Founder at Emergence Capital, entrepreneur, father of four, rower, runner, mountaineer

San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2009
The real moat in enterprise AI sits above the models, in systems that learn how dynamic work gets done and compound that knowledge over time. I distilled what that requires below. More here: emcap.com/thoughts/above-the…
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Judgment is the asset. It only compounds if you can see inside the model it's built on. @emergencecap signed the Open Weights letter with @Microsoft today. emcap.com/thoughts/why-we-si…
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Gordon Ritter retweeted
🚀 Introducing Genspark AI Workspace 6.0, our most ambitious release yet. The idea behind 6.0 is simple: AI's next breakthrough isn't models. It's context. Even the most powerful model starts from zero if it doesn't understand your projects, team, inbox, meetings, files, and decisions. Today's AI is a genius with a goldfish memory, every conversation starts from scratch. Genspark 6.0 changes that, moving AI beyond one-off generation into a workspace where agents remember, build, collaborate, and act. What's new: The biggest update is SecondBrain, your own personal memory system. Connect your emails, meeting notes, IMs, docs, apps, and Genspark projects into one context layer. This way, Genspark Super Agent can work from everything it knows about you, more personally and intelligently. And to feed your SecondBrain, meet our first hardware, SecondBrain Note. A card-thin AI voice recorder. Press once to record up to 35 hours. Every meeting automatically becomes AI notes that flow right into your SecondBrain. For teams, we've reimagined Genspark Teams into GenTeam. A workspace where your team and AI agents chat and work side by side. For the office suite, we've upgraded the AI Inbox into GenMail. An app for both desktop and mobile, with an email agent built on an email brain that knows you and handles your inbox 10× faster. For the build suite, we've added Genspark Design and AgentBase. Design takes you from rough idea to professional, production-ready design, prototypes, videos, posters, and more. AgentBase is an agent that builds custom dashboards, CRMs, and internal systems from your data. And AI Slides gets even better. New Slide Skills make every deck think like an expert, and a redesigned canvas makes editing smoother. Come try the new Genspark 6.0 today: genspark.ai/ 🎁 To celebrate 6.0, we're giving away free credits, details in the thread.
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2017: @jakesaper and I argued that human judgment would become the rarest and most valuable form of IP. 2026: @Microsoft (and @BradSmi) is betting on it too. Sometimes you're early. Sometimes you're just right. Link to the thinking… bit.ly/49YsofQ
.@gordonritter makes an important point: the most automated decade in business history will reward the companies that invest in their people, not those that replace them. emcap.com/thoughts/above-the… As Gordon points out, the lasting value of AI won't reside in any single model, but in human judgment, creativity, and expertise that’s amplified by AI and compounds inside their organizations. This is the foundation for an AI economy and Frontier Ecosystem that works for everyone, where every company, industry, and community can build and own its unique advantage, and where the benefits are broadly shared, not narrowly held.
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Worth reading from @satyanadella. The real edge in an AI world is your people, and the loop that compounds their judgment. We called it "Coaching Networks" in 2017, and I made the case again last week: bit.ly/49YsofQ
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Huge congratulations to the entire Logik.ai team on their agreement to be acquired by @servicenow! 👏 This is a well-earned milestone — and a powerful moment for the future of enterprise CPQ. 🧵
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Gordon Ritter retweeted
Today we're announcing $105.5m in funding to take Bolt to new heights! 🚀 Our Series B was led by Emergence & GV, with participation from Madrona, The Chainsmokers (Mantis), Conviction, and some of the best operators building in devtools & AI 👇
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2/ Historically, increasing financial data portability has driven game-changing fintech innovation. 🔑 Plaid made sharing banking data seamless, powering companies like @Chime , @RobinhoodApp , and @brexHQ . 🌍 More access → More innovation → Better user experiences.
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The AI plateau problem is real, but there is hope. @emergencecap believes the next innovation S-Curve jump will happen when startups help businesses tap their data to unleash their brilliance. Read my piece with @wendyluwho: emcap.com/thoughts/ai-s-curv…
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Big news this morning! 🌳🌳🌳🌳 We're so excited to partner with Mechanical Orchard as they move the global economy from mainframes (yes, they're still dominant) to the cloud with the help of AI! It's a fascinating story... more below. And you can find them at @mech_orchard and mechanical-orchard.com/
Exclusive: Pivotal founder Rob Mee is back with a new startup. By using AI to try to wean big businesses off of mainframes, Mechanical Orchard already reached $10 million in revenue and profitability in 16 months. Now it's raised a $24 million Series A. forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/…
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Gordon Ritter retweeted
🤯🤯 LLM trained with 64K+ context length! What could you do with that? Prompted our model with the ENTIRE contents of "The Great Gatsby" and asked it to write the epilogue. Snippet 👇 Model dropping soon to an open-source repo near you. Epilogue: It seemed to me that Gatsby was already dead when I went up to East Egg. He'd died before I could find out. I thought this, as I climbed the old stone steps—they rose up a little now, but were all the same, and the grass had begun to grow in the cracks. On the steps the wind had broken the yellow tape that cordoned them off; I had tried to walk over once and had been turned back by a policeman. I had seen something like an exclamation point in the tape when I first looked at it, but when I looked again I couldn't see it any more; it had been torn away long ago, no doubt by a little boy running after his ball. But why should I believe that he was still on the other side, running after his ball. After all the years I would remember this little boy—perhaps it was some cousin or something of that sort—and I would see him running like a young deer across the grass with the sunrise flashing in his face. It mightn't be that the boy was really there, but the sky might be brighter because the sunlight came in from a different place. The night of Gatsby's burial came as a surprise to me. I had made a point of coming down from my hotel early and driving out to his house in the Ford roadster, and I had gone over the whole course of that morning in memory. I hadn't expected there would be anything I could actually see on the ground that would show that the old place had once been inhabited, but the moon was full and the white beach had a ghostly sheen, and I could have seen the grass growing, and the stones standing white and unbroken for ever. The cemetery was at the foot of a hill and when I came down the steep slope there were white boulders piled up under my feet where they had tumbled away from his grave in the rain. Gatsby was buried in a small stone square at the foot of the hill. When I came out on the lawn there was an open grave—there had been none at first—and standing around was a crowd of people, many of them old acquaintances. I could hear a child weeping, and a woman's voice singing and weeping. A man came forward, I think it was the minister, and offered me his hand. He was a strange-looking man, tall and thin, but I couldn't quite see through his spectacles. "You're a good fellow, Nick, a real good fellow," he said to me. "You know what the minister's gonna say." I did not know and was surprised. "Mr. Carraway, that was a good boy," he repeated. "He was always good to us." "I am," I said, and I thought of my mother. "Well, here goes the minister now," said the other man, a squat man with a pale beard. He was standing at the grave with his hand on his cane and smiling a little. "I feel bad about all of you," he was saying, "that my boy's gone and left us with so much work. But he's gone, like you said, into the good place. That's where he's at, now. That's where he'll stay all the rest of eternity, and we can get together there, all of us. What a thing it was when he first came out here and got so many ideas that he forgot his own family. We had to help that boy see the truth, and now he's seen it." A woman in the crowd was giving a short, passionate wail, almost a howl, over by the grave. "He's gone to another house." The woman stopped. All the mourners stopped. The minister, who had seen the change in me, said: "There was a time, you know—there wasn't much chance for him. But now he's right. It's hard, but you must believe. You know the saying." A young woman began to weep then, and other people took it up. They stood at the grave, looking at one another, talking and crying, and then at a signal from the minister they began to move off in the moonlight. I went up the hill in the Ford, trying to arrange in my mind the order in which I would tell people. ...
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I’m proud to announce Textio for performance feedback Now with @Textio, you can apply language science to written feedback to interrupt unconscious bias in real-time and ensure every employee receives bias-free, actionable feedback. Learn more: hubs.la/Q01m6JDb0
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Our latest newsletter is out! Learn more about our newest Partner @Carlottasini and our Senior Associate @YazanElBaba and the value they bring to the firm and our founders. Plus, news, podcasts, and exciting opportunities to come work with us! mailchi.mp/emcap/nov21
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Our latest newsletter is out! Learn more about our newest Partner @Carlottasini and our Senior Associate @YazanElBaba and the value they bring to the firm and our founders. Plus, news, podcasts, and exciting opportunities to come work with us! mailchi.mp/emcap/nov21
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Don't miss @Carlottasini on the Disrupt Desk Wednesday at 11:45am PT to debrief the opening sessions and discuss the latest enterprise trends with @jordanrcrook and @etherington.
User's Guide to TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 tcrn.ch/2Zcf6L9
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