Co-founder & Partner NextView Ventures, previously LinkedIn co-founder and foot soldier in PayPal Mafia. Obsessed with the big picture.
Boston / SF
Joined March 2008
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The @skyfallai team has been working on world models for a while, and now has released SKY-001 an engineering world model.
Very exciting times for AI design of physical things.
Introducing SKY-001, the first Engineering World Model.
On CAD and BIM tasks, it beats GPT-6 Astra and every frontier model we tested:
-> 51-125x faster
- > 150-210x cheaper
-> Higher IOU than all frontier models
SKY-001 lets you dream a physical object before you build it.
18 months of work. Built by the team out of Maluuba's deep learning lab (acq. by @MSRResearch).
The first ‘AI General Engineer’ will be the backbone for Autonomous Manufacturing.
Congrats to Ultra on announcing their $50M Series A today.
AI & robot foundational models have been a paradigm shift for robotics, a field which has existed for decades. Everyone believes robots will be far more pervasive in the next 5-10 years than they've been for the last 50. But actually deploying in real world settings is both how innovation will accelerate and where value is being created, so we're thrilled that Ultra is one of the companies in this vanguard.
NextView led the initial seed round for @Ultraroboticsco and it's been incredible to see the progress for this company. It's also our 2nd time investing in @JonMSchwartz and his co-founders which has been great.
Robotics has a distribution problem. Today, Ultra is announcing $62M in funding to solve it, including a $50M Series A led by @hiFramework.
We believe that deployment is the bottleneck in robotics.
It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again.
So that’s what we’re focusing on.
My partner @robgo has shared views on the state of seed investing over last 6-12mo. He now delves into the differing paths for seed investors now:
1) Fighting over diamonds in plain sight
2) Searching for diamonds in the rough
3) Mining for silver
nextview.vc/blog/the-three-p…
Lee Hower retweeted
For those of you outside silicon valley, Cognition / Factory drama is like if Timothee Chalamet broke up with Kylie Jenner to date Kim Kardashian and then the E! Cable Network execs chose sides
Lee Hower retweeted
OpenRouter users spent more on OpenAI models than on Anthropic models last week.
This hasn't happened for more than 2.5 years
A thoughtful, nuanced perspective.
Last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone: meta.com/thefutureisforevery…
Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens.
The reality is:
- People won't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned.
There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind.
- Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well.
Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security. We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us. I'm proud of the security foundations we've built.
- Engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. In general, it would be helpful for there to be a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators.
- Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well.
I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do.
Lee Hower retweeted
Worth the read every year. #neverforget
Todd: Hello… Operator…listen to me…I can’t speak very loud. – This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco.. We have a situation here….Our plane has been hijacked…..can you understand me?
Lisa: (exhaling a deep breath to herself) I understand… Can the hijackers see you talking on the phone?
Todd: No
Lisa: Can you tell me how many hijackers are on the plane?
Todd: There are three that we know of.
Lisa: Can you see any weapons? What kind of weapons do they have?
Todd: Yes…. they don’t have guns….they have knives – they took over the plane with knives.
Lisa: Do you mean…like steak knives?
Todd: No, these are razor knives…like box cutters.
Lisa: Can you tell what country these people are from?
Todd: No…..I don’t know. They sound like they’re from the mid-east.
Lisa: Have they said what they want?
Todd: Someone announced from the cockpit that there was a bomb on board. He said he was the captain and to stay in our seats and stay quiet.
He said that they were meeting these men’s demands and returning to the airport… It was very broken English, and… I’m telling you…it sounded fake!
Lisa: Ok sir, please give me your name.
Todd: My name is Todd Beamer.
Lisa: Ok Todd….my name is Lisa…Do you know your flight number? If you can’t remember, it’s on your ticket.
Todd: It’s United Flight 93.
Lisa: Now Todd, can you try to tell me exactly what happened?
Todd: Two of the hijackers were sitting in first class near the cockpit. A third one was sitting near the back of the coach section. The two up. front got into the cockpit somehow; there was shouting. The third hijacker said he had a bomb. It looks like a bomb. He’s got it tied to his waist with a red belt of some kind.
Lisa: So is the door to the cockpit open?
Todd: No, the hijackers shut it behind them.
Lisa: Has anyone been injured?
Todd: Yes, ..they…they killed one passenger sitting in first class. There’s been lots of shouting. We don’t know if the pilots are dead or alive. A flight attendant told me that the pilot and copilot had been forced from the cockpit and may have been wounded.
Lisa: Where is the 3rd hijacker now Todd?
Todd: He’s near the back of the plane. They forced most of the passengers into first class. There are fourteen of us here in the back. Five are flight attendants. He hasn’t noticed that I slipped into this pantry to get the phone. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor in the rear of the plane……….oh Jesus.. Help!
Lisa: Todd….are you ok? Tell me what’s happening!
Todd: Hello…..We’re going down….I think we’re going to crash……Wait – wait a minute. No, we’re leveling off….we’re ok. I think we may be turning around…..That’s it – we changed directions. Do you hear me….we’re flying east again.
Lisa: Ok Todd…. What’s going on with the other passengers?
Todd: Everyone is… really scared. A few passengers with cell phones have made calls to relatives. A guy, Jeremy, was talking to his wife just before the hijacking started. She told him that hijackers had crashed two planes into the World Trade Center……Lisa is that true??
Lisa: Todd…..I have to tell you the truth…..it’s very bad. The World Trade Center is gone. Both of the towers have been destroyed.
Todd: Oh God —help us!
Lisa: A third plane was taken over by terrorists. It crashed into the Pentagon in Washington DC. Our country is under attack….and I’m afraid that your plane may be part of their plan.
Todd: Oh dear God. Dear God…….Lisa, will you do something for me?
Lisa: I’ll try….if I can….Yes.
Todd: I want you to call my wife and my kids for me and tell them what’s happened. Promise me you’ll call..
Lisa: I promise – I’ll call.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
No verbatim transcript of Todd Beamer's call with Lisa Jefferson exists, as the conversation was not recorded and the text includes fabricated dialogue.
snopes.com/fact-check/tra…
usatoday.com/story/news/fac…
nps.gov/flni/learn/his…
catalog.archives.gov/id/2610189
We are grateful for all of your contributions as an investor and firm-building collaborator over the last 4 years, and wish you well in whatever's next. Thanks Stephanie.
After four years at @NextViewVC, I'm stepping into a new chapter. I moved from Partner to Venture Partner and will keep supporting portfolio companies as a board member and advisor while I turn my attention to what's ahead. On what matters in this work: stephpalmeri.medium.com/the-…
Fambot has come out of stealth and announced it's pre-seed round today.
Living in a household with two working parents and a fifth grader, an agentic "family chief of staff" is something near and dear to my daily life. Excited for the Fambot team continuing to build here and for more families to experience the product.
techcrunch.com/2026/09/01/fa…
Broadcom is following in NVIDIA's footsteps providing fin'l guarantees to buyers of chips. Some are fretting about "circular financing" risks. Obviously if AI productivity doesn't materialize and capex drops off a cliff this is a problem.
But direct financing of customer capex by manufacturers, including guarantee of residual value or loan backstops, is commonplace in other industries like automobiles and aviation. So it compute is a fundamental layer of the 21st century economy in the way that cars and planes were for 20th century, this doesn't seem out of place.
finance.yahoo.com/technology…
By spring 2027 I predict frontier models will be awesome at failing as a company
axios.com/2026/08/17/google-…
Lee Hower retweeted
Small fund secondary liquidity doesn’t really happen in practice. Sure, I’ve seen it and benefitted from it.
Couple realities:
1) Small funds have fund math that is reliant on a very small number of outcomes. Cutting your 1-2 fund winners at the C/D often comes at the expense of the terminal return your LPs signed up for. Returning your cost basis on a 1.7x net fund doesn’t get anyone excited.
2) Secondary is readily available in a very small number of names at par. Direct secondary buyers are looking for a discount that is often painful.
3) When it comes to tenders, founders/employees eat first. The median tender size per Carta is $27.6M for Series C+ (2025 data).
4) Pricing is hard. GP wants LRV—seller is taking into account a different security class, possible structure and likely limited information rights.
5) Liquidity is never easy.
Lee Hower retweeted
Around 15 years ago, Kaheer Suleman and I started Maluuba with the vision of building Universal Turing Machines. Back then, we were one of the pioneer research labs building foundational modules of deep learning and Reinforcement learning with Turing award winners @Yoshua_Bengio and @RichardSSutton. There was no AI hype then, as there is now. Those were the good old days of doing pure scientific research unlike the n+1 research that we see today. Maluuba was later acquired by Microsoft and became @MSFTResearch Canada.
Grounded in that same mission, we're finally ready to introduce @skyfallai to the world after a lot of experimentation in stealth over the last year. We're a frontier neo lab building the first Autonomous Enterprise by moving beyond the current LLM paradigm.
For the last 5 years, the foundational model market has relied on a single paradigm: scaling laws for LLMs - more data, more compute, bigger models. However, the real world is messy and much more complicated. In order to achieve our long term vision, the next generation of AI models requires a different approach. Skyfall is solving the hardest open problems in frontier AI: long-horizon planning, data inefficiency, and brittle performance in dynamic real-world environments.
To achieve the team's vision of a completely autonomous enterprise, the team is developing a next-generation frontier model (Enterprise World Models) using Continual Learning and World Modeling. Enterprise World Models can simulate the multi-layered consequences of strategic business actions. Our approach unlocks a new category in the foundation model market. To prove it, we're introducing Morpheus, a Continual Reinforcement Learning platform for AI researchers.
I'm building this company with the people I trust the most: my longtime friend Kaheer Suleman (prev. Co-Founder of Maluuba) and my brother @omgiamgod (prev. YC founder). Sumit and Kaheer are the first principles thinkers I can trust to go to the end of the world with to achieve the mission impossible together. Together with a stellar team of 25 researchers and engineers, we're pushing a new frontier in AI forward.
We unpacked our long term vision in today’s Forbes feature 🔗- read it to see what we’re building toward. Thank you so much Victor Dey for the interview.
To achieve our goal of enterprise world models, we are soliciting bids to acquire small SaaS startups (up to $1M) and fully automate them. If you’re interested, submit your business here: skyfall.ai/acquisition
Finally, thank you to our investors and advisors for believing in our vision since day one: @Fidelity , @sk121 (@touringcapital), @karam_n and @chrisarsenault (@inovia), @morgan_blumberg (@M13Company ), @stephpalmeri (@NextViewVC ), and @michaellitt and @mmccauley (@GarageCapital ), @jennydhe, @fchollet @NaveenGRao and so many others for supporting us in this journey.
Ranch dressing & Waffle House are the pinnacle of geopolitical soft power
wsj.com/sports/soccer/team-u…
Some flammable stuff in that e-commerce warehouse
Skyfall AI is pushing the boundaries of world models, and today they're releasing Morpheus.
Today we are very excited to launch Morpheus, the world’s first real world Reinforcement Learning environment.
Every Reinforcement Learning environment operates in the game world. Benchmarks like Atari, OpenAI Gym, MuJoCo, and Procgen are all small, game-like worlds that reset every few minutes.
But the real world never resets.
A business keeps running and evolving everyday.
Customers churn, suppliers fall through, and yesterday's decisions become today's bottlenecks.
Therefore we built Morpheus.
It is a simulator and benchmark suite for training and evaluating reinforcement learning agents in structured, evolving enterprise environments.
It models persistent worlds with realistic processes such as routing, inventory, and resource allocation that change over time rather than resetting between tasks.
We tested the leading RL algorithms :
- Standard Reinforcement learning
- Experience Replay
- Weight Regularization
- Latent-Context Models.
All of them failed horribly.
This proves that RL algorithms are not ready for the real world.
We also tested how frontier LLMs would perform in realistic and dynamic
enterprise environments on Morpheus.
The main conclusion was that LLMs are not continual learners.
Do you want to build out your RL agents in the real world?
Links:
Website: lnkd.in/g-whug6v
Environment Hub: lnkd.in/g4VqBnQt
Blog: lnkd.in/gw5A4X6r
HF: lnkd.in/gwQMUddt