I'll be going on TBPN today. I'm at the MTS Live studio. I just announced a new $2.42B round on Sourcery. I'm on a redeye to London for 20 Minute VC. Just did the MOTS Pod pushup challenge. I'm whiteboarding with Dwarkesh. Just did Senra. I'm on Invest Like The Best.

I’m super excited to announce Synthefy’s $6.5M seed round, led by Wing Venture Capital and joined by Haystack, Samsung Next, Canonical, Lightscape, and angels and operators from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta. Setting the price of every Uber ride in real time. Spotting the early signs of disease from thousands of patient measurements. Blocking a fraudulent payment before money moves. Keeping the power grid stable as supply and demand change every second. These decisions are not waiting for a better chatbot. They require Machine Intelligence, systems that can learn from massive volumes of structured data and make predictions beyond human scale. At Synthefy, our vision is to advance Machine Intelligence, enabling enterprises and users to make predictions on their troves of structured data that enable them to make critical business decisions. Nori is our first foundation model in a class of AI that will transform prediction. It already unlocks brand new ways of looking at prediction. But this is only the beginning of our journey towards zero-shot prediction that outperforms any bespoke ML. Our mission is to give customers predictive answers from their structured data that they cannot get from today’s tooling, 100× faster and at one-tenth the cost of bespoke ML. We aim to make Nori the universal prediction engine that enterprise software and agents call whenever they need to forecast, score risk, or make a decision from structured data. I’m deeply grateful to my co-founders, the Synthefy team, our early users, and investors. Special thanks to @ai for backing us from day -10, when I was still learning what PMF meant, and to Gaurav (Wing) for seeing the ambition and helping us take it further.

We are announcing our $6.5M seed round led by @Wing_VC, with @haystackvc, @samsungnext, Canonical @ai, @LightscapeVC, and angels from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta. We started Synthefy around a simple observation: most data that runs the economy is not text. It is transactions, sensor readings, trades, inventory, customer records, and time series. Yet every prediction problem built on that data, from forecasting and fraud detection to pricing and predictive maintenance, still requires a bespoke pipeline and months of data and ML work. We are building foundation models for structured data to change that. Our first model, Nori, puts predictive capability into its pretrained weights, so customers do not need to train and maintain a separate model for every dataset and use case. Our mission is to give customers predictive answers from their structured data that they cannot get from today’s tooling, 100× faster and at one-tenth the cost of bespoke ML. We are grateful to our team, early users, and investors for believing in our mission. Try Nori at Full announcement in the comments.

I now ignore all inbound decks & pitches that are 90+% AI. Initially I was open-minded, but as the aphorism goes: how you do anything is how you do everything. If someone is sloppy or lazy with a high leverage fundraise, it's hard to build conviction on execution in other areas.

At @Nominal_io, we are committed to delivering the best-in-class experience for every part of a hardware engineer’s day. Turning human expertise into efficient, repeatable, scalable, and machine-actionable operations. Data-driven procedures (and yes, the agents that interact with them too—more on that soon) are one important piece of the puzzle. They’re powerful and flexible, and they respect the complexity of our users’ work. And they live in the same place as your critical manufacturing, test, and operations data. Build procedures on Nominal! ⚙️

Well written and you're absolutely right. These two-tier deal structures are getting out of hand! I've seen several more this week pitched into our existing portfolio and on new deals. The optics were initially to trick journalists and media into only covering the higher number (two tier optics). Now they're extending to try to obfuscate things for employees and other co-investors (two tier economics). This is PE style games. Venture is all about being simple and aligned. The more straightforward and clean the deal in the early days, the better for everyone. If you have to build a model to understand different return scenarios in a positive outcome for different shareholders (employees or investors), that's generally a bad sign. This is going to end badly.

Key lessons I learned from @paulg yesterday: 1. Grow 10 percent a week. If you optimize for growth, growth designs the product. Users tell you what to build next. 2. The growth rate is a decision filter. If code is not the limiting factor, stop writing software and go sell. 3. Fundraising is not winning. Money from customers is. A valuation is a prediction of future customer revenue. 4. Believe the no, not the why. Rejection reasons are breakup lines. 5. If everything else fails, keep a small group of users happy. Hang on to that like a rope in a hurricane.

When Starcloud, a space data center startup, announced in March that it had raised $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation led by Benchmark and EQT, you had to read deeply into the press release to learn that the deal was done in two tranches, with the first part led solely by Benchmark. What it didn’t say: that first piece came at a valuation of $250 million, according to two sources familiar with the deal. Just days later, the second tranche, which also included a host of smaller investors, closed at more than four times the price. The Starcloud deal is an example of what investors say is becoming a common practice: prestige firms getting a significantly better price than other investors in what is essentially the same round. Proponents of such deals say they’re simply reflecting the market reality that some investor dollars are greener than others and it’s only logical for firms to cash in on that — especially in early-stage deals where an investor’s brand name can make a huge difference. But critics say such structures can be problematic, not least for employees. Brendan Foody, CEO of the AI-training startup Mercor, stirred the pot on the issue on X last month, writing: “in the last 6 mo’s ive seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in 2 tranches. everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation,” and calling the tactic “deceptive.” Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, in a reply, claimed the practice was rare. But Newcomer’s reporting suggests it’s increasingly common across the industry. @followthemani

Few spots left for @colintluce's of Basis Theory, he produced a startup doc "The Story of Venmo" to be unveiled in a red carpet premiere at SF JAZZ on Tuesday Sept 8th. I'll be there, along w/ Venmo founders & @lessin & @davemorin. Tell 'em I sent you:

Many VCs discuss current parallels to 2021 heat. From @ttunguz: "In 2021, I wrote about the 100x ARR multiple, a premium valuation for private startups & public companies. Five years later, we’re back at those levels, but the growth underneath is about 3x faster."

🚀 announcing Envoy Response 🚀, leveraging AI for at-scale threat intelligence for the physical world! it's been an insane adventure wranging AI to be reliable for such an important job, but we think it's going to make all the difference. see more here!

“We really try to avoid non-player characters (when recruiting) - people who just go through life as if they’re on a stream and they have no agency over themselves.” @WilliamBryk. Co-founder and CEO of Exa. The founder who listens to the Mission Impossible soundtrack every morning, and finds more inspiration in fictional superheroes than real-life ones, on how he’s building the company powering the internet of agents. Knuckle Up ↓ In this conversation with Will: 00:00 Who is Will Bryk? 01:49 Why do agents need a different search engine than humans? 02:53 How can an independent search company survive the big labs? 07:33 What does the internet look like when agents do the searching? 10:19 How did writing a book on the history of civilization lead to Exa? 15:39 Why does Exa hire first-principles thinkers, not rebels? 18:05 What is a “non-playable character,” and why does Exa screen for it? 19:49 How does Exa win engineers against the labs’ packages? 21:30 Why does Will kill process “before it lays eggs”? 26:27 Does the “bitter lesson” apply to humans? 29:52 What breaks when a company outgrows a single room? 34:47 Are there 100x and 1000x engineers now, not just 10x? 37:32 Why should nothing at Exa ever take a month to ship? 45:30 Where does Will’s drive actually come from? 48:28 Why are Will’s role models fictional, not real? 51:05 What does “We’ll figure it out” mean at Exa? 54:05 Why do Will’s best thoughts happen at 2:00 AM? 57:47 Quickfire: red flags, young founder myths, and Will’s mission impossible

Dario is reportedly worried that some new Anthropic hires are there for the money, not the mission. Facebook had a version of this problem around 2010. I like what Mark did. Much of the original product crew had left or was leaving: Adam D’Angelo + Charlie Cheever → Quora Dustin Moskovitz → Asana Dave Morin → Path Matt Cohler → Benchmark Meanwhile, Facebook was filling up with very smart professional managers: a new executive bench and a flood of ex-Googlers. Mark’s answer wasn’t a lecture about mission. He bought small companies for their founders, wound down almost all of the standalone products, and handed those founders important parts of Facebook. FriendFeed → Bret Taylor → Facebook CTO Hot Potato → Justin Shaffer → Facebook Groups and Video → Sam Lessin → FB Timeline and Identity Nextstop → Carl Sjogreen → Platform and Open Graph Chai Labs → Gokul Rajaram → Ads Beluga → Lucy Zhang, Ben Davenport and Jon Perlow → Facebook Messenger Zuck said it plainly in 2010: “We have never once bought a company for the company. We buy companies for excellent people.” The key wasn’t the acquisitions. It was the trust. Facebook acquired Hot Potato on August 20. Six weeks later, Shaffer was the product manager fronting the launch of the rebuilt Facebook Groups. The work had started before he arrived, but Zuckerberg said it wouldn’t have gotten finished without him. Facebook acquired Beluga in March. Five months later, its team shipped Messenger. Sam Lessin didn’t disappear into an innovation group. He got the Facebook profile. The strategy even brought old product talent back. Aaron Sittig- the early Facebook designer behind photo tagging - left after five years. Six months later, he returned and said the arrival of people like Lessin and Shaffer was part of what brought him back. That’s the part of Zuck’s playbook Dario should study. Facebook paid founder prices, then gave employees founder scope.

I cloned myself. Meet v2 of Hal = my second brain and AI human (digital twin) He is 10x better than v1, which we posted a few weeks. Smarter. Faster. More me. For most of my career, I chased developers to help me build something. For Hal, I did it myself. I stayed up until 4 am several nights building the core brain, connecting all the tools. Having total control over the context and architecture was the most fun I’ve had in years. He is an actual presence in my meetings and remembers more than I ever could.