Ask yourself a simple question. Why is almost every celebrity on the same side? Actors, singers, late-night hosts, award-show presenters. Thousands of people with different backgrounds, different lives, different temperaments. And somehow, on every major issue, they land on the exact same opinion, at the exact same moment, with the exact same hashtags. Free minds don't behave like that. An ecosystem does. Now ask a second question. Elon Musk is landing rockets on their own tails. He's bringing internet to villages that never had a phone line. He's building cars that drive themselves and implants that let paralyzed people move a cursor with their thoughts. Artists are supposed to be the ones who dream about the future. Here is a man actually building it. How many of them stand next to him? A handful. Why? Because Hollywood is not a free market of talent. It's a royal court. A young actor doesn't make it because he's good. Hundreds are good. He makes it because someone lets him in: an agent, a casting director, a producer, a studio, an awards committee. Every step is a gate, and every gate has a keeper. When your whole career depends on a few rooms, you learn very quickly what can be said in those rooms and what can't. This is how it works. First you stay silent. Then you nod. Then you repeat. Then you believe. Compromise never arrives all at once. It arrives one dinner, one role, one red carpet at a time. And once you've given up enough, you need the system to stay in place, because the system is the only thing that makes the sacrifice worth it. Want to see the whole mechanism in a single story? For decades, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood was the subject of accusations from dozens of women, and much of the industry treated it as an open secret. A host even joked about it at an Oscar nominations announcement, and the room laughed. Speaking up seriously meant losing everything. When the truth finally broke, the same industry dressed in black and applauded its own courage. Silence while it pays. Virtue once it's safe. That's the system. And that's the real lie. Not that these people are monsters. Most aren't. The lie is calling it courage. Real courage costs you something. Saying what every room in town already applauds costs nothing. Saying the opposite is what costs. That's why so few artists stand with Elon. Not because they've studied his ideas and rejected them, but because standing there is a career risk they can't afford. Look at what happened to him when he left the consensus. Advertisers fled. Friends disappeared. Invitations stopped. He could afford it. Almost nobody else can. That tells you exactly how free that world really is. So wake up. Stop taking your political cues from people whose paycheck depends on agreeing. A celebrity endorsement is not an argument. It's a loyalty signal. Your vote, your convictions, your children's future: don't outsource them to people who are paid to recite lines someone else wrote. The people who build the future rarely get applause from the people who perform it. Think for yourself. It's the most American thing you can do.

5 months. 6 finished projects. 0 MRR. All my ideas are useless. Close to giving up as indie - not joking. (luckily still have my day job) Expert Software and AI Eng skills. 0 understanding of Marketing and Sales. What should I work on next? Anything but: X growth, Reddit leads, SaaS listings, SEO tool.

"If you look at the hottest concepts in AI investing today, like RSI or RL environments — those are very old terms in the research world. Suddenly the venture world is like, 'This is the hot new thing, let's put a ton of money into it!'" Generally speaking, the job of a venture capitalist is to back great founders and stay out of the way. However, learning to recognise great technical founders can require some familiarity with the principles behind the pitch. Too often, particularly in hot markets, investors are excited by simple narratives (e.g. promises of AGI) and overlook more complex truths. This is the opportunity that @jennywxiao, former researcher at @OpenAI, AI/ML PhD from @Columbia and GP at @LeonisCapital, recognised in 2022. TL;DR — if you want to claim you invest on the frontier, it helps to have an idea where the frontier is.

In my experience, bubbles create a conundrum for founders. If you "go big" and raise a lot of money, you could end up overvalued and never get an exit (see: many of the ZIRP-era SaaS companies). If you "stay lean" and don't raise a lot, the "go big" competitors could pass you by. Or, as a new twist, if you don't evolve fast, the models themselves could make you irrelevant. What's the hack for the situation? I've seen the following approaches: 1. Go big and raise enough to weather a downturn. Then survive through it and become a real business amongst many failed ones. Amazon is the ultimate example of this. To do this, you need to be very ambitious and continue the ambition. Don’t stop building and growing. I admire folks like Rippling and Ramp in this model. 2. Bootstrap and build a "picks and shovels" business (e.g., services, etc.), where you make money from the "go big" businesses and pocket the cash. Many agencies and consulting firms mint money during bubbles - and keep it as long as they themselves don't get too greedy and try to go big. 3. "Go medium" and try to quickly sell to someone going big. Many recent AI M&As fall into this category. The key is having your market value > your last round valuation in this scenario. What else have you seen work to navigate these approaches?

Cognition is Infoysys masquerading as Anthropic

okay so after crunching some numbers, the math ain't mathing I have executed $2,429.92 in transactions on Instinct and I use it more than anyone else I know. I've heard that Instinct crossed over 100K users, let's just assume it's at 200K to add some padding $1B transactions / 200K users = $5,000 spend/user That means the AVERAGE user would need to be spending more than 2x what I spend as a power user What am I missing here? Is this number inflated by a small group of ultra-wealthy? Is my user estimate wrong? Of course, there are people who use it more than me. I'm sure there are also people who use it less and spend more. But 1B is a massive number, I don't know something just feels off the more I try to dig into it (btw, would LOVE to be proved wrong here - this level of commerce via agents is so exciting and i'm incredibly bullish on this being the future path of consumer behavior)

there are more and more solo founders and it’s being glamorized a fair bit this is my second time being a solo founder it fucking sucks don’t do this unless you have a set of trusted advisors you can go to in the darkest moments, and there will be dark moments

Today, we’re launching an ambitious new school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy. Based in San Francisco, The Academy serves the most promising young high school graduates. We think this can be an elite institution that attracts top tier talent. One that prepares students for the future rather than remaining stuck in the past. The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They'll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups. There are classes and guest lectures, too, from some truly amazing people who have built modern-day Silicon Valley. The Academy is designed as a network, since that’s the reason students go to school in the first place. Core to that network are our 10 Founding Partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The network includes over 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors. To join as a hiring partner or faculty member, you can apply on our website. We raised $42M in funding led by @a16z. I'll be CEO and @pmarca and @eriktorenberg will join me on the board. Applications are open for our Founding Class Fellowship, which will be one year and tuition-free. Eventually, pending regulatory approval, we plan to offer a two-year program that charges tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university. We're looking for the most unusually ambitious young builders on the planet. Come join us in San Francisco: theacademysf.com/

The last time there was a popular VC reputation website (thousands of members), the operator... ...got regular cease-and-desist letters from VC firms ...was subpoenaed to reveal the identity of founders so they could be sued for defamation ...found VCs were making portfolio founders post positive reviews ...was explicitly threatened by VCs with lawfare that would "make his life miserable" That's why these websites don't last.