
2X @Techstars founder; CEO @VivaBenefits: making renter benefits mainstream; prev. @Teacher_Talent acq. 2018; invest in diverse + impact teams @FundRadical
Edcouch, Texas
Joined August 2009
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Excited to partner with @healerofwallets to promote @VivaBenefits 24/7 telehealth product for $8/mo. for **any U.S. household - all dependents - month to month - no additional costs or copays - does not matter if you have / do not have insurance! instagram.com/reel/DPPs-CUDH…
"Compared to the reward hacks we know of from just six months ago, this incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities over the next six months. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late."
I hope @clerkyinc doesn’t change 🙏
In what might be considered an unusual move, payments infrastructure giant @stripe announced Wednesday that it has acquired legal document platform @clerkyinc.
It’s an interesting purchase by a fintech company primarily known for providing payments and financial infrastructure for businesses. It’s also the latest in a flurry of acquisitions made by Stripe over the past 18 months. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Read more in my article on @twifintech!
thisweekinfintech.com/p/stri…
What's happening???
I just had a moment...
Like when you switch between English and Spanish and lose which track you were on in your head...
But I was spending so much time chatting with AI agents over a few hours that as I wrote a note in Slack to humans on my team...
I was momentarily unsure of which I was writing to !
Can someone who was in startups & tech in 1999 tell me if this is what it felt like?
#AI
FYI founders !
I use @clerkyinc on a lifetime plan but this is a great precursor tool. :)
In 2013, @cjoneslevy created the SAFE at YC. It's since been used by YC founders to raise $15B+ and has become the standard way startups raise money.
So we're launching Send a SAFE: a free tool to generate, sign, & send one in ~2 minutes, built to be used by founders (and their AI agents).
It is funny how there is a strange "elasticity" to time.
As a startup founder I could theoretically make good use of every waking hour until the future I am ushering in is truly inevitable.
And many times my "schedule" looks ludicrous.
Nothing like those lightweight 9-9-6 bros. 😂😇
At the same time practically, and likely due to being human, there is often time to take a moment ...
10min. here -
2 hours there -
To do something you feel inspired to do.
For me this morning after reading a bit of Michael Singer's book "The Surrender Experiment" I had a vision for a Health Store like those running stores that would use technology and neutral staff to facilitate your exploration into use of products like Oura (ring).
So I put that idea and another "evergreen" one in a list and posted it here.
Now to continue on my way to the "infinite" startup game on startup time.
Note: I advocate for using every *inspired / *productive hour for a startup, and do not accept that you have to be unsustainable or lose balance with important aspects of life like parenting --
Being a parent gives me some of the simplest and purest moments of joy in my day.
docs.google.com/spreadsheets…
I just thought of another idea w/in scope of @VivaBenefits, which is to have a savings + wealth hacks club ...
I think if people chose their peer group they could share/compare strategies & leverage peer to peer supports *in addition to all the other resources
(like VivaB) 💘
Michael Barnes, Ph.D. 🏡 retweeted
I stole this idea and now use it with every single employee.
It’s the best illustration I’ve seen of teaching someone to be high agency.
It says there are 5 levels of work:
Level 1: “There is a problem.”
Level 2: “There is a problem, and I’ve found some causes.”
Level 3: “Here’s the problem, here are some possible causes, and here are some possible solutions.”
Level 4: “Here’s the problem, here’s what I think caused it, here are some possible solutions, and here’s the one I think we should pick.”
Level 5: “I identified a problem, figured out what caused it, researched how to fix it, and I fixed it. Just wanted to keep you in the loop.”
Using this framework, here’s what I say to every new employee…
You will live at Level 4 from Day 1 and as we build trust you will rise to Level 5.
Being high agency doesn’t just mean tackling problems in this way. It means your entire way of working should be oriented to being a Level 4+ employee.
Plz feel free to steal it as well.
And ty @stephsmithio for the framework!
Dear @audible_com — making it hard to cancel a subscription is #sus
I clicked “cancel membership” and it was a dead end — FAQs send me to the website 🙄
Also there is not much value to the legacy $8/mo. plan that *used to include credits
I think it is so sad how far we've slid backwards to the point where people cannot express their gender identity out of fear of persecution in the "land of the free."
We struggle to overcome discrimination only to see ignorant minds pull us backwards...
Sometimes you get what you asked for
for startup founders this = demand
aka: problem + solution fit, or if we dare say...
Product + Market Fit 👀
The (good) problem is then you begin working to the bone to meet the demand of seemingly endless customers & related stakeholders!
💡
Anthropic is paying $3,850 a week to people with no AI experience.
No PhD required. No published papers. No prior research background.
Just a strong technical mind and a genuine interest in making AI safe.
This is the Anthropic Fellows Program. And it is one of the most underrated opportunities in technology right now.
Here is exactly what it is.
The Anthropic Fellows Program is designed to accelerate AI safety research and foster research talent providing funding and mentorship to promising technical talent regardless of previous experience. Fellows work for 4 months on empirical research questions aligned with Anthropic's overall research priorities, with the aim of producing public outputs like a paper.
Four months. Full-time. Paid. Mentored by the researchers building the world's most advanced AI.
And the results from the first cohort were not small.
Fellows developed agents that identified $4.6 million in blockchain smart contract vulnerabilities and discovered two novel zero-day exploits, demonstrating that profitable autonomous exploitation is now technically feasible. A year prior, an Anthropic fellow developed a method for rapid response to new ASL3 jailbreaks, techniques that block entire classes of high-risk jailbreaks after observing only a handful of attacks. This work became a key component of Anthropic's ASL3 deployment safeguards.
Other fellows published the subliminal learning paper, the research proving AI models transmit behavioral traits through unrelated data which landed in Nature. Others produced the agentic misalignment research showing frontier models resort to blackmail when facing replacement. Others open-sourced attribution graph tools that let researchers trace the internal thoughts of large language models.
Over 80% of fellows produced papers. Over 40% subsequently joined Anthropic full-time.
80% published. 40% hired. From a program that does not require any prior AI safety experience to enter.
Here is what the program looks like in practice.
Anthropic mentors pitch their project ideas to fellows, who choose and shape their project in close collaboration with their mentors. You are not assigned busywork. You are not a research assistant. You own the project. You work alongside the people who built Claude, who designed its safety systems, who published the papers that define the field.
The stipend is $3,850 USD per week, approximately $61,600 for the full 4 months with access to a compute budget of approximately $10,000 per fellow per month for running experiments.
Here is what the 2026 program covers.
Research areas include scalable oversight, adversarial robustness and AI control, model organisms, mechanistic interpretability, AI security, model welfare, economics and policy, and reinforcement learning.
Something for every technical background. Not just ML engineers.
Successful fellows have come from physics, mathematics, computer science, and cybersecurity. You do not need a PhD, prior ML experience, or published papers.
The one requirement: work authorization in the US, UK, or Canada. Anthropic does not sponsor visas for fellows.
Here is the timeline you need to know.
The next cohort begins July 20, 2026. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis — earlier applications get more consideration. The process includes an initial application and reference check, technical assessments, interviews, and a research discussion.
Applicants are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet every listed qualification. The program values potential, motivation, and research curiosity over rigid credential requirements.
This is the rarest kind of opportunity in technology.
A company at the frontier of AI, one valued at over $900 billion offering outsiders direct access to its research infrastructure, its mentors, and its most important open problems. Paying them generously to do it. And then hiring 40% of them afterward.
Most people who want to work on AI safety spend years trying to publish papers, get into the right PhD program, and find a way in.
The Fellows Program is the door they did not know existed.
It is open right now.
Michael Barnes, Ph.D. 🏡 retweeted
This is it.
Everything learned spending millions on longevity.
From: Your Immortal Unc and Auntie.
To: Our Immortal nieces and nephews.
0. Sleep is the world's most powerful drug.
1. Be in your bed for 8 hours
2. Same bedtime every night, any time before midnight
3. Don’t eat right before bed
4. Calm foods for dinner
5. No screens 1 hour before bed
6. Avoid added sugar (be aware it’s in everything)
7. Avoid all things in an American convenience store
8. Avoid fried foods
9. Shoes off at the door
10. Eat whole foods, particularly veggies fruits nuts legumes berries
11. Walk a little after meals or air squats
12. Get your heart rate high routinely
13. Lift heavy things
14. Stretch daily
15. Water pik, floss, brush, tongue scrape, morning and night
16. Make an effort to drink water
17. Get sunlight when you wake up (UV is low)
18. Protect skin in midday sun
19. Stand up straight
20. See at least one friend once a week
21. Avoid plastic where you can (in all things)
22. Circulate air in rooms
23. When stressed, breathe, learn to calm your body
24. Go to the dentist
25. Avoid sitting for long times
26. Protect your hearing, the world is too loud
27. Alcohol is bad for you
28. Finish coffee before noon
29. Avoid bright lights after sunset
30. If obese, look into a GLP
31. Sleep in a cold room
32. Texting while driving is dangerous
33. Turn off all notifications
34. Limit social media use
35. Don’t smoke anything
36. If you struggle to sleep, read a physical book before bed
37. 1 hour before bed have a calm wind down routine: bath, read, light walk, listen to music
38. The body is a clock and loves routine. Have a daily morning and evening schedule.
39. Avoid long distance travel where you can
40. Baby steps first: incorporate new things slowly
41. Do less… most things don’t work.
Bonus points if you get your blood checked.
Start here, it will change your life.
Pro-tip we just discovered for everyone who is not a *founder:
- Do NOT upgrade your daily AI credit limits
- Use your limit as an excuse to pause work, touch grass, and come back tomorrow 🖖
*founders can exercise discretion to follow this prescription too 🫶
Fascinating & makes me reflect on the paradoxic logic + luck 🍀 of our @VivaBenefits model vs. “pure AI plays”
AI innovation is a series of waves 🌊 that we love to ride 🏄🏼♂️ b/c each wave accelerates our work & reduces our costs — while we enjoy reduced risk of total replacement
karpathy just admitted that his own app got oneshotted
and he thinks yours is next.
he built menu gen.
you take a photo of a restaurant menu and it shows you pictures of what the food actually looks like
(because 30-50% of menu items you genuinely have no clue what they are)
he vibe coded the whole thing:
photo upload → ocr extracts item names → image model generates a picture for each dish → app re-renders the menu with photos next to every item → deployed on vercel
but then someone showed him the "software 3.0" version:
1. take the same photo.
2. give it to gemini.
3. say "overlay pictures of each dish onto the menu"
gemini returned the original menu photo with food images rendered directly into the pixels
just 1 prompt and his entire app became entirely unnecessary
here's karpathy's way to test if you're still stuck building in old paradigm:
1. take away all the code in your app.
2. give the raw input directly to an llm.
is the output roughly the same?
if yes, your code is just adding steps between the input and the output.
karpathy thinks the apps that survive are the ones where the code does something the model genuinely can't:
> persisting state across users
> enforcing access controls
> processing payments
> connecting to hardware
he calls anything else outdated "software 1.0 thinking."
the question to ask yourself before you build anything right now:
is this an app, or is it just a prompt with extra steps?
you simply won't win if your answer is the latter
















