Most founders think hiring is about interviewing. But it's actually about selling. For Startup School, @juicebox_work co-founder & CEO @davepaffenholz joins YC's @harjtaggar to share how early-stage founders can find, pitch, and close top engineering and sales talent— from crafting better outreach to winning great hires from Big Tech— even when you're an unknown startup. 0:00 – Why your first hires matter 1:17 – What great candidates actually want 4:38 – How to sell your startup to top talent 7:49 – Finding and sourcing great engineers 13:17 – Writing outreach that gets replies 20:58 – Interviewing: sell first, assess second 25:59 – Closing fast and competing with Big Tech 31:06 – Common mistakes founders make 38:52 – When (and how) to hire a recruiter 43:11 – Final thoughts

how long until machines reach human-level intelligence: yann lecun: 5-10 years for a new paradigm; full human-level will take longer fei-fei li: already surpasses humans in some tasks, but won't fully mirror us jensen huang: general intelligence already there; timing no longer matters geoffrey hinton: within 20 years, machines will always win a debate yoshua bengio: 5 years for employee-level AI

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” T Sowell good VCs do the same ;)

Results from an OpenAI survey of more than 5,000 ChatGPT Enterprise users: - 95% report that ChatGPT saves hours in their work week - 70% said ChatGPT helps them be more creative in their work. - 75% say it enables them to take on new tasks, including work stretching beyond their current skill set

OpenAI just posted a detailed story on LinkedIn about using GPT-5 Pro to repurpose a drug, which I shared here a few days ago. There is an exciting follow-up as well: “With GPT-5 Pro, immunologist Dr. Oral Alpan of McLean, Va., is discovering new applications that existing FDA‑approved drugs may have for untreatable diseases…“For me, this was evidence that AI can behave intuitively in the scientific sense,” Dr. Alpan said. The next step is to tackle other untreatable conditions, some of them affecting millions globally. Clinic observations suggest a subtype of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) may share the same type‑2 inflammatory footprint seen in the FPIES cohort. Guided by GPT‑5 Pro, the Amerimmune team found another drug candidate, fevipiprant, which Novartis originally studied for asthma, but discontinued. The same molecule has potential applications to postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), where autonomic symptoms may intersect with immune signaling. linkedin.com/posts/openai-gl…

Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo says vibecoding is still under-hyped. “Everyone in the world is going to be able to create things that would've taken a team of a hundred professional software engineers.” “That's just going to massively open up opportunities for everyone.” @adamdangelo

With their work to track fusion progress around the world, @swurzel and @ScottCHsu are playing a really helpful role in the effort to commercialize this new source of electricity. Their 2022 paper charting that fusion progress provides one of the best records of actual fusion performance among dozens of experiments by labs, universities, and companies. It truly is the scorecard for the plasma physics needed to make a fusion power plant. And this week, they published a welcome update to that paper. On top of adding a lot of fresh data, it shows an encouraging level of agreement that transparency is important. I published an open letter last year calling on fusion companies to detail their progress on six milestones toward commercial fusion energy (cfs.energy/news-and-media/bu…), and this paper from Scott and Sam can be used to track the first four of those. Tracking that progress is important to let observers — investors, policymakers, journalists, and the public — get a better handle on what’s real progress and what’s merely hype. Ultimately, that more grounded assessment builds a foundation of trust in the fusion industry. The tables in their work are the ground truth of what people have actually done: peer-reviewed data. There’s some notable information in the update to the paper. For one thing, it now shows the successful results at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) starting in 2022 that showed net fusion energy, known as Q>1, which means more energy came out of the fusion reaction than went into it. That’s an important scientific achievement — the fourth of my six milestones — and NIF is the only facility to reach it. In fact, they’ve made it to Q>4. Congrats to the @Livermore_Lab for this achievement. The paper also shows the progress at the Joint European Torus (JET) in the UK, a project that, like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, uses a fusion machine called a tokamak. JET is shut down now, but it produced record levels of fusion energy — 59 megajoules in 2021 and 69 MJ in 2023. You can now see those points just below Q>1, around Q~0.3. You can also see some more data from some of the companies including @Energy_Zap, @TokamakEnergy, @TAE, and @GeneralFusion, showing how they're improving their performance. Kudos to them for showing their work. Right now we’re building our own first tokamak, SPARC, and we expect it’ll be the first magnetic confinement machine to show Q>1. That’s because we have published predictions based on the existing science today. The update from Scott and Sam adds a new Fig. 4 that chronicles Q rising year by year, and we hope to see SPARC there in a future update. You can read the new research here: pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article… #FusionEnergy

Great update yesterday from @maxhodak_ on BCI and for now his retina implant has actually allowed blind people to see.

So true. I get dinged for the latter all the time. Since 2004 the @khoslaventures website has proclaimed “we prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness”. Proud to be a big investor in @PimDeWitte’s two ventures: general intuition and highlight.

Cuts to SNAP/CalFresh are creating deep uncertainty for families who rely on these benefits. In the two counties Second Harvest of Silicon Valley @2ndharvest serves 168,000 people depend on SNAP and will go hungry. Help pitch in!

There is lots of room for innovation...

Excited to share @reevo_ai is coming out of stealth with $80 million in funding. Grateful to partner with @khoslaventures and @kleinerperkins - and a heartfelt thank you to @vkhosla, @SamirKaul1, & @mamoonha for their support in helping us build something category-defining.

Trying to address all the questions on AI valuations, margins to AI vendors and infrastructure, huge investments in data centers, chips, circular economics, robotics, energy and more with @akashpasricha of @theinformation: piped.video/watch?v=6rR2cF5A…

We incubated Mazama to prove geothermal can scale like oil and gas —cost parity, clean and just as abundant.  Today’s news marks a technological breakthrough, on the way to 450 deg C geothermal, to power the insatiable needs of AI and cloud infrastructure.  Excited to be in this with Gates Frontier.

This isn’t an attack on Sequoia but rather a word of admiration for the COO who left since enough people are sacrificing principles for money. No guise here and not a comment on Shaun either.

Admire people with principles

Creators can contribute their labor of love and @studiojadu cofunds compute and production jobs

Awesome example of entertainment to come— an AI native studio as a @YouTube channel

We have done kidney's for kidney transplants @eGenesisBio. Exciting to see @maxhodak_ working on restoring sight! Rewarding work.