founders: getting up to $1M in funding via @speedrun is actually the easiest part of the journey - as you start to build your product, you'll need to build your team... and I have some bad news: recruiting sucks. Most experienced founders will tell you that they spent at least half their time in the early days trying to woo early missionaries to join their cause. Your options at the earliest stages aren't great: • Agencies are expensive + generally have perverse incentives • You could do all the recruiting... but it's often too time-intensive to do effectively • Hiring an internal recruiter doesn't make sense yet... • Job postings... welcome to the nightmare of AI-generated apps! I want to give you a better option. Our goal as the Speedrunun talent team: lend you our brand and hiring prowess. Not just hollow words and advice... because advice is cheap. Sourced candidates are not. Our team of internal recruiters spends every single day cultivating relationships with world-class talent from the most heavily in-demand functional backgrounds (AI, ML, Full Stack Eng, Design Eng, Designers, etc), and then we curate and share that talent with founders across the portfolio. We're on track this year to directly place ~150 hires into speedrun portfolio companies. No fee. No perverse incentives. Just a purely aligned desire with the founders to get them exactly what they are searching for. One day there will be a solo-founder unicorn, and all this hiring drudgery might go away. Until then, you're going to have to build your team - so let our team (@nazzari, @thetalentcarver, @joegarciaisme ) help you build yours. APPLY TO SPEEDRUN >>> bit.ly/3UawfBA

SR008 applications close Nov 1. We asked the speedrun investors who’ll be reading your application and interviewing for their best advice 🧵

The games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd earn back, will soon become possible. As will the games developers wanted to build, but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.

Travis Kalanick on the founder's paradox: the better you get, the harder it is to stay fired up. "The young entrepreneurs that are coming up right now don't totally get it." "When you get into your 3rd and 4th company, I don't know, this may be even my 5th at this point, you get fricking really good at doing stuff." "Things that used to take me a day or three days, a lot of stress, anxiety, like, 'How am I gonna do this?' take me like 45 minutes. And that's a beautiful thing." "I'm so used to adversity at this point that it's kind of normal, so I don't get as pissed off. But being pissed off makes you good as an entrepreneur, so I gotta make sure I'm still fired up." "You get too used to adversity, and that's kind of a problem." Full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=r8qKNFeB… @travisk

SR008 APPS ARE OPEN. Up to $1M + $10M+ in credits. 12 weeks in SF, Feb through April. Built to help you land capital, customers and talent. Apply by Nov 1: speedrun.a16z.com/apply

We are excited to announce the launch of Faradex! Secure AI for your most sensitive work. Deploy the latest Claude model on your own server instance in minutes. Qualified firms can sign up for a 2-week free trial and receive $150 in AI credits.

At @speedrun demo day kicking off with @andrewchen! Amazing group of founders from all over the world sharing their life’s work today - this is a glimpse of the future!

Meet @Sotant_ai , backed by a16z @speedrun . We create AI workforces for supply chain operations in just hours. We’ve been doubling revenue every month and just crossed $530K in live ARR. 🚀 We are live with some of the world’s largest enterprises, already saving them millions of dollars. Some of our customers are DHL (the world’s largest logistics company) and Grupo Bimbo (the world’s largest baking company with $20B+ in revenue). In fact, we recorded this video at a Bimbo factory in San Francisco. Sotant creates teams of autonomous AI employees that deliver end-to-end business outcomes. We create them in hours using proprietary technology that replicates how experts collaborate and make complex decisions. Supply chain and logistics is a multi-trillion-dollar industry still driven by manual work, where coordination errors can cost millions of dollars and even human lives. Our team experienced these challenges firsthand at Tesla and Bosch, where members of our team led the implementation of AI for supply chain operations. @educandela is our co-founder and CEO. He studied Operations Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did his PhD in AI agents at Imperial College London, where he developed technology for multi-agent collaboration. That’s precisely what we do at Sotant now. @jdhackgrowth is our co-founder and COO. He is one of the leading growth hackers in Silicon Valley, having led growth at Investopedia, Robinhood, Stash, Mesh, and bootstrapped his previous company to over $5M in ARR. The main reason Sotant is seeing huge market pull? Agentic network effects. When we sell one AI employee, customers start requesting more. Each new AI employee can collaborate with the ones already deployed, making the entire workforce more valuable and unlocking more of the operation. We’re incredibly excited about the impact we are making! We’re saving customers millions while helping deliver life-saving medicine and food, and reducing carbon emissions. If you want to learn more about Sotant, book a call at sotant.com. Thank you to everyone at a16z Speedrun for believing in us: @marcussegal , @emilybenn12 , @Tocelot, @andrewchen , @_CallMeMacy , @Chen, @tkexpress11 . And thank you to our first believers: @CreatorFund, Alexandra Ntemourtsidou, @MacfarlaneJamie , @henrylf , LEAP4, Dr. Tobias von Wiesentreu, Matthias Kempf, Theresia M.R. Heinrich, Fares A., Daniel Willenbrink, Konstantin Meyer, Gerhard Cromme, Zafeer Ahmed, Bam Azizi, Sumon Sadhu, James Baston-Pitt, Hugo Rayne, Gabriele Maroso, Holger Rothaug.

Gaming in iPhone Duo - 3 perspectives