It is my great honor to serve on President Trump’s Super Intelligence Force (SIF). At the @DeptofWar we have seen what is possible when red tape is removed and America’s best technology is rapidly put into action. Working alongside America’s leading technology companies, we are putting the most advanced SI capabilities into the hands of our warfighters at speed and scale. I look forward to serving alongside DNI Jay Clayton, @AFergusonFTC and @skupor to secure America’s leadership in Super Intelligence and ensure this transformative technology directly serves all Americans.

My conversation with @PeterRahal, one of the best CPG founders on the planet. 0:00 Life after selling RXBAR for $600 million 7:29 Going all in and burning the boats 11:48 Building the most important food company of the 21st century 13:49 How a brand is like a human being 21:07 Why Peter always chooses the hard path 28:17 From zero to $300 million in two years 29:59 Why Peter started selling frozen cod 32:51 The organization is the product 36:56 Why he recruits former founders 41:15 Buying his supplier and victimizing his competitors 51:56 How Neil Mehta and Greenoaks earned a spot on the cap table 55:47 How Peter fundraises 1:00:31 Running a business is like a river 1:04:16 Why the company is named Medici 1:06:28 Bureaucracy is not inevitable 1:11:48 Why Peter has 25 direct reports 1:16:06 Peter's principle of reactionary leadership support 1:17:45 On divine discontent and loving the fight Includes paid partnerships.

Two things early founders often get wrong, and should remember: 1) Building culture can feel like it's just fluff at the start. Until you start to raise capital or hire teams, and then you see how it shapes everything you do moving forward. 2) You should build a team so talented that it makes you slightly uncomfortable to be with them, because you know you are going to have to raise your game to keep up.

At midnight on February 6th, earlier this year, the doorbell to our apartment rang. The doorbell was followed by a pounding on the door. I answered the door and a security person in our building handed me his phone. It was my oldest daughter Eloise. She had found my 26-year-old daughter unconscious on the floor of her apartment and had called 911. The EMT team was already there, but they did not know what was wrong with Lucy or to which hospital they would take her. I threw on some clothes and jumped in an Uber heading east toward Brooklyn. (Lucy lived alone in Williamsburg.) On the way, I learned that they were taking her to Elmhurst, a City trauma hospital in Queens. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to join Eloise, Lucy’s mom, and a friend, and waited to learn what was wrong. After about 15 minutes, I asked a nurse where she was. I looked over his shoulder to his computer. Next to her name, it said “non-responsive.” I walked into the emergency room and wandered around looking for her until I found her unconscious on a gurney surrounded by several doctors and nurses. By about 2:30am with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy’s doctors had determined that she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage. I called our wonderful friend and family doctor Eddie Fisher and explained what was going on. He woke up Josh Bederson, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai, to find out more about Zach Hickman, the neurosurgeon on call that night. Dr. Bederson said Hickman was an excellent surgeon, which was comforting as we had no choice. The surgery to save Lucy’s life began around 3:15am and finished around 5:30am. It was successful. The following day, I joined Lucy in an ambulance while she was being transferred to Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue. Later that day, we determined from Lucy’s Oura ring that her hemorrhage had occurred around 9am, which meant that more than 19 hours had passed from the time of the hemorrhage to the completion of the surgery to release the pressure on her brain (I only wish @ouraring had an alert for this kind of a medical event. Imagine it could call a family member if the wearer doesn’t cancel the alert). I later learned that the standard of care is not to do surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage. Even when the surgery is done, I was told that the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia. When I met Lucy’s doctors, I did my best to inspire them: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” And I promised that whatever we learned we would make available to everyone. Dr. Chris Kellner, her neurosurgeon, and Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System have led Lucy’s care team since that day. Words cannot describe the remarkable and compassionate care that she has received beginning with the EMT team and then from nurses, doctors, therapists, and the army of people who have worked to save her and return her to life. To this day, we have a daily Zoom where we discuss her progress and make adjustments to her care. While her care and oversight have been incredible, the learnings for the Mount Sinai team have also been elucidating and will assist in the care of many others. Lucy began in a bad place. She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak. Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition – she understands everything including her circumstance – is able to walk a hundred or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see. Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds. Every day I tell her that she just needs to make a little progress and it won’t be long before she is back. We remain optimistic that Lucy will return to normal function. It will likely take years, but I believe it is only a matter of time, hard work, and technological progress, along with some, and perhaps a lot, of divine intervention. Many people have been praying for Lucy and we are incredibly grateful for the prayers and remarkable support she has received. Lucy’s friends have been with her every day since the beginning, and their presence and friendship have saved her life and helped to rebuild and maintain her spirit. And on a very positive note, Lucy’s challenge has brought together our entire modern family who have all been incredibly devoted to her care and recovery. Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface, work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the space. If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen. We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space. With respect to our promise to make Lucy’s care available to others, we have made good progress. In May, a real estate colleague made me aware of a 93% vacant, brand new, 400,000 square foot Class A+ purpose-built biotech facility on West End Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets that missed the market and was available for sale. The Pershing Square Foundation acquired the building 60 days later. We also put under contract an adjoining 130,000 square foot building at 320 West 66th Street that is currently being used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. The building has 35-foot ceilings with massive column-free spaces that can be converted into superb rehabilitation facilities. We will close on the SNL building in December. We are also acquiring an adjoining vacant lot with additional air rights. With just the existing zoning rights, we can add a 150,000 square feet for a total of 680,000 square feet, a lab footprint larger than Rockefeller University, and that’s without including the potential for an upzoning that would allow for substantially more buildable area on the site’s 3.4 acres with spectacular views of the Hudson. Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute. We have named it The Ackman Oxman Institute or the AOI for lack of a better name, but also to reinforce the point that Neri and I and our family are all-in on the mission. The AOI will be patient-centric. It will not be an academic research institute that produces lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients. We will be laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient. While the AOI will be a non-profit, it will have highly commercial instincts. The AOI will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist, and spinout to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible. On one 3.4 acre campus in what is still the greatest city in the world, we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, BCI and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life extension programs, and we will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy, or any other constraint that is inconsistent with the mission. Mount Sinai will be an important partner and deservedly so, but it won’t be our only hospital or medical school partner as we don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent. We don’t believe in exclusive relationships because that is not in the best interest of patients. Five years ago, we considered launching a brain institute inspired by Neri’s mom who sadly died from Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t make the math work as the real estate was too expensive and we believed it would be too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort. Since then, the real estate became available at a 70% discount, universities became a much less attractive place to work due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning, the curse of antisemitism, and a decline in funding. Fortunately, during the same time, I made sufficient personal economic progress to make the AOI possible. The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission. AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and the AOI should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI. Today, I am making a public filing disclosing a gift from Neri and me of ~$400 million or 10,000,000 shares of Pershing Square Inc. (PS) to the AOI. It is very early days for Pershing Square so these shares are intended to anchor the long-term work of the AOI as the shares compound over time while generating what we expect will be a growing stream of quarterly dividends to fund the Institute. We will also be announcing an additional gift of similar and potentially greater size which won’t be in the form of Pershing Square stock to provide the AOI with the short- and intermediate-term runway necessary to enable it to achieve its goal of becoming a self-sustaining institute, which reinvests all of its revenues, royalties, and the economic rewards of company formation to advance the fields of brain health and human longevity. Neri and I have chosen to anchor the funding of the AOI to maintain vision alignment and limit the need for the organization to focus on fundraising. We expect the AOI to be the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world. We are grateful to have been able to form a board which includes Dean Kamen (our generation’s Thomas Edison), George Yancopoulus (CEO of Regeneron), James Rothman (Nobel Laureate), Bernardo Sabatini (neuroscientist), Chris Kellner (neurosurgeon), Olivia Flatto (CEO Pershing Square Foundation), Neri Oxman, and myself. We have recently identified a CEO who we expect to announce by October along with other key hires, and are beginning searches for a Chief Scientific Officer, a Chief AI/Technology Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and other key leadership roles. If you find what we are building compelling and want to be part of the leadership team that creates and builds the AOI from a standing start, please send an email to: [email protected] with a short note as to why you believe you can help. Please include your best three ideas for the AOI along with a summary of your background and your most important accomplishments. We promise strict confidentiality to those expressing interest in working with us. We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury. There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste. For details from my Pershing Square SEC filing see: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…

More Americans believe we’ll colonize the moon before we fix K-12 education. This is a policy problem. We have been building a solution that’s already trusted by many of the Fortune 500 as well as 1/3 of federal and state elected officials in the United States. Organizations are more impacted by policy than by financial markets. Yet financial markets have been real-time for decades, and policy markets are still nearly impossible to follow. @StateAffairsUS has raised over $70M from @rabois, @khoslaventures, @foundersfund and others to fix that. We are creating the world’s first real-time knowledge graph for policy and regulatory markets. This platform is foundationally built on non-partisan journalism and the collection of on-the-ground data that isn’t digitally accessible. In the future, we believe every executive will watch policy markets the way they watch financial markets. Instead of reacting to regulation, they’ll navigate it proactively. Policy should iterate at the speed of our most innovative industries.

I’m hiring a Chief of Staff who’s as obsessed with the inception stage of a company as we are at @firstround . The earliest days of company-building require a crazy work ethic and irrational tolerance for delayed gratification. The work we do at First Round is in service of founders in this phase, and we try to embody that same ethos. In venture, much like in startups, remarkable outcomes are powered by thousands of small, consistent inputs. A lot of the work that goes into the Chief of Staff role is unglamorous work — inbox triaging, late nights drafting investment memos, testing new automations or workflows for our partners. The role also gives you the closest seat there is to see the work it takes to lay the foundation of great companies, and you’ll get to shape how First Round shows up to support exceptional founders.

@KingJames hey bro hope you're having a good day...... Want to join us in philly?? Peace

From the NFL Draft: A wild story, as the #Eagles trade up for Makai Lemon... while he was on the phone with the #Steelers.

Excited to announce that @HowardSchultz has joined Gopuff’s Board of Directors. Over the years, @YakirGola and I had the privilege of building a real relationship with Howard learning from his remarkable journey building Starbucks into a global icon. His wisdom, experience, and strategic perspective will be invaluable as we continue pushing the boundaries of instant commerce and strengthening the Gopuff brand. Deeply grateful to have him as formal partner on this journey. finance.yahoo.com/markets/st…

Everyone thinks Uber acquiring Blacklane is a premium travel play. The real story here is the sequencing. This was a Product roadmap acceleration disguised as M&A. Buying time - not revenue. Let me explain: 🧵

See you Sunday 🇺🇸

I had watch this several times. This maneuver was extremely hard to pull off and he handled it masterfully. Background: last week The Telegraph ran a headline saying Spacey was now homeless. One of those things where it’s humiliating even to deny it. So Spacey completely flipped the framing: Instead of embarrassingly having to defend his solvency, he reversed the frame to speak from a position of high status. People have been so kind in offering him support that it would be dishonest to let them believe he actually needs the help! He doesn’t treat the “homeless” label as an indignity to recover from, but as an instance of sloppy clickbait that won him undeserved sympathy. In this framing, he’s graciously refusing to exploit the generosity of the many people misled by The Telegraph (which he makes look even more absurd by doing this via video showing a beautiful home in the background). Standout moments: > “I don’t usually make it my business to correct the media; if I did I wouldn’t have time for much else...” Starts with wry humor, to show he doesn’t take this too seriously and neither should you. By lumping all media inaccuracies together, he also casts doubt on other, way more damaging, news reports. Makes you wonder what else the media got wrong. > “I feel the need to respond — not to the press, but to the thousands of people who have reached out…to all of you let me say I’m touched by your generosity. Full stop.” He makes clear who his audience is and puts himself on the same side as them (momentarily to be united against The Telegraph). > “It’s a shame The Telegraph chose to undermine the work of their own journalist by selling him out with a knowingly misleading headline for the sake of clicks.” Pits the editors (dishonest) against the journalist (“wonderful”). He’s not offended on his own behalf, but standing up for the journalist. Also shows he’s not antagonistic toward all media. > “I said I was living out of hotels…going where the work is, just as when I started out in this business. I’ve been working nearly nonstop for a year and for that I have so much to be grateful for.” He’s obviously saying that he’s getting a lot of work and his career is as strong as ever, but framing it as gratitude instead of a rebuttal shows confidence and is more convincing. > “There are many people who are indeed actually living on the streets or in their cars…and my heart goes out to them. But it is clear I am not one of them, nor was I attempting to say I was.” This was particularly elegant. It’s hard to say “hey don’t call me that” without seeming to denigrate people who are “that.” The way Spacey frames it is that there’s no shame in financial hardship, but he simply wouldn’t want to accept sympathy for a struggle he hasn’t endured. Lastly, note that format matters. This wouldn’t have been nearly as effective in writing. Video was the perfect format, given the “show don’t tell” home in the background and the fact that screen presence is his superpower. Whatever else you might think about Kevin Spacey, it’s hard to watch this and walk away thinking he’s actually homeless.