doing things with passion: https://xitter.cf/t.co/jylHwuNPO8 @skatekrak @chessboxing parenting, used to @dusthq @withobjet
flaneuring ✍️👉
Joined October 2010
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kev retweeted
For the first time, families can try Kale in public.
This Sunday, NewKid Days brings together researchers, startups and intentional families to talk about technology for kids. Free for families.
If you’re a Bay Area parent, bring your family and come say hi. Sign up in the comments!
i did put money under our oldest pillow like... a week ago haha! and his (and his brother face) the day after? Magic in the air!
may the fun begin sir @adilmania 🤩
introducing Mania.inc ✨
the greatest AI company ever built to waste your time, instead of saving it.
may the fun begin.
just read this at the very bottom of a website and found it (very) refreshing -- well done!
"As an anti-scroll ally ⚔️ Rebel Paris Tours does not participate on social media."
well, i've a proposition Sam (incl. y'all @davemorin @brit @Jessicalessin), would you join us in SF on Oct. 25 with all your kids to dig deeper into that 'heated' education topic?
event's here: luma.com/snoi9y9g
you know what, i do think Jessica would be such a great moderator on the 'What should we pass on to our children?' panel
This week's More or Less got heated. Jess said she'd rather send our kids to the military than to a16z's new university. Brit's take: the $35M 'school' is a marketing spend — top-of-funnel to sign founders before they're 19. I'm all for burning down broken higher ed, but an advisory page of Altman and Murati is not a substitute for education. Fight me.
Also: a Blackstone exec at The Information's AI summit got asked point blank who pays back all the data center debt. Answer: 'We don't know.' Not embarrassed. Just where we are in the cycle.
Jess nailed the deeper problem — the AGI trade is the St. Petersburg paradox. If you sell an infinite payout, there is no price you can't justify. Now the story is quietly becoming 'AGI is gradual'... conveniently after AGI clauses got written into billion-dollar agreements because deals were moving too fast to do anything else. Infinite demand ≠ infinite margins. Calculations aren't valuable just because you consume more of them.
Oh — and Mazzeo claims GLP-1 revenue now rivals AI revenue. Ep 168 is up.
i did it last night -while drinking and under the creator camera haha- and it did was a 'beautiful' experience.
Built an immersive 3D onboarding in Fenn.
It's performing surprisingly well
Try it here:
apps.apple.com/app/fenn-coup…
i'm seriously diggin' your blog right now @lauradang0 (community post's on point) and wondering: any RSS feed by any chance? 🙏
okay. we're back at it again. if you're in SF next week -- come hang out with a bunch of good product people -- see you there: luma.com/ax6ec4f5
hosted at @club_homebrew :v:
thanks for reminding everyone of this! what a (wild) ride -- y'all rock :v:
I knew our startups would be successful. But I never imagined a team from @joinstationf would be acquired by @nvidia for $13bn - the biggest exit by a French team to my knowledge. Just goes to show you ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE 🤗
something that's bringing me much joy with the whole @huggingface story & success: how many entrepreneurs from the 2010s Paris scene have great anecdotes and memories with @ClementDelangue @julien_c and @Thom_Wolf to share 🤗
which also tells a lot about the kindness -and open spirit & mindset- of these people. such things can't be faked btw! and there are measured over decades!
i do recall myself some Southern Fried Chicken in Brooklyn (first time in my life) with Clem, or a coffee chat in @joinstationf cause we were both there for a day haha (that would be worth a whole other section but what @roxannevarza & team built over there is quite special)
anyway, let's not go down memory lane too much -- congrats to everyone involved (again) -- just know that you're a true inspo for so many people. so keep on pushin'
and peace :v:
Super happy to officially announce that we are a̶c̶q̶u̶i̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ joining forces with @nvidia 🔥
Here is a more personal take:
AI is at an inflection point. Open source AI can become less relevant in the coming years if the big closed labs run away with it, OR it can become the foundational fabric of the next phase of human civilization.
Those are vastly different outcomes, and we need the critical mass to ensure we give our collective best shot to the second outcome. Given @JensenHuang's stance on open source AI and how he stepped up to defend it when it was under threat earlier in the summer, NVIDIA was the only partner we truly considered.
HF will remain an independently run, neutral platform.
This gives fuel to our long-term vision and mission of unlocking the community's progress to ensure that AI, which is the greatest breakthrough of our lifetime, is accessible to as many people as possible.
that breakdown tells a lot.
first and foremost: big up to @ClementDelangue @julien_c and the whole team. period. such an outcome is no small feat.
second: they did a great job keeping that much equity and i do hope many employees (like: MANY) are getting rich in the process.
third: no french VC
so, entrepreneurs: if you meet a so called 'early-stage fund/investor', ask them about their HF story, exchange with Clem back then, and more globally, where were they around 2016/2017/2018 (similar to another test: did you meet The Facebook in 2004? follow up question: why? what happened?)
Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for ~$12.9bn. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇
*Investors are sharing ~$7.3bn of profits on <$400m invested. A cool ~20x blended.*
*1) The single biggest winner here? Lux Capital.* 👑
Lux is taking the crown for the most $ returned in this transaction. The two rounds they led (Series A & Series C) generated ~$2.6bn combined. They also participated in the Series B.
Congrats to @wolfejosh and team. The $15.0m Series A alone will return ~132.5x the capital invested, or ~$2.0bn. The most lucrative round in absolute $ returned.
*2) Backing an exceptional team paid off with a >1,000x return for Betaworks and the angels* 📈
The story few people know: Hugging Face started life as a chatbot for lonely teenagers... You sent it a selfie and a sad emoji, it told you it understood. Quite far from where it landed!
That is why backing an exceptional team in @ClementDelangue, @Thom_Wolf and @julien_c is always the right thing to do. It paid over 1,000x for Betaworks, Kevin Durant and Thibaud Elziere.
*3) Founders and team are crushing it: not taking too much dilution along the way paid off* 👏
I estimate they will share ~$5bn in proceeds, assuming no secondary was taken along the way. A life changing outcome for them and many employees.
Taking a 15% attributed option pool at exit, this would mean ~$2bn for the team and >$3bn to share for the three co-founders. Legendary!
*4) Salesforce Ventures is cementing its reputation as one of the very best corporate VCs.* 🥇
Salesforce is adding Hugging Face to its long list of successful exits: Snowflake, Zoom, DocuSign, nCino, Auth0... Very few investors can claim as many successes, let alone corporates.
The $235m round they led returned $675m in just three short years. Meanwhile, Salesforce's own stock has been flat for the period. Capital well invested!
*5) This is a little bit of a heartbreak: but I wanted to congratulate @joinstationf here:*
Hugging Face walked into StationF as a 4-person team on day one, June 2017. Back when it was a chatbot for teenagers. They went through multiple corporate programs (Microsoft, Ubisoft, then Naver). Unfortunately they were not investing or taking equity at the time - but they contributed to making it possible. And so for that: hats off.
And of course, congratulations to all others involved: Addition, Sequoia, Coatue and many others. No one will be left out!
new month - new life update - new adventures coming 🗺️
i'm grateful for the opportunity @gabhubert and @spolu offered me. @DustHQ has been 'a first' for me on so many levels:
- first time i worked this hard for a company i haven't founded
- first time i joined a team this big (20+ people back in Feb. '25)
- first time i was part of a team growing this fast (dangerously close to the 100 people mark now)
- first time i experienced such product-market-fit (i thought i experienced it before but nope, that wasn't it — and you know what they say: "pmf is like an orgasm. when you have it, you'll know" — i confirm)
- first time i've made so many friends at work
our hypothesis when i joined Dust was that nothing could be more powerful than a non Dust employee preaching about Dust. and we thought the product was so great that we could start a true organic grassroots movement. oh boy were we right. hundreds of experiences and thousands of praises later, the community is as strong as it's ever been.
it is time for me to reunite with my old time -professional- soulmate (aka @maximetrap) to build some cool things with some of our favorite Boulderites (more on that soon enough)
while my soulmate @m4th1ld and I are taking the kids across the world for a year-long adventure -- starting with SF this month 🌁
it's all about love 🫶
no one's perfect (i let you guess which line triggered that one my friend ;p) but one thing's true: there are some people out there who live their life like a sun ☀️ irradiating us all with their infinite energy and embodying a proper 'world of abundance'.
adil is one of them!
the 'funny' (in the 'interesting' sense of the term) thing being: it can be done so easily -and fast- without ever announcing your intentions at first 😈
since we've released our t-shirts and swestshirts at Dust, well, come to the office any random day and i can tell you: more than half the company (now at 100 people strong) is -proudly- wearing one of those 🎯
this is SO true and overall so underrated. which is exactly why the first question to ask strangers: 'what do you obsess about?' -- truly magical moments will follow trust me
currently reading something written by my friend @WillyBraun that is taking me off-guard; literally pausing every other sentence to think.
"Each optimisation contracts the field of the possible. [...] The GPS is efficient. The compass is formative."
what a read!!
this 💯
"both freedom and friction are necessary. Optimisation removes the friction. Dependence removes the freedom. AI, when it does your thinking for you, threatens both at once. [...] The instinct is right: frictionless is not always better."
full thing is definitely worth a read 👉 libido-sciendi.com/journal/2…
