The best founders I know are all questionable at best at the 0-1, but absolute killers at the 1-n. If you’re charismatic and can push things through no matter the cost, you end up with false positives that may continue to lead you down faulty paths.

Teams can tell the difference between leaders driven by paranoia and those driven by fear. Paranoia is rooted in the legitimate concern that everyone is out to get you in business, and aids practically and directly in strategy. Fear is reactionary, panicky, and unpredictable.

all model companies were pretraining on the ~same internet. of course, grok has access to twitter dataset and gemini can pretrain on youtube & so on. but it's mostly the same internet otoh, rl envs will be w.e the lab chooses to prioritize. so you should expect more speciation

early stage investing is knowing this founder will be successful but hoping it will be with this company

You know who’s killing it right now? That cohort of founders who dropped out of school in 2020 to start a company that failed / sold for peanuts, and are now onto their second. Only loosely keeping track but a number of them have already blazed past series B and still crushing.

This is exactly what we are building at @fleet_ai

The Arc deadline is Sunday. This could be your path to partnering with @Sequoia & to spending time with the most ambitious people I know (and me!). DM or apply :)

Arc gave us the opportunity to work with incredible mentors like @thilokonzok, it prepped us with some of the most impactful frameworks that we still apply to this day, and it surrounded us with the most ambitious / impressive builders who I’m still friends with to this day Go apply!!

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is unleashing the next wave of AI capabilities. And it's no longer just a secret tucked away in research labs...🧵 Here are just a few of the startups tackling current RL challenges like task generalization, designing effective evals, and crafting reward models:

Today, I’m thrilled to finally share what we’ve been building at @traversal_ai and announce our launch out of stealth—backed by $48M in seed & Series A funding led by @sequoia and @kleinerperkins, with NFDG, @hanabicapital, and an incredible group of angels. Traversal is tackling one of tech’s most stubborn problems: when production software systems go down, why is it still so hard—even with all our dashboards and data—to find the root cause, fast? For my co-founders Raj Agrawal, Raaz Dwivedi, Ahmed Lone, and me, this is a deeply personal problem: we've seen how hard this problem is to solve, but also why it’s the perfect problem for us to solve together. Traversal is building the AI Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) for the enterprise: the only AI agent that can autonomously troubleshoot, remediate, and even prevent complex production incidents. Our architecture pushes the frontier of AI agents and combines it with our research in causal machine learning to pinpoint the true root cause—not just symptoms—in real-time. At 99.9% uptime, you get less than 44 minutes of downtime per month. Our agent is engineered to operate within that margin—scaling with your infrastructure to keep you well below the line, learning from your systems, telemetry, and incidents to improve continuously. And it’s already working: @digitalocean, @eventbrite, @Cloudways, and more in the Fortune 100 trust Traversal as their first line of defense, with >90% accuracy on hundreds of high-impact incidents—freeing engineers from endless “dashboard dumpster diving.” Huge thanks to our exceptional investors — @BogieBalkansky, @charliecurnin, @mamoonha, @anaganath, @natfriedman, @pdhsu, @BryanOffutt, Ishani Thakur and @mavolpi — and our early customers for believing in us. We’re also delighted to have shared our news exclusively with @agarfinks at @FortuneMagazine 👇 fortune.com/2025/06/18/trave… At Traversal, our roots remain deeply embedded in AI research, and we’re channeling that scientific rigor and creativity into building the premier AI agent lab for the enterprise. Hence, what we’re proudest of is assembling the most talented yet nicest group of individuals at Traversal to take on one of the hardest problems for AI to solve. If you’re passionate about redefining software reliability and pushing the limits of AI, we’re hiring. Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io/tra….

gen z founders on why you should join their team:

Situational awareness was net-negative IMO because it freaked out the Trump admin and led to conversations around banning open-source AI access in the US, which would obviously decimate the industry

“One of Silicon Valley’s biggest contradictions is the love of two diametrically opposed things: The use of pattern-recognition to predict the future… and the obsession with a small number of exceptional successes” @andrewchen andrewchen.com/how-sheep-lik…

Software development is more than just coding. Introducing Droids -- the world's first software development agents. 🤖 Starting today, Droids are available for general access. Factory integrates with your entire engineering system (GitHub, Slack, Linear, Notion, Sentry) and serves that context to your Droids as they autonomously build production-ready software. Factory is the first platform that allows you to work with agents: local + synchronous and remote + asynchronous.

Anthropic’s models have consistently been better than the sum of its evals. Best in class at out-of-distribution tasks. Unsurprising to see Sonnet 4 set SoTA.

coding with sonnet 4 is nothing short of magical. one-shots pretty much all my coding tasks. it's like o3 without the cost or latency

I’m personally looking forward to talking with dolphins

damn, would you look at that

apparently claude 4 is particularly good at long-horizon tasks i'll believe it when it can beat pokemon in <1wk

this is the feature my non-tech friends are all most excited about. major economic implications if it works. historically having good English was the unlock for many people in developing countries to get jobs w 10x pay