
Founder of @we_CoLearn. #VC Partner at @LearnCap. Growing economic systems for shared prosperity. #EdTech #KF20 at @KauffmanFellows
San Francisco
Joined March 2008
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Michael Staton retweeted
Colombia no tiene un problema de energía. Tiene un problema de permisos. -
El dato que debería obsesionarnos:
1 GW adicional ≈ US$60.000 millones de PIB.
Y Colombia consume menos de 2.000 kWh por persona.
@risierra88 lo pone simple: no existe una sociedad rica energéticamente pobre.
Pero acá una granja solar puede demorarse 3–4 años solo en permisos. Y después aparece otro absurdo: muchas veces ni siquiera hay dónde conectar 1 kW nuevo a la red.
Mientras nosotros llenamos formularios, Texas resolvió un problema energético equivalente a varias Colombias con una regla bastante más sensata: conéctese, produzca y deje que el operador gestione el riesgo.
La AI necesita electrones. La industria necesita electrones. El crecimiento necesita electrones.
Entonces, si 1 GW puede representar US$60.000 millones de PIB, ¿cuánto crecimiento estamos dejando sobre la mesa por hacer casi imposible producirlo? - @dariopalacio
Michael Staton retweeted
The AWS Builder Loft Berlin is officially open 🇩🇪
Free event + coworking space in Berlin-Mitte, our 2nd permanent Loft after SF (São Paulo + Hyderabad next). Opening night, the mic went to Berlin's user group leaders, because this space is built for the community to make it their own.
Come build with us!
Location details: builder.aws.com/connect/even…
Farrah's article on Builder Center : builder.aws.com/content/3KjO…
We used a voting method borrowed from a fourth-grade classroom to help pick Thiel Fellows.
Some of those fellows went on to build Ethereum, Figma, and Anthropic. The early days were a lot weirder than people remember
review.firstround.com/inside…
Michael Staton retweeted
We moved from the SQLGlot-based parser to our own Go SQL parser and made Bruin binaries 30% smaller + 75x faster on a fresh install.
Ours was a bit of a peculiar usecase for sqlglot: Bruin CLI is written in Go, and sqlgot is in Python. This meant that we had to find a way to embed sqlglot into our Go process somehow without requiring our users to install stuff.
The solution we found to that was go-embed-python by @codablock. It runs Python in a separate process using the standalone builds maintained by @astral_sh folks, and enables communication between Go and Python processes via stdin/stdout. This solution allowed us to embed sqlglot into Bruin CLI for ~2 years.
While this worked well, it had a few shortcomings, mostly around startup performance, build process complexity, and type safety between the processes. It worked fine enough, and we didn't prioritize eliminating this up to now. I don't think it was the case that sqlglot itself is slow, it is just that the way we wired it made it slower than it could have been by nature. We parse queries in a lot of commands in a one-off fashion, which meant that we had to pay the Python import costs in every import.
For a while I experimented with the polyglot library, Rust-based SQL parser, to eliminate the Python dependency in general. While the library seems to have worked nicely, the slowness of the build process made many of our agentic development activities slower and more expensive, and I ended up stopping that experiment after a few months.
Having a SQL parser in pure Go was a long-standing side project of mine, but the ROI to do that wasn't there. While messing with a feature last week, I thought: why not just throw this to an agent and see if we can have one in Go?
In about 3 prompts, we had a 100% compatible -for our use cases- SQL parser in Go that did everything sqlglot did for us. Faster, easier to compile and distribute, and virtually zero startup time. It is a direct port of sqlglot to Go, it just rewrote the existing Python code in Go, along with references to the original Python codebase, and made sure the tests passed. I included the original sqlglot license in the package as well/
This is not a shade to sqlglot; on the contrary, I think it is a lovely piece of software, and sets the standard on quality for parsing complex SQL. It just wasn't the right fit for what we were doing, parsing SQL from a Go process. We had to pay the Python overhead and lost quite a bit of the DX benefits of Go. We had to bundle a full Python build into our binary, and start a fresh process every time we had to parse queries. Our customers run Bruin CLI on a variety of machines, and the speed impact of this on an overloaded Windows machine is even bigger.
The credit belongs to @Captaintobs and his team for building and maintaining an awesome library that served us well for such a long time. I have full respect for them.
On the other hand, this experiment is both exciting and scary for the future of software development. It took me ~15 mins to generate a specialized version of a dependency we had, which dramatically changes the nature of what I would consider depending on in general. The same applies to the software we build as well: if people can generate complete systems in a short amount of time, what is there to build for the long run?
As I said, both exciting and scary.
Michael Staton retweeted
We built a reverse ETL product into ingestr. You can replicate data from any source to any destination with a single command. Fully open-source
We built ingestr to be a flexible enough layer to solve any data transportation usecase, and reverse ETL is one of them. You enrich some data inside your Snowflake warehouse, and you sync this data back to Salesforce with a single command.
This is all open-source, and built on the same core principle: a single command to move data from anywhere to anywhere. I am glad to see the premise realized with the launch of reverse ETL.
With this, Bruin becomes the only platform, and the only open-source tool with built-in ingestion, transformation, quality, governance, BI, and reverse ETL.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can make this better.
Every founder I have met will raise at market valuations and in frothy markets raise too much.
So Yuri’s well intentioned advice is basically never followed.
More useful advice, raise at top of market and spend as if its bottom of market.
Then you can easily cover a downturn.
Founders often think that raising more money gives them more optionally, but counterintuitively in practice the inverse is often true.
The reason is that money has a way of getting spent no matter how much you raise, and spending more is often uncorrelated with achieving your next milestone.
So the only thing that happens is that 18 months in you have a similar amount of progress to show regardless of how much you’ve raised, but if you raised a lot you’ve taken some paths off the table (bridge rounds, smaller Series As, etc).
Michael Staton retweeted
We're looking for entrepreneurial scientists to join our team at Intercept (part of Public Goods @stripe)!
Come join me and @nanransohoff @jmazz_1 on our quest to radically reduce the burden of respiratory viruses!
Michael Staton retweeted
I’ve been looking forward to today for 3 years
Today we’re announcing Foundation - Chroma’s solution to memory
Our research preview of this technology builds self-improving memory from your agent sessions. Try it out at trychroma.com/foundation
Introducing Foundation
Chroma's solution to agent memory
Michael Staton retweeted
why are you mentioning everything but the only end to end encrypted router @chamath use trustedrouter.com/
Michael Staton retweeted
Own Your Agents!! — Livestream xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1yGBeeWDj…
Michael Staton retweeted
don’t give your alpha up. use @TrustedRouter
Michael Staton retweeted
Aalo was started at the perfect time. Our goal is to create the ideal energy product for powering AI data centers.
Google search volume for "AI":
Michael Staton retweeted
Big thanks to @NYSE and @Nasdaq for supporting our launch yesterday. Who is going to open the first stock exchange in space? @TerraFirma_Inc is willing to be the first IPO on Mars
Michael Staton retweeted
Today, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $115 million in funding, including a $100M Series A led by @kleinerperkins.
America has lost the ability to build, and we’re here to restore it. My co-founder, @NoahMcGuinn, and I left our jobs at @SpaceX , where we worked on programs including Starship, Starshield, and @Starlink, to build a company that will solve construction’s greatest challenges.
Infrastructure is the foundation of civilization, and construction is the precursor to innovation. If America wants to build a brighter future for the next generation, we have to make it faster, cheaper, and safer to build.
That’s where @TerraFirma_Inc comes in. We’re a new type of company, a robotic construction company that builds the full technology stack needed to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in one of the world’s oldest, largest, most important, but least efficient industries.
We are building technology that expands what’s possible in construction on Earth, and then we'll use that same technology to build megastructures and colonies on the Moon and Mars.
We’ve made tremendous progress over the past year, growing the company more than 10x in the last 12 months. We are performing projects across the world. By the end of October 2026, we are on track to operate 3 of the top 3 largest robotic construction fleets in the world, each on a different continent, bringing unprecedented speed, scale, and efficiency to some of the world’s most complex critical infrastructure projects.
This funding will allow us to step on the gas and scale our manufacturing, software, operations, and construction deployments, including work on massive commercial and government contracts.
We’re building the future of construction right here in Austin, Texas, and scaling it globally. If you want to be part of the team changing the world, now and on Mars, join us.
Our Series A was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, BANNER VC, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Definition, PEAK6, Magnetar Capital, and Ravelin Capital. Huge thanks to all of our angel investors, friends, and family who have helped and supported us throughout this journey.
Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/TerraFirma-…
Michael Staton retweeted
PS, our crack marketing team also updated the website this week and it might be the coolest thing I've ever seen. aalo.com
Michael Staton retweeted
Stills from @WHOSTP Director Michael Kratsios touring Aalo's CTR Facility, marking the 1-year anniversary of U.S. nuclear EOs.
Michael Staton retweeted
Episode 3 of "Critical Thinking" is live: Inside the Aalo-1 Core.
@yasir_fission sits down with Aalo engineers (and resident PhDs) Firas Abdullatif and David Jaluvka for a dive into reactor physics, the Aalo-1 core, and the designs choices that went into it.
Firas and David walk through Aalo's combination of UO2 fuel, liquid sodium coolant, and a graphite moderator, and the tradeoffs that came with each.
You'll also learn about reactor physics from the ground up: how fission actually works, fast vs. thermal spectrum reactors, why HALEU supply chain matters, and how neutronics, thermal hydraulics, shielding, and manufacturing all have to come together to make a reactor real.
If you caught Episode 2 (sodium coolant), this picks up where that left off.
Link: youtu.be/7DaZw_fzD2E





























