I'm proud to now be a Partner at @8VC, and I can't think of a better moment to be in this seat. Startups are beautiful things designed to fight the inertia of the world, but they die if the world stands still. The question we ask every founder, "why now?", is a second-derivative one (incumbents handle a low, predictable rate of change just fine), so four years ago most pitches didn't have a great answer, and today these answers are inspiring and plentiful. For years we argued for ideas outside consensus (that America needed to build again, that the legacy industries written off as bad software markets were exactly where AI would strip the tedium out of work). The Overton window has since moved our way, and more of the founders building in those markets now start with us. Ambition has changed too. You used to wait for scaled PMF before shipping products 2 and 3, but software is now infinitely iterable (thanks @DevinAI), so the best teams chase the maximally ambitious version of their company far earlier, and the intensity of the work right now is contagious. I'm an ambitious person myself, and I feel privileged to do this work at this moment. Thank you @JTLonsdale @AlexKolicich @andrewoetting and the whole 8VC team for the trust. Never been more optimistic.