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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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
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
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.
Lee Hower retweeted
Big news: the FDA has formally closed its warning letter on WHOOP Blood Pressure Insights. We stood by the science and the belief that safe, transparent wellness insights can help people better understand their health.
As background we launched Blood Pressure Insights last year as a first-of-its-kind feature to give members daily BP estimates and explain how BP affects their wellness. The FDA sent us a warning letter claiming that Blood Pressure can only be used for medical diagnosis. This of course contradicts what medical research says about Blood Pressure in the context of sleep, stress, exercise etc. WHOOP fought for our position and the FDA has ultimately updated their guidelines to now include Blood Pressure as a wellness metric.
This is a win for WHOOP and consumers. Proud of our team. Thank you to the FDA. Onwards.
Lee Hower retweeted
Every VC firm will tell you it has an AI initiative. The technology is the easy part.
The hard part is the operational rebuild almost no one has the will to do.
New in Carried Away, my blog on how AI is upending VC itself: "A New Engine, Not a New Paint Job."
carriedawayvc.substack.com/p…
🤖 Made with AI
ALT The finished facade and what's being rebuilt behind it. GPT Image, in the manner of Monet.
Lee Hower retweeted
Honored to be named to the first-ever TIME100 Sports list 🙏🏼 truly so many athletes and execs I admire on it. Sport has been core to our foundation at whoop and I’ve always believed that the best athletes inspire us to dream bigger in performance and life. thank you @time
Lee Hower retweeted
Congrats on another podium @lewishamilton.
Proud to celebrate another exceptional result alongside Scuderia Ferrari HP.
@ScuderiaFerrari
#F1 #MonacoGP
Lee Hower retweeted
Every year, I share this video of French caretakers who take sand from Omaha Beach in Normandy, and scrub them into the letters to give them the gold coloring.
They do this for all 9,386 US soldiers who died.
France also gave us this land as American soil. #MemorialDayWeekend
Lee Hower retweeted
Congrats to NextView Partner @stephpalmeri, named to @BusinessInsider's Seed 40 — a list recognizing "the women whose early bets have helped shape the startup ecosystem."
"Lists like this are fun, but the real story is always the founders." - @stephpalmeri
More below 👇
Lee Hower retweeted
This IPO illustrates the power of an individual partner over the brand name firm in VC. Pierre Lamond was a partner of both Sequoia and Khosla. But instead of those firms backing Cerebras, it was Eclipse (the firm he joined at the age of 84) that backed this little known chip company, multiple times, in the early years. What a way to wrap up a career (he was born in 1930, same year as Buffett).
Lee Hower retweeted
There's never been an investment like the investment in railroads. (This graph has a log scale!)
Lee Hower retweeted
Salesforce is the greatest B2B company of all time.
Founded in 1999. $1B in revenue by year 10. $10B by year 19. $42B by year 27. No other enterprise software company has ever built a business that large, that durable, with that much compounding.
It took Salesforce 19 years to get to $10B ARR.
It took Anthropic 4.
Here's what the revenue trajectories actually look like side by side:
Salesforce:
Year 5: $100M
Year 10: $1B
Year 15: $4B
Year 19: $10B
Year 27: $42B
OpenAI:
Year 8: $2B
Year 9: $6B
Year 10: $25B
Anthropic:
Year 3: $87M
Year 4: $1B
Year 5: $30B
Anthropic went from $87M to $30B in about 15 months. Salesforce went from $87M to $30B in about 22 years.
Both are real businesses with real enterprise customers. Salesforce has 150,000+ customers. Anthropic now has 1,000+ spending over $1M each, a number that doubled in under two months.
This is not about one being better than the other. Salesforce built the template that made enterprise cloud software possible. Every B2B company that came after it, including the AI companies, benefited from the playbook Benioff wrote.
But the speed is different now. Usage-based AI revenue scales with compute, not headcount. Cloud marketplace distribution replaces years of building a direct sales force. And the product is horizontal from day one, not vertical.
The first $10B in B2B used to take a generation.
Now it takes a presidential term.
Lee Hower retweeted
I trained an LLM from scratch on pre-1900 text to see if it could come up with quantum mechanics and relativity.
While the model is too small to do meaningful reasoning, it has glimpses of intuition.
When given observations from past landmark experiments, the model can declare that “light is made up of definite quantities of energy” and even suggest that gravity and acceleration are locally equivalent.
I’m releasing the dataset + models and leave this as an open problem to the research community.
I also include what this project has taught me about intelligence in a mini essay linked below.
🧵(1/n)
Lee Hower retweeted
BREAKING: WHOOP RAISES $575M AT $10.1B VALUATION
I am pleased to announce that we’ve raised $575M at a $10.1B valuation to accelerate our mission of unlocking human performance and healthspan globally.
This round was led by Collaborative Fund with participation from 2PointZero Group, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Mubadala Investment Company, Abbott, Mayo Clinic, Macquarie Capital, Glade Brook, B-Flexion, IVP, Foundry, Accomplice, Affinity Partners, Promus Ventures, and Bullhound Capital alongside a group of individual investors including Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Rory McIlroy, Virgil van Dijk, and Mathieu van der Poel.
This investor group and this moment reflect a powerful evolution underway for Whoop and the broader healthcare market.
Whoop was born in performance - trusted by the best athletes in the world to train, recover, and compete at the highest level. That foundation remains core to who we are. You see that in the iconic athlete investors joining this round.
But it also represents our push into broader health.
In the past 12 months, WHOOP has received medical clearances, launched blood testing, and created a platform that has saved lives. Abbott and Mayo Clinic - two of the most respected and influential institutions in global healthcare - are now investors in Whoop. These are organizations that have shaped modern medicine. Their decision to partner with us is a clear validation of where our technology is headed.
Healthcare systems around the world are reactive. For too long, they have waited for people to get sick, then intervene. Chronic disease is rising and costs continue to climb.
At Whoop, we believe the future looks fundamentally different. We are building the most powerful, personal, preventive health platform in the world - powered by continuous biometric data, advanced analytics, and AI to help people understand their bodies and improve their health in real time.
I am grateful to our team, our members, and our partners for believing in this vision. I’ve been building this company for 14 years and I’ve never been more excited for the future.
Lee Hower retweeted
a little sneak peak of our newer robot. these are the first two to leave new york but #3 and #4 to be in customer hands :)
That's as many robots in the first 75 days of this year than the entirety of last year. Expect to see some (much) bigger numbers in the next few months
