not to glaze but martin casado feels like a great modern investor the guy is working on oss projects with his portcos, writes and invests in open technologies, is apparently deeply curious neat to see wins flow this way

We've raised $700M at a $21B valuation from Jane Street, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, A16Z, Peter Thiel, BCV, and Blackstone. We're also excited to share that we've shipped our first rack to Jane Street.

I started working for Erik at Turpentine in 2023 as a lonely, unsure, curious college student. I spent all day on Twitter and daydreamed about dropping out to move to SF because that's what cool smart people on Twitter did. I avidly listened to Turpentine podcasts like Moment of Zen (rip) and Upstream, and working on those podcasts felt like the best way to get closer to the illustrious world of tech Twitter I so longed to be a part of. 18 months later Turpentine was acquired by a16z. Erik asked me if I wanted to be an intern on the New Media team. I called my parents, texted my friends, the whole shabang. It was awesome. Over the summer I turned my years of a crippling addiction to lurking on X into a full time job leading socials here. This is the greatest first real job I could ever imagine. Erik and the team (@liangsays @humford @richardzphotoz @theojaffee to name a few on a long, long list) have been life changing mentors and friends. I have grown more in the past year than I can remember growing in a single year. I did eventually finish college online, but I took a leave of absence for a semester to LARP as a college dropout in SF. Thank you Erik for believing in me, changing my life, and enabling me to accomplish things I'd never imagined doing. If you: - Are young, hungry, humble, and online - Move quickly - Want a path into venture/tech media Apply!

Stripe’s strategy is to “win all the startups and then win them again.” I had a great time talking with @gaybrick. Will has held a broad seat at @stripe for more than a decade, joining as CFO in 2015, and today leading Technology and Business. This makes him the right person to explain how Stripe went from a simple payments API to a platform with ~25-30 banner products and 288 launches at its most recent Sessions event. Here’s what their strategy looks like: -Companies like DoorDash and Instacart started on Stripe when they were tiny and pulled the company upmarket as they expanded. -The fastest startups act as canaries for new product opportunities. Cursor surfaced a burgeoning problem of AI free-trial and token abuse; so Stripe built a token detection pipeline with the team in a weekend, and the resulting network now helps companies on Stripe’s platform block thousands of fraudulent trials daily. -Stripe keeps expanding the number of needs it serves inside each company, from Billing, Radar, and Tax to Managed Payments, Treasury, and stablecoin infrastructure. There is a large and timely lesson from Stripe which I strongly agree with: using AI solely to reduce cost is essentially going short your own company. Instead, companies should be using AI (and the tailwinds it creates) to ship more, serve users better, and create their next product line. And as Stripe continues to invest in agentic commerce, the company can move from processing a transaction to orchestrating the entire economic loop around it. The line between tokens and dollars is already blurring, and Stripe’s next mandate is to make moving between them as seamless and safe as moving between dollars and euros. A fun conversation about what it takes to build the next Stripe inside Stripe. @a16z

That "user from Japan" with the book — that was me. August 2024, first Cursor Meetup in SF. The book wasn't even published yet — I flew from Tokyo with the cover proof of the first book ever written on Cursor. Two years later: Cursor Meetup Tokyo drew 6,000+ registrations, with meetups from Sapporo to Okinawa. "The Beatles for software" — couldn't agree more, @cursor_ai 🇯🇵