Starting smtg new. ex General Partner @a16z. founder @ Autonomous Partners. investor @phantom @talostrading @suinetwork @blackbird @odessiatravel & many more
Joined March 2011
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Great conversation! Thanks for having me ✨
Had the pleasure of interviewing @AriannaSimpson today at the @mercury Bookstore! We talked about what she looks for in an early-stage startup before the business numbers have settled into a clear story, and what gives her conviction to invest.
The Bookstore is open for #SFTechWeek through tomorrow. Stop by 201 Jackson Square! 📚
Let’s go, congrats guys!! 🚀
We’ve raised a $30M seed round led by @Sequoia, with participation from @Jump_, @Lux_Capital, @AntiFund, @SeliniCapital, @PeakXVPartners, SF1, and others.
Hosting a little dinner with my friends at Mercury in a few weeks and have a 2 spots left for top Seed - Series A founders. DM me if you’d like to join!
I think what’s actually happening is the young people just don’t answer the survey. Response rate is abysmal!
Arianna Simpson retweeted
Introducing AI IQ Bio: the most comprehensive set of biotech benchmarks in the world
...& Bio IQ: the most comprehensive "biotech capabilities index" ever produced
Benchmark sources include benchmarksdotbio, FutureHouse, SecureBio, Anthropic, OpenAI & more
It would be so awesome for everyone to never to have another cold or flu again. Go Intercept!
OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Bill Gates are putting $500 million in funding into a new organization called Intercept. Intercept's goal is to prevent the common cold and the flu, and eventually eliminate all respiratory viruses completely.
Arianna Simpson retweeted
Introducing the Kairos × @Polymarket × @TXODDSOfficial Trading Championship.
$30,000
Top traders.
Top creators.
Four Prize Pools.
Bet on your favorite participants directly on Polymarket, or climb the ranks on Kairos and get featured yourself.
Think you can outperform the market?
Details Below:
Arianna Simpson retweeted
Introducing @PoeticHQ: a new AI system that executes complex multi-hour tasks with 99%+ accuracy and 10x fewer tokens than agents.
We raised $50M at $500M from Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, First Harmonic, and Genius Ventures to build AI that does complex work inside Fortune 500 companies without hallucination.
While code is too brittle, agents are too unpredictable. The work that runs the global economy - anti-money laundering, fraud investigations, underwriting - needs extreme accuracy.
So we built a new kind of software that pairs the flexibility of AI with the predictability of code.
When the world stays the same, Poetic runs fixed code: fast, cheap, identical every time. When the world changes, Poetic uses AI to regenerate its approach and find its way back to the objective.
In one year, we went from zero to an eight-figure run rate as a team of four.
Since then, we’ve scaled the team and executed the highest-stakes processes at AIG, SoFi, and Chime. At SoFi, a large US bank, Poetic reached 99%+ quality on fraud investigations in five weeks.
This is wrong. Technical founders are more important than ever. The bar has just shifted— if you were zero percent technical before, now you’re somewhat technical, but if you were a 10x engineer, now you’re a 100x engineer.
The small team size I can get on board with.
"The next great company does not need a big team or a technical founder," Lovable CEO Anton Osika told Business Insider. bit.ly/4eAIBcL
Are VCs ok?? Narcolepsy appears to be running rampant
I once pitched a partnership in 2015 for our Series A where one partner (famous Midas lister) fell asleep & another couldnt stop scowling. Got a call 2 hrs after the IC that they were sending a term sheet over. (And somehow, they later acted shocked when we didn't take it.) For better and for worse, VC has changed.
Francis is an incredible founder (and dear friend).
He’s obsessed with consumer travel, and has years of incredibly hard-won experience from his time building Sonder, a company he started in his dorm room and took all the way to going public.
He’s back with Odessia, and is the perfect founder to build it. Thrilled to be along for the ride!
Arianna Simpson retweeted
AI moves too fast for one human to stay on top of it
That's why we host Research Friends Meetings. Dedicated time to learn.
Today's lesson: full AI stack, all the way down to raw materials like copper and rare earth metals
Attendees:
@hunterharloff
@AriannaSimpson
@loewenkc
Whats your fav way to learn?
Arianna Simpson retweeted
I love how heavily @SpaceX leaned into photography in their S-1. The first 15 pages are all pictures, many of which have no explanation at all.
It just makes you... feel.
Wow. Historic moment in mathematics (and AI). I got goosebumps watching.
Today, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946.
For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids.
An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.
This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.
Arianna Simpson retweeted
I believe my first time telling the story of when I pitched Bill Gates and then Satya on the Fluid Framework in product reviews. Still probably the coolest algorithmic and systems work I've done.
Bill called what we were working on "the dumbest fucking thing he'd ever heard". I sat just to his left and proudly watched as he wrote my name down at the top of a yellow legal pad. Ultimately he supported our work.
Satya was much more forgiving. I must have looked like hell when we first met, although it seemed he remembered me in subsequent meetings. 36 hour sprint to a working demo, but I had sit cross legged, sweaty below a glass podium (why glass??) so I could modify a couple of configs live during the demo to get the thing working. I remember him asking me if it was a good idea to demo the thing, and I think I said, "Yeah, it's pretty cool"
Anyway, great to join @drewrogers and the @stabledash team to do the deep dive on @bettermoney_co. I'm doing stablecoin payments now, but the problems of sync, consensus, and correctness remain core to the solution. As well as a love of things that make a big impact through small improvements to every day experiences.
Listen in below!
.@SamBroner spent years at @a16zcrypto studying hundreds of stablecoin-focused startups.
Mature fintechs, banks weighing their stablecoin strategy, early teams pitching infrastructure plays. The one pattern that kept surfacing: stablecoins were built for trading, not payments.
Before a16z, Broner was an engineer at @Microsoft, where he built the Fluid Framework that helped re-platform Word from desktop to browser. He demoed for Bill Gates two weeks into the project.
Spent time at the Boston Fed's stablecoin initiative during MIT Sloan, angel invested in Cursor before most people had heard of it, and kept circling back to the same problem: moving from one stablecoin to another still works like a trade, not a payment.
That's when he founded @bettermoney_co - a stablecoin clearinghouse. Any stablecoin in, any stablecoin out, at a fixed price, with a guaranteed time of delivery.
Its member issuers include @Stablecoin, @paxoslabs, @withAUSD, @m0, @moonpay, @brale_xyz, and @fraxfinance. Clients include @tryramp, @privy, @turnkeyhq, and @ModernTreasury.
The Better Money Company raised $10 million from @a16zcrypto, @BoxGroup, and @seedtosunflower, and came out of stealth last week.
Broner's point is simple. You don't sell Wells Fargo dollars at a variable price to get Bank of America dollars. Stablecoins shouldn't work that way either.
@SamBroner sat down with @drewrogers in Brooklyn.
00:00 - "I was living in Beijing in 2017"
02:24 - Paperwork in payments, and why engineers find it ridiculous
06:49 - MIT Sloan, the Boston Fed, and the stablecoin research scene
09:07 - The Fluid Framework: coding under a podium while Satya watched
13:10 - Why making payments a little bit better matters at massive scale
15:08 - Stablecoins are optimized for trading pairs, not payment flows
17:20 - What a clearinghouse is: from London taverns to hub-and-spoke
21:46 - Guaranteed pricing, guaranteed settlement, compliant clearing
25:41 - "Better money needs to be one to one"
31:52 - Instant payouts for gig workers: a weekend build on stablecoin rails
33:49 - Tourists in the Bazaar: how agents will transact
39:58 - Atomic payments and why faster settlement changes everything
44:01 - Why enterprise agent payments dwarf consumer agent payments
47:38 - Selling shovels vs. going for gold
53:24 - What's next for The Better Money Company
Episode 0048, Presented by @altitude
Eddy is a true OG legend. Deeply technical, equal parts thoughtful and passionate, extremely high horsepower, and an amazing teammate. I loved working with him, and founders do too.
Thrilled for this very well-deserved promotion. Congratulations @eddylazzarin!
