@onnbase

Investing in fintech and AI @acrewcapital. Co-Founder @assembliai @Perplexity_AI Fellow. @Penn @Wharton @HotchkissSchool. Building? [email protected]

San Francisco / New York
Joined January 2025
Everyone loves to hop on the retrospective founder DMs trend when an amazing company announcement happens. Almost all of them are the sad "missed that generational opportunity" type. Well, I'm happy to say this is the ecstatic "start of an amazing partnership" type! I first learned about @tankots and @WisprFlow in May '25 when I was at a dinner and the AI Grant whatsapp group chat was lighting up nonstop - the entire dinner - after @natfriedman asked if anyone had tried this new thing called wisprflow. There was so much excitement about it. So much so that one AI grant founder said their office had "become a zoo where we all talk to our computers." Fast forward two months, Tanay presented it to the Perplexity fellowship and it blew my mind how seamless the product experience was. It truly "just worked." Fast forward a year, and I'm stoked to say that @AcrewCapital is fortunate enough to partner with Tanay for his $280M Series B at $2B valuation, led by our friends at @MenloVentures ! We're avid Wisprflow users - especially Tom Porter who must hold some kind of spoken words world record at this point - and love how much better we communicate because of it. The product is magical and the business is absolutely crushing it. We can't wait to see how this funding unlocks their next phase of growth!
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This is the new reality.
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Andrew McKinzie retweeted
The top AI software companies are growing at intimidatingly fast rates, with the median company <$10M ARR growing revenue 10x YoY. The median top quartile company goes from $1M to $100M ARR in 3.5yrs. We have never seen such levels of blitzscaling ever before.
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Andrew McKinzie retweeted
Now your AI agents can use @arc (+ other chains & rails), controlled by rules you set. Here, our agent requests a $10/day budget, gets approved, and goes to work. Early Access is now open for a limited time. Sign up, try Arc, and you could get up to $50 for your agent's feedback.
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One of the early stage investments we're most excited about right now has grown ARR 30x+ in under 8 months, on a baseline of > $2m ARR. Setting the pace.
The Great Sorting has begun. A new class of software companies identified from our dataset, which we call Pacesetters, is compressing years of growth into a fraction of the time. They’re spending more, growing faster, and generating more for it. Earlier this year, we explored this shift in “A Coming Age of Reason.” Our latest report puts the data behind that thesis. Download the 2026 State of Scaling: our annual Topline Growth and Operational Efficiency Report: bit.ly/4hcZT0P Disclaimer: bit.ly/3H4dQj0
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Anyone confused by this handshake interaction skipped their U.S. history chapter on the Lyndon B. Johnson treatment
Today's top tech news: SaaS SalesChad BRUTALLY FRAME MOGS EA Doomer Org leader More at 11
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Not the Polymarket founder glazing my brother 😂😂😂
Thrilled to announce Collin McKinney Hill has joined Polymarket as our new VP of Operations. He's coming from DoorDash where he was a GM and ran one of their largest business units. DoorDash is known as one of the most operationally excellent businesses, and that's the rigor Collin's bringing to Polymarket. Before that, he was at Bridgewater where he was Ray Dalio's Chief of Staff. He's also 6'7. And handsome. Some guys just have it all. Onwards.
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Andrew McKinzie retweeted
Wild 24 hours for AI and lots of different proposals have been made. TLDR; the only *tangible* new fact is that OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have embedded 3rd party evaluators from unknown organizations with Dario floating METR as a possibility. Having 3rd party evaluators is smart as there is no Section 230 style liability shield for model outputs and showing a “duty of care” will be important in future litigation. Several internet companies might have gone bankrupt without Section 230 so limiting liability really matters. There are minimal investment implications from this single new fact, but I do think that for anyone who wants a “smoother for longer” cycle then most constraints are good: wafers, watts, real rates and spreads. Excessive regulation is a different matter but I don’t think we are anywhere close to this even if the vector changed over the last 24 hours. To summarize the events: Dario made the most maximalist proposal of the weekend: embedded 3rd party evaluators, a national regulatory regime for models beyond a certain capability/ingredient threshold, a broad international regulatory pact between democracies, stricter limits on compute/distillation for China and then a different international regulatory regime that encompasses China. Before there is a national regulatory regime, he wants a Sherman act waiver so that Anthropic can safely coordinate with OpenAI and other frontier labs without antitrust fears. TBF, this latest proposal is much less maximalist than some of his prior proposals like “Policy on the AI Exponential,” where he advocated for an FAA for AI. I believe he is sincere in his beliefs. And despite all the protestations, all of this would also probably be good for his business over the long-term. Sam agreed that embedded 3rd party evaluators were a good idea and stated they would implement them. Again, this is smart as should help limit future liability. Elon said “Dario is right” and later specified that “Dario is right that there should be some oversight. Peer review of AI by competitors is the right way to start this off.” This would be a MPAA like self-regulatory structure for AI with regular calls between the labs plus a process where each new model is evaluated for safety by competitors for a 1-2 week period before being released. That is *wildly* different from Dario’s proposal and in-line with what David Sacks has been proposing. Elon also stated that nothing was going to slow down open-weight models. Demis said that Dario’s essay was a “step in the right direction.” Dario also said that he was also open to Demis’ idea of a FINRA like self-regulatory structure as part of his proposal. David Sacks had a thoughtful post where he said that Dario and Sam should pace unilaterally, called the antitrust waiver a cartel request and denied that METR was truly independent given their ties to Anthropic. Sriram Krishnan, former White House AI advisor, noted that it would be important to have the 3rd party evaluators come from independent organizations that are not affiliated with any lab, which is basically an indirect statement about the relationship between METR and Anthropic which Sacks was explicit about. Clem from Hugging Face said they were open to being a neutral 3rd party evaluator, which is interesting especially if Jensen was consulted before that post. Alexander Wang from Meta noted that alignment would be an increasing focus going forward. An executive order seems likely after all this and the language in this EO is going to be really important. It is possible to democratize and distribute AI broadly and safely without centralizing it in the hands of a few corporations who might each become more powerful than any single government. I do not want a few humans in control of intelligence. I want us all to have our own intelligences that reflect our own values and human variation in all of its richness. Intelligence distribution over intelligence centralization FTW.
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Andrew McKinzie retweeted
recursive self-improvement is why everything is getting so wild right now the models are becoming sentient
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RSI has been achieved
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Could not agree more @DavidGeorge83. There’s a very clear reason why venture capital dollars are concentrating into a very small number of companies. Startups not included in that small number of companies this vintage cycle are becoming incrementally more difficult to fund given this compounding dynamic and the opportunity cost of capital.
a16z's David George says AI's power law is becoming more extreme because dollars alone can compound a company's advantage: "Right now, clearly the power law is more extreme than it has been in the last 10 to 20 years of technology investing, probably going back to the emergence of the network effect-driven consumer companies." "Increasing returns to scale have always been a dynamic in our business... Brand reputation in the market, the accumulation of resources, all provide competitive advantages." "That all still is the case. But right now, especially with the labs, for the first time in my career, you can take capital and throw it at a company, and it compounds their advantage." "How do you screw up a startup? Throw too much money at it and have them hire 1,000 people, and then you create all these coordination issues and overhead issues and dueling priorities... because you can't hire enough people to do enough things fast enough." "Now that's not the case. You can throw dollars at compute, and compute can make products and the businesses better. So to me, it's not terribly surprising that the power law is more extreme. Right now, economies of scale are a very real thing in the AI market, and I think it'll continue to be the case." @DavidGeorge83
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Overheard at the Philz truck this morning: "Yeah man I just got back from burning man last week... it was sick... but I actually missed my Claude agents" LMAO
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Unfortunately for many founders building businesses that can’t keep pace with faster growing companies in this market environment, the market will be unforgiving when they try to raise. Opportunity cost of capital is way too high. Many companies will need to become profitable or explore M&A.
If you are stuck at $1M-$5M ARR, it's difficult to raise the next round. The market is less forgiving than it used to be. So many companies are zooming to 10x YoY that if you have a couple of bad quarters, investors won't give you another chance. And if you can't raise, you have to really do something different. The market is moving too fast to keep grinding on the same thing. So if you are a stuck founder, decide to optimize for the long term. The opportunity cost of not working on what they believe in and care about is just too damn high.
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Massive release by our portfolio company humans& ! 🧡
For AI to work with us, it needs to understand us Today, we're introducing Persimmon, the first large-scale model designed to realistically simulate how people talk and interact
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So proud of my friend Meghana Jayam on this launch!!!
Now available: ChatGPT for Financial Services. This is a tailored ChatGPT Work experience that combines built-in financial data with GPT-6 Astra’s reasoning. Teams can develop research, build financial models, and create customized client materials. openai.com/index/introducing…
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Andrew McKinzie retweeted
Once valued at $17.5B
Bending Spoons has acquired to acquire Miro for $1.335B. The digital whiteboard platform was once valued at $17.5 Billion back in January 2022.
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Andrew McKinzie retweeted
“You’re weeks away from an IPO. Now tell them your product is going to kill us all.”
Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.
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Andrew McKinzie retweeted
We are announcing Net30 - an applied AI summit on the future of finance in the age of automation. You will see what's working right now at the frontier of applied AI, hear from finance leaders on the evolution of the strategic finance role and meet peers deploying agents in production. October 21st // New York, hosted by @usemonk at The Times Center Request an invite in comments
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good morning to everyone else who stayed up until 3:30am to watch shelton acaraz ☕️
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Andrew McKinzie retweeted
HUGE NEWS DAY! Chime just bought its partner bank. $590M in cash for Stride Bank, the bank that has held Chime deposits for seven years. 🔄 Uno reverse. The fintech built on top of the bank now owns the bank. The numbers: - $590M cash acquisition roughly 1.5x Stride's tangible book - Stride has $4.9bn of assets and a 26% ROE - Chime expects $100M+ of net "synergies" (God, I hate that word) from sponsor fees, cheaper funding, and more lending. That is a 20% uplift on its ~$485M 2026 adj. EBITDA guide. There's your ROI. - Guidance raised the same day: FY26 revenue $2.76-2.77bn, up 26-27% Deal closes in H1 2027, pending OCC and Fed approval Chime becomes a bank holding company in return for a 20% improvement in adj. EBITDA. The Fed will supervise Chime Financial, Inc., the whole company, alongside the OCC supervising the bank. My first question was, how are they making sure their card transactions are still Durbin exempt? (Banks under $10bn in assets get higher interchange revenue per swipe). The $10bn exemption counts the issuer plus all of its affiliates, consolidated. It turns out that Chime, the holdco, has $2bn of assets. Stride has $4.9bn. Call it $6.5bn combined once the cash leaves. That is under the line. But Chime now owns the line, and it wrote this into the release: it will "keep its assets below $10 billion for the foreseeable future." So The Bancorp stays as a partner too, and Chime will continue to work across both. Bancorp is already at $9.2bn. So expect deposit sweeps, loan sales and a very disciplined CFO. Chime owns one sponsor bank and still rents the other. They get $100m of cost savings from removing sponsor fees and reducing their cost of funds on the lending products like MyPay and Instant Loans. Chime is a payments company that now owns a bank it needs to keep small. Whether the market will ever fully understand them is another question I'm, and I'm sure they, continue to wrestle with!
Wow! “Chime $CHYM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Stride Bank, N.A. for $590 million in cash. Stride is a nationally chartered bank that has been Chime's bank partner for more than seven years.”
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