coder / founder / investor. Founder @FirstStarVC Interests: AI/ML, bio, bots, energy, Bitcoin, decentralization, and coffee. @Harvard @MIT
Cambridge, MA
Joined November 2008
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Watched the Roadster video w/ my 10 yo and loved seeing his wonder.
His take: “why would anyone buy a Lamborghini now? It’s just fast but this is fast and can also fly.”
Fascinating and a delight to read.
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Drew Volpe retweeted
In partnership with Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla), I’m proud to introduce Reservoir.
Billionaires have owned their cells for years. Starting today, you can too.
Sign up today: withreservoir.com
YC really needs to change what they'll telling startups. Hype videos of what you hope to build is fine for a SaaS app. Bad idea for medical devices.
This product does not diagnose Alzheimer's and it's wrong to imply it does.
You can have Alzheimer's for 15 years and not know it.
We can finally slow it down. But only if we catch it early.
So we built the earliest test for it. Saccade (YC F26)
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Saccade markets its VR test as the "world's earliest Alzheimer's test," but its site states results "do not confirm or rule out Alzheimer’s," are "investigational research measures" and not validated for individual diagnosis. saccade.health saccade.health/assessment.html
Pro rata rights are a free call option on future rounds. Has any startup ever priced them separately?
If a VC wants them, charge x% extra instead of bundling it in.
Drew Volpe retweeted
So many people have DM’d me about this trailer and I’ll be honest, watching it made me physically throw up.
I was COO from before FTX even had a name, it was my baby, and I was the last one out of the Bahamas after Sam got extradited. I lost everything I had on it and it took me a long time to get over, so I have zero interest in defending the people who caused this.
The media loves the story that FTX blew up because we were all partying in the Bahamas, but the place I worked looked nothing like that.
We had under 200 people in the core company at its peak, not counting subsidiaries, when other exchanges our size had thousands, so a lot of us were doing 16 to 18 hour days for over three years and barely had time to sleep, and whenever we walked in, day or night, Sam was at his desk.
I worked with Caroline and never once saw her get aggressive like she does in this trailer. She’s quiet and mild, and often lost in her own thoughts.
Most of us didn’t even know she and Sam were dating until we read about it after the bankruptcy, and I never saw him so much as put an arm around anyone.
FTX’s collapse ruined so many people’s lives, including ours, and Netflix decided to make it a love story.
Shame on you @netflix.
Start the company. Have the kids. Glauber is a top tier founder and human being.
I am proud of what we did at Turso. I was already proud of the journey, now of the outcome too.
But what I am proud of the most is building the company at the same time I had my 5 kids.
I am not going to lie: it was hard. Brutally hard, especially since for many of those years we couldn't really afford a lot of help. I still worked an insane amount of hours, including most weekends. Could we have done better if I didn't have my kids around ? I don't think so, but who knows? Maybe ? Perhaps I could have built more, done more, achieved more.
But the thing is: as I look around and see them playing with each other, the question in my mind is: which one of them would I forego for more success ? If I could go back in time and have fewer, which of them I would give up so that I would accrue more of whatever the world has to give ?
And the answer is obviously none. I love them all. If anything, if I could go back I would tell myself to start earlier. I was married for 10 years already when we had our first one. I didn't want any and didn't have any plans.
Drew Volpe retweeted
the best way to teach yourself about geothermal reservoirs is to walk through one, and the Timpanogos Caves in Utah is the best public example I know of
the tour guides will show you neat looking cave rocks or talk about cave explorers, but you can ignore these distractions and look for 3 obvious features that point to its hydrothermal origins
-the yellow and green cave rocks (nickel substitution in calcite and aragonite)
-the open cracks along the ceilings and the orientation of the caves (visible faults)
-solution sculpting, aka "bubble tracks" along the walls and "scoops" in the ceilings (boiling conditions)
and even after hundreds of thousands of years of cave rock deposition after the hydrothermal system shut off (processes that close caves up), the caves are still large enough to walk through today
this concept breaks people brains (including geologists)
that conventional geothermal reservoirs can be such large, open, interconnected fracture systems, extending tens of thousands of feet into the crust, that you can drill into and produce enormous volumes of hot brine and steam
if you don't believe me go visit these caves, you will become a believer
the zanskar r&d team traversed through them last week and we were all changed geothermal souls
Drew Volpe retweeted
@supabase has acquired @tursodatabase
i'm been a huge fan of the team and what they've built. we have big plans together. more to share in our keynote in a few hours
this is the tweet that convinced us they'll fit right in
xitter.cf/glcst/status/209307402…
@supabase has acquired @tursodatabase
i'm been a huge fan of the team and what they've built. we have big plans together. more to share in our keynote in a few hours
this is the tweet that convinced us they'll fit right in
xitter.cf/glcst/status/209307402…
Wonder if Oura got interest from VCs at a better valuation and decided staying private made more sense.
If their goal is long-term growth, makes sense to stay private longer.
Watched the Starship videos w/ my 10 yo and the dinner time conversation was all rockets and space. He now wants to build a rocket that goes 99% C 🚀
More data showing how many lives Waymo saves. Long overdue to bring it Boston.
270M+ miles. 841 fewer injury-causing crashes.
Our latest safety data shows the Waymo Driver continues to make roads safer for everyone.
Compared to human drivers across 5 territories, it reduced:
📉 Injury crashes by 82%
📉 Serious injury crashes by 95%
Full data: waymo.com/safety/impact
Geothermal power, so hot 🌋🌋🌋
Big news at Fervo today. fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy…
Drew Volpe retweeted
Excited to introduce @ReactorfieldAI Cohort 1:
@merge - brain-computer interfaces with no implants, $250M seed led by OpenAI and Bain
@episteme - a new R&D institution, cofounded by Louis Andre and Sam Altman
@RetroBio_ - unicorn longevity startup, adding 10 healthy years to human life. In phase 1 trials
@NorthwellHealth - NY's largest healthcare system, with Chief Biotech Officer @itchdoctor
@StrandTx - programmable mRNA medicines out of MIT, lead cancer drug already in patients
@MayoClinic - turning leading clinical science into new ventures represented by @vera_mucaj
@xiliotx - publicly traded biotech making cancer therapies to activate inside tumors
@marathonfusion - producing the world's most valuable isotopes from compact fusion reactors
@KopraBio - viruses that turn cancer cells into factories for their own destruction
@radifymetals - hydrogen-plasma reactors that turn rare-earth oxides directly into metal
@FoundationManf - rapid domestic CNC machining for frontier hardware
@MassMagnetics - US-made high-performance magnets from recycled rare earths
@algabiosciences - turning cattle methane into calories, peer-reviewed cuts of up to 63%
@lumehealth - building a wearable that measures cortisol continuously from sweat
@liu_liu_lemon - smart materials for med tech and robotics, @Harvard PhD, Fulbright Fellow
AI transformed coding, science is next
@ReactorfieldAI makes scientists and deep tech startups AI-native
Built by me and @berkbuilds to accelerate science with frontier AI
Great opening for a sci fi series…
When you go skiing in the winter, and see those big machines spitting out snow, know that they are spitting out purified proteins made from dead bacteria.
I didn’t realize this until recently! Basically, they take Pseudomonas syringae cells — not engineered; a natural microbe found on plants — and grow them up in huge bioreactors. The cells make ice-nucleating proteins, which sit on their outer membranes and help ice crystals form. The cells are concentrated, freeze-dried, and sterilized until only these proteins remain.
The reason these proteins are useful is because they help water molecules form ice more quickly. Water can remain liquid even below 0°C, and only freezes when enough molecules form into a crystal. The proteins have, on their surfaces, repeating snippets of amino acids that help water molecules organize into that shape.
So these snow machines just blast super cold water with these proteins, and the two hit the air, mix together, and immediately freeze into snow.
Drew Volpe retweeted
Can genomic language models design biological systems to access new regions of chemical space?
Some of the most complex molecules in nature are made by biosynthetic gene clusters: massive enzymes that carry out complex chemistry. But engineering these systems is challenging due to complex cross-domain interactions. To solve this, we applied gLM2 to controllably generate new domain architectures by learning from vast evolutionary data.