A Walk In The Park (part III) feat @toddsaunders 00:00 Software should fit your business 00:16 Meet Todd, the councilman 03:01 From Google to flooring software 07:51 The $10M pivot 11:55 Life after the exit 17:35 Vertical vs. horizontal software 23:21 The college startup story 24:35 Cofounders and the Dalton Mills name 28:06 Why raise VC again? 32:43 Who Todd wants to hear from shot on @iPhone, edited on @descript 📍westfield, nj

I have been using Codex as my primary "agent" for such a long time that I forget the average person has never used it.. Instinct and Muse are great especially for browser use on the phone. It shows what a great agent is like for the masses with ZERO setup. But, Codex on Mac is simply undefeated in all the work in can do with Computer Use (h/t @AriX and the Sky team). Like try doing a workflow that you do manually and give it Codex to one-shot. I can't wait to see what their latest launch will be as they reportedly get ready to release their "agent" to the masses. My only ask would be to showcase the work and make it easy for folks to get started. Such a privileged time to be a customer for all these products - truly the golden age!

With a few exceptions, the companies boasting about tokenmaxxing have the worst product experiences.. It’s because good products are all about curation & gardening and not throwing the kitchen sink at agents expecting them to figure it out. Less is more has never more apt.

Jokingly thinking of starting a new cloud kitchen called “next day curry”.. Where I order the best curries, store it overnight and serve it the next day. Saying this as I devour my leftover Manchurian. Have the exact same experience with Ramen, Indian food, Thai curry and others. Might be blasphemous to the purists but they taste so much better!

I spend ~2 hours a day programming, building side projects, tinkering obsessively, trying new repos.. I get basically a DM a day asking “aren’t you a VC, why are you doing this?” Unlike other eras, things are moving SO fast that if you don’t do this, I simply don’t understand how folks will ever learn what’s coming next. For me, it’s quite simple if you want to invest in the AI era: 1) You have to understand the model capabilities to see where the next set of models will improve - still so much alpha in reading technical papers (model research) 2) You need to see what tools do they need to be successful and complete even longer long horizon tasks (infra) 3) You need to understand the harness capabilities that will make these models help building autonomous companies (app layer) You can obviously learn this by talking to researchers / builders and simply betting on founders - and I do that too. But, I was never honestly good at learning without getting my hands dirty so just leaning in to what I know best. It’s also honestly so fun! So, my push to other folks who want to learn is just get started and find time to tinker daily. Once you do it for 10 days, I’m sure you’ll be equally obsessed!

A lot of really great companies take a while to get going, and revenue growth is not the end all be all.. But, if this is what a pacesetter means, there are at least two portfolio companies in our current fund that would be considered in the top decile 💪

I have been obsessed with self driving companies for more than a year now.. tried a LOT of products, none of them met the bar and decided to just build one myself with "claude" in the loop. Introducing my first experiment: nosugarforkids (dot com) 🙅‍♂️ > catalog of only healthy snacks for kids (surprisingly this didn't exist) > you can chat to get recommendations for school, lunches, snack boxes > built a "tier" list based on the nutrients and what's actually good On the autonomous side, I have a Claude agent that wakes up once a day to do the following things: > checks catalog for new additions > prunes any products that may be dead > finds new content ideas to help increase reach > checks dataforSEO and Google Search Console for performance > writes and edits new pieces that might be useful to help > keeps quality high, and tries to not introduce slop > (new) reaches out to publications to get backlinks Even with ZERO backlinks today and no social presence whatsoever, site has organically grown to ~6k impressions a day and 60 clicks. Lots of rough edges still, but parents give it a try and tell me if it's helpful!

Been tinkering with a “Home” @NousResearch agent for a few months and it’s finally gotten really good.. It’s also our first “group” bot where my wife and I interact with it on a daily basis - which has been fun learning especially when it fails 😅. I have tried to recreate with Grok Bot and similar and you can’t get this level of granularity and control (eg only read certain emails, convert in line attachments to structured data or logged in browser sessions) I asked it to share what it does based on the capabilities and our conversations and you can see it’s response below!

I’m meeting one too many founders who think the money spigot will magically flow and the next round will happen no matter what.. Capital is a weapon for acceleration. Used well you’re unbeatable. If you are so dependent on it, a simple downturn can lead to not so great consequences. If you don’t believe me, a simple prompt asking for this history will suffice. So been sharing this with a lot of the founders we advise: figure out the default path that ensures the survival of your company and a great self fulfilling business. And then figure out scenarios where abundant (or lack of) capital and what it does to your business. The only constant is change and we don’t know how capital markets evolve in the next 6-18 months!

I have been obsessed with closed payment loops for a LONG time, and have been looking to find a company trying to solve a real problem.. excited to finally back Piston (piston dot com) ⛽️ USA alone spends hundreds of billions in fuel. Most of that spend comes through cards (credit, fuel, or sometime house cards). However, a lot of these cards are not even tied to a particular driver. They often get stolen, skimmed, or misused. The fleet owner then has to eat the fraud and then spend a long time reconciling what exactly happened. The gas station has to pay interchange fees to accept the card, but has no relationship with the fleets on the other side. And a lot of companies have come and gone trying to optimize this infrastructure rather than thinking about it from the very beginning. You really can't fix this issue by JUST building a better fuel card. The card is the problem, and so Piston decided to get rid of it. It moves the payment over its own rails without networks or any intermediaries. Piston pays the station and then invoices the fleet. Every transaction is tied to a specific driver with the time, location, and fuel type attached, and soon it'll be integrated with the vehicle itself. The founders faced this problem themselves. @vik_sekhon runs his own fleet of trucks, and his fleet lost real money to fuel fraud. @Shivam2291 used to recruit thousands of drivers before the two of them got together to help build Piston. The best signal for how effective Piston is for fleets is the moment they switch over to Piston, they see their fuel spend automatically go down. I have seen so many charts and customer quotes that show this directly. Customer love shows in the metrics. Payment volume has grown 8x and merchant network has grown 40x while retention has stayed above 98%. Piston is now live across 2,000 stations and across 48 states. Fleets pay nothing for it today and they get fraud prevention, which is what a card-based system cannot offer. Gas stations get direct access to fleets to help build loyalty and offer adjacent products. To increase their reach, Piston is now directly integrated with POS of the majority of gas stations in America. This allows them to turn on hundreds of gas stations at once, secure supply and hence fulfill their already burgeoning demand. Thrilled to be leading their Series A and joining the board, along with existing investors @sparkcapital & @pearvc. Special thanks to @arpans who introduced me to this team last year!

PSA to the new Dreamforce visitors.. Lyft bike is way way faster for your intra city commutes than spending hours stuck in a Waymo / Uber. The dedicated bike lanes in SOMA make this a breeze. Just like open source models you get 90% of the value for 10% of the time!

Honestly having kids reduces p(doom) by an exponential amount.. Case in point: We have been playing the garbage truck and excavator (techno version) for the past hour. And dancing to it as if we were at a concert. With a temporary abandon to what the world is fighting about.

“Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” I never realized the gravity of this quote till I saw extremely successful VCs fight for attribution of the hot deals. And you realize this viscerally because the large exits (or markups) are genuinely rare and those are the ones you raise the next fund on (your own or part of the firm). This is why in the next couple of years you’ll see many names scrubbed (or conveniently omitted) and everyone wanting to revise history to claim some credit for the ones that eventually succeed. So many emerging GPs are facing this explicitly as the only thing they can take to their future LPs is their track record. And it’s been sad to see them not get the credit they actually deserve. As @AnjneyMidha said, eventually the new guard will shine as they will figure a way out. But in the short term, hold your founders close since they’ll be the real reference checks! (this is genuinely NOT a subtweet at any firm, just what I have been noticing across the market as I’m helping emerging managers)

Three truths in early stage venture right now: 1) everyone wants to raise a $50 million seed 2) everyone thinks they will hit $30 million ARR next year 3) every hot tranched seed round magically ends up at the ~$300 million valuation