupsen and waiting a year to invest in @turbopuffer - Two fundamental questions: "what is it?" and "who cares?" - Software's barbell future: Benioff building "sales city" and "the champagne region of Palantir" - Founder Vision: "you go where you look" and what @mntruell saw for @cursor_ai - Getting up to speed as a generalist: "I don't know" and "I'll figure it out" - Intuition for great: committing to SpaceX laser engineers (@meshoptical) in 48 hours, with no domain expertise - Humility and conviction: leaving Thrive after a ~decade for Benchmark, and coming back Timestamps: (0:00) Opening Highlights (1:37) Intro: Miles Grimshaw (4:30) Infinite Games, Adventure Racing, and Starting Anew, Over and Over (11:01) Staying Hungry: Proactive Hunting and the Turbopuffer Story (17:35) Impatiently Patient: Courtship, Cursor, Recruiting, and Joining the Team (25:33) Loving Change: London to America, the Himalayas, and Learning New Sports (31:36) The Genetics of Companies: "What Is It?" and "Who Cares?" (38:08) House Cats & Tigers: Where Is the Founder Looking? (47:00) Confidence in Uncertainty and Customers That Pull You Into the Future (54:25) What Remains for Software: Moats, Cities, Wall-Clock Time, and the Barbell of Scale & Luxury (1:04:54) Craft, Trust, and Why Software Isn't Over (1:11:13) Intuition: Gradient Descent and Seeing Greatness Up Close (1:18:07) "I Don't Know" and "I'll Figure It Out" (1:22:12) Commitments, Not Bets: Closing People and Board Work (1:29:06) Joining Thrive, Being a Punk, and Music Studios over Jury Trials (1:36:18) Leaving for Benchmark and Returning to Thrive (1:43:18) Dream Bigger: Lessons from Josh, Teaching Agency to Kids, and Going the Distance @DialecticPod 56: Miles Grimshaw - Back Down the Mountain - is out now below and on all platforms.

With all the excitement around AI accelerating science in the next few years, it can be easy to lose sight of the impact models are having _today_ on some of the hardest challenges in the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. Chai-3 was a step-change for us and our partners. Excited to work with @bmsnews to chart new frontiers in medicine and science.

Announcing @xdofai: We’ve raised $70 million to build the core robotic infrastructure ecosystem for robot foundation models. My cofounders Fred (@YideShentu), Nemo (@itsnemojin) and I have been pursuing the dream of general purpose robots for our entire lives. After work at Covariant, Meta and Tesla, it became clear to us that general purpose robots are coming, and we are building XDOF to help make them a reality. For the last two years, we’ve been working behind the scenes to support major labs and companies deploying robots. In us, they have a partner with full-stack expertise, from hardware to operations to policy training. As our first public contribution to the space, we are open-sourcing ABC-130K, the largest open source teleoperation dataset, in collaboration with our partners from UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Amazon FAR. Thank you to our customers, partners, collaborators and investors for your trust and conviction in us. Together, we can accelerate the future of robotics!

turbopuffer crossed $100M run-rate in March. 19mo after $1M. Profitable & <$1M raised. Cursor・Anthropic・Notion・Cognition・Harvey・Bridgewater・Ramp・Linear・Legora・Superhuman・Atlassian・Granola We’d be nowhere without them. We work like hell to exceed their expectations.

Today is a big day for @SocketSecurity. We just raised a $60M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @ThriveCapital with participation from @a16z, @AbstractVC, and @CapitalOne Ventures. Total funding is now $125M. Four years ago, we started Socket because open source dependencies were flowing into production faster than anyone could vet them. AI has massively accelerated that. Code is being written, shipped, and deployed before any human reads it. Security has to operate at that same speed. One data point from Thrive's diligence that I keep coming back to: they first discovered Socket because @cursor_ai, @OpenAI, and @AnthropicAI all independently told them it was the most important security tool they'd adopted for AI-driven development. Three of the most sophisticated AI companies converging on the same vendor unprompted. Since our Series B, Socket has grown to more than 20,000 organizations, protecting over 1.5 million repositories and blocking more than 1,000 supply chain attacks every week. The team is now over 100 people. Three out of five FAANG companies are Socket customers. So are the companies building the most ambitious AI products: @AnthropicAI, @cursor_ai, @xai, @figma, @vercel, @Replit, @scale_AI, @GustoHQ, @Mercadolibre, and @cribl_io, alongside Fortune 100s in financial services and global media. What we've shipped since the last round: • Socket Firewall blocks malicious packages at install time, before they reach a developer's laptop or CI pipeline. Free for everyone. • Reachability analysis via our acquisition of Coana, eliminating 50-80% of irrelevant vulnerability alerts by focusing only on CVEs that are actually exploitable. • Socket Certified Patches for remediating exploitable CVEs in seconds without waiting on upstream maintainers. • Coverage extending to browser extensions, editor extensions, MCP servers, and AI tools via our acquisition of @secureannex. When the Axios compromise hit, our detection systems flagged the malicious dependency within six minutes. Within 24 hours, more than 2,000 organizations onboarded to Socket to block it. Where the funding goes: deeper investment in Firewall, massively expanding Certified Patches, moving protection closer to every point of install across the developer toolchain, and new product launches pushing Socket into a category we haven't entered before. We're hiring across engineering, sales, customer success, and threat intel. ❤️ Thank you to our customers, investors, and the open-source community for your support. Together, we’re making software safer for everyone.