1/ Published a piece with @bchandras3karan this AM on why we think startups building and selling commodities are poised to dominate the next decade; quick thread below
Belated life update: I recently wrapped up my last day @tryramp. Over the past 2.5 years, I learned how to build and scale products, teams, and systems from the very best in the business, and I wanted to quickly highlight some of the most important lessons
SF: sorry I can’t come out tn, doing a long run tmrw afternoon cause I’m marathon training
NYC: wanna grab a beer? Just ran 10 miles and I need a fucking drink
Venmo is fascinating cause on the one hand I use it 5x a week, and on the other I can try searching for a user I have 50+ mutuals with by their exact handle and get zero matching results
They go out of their way to prevent any kind of virality, and yet! 80M+ users, $1B+ revenue
Seeing some speculation on whether Devin is as capable as it seemed at launch.
The example run shown in the main launch video (benchmarking Llama 2 across API providers) was a real task that I gave to Devin while doing due diligence for a potential investment in @cognition_labs.
Don’t have any opinion on school-based selection for founders. But will say that what made MIT so unqiue/special was how consistently low ego, positive sum, and collaborative of an environment it was despite the density of talent and ambition (especially coming from the Bay Area)
Was thinking about Scale AI, Cursor, and Windsurf outcomes / valuations. It seems like the vast majority of the unicorn+ outsized outcomes from the past several years are from MIT founding teams. I think this is because of a collaborative and low-ego atmosphere that MIT creates
Holy shit Ezoo forces you to 1) pay for all food/drinks using your wristbands, 2) pre-load the wristband with balance rather than just linking your card, and 3) pay a flat $5 fee to refund any unused balance at the end…the greatest fintech of our generation is a MUSIC FESTIVAL??
As for what’s next, I’m still laser focused on learning to build great companies 0->1 but think it’s time for a fresh perspective. That’s why I’ve joined @eladgil’s team where I’ll be working on early stage investments and incubations. Hmu if you’re in the Bay and want to chat!
You’d be hard-pressed to find a pair of sharper, more thoughtful, and more customer-obsessed builders than @ryanjdaniels and @jsarihan. Thrilled to get to support them as they build the world’s first agentic law firm!
We’ve raised a $20M Series A from @IndexVentures, @BainCapVC, and @eladgil, with participation from @sequoia, @CooleyLLP, and @patrickc
It took us 173 days to review our first 1,000 contracts. Now, we do this every three weeks. Even as we’ve scaled, we’ve kept our signature
Ever been curious what makes one embedding model “better” than another?
@davidtsong and I built and open-sourced embeds dot ai so you can compare different embedding models on real-world queries/datasets!
Some cool takeaways below 👇
At Ramp we liked to say every day was still Day 0. Seeing how committed Jensen is to that same exact mentality 30 years and $3T into the journey was incredibly humbling and inspiring. Huge shoutout to the @nvidia team for organizing this great event!
This is what a platform company looks like.
Grateful to the GOAT Jensen Huang and team @nvidia for hosting @conviction, @eladgil and founder friends yesterday. Incredibly impressed by the warm commitment (30+ years in, at massive scale) to the startup and developer ecosystem.
1) Delight is just as, if not more, important than pain.
User interviews should be used to surface problems, not dictate your roadmap. If you only ever build what customers tell you they want or need, you’ll end up just creating a slightly optimized version of the status quo
One of the best parts of working @crosbylegal is @ryanjdaniels will randomly go up to the jazz band playing in Madison Sq Park while you’re on a casual walk and convince them to do a private show back at the office
turns out you really can just do things
If you’re wondering how legit the Devin demo is, the Llama 2 benchmarking example from this video is a real prompt I tried a few weeks ago - and Devin nailed it in one shot. One of the coolest tools I’ve used in a long time. Big congrats to @cognition_labs team on the launch🔥
Today we're excited to introduce Devin, the first AI software engineer.
Devin is the new state-of-the-art on the SWE-Bench coding benchmark, has successfully passed practical engineering interviews from leading AI companies, and has even completed real jobs on Upwork.
Devin is
