The @BostonCollege Investment Committee (an LP and my beloved alma mater) asked for a few thoughts on what's happening in AI. I recorded a test run yesterday morning and then shared it with my partners, who encouraged me to share it more broadly... so here you go! This is not a sales pitch, it's just a reflection on what we're seeing. And it wasn't intended to be shared, so please pardon the rough edges. loom.com/share/c016702964a04…

A framework to make sense of the biggest investment wave of our lifetime

All seven Databricks co-founders began our journey together at UC Berkeley. We started the company in a room in Soda Hall, moved to a small office on Addison Street, and spent our first few years in Berkeley before eventually heading to SF. Two of our co-founders are still on the faculty. Today we announced Databricks Field at California Memorial Stadium, our first collegiate athletics sponsorship. Berkeley shaped everything about how this company thinks, and this is our way of investing in the next generation of students and builders who'll do their best work on that campus. Go Bears! databricks.com/company/newsr…

@motionaldrive has been flying under the radar, quietly preparing for a driverless launch on Uber in Las Vegas in Q4. I had the chance to spend half a day with the Motional team today, and took a driverless Motional for a spin through Vegas. Flawless ride - can't wait for everyone to experience it soon!

Why didn't @travisk raise more than $1.7B for Atoms? "You gotta stop somewhere." "We'll do a second close. If you're a homie, we definitely have room for you. If you're not a homie, you should talk to one of my homies."

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he’s wired in

a brief snippet from DIMENSION's most recent letter to partners

This is a phenomenal effort and no one better than @gaganbiyani to lead it. Can't wait to see how this evolves. As someone who sends their kids to Alpha School, I am a believer that the way we teach our kids has to fundamentally change. We are no longer preparing our kids for the real world. And for those who ask : my kids advocated for Alpha School themselves (I am a type A Indian mom and fit the stereotype and I was quite skeptical of 2 hour learning. But they have proven me wrong so far!)

Thrilled to see longtime friend @dee_bosa making the leap as an entrepreneur 😍. A toast w/ @_ram_ @RiskReversal + friends, then off to create legendary content…

Faire I am incredibly proud to have been an investor in @Faire since 2017. I worked closely with founders @maxrhodesOK, @Kolovson, @Mescortes, and Daniele Perito for several years before they started Faire. They are absolutely stellar S-tier talent. What they and the Faire team have accomplished since is extraordinary. This Wall Street Journal piece (linked below) captures the scale of that accomplishment: a $730M+ annualized revenue run rate, 45% year-over-year growth, and an expectation of reaching EBITDA breakeven in Q4. Those are remarkable numbers for a company taking on an enormous and stubborn problem. Wholesale has changed remarkably little for more than a century. Independent retailers still spend huge amounts of time discovering products, managing inventory, and absorbing costs that large chains spread across thousands of stores. Faire is changing that for hundreds of thousands of retailers and brands. The company is now on pace to facilitate more than $4.5B in merchandise purchases annually. Every order adds to Faire’s understanding of which products sell in which stores. That information improves product recommendations, gives retailers more confidence in what they buy, and connects brands with customers they would struggle to find on their own. I’m especially excited by how much opportunity remains. International markets give Faire much more room to grow. Advertising, launched in 2024, already contributes about 9% of revenue. Fulfillment could reduce customer shipping costs by roughly 80%, directly improving retailer margins. For Faire employees, I hope this article brings a deep sense of pride. You have built something truly special. For candidates, Faire offers a rare opportunity: proven demand, enormous room to grow, hard technical and operational problems, and a founding team that I would back again without hesitation. Very few teams get to build a company of this scale while improving the odds for independent retailers and brands around the world. Faire does both. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been part of the story from the beginning. I have never been more excited about what this exceptional team will build next.

A few thoughts on the current state of venture capital. When the Music Is Playing In July 2007, a few weeks before the credit markets seized up, Chuck Prince, then the CEO of Citigroup, gave an interview to the Financial Times. The line everyone remembers is this one: "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." He was mocked for it for years afterward, and he lost his job a few months later. But I have come to think he was saying something honest. He wasn't claiming the music would play forever. He was admitting that he couldn't sit down while it was still going, and neither could anyone else in his seat. I've been thinking about that quote a lot lately, because right now is the most disorienting period in venture capital I can remember, and I have been doing this for a while. Here is what makes it disorienting. It's not that things are bad. Some things are spectacular. We have companies in our portfolio growing faster than anything I have seen in my career, and I don't say that lightly. At the same time, we have companies with no revenue, no product, and a founding team you could fit in a conference room raising billions of dollars at valuations of $10 to $50 billion. Both of these things are true at once, and if you try to reason about them with the same framework you will drive yourself crazy. Two ideas have helped me make sense of it. Neither is mine. The first is reflexivity, which George Soros has been writing about since the 1980s. In most of life, perception follows reality: the weather is what it is, and your opinion of it changes nothing. In markets, it runs the other way too. Prices change what participants believe, and what participants believe changes the prices. The feedback loop can run for a long time, and while it's running it looks exactly like progress. Here is how reflexivity is playing out in AI. Full disclosure: Menlo is an investor in Anthropic, so read the following with that in mind. People watched a frontier lab go from a $4 billion valuation to $18 billion, then $60 billion, then $180 billion, then $380 billion, and now something close to a trillion. They drew the obvious conclusion: that is what a neo lab looks like. So the next neo lab gets priced off that path, not off anything it has built. Then it gets marked up in a subsequent round, and the markup itself becomes the proof. Look at Thinking Machines. Look at Reflection. At that point valuation has stopped being an output of the metrics and has become the metric. Nobody is discounting cash flows. They are discounting the last round. Soros is very clear about one thing, and it's the part people skip: you cannot know when or how a reflexive process ends. You only know that it does. Every one of them has. The second idea is Chuck Prince's, and it explains why smart people keep dancing even when they can see the loop for what it is. As far as I can tell, there are two groups on the dance floor. The first group got in early. Firms like ours were in some of these AI companies before the numbers got silly, and the paper gains are enormous. When you are sitting on gains like that, you start to feel like you're playing with house money. I have been around long enough to know that house money is the most dangerous kind, because you don't respect it the way you respect money you had to earn. The second group missed the early rounds and knows it. Their LPs know it too. So they are trying to make up for lost time by writing very large checks very late, which is the one strategy almost guaranteed to turn a missed opportunity into a real loss. House money on one side, FOMO on the other, and reflexivity feeding both. That's the whole story. Everyone has a reason to keep dancing, and the reasons are different, which is why nobody can talk anyone else off the floor. So what do you do? The instinct in our business is to answer with company identification: just pick the right neo lab and you'll be fine. I think that's the trap. When price has become the signal, being right about the company is not enough, because you can be right about the company and still be wrong about the price by a factor of ten. The public-market investors I admire figured this out a long time ago. They spend as much time on how much to own as on what to own. The winners in venture over the next decade will be the firms that treat portfolio composition and position sizing as seriously as they treat sourcing. How much of the fund is in companies whose valuation rests on the last round rather than on revenue? What happens to the portfolio if the reflexive loop breaks next year instead of in five? Those are not exciting questions. They are the ones that will matter. The music will stop. It always does. Dance if you must, but know where the chairs are.

Jensen Huang says there is '0% chance' AI destroys the world by 2030 — 'We should go as fast as we can, irrespective of anyone else,' dismisses Anthropic doom warnings and rejects new regulations tomshardware.com/tech-indust…

Looks like today may be a record day for token volume % of open models on Vercel AI Gateway: 🟦 Open 78.4% 🟨 Closed 21.6% While spend 💲 usually tells a different story, #3 and #4 today are Moonshot AI & DeepSeek. Adding Z⁠.ai, their combined spend surpasses OpenAI (#2). (Do note that's the spend for inference of the model across providers (mostly in the US), not revenue going directly to the open weight labs.)