Investing in Europe’s most ambitious founders | Founder turned VC (Blocktorch, acq. by thirdweb) | @developer_dao #2621 - shipping on weekends
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Joined January 2022
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Gery_P retweeted
Today, we're launching Echo-3, our world model for reconstructing real spaces.
Key idea: treat reconstruction as conditional generation. The outputs are photorealistic 3DGS, point clouds, and meshes at metric scale -- only from a short iPhone video.
We believe this is an important step for physical AI, which is bottlenecked by real-world 3D data. When any phone can produce a metric digital twin, capture scales with phones rather than expensive scanning rigs, for robotics as much as for construction and real estate.
Echo-3 is also available via API: photos or video in, 3D worlds out. Check it out!
Gery_P retweeted
Introducing Echo-3. A state-of-the-art world model.
Echo-3 turns phone captures into photorealistic, metric-scale 3D worlds. From a single room to multi-floor buildings, outdoor and public spaces.
Available today.
Gery_P retweeted
Last month, 52% of the pull requests our team merged were automated through SuperPlane.
Today, we’re launching @superplanehq 1.0: an open source software factory for engineering teams.
We built it because using a coding agent can feel like becoming its assistant.
Starting sessions. Checking its work. Chasing failing CI.
SuperPlane takes on that coordination:
- Scans your backlog and proactively picks up tickets suited to automation.
- Runs a coding agent and verifies the result.
Works through CI failures and review feedback.
- Your team reviews the evidence and decides what ships.
The setup, instructions, and standards are shared across the team. When someone improves the process, everyone benefits.
Choose your agents and models. Run it on your own infrastructure.
We spent more than a decade building CI/CD at Semaphore. We’ve seen how much teams can accomplish when routine work runs reliably in the background.
Now we’re bringing that approach to coding agents.
Here’s how it works:
Gery_P retweeted
Startups should staff themselves with Warriors, and root out Guardians or Caretakers.
Bad performance is easy to spot. Mediocre performance and complacency is harder to spot. Mediocre performers will never achieve greatness. They will always be Guardians at best.
Warriors become complacent when high performance shifts to autopilot. Metrics may still look strong, but the commitment is no longer the same, and the changes in behavior are subtle. Meeting goals doesn’t mean someone isn’t complacent. Complacent Warriors lose the will to fight and become Guardians themselves.
Startups operate in a highly competitive environment. You are battling both incumbents and other startups, so you need to recruit, retain, and reward Warriors. Send the Guardians and Caretakers to your competitors.
One of Europe’s most exciting foundational model and one of the globally leading World Model companies is hiring. A truely unique opportunity to join an early stage rocket ship 🚀 check out the open positions 👇
Offline communities are the next big thing in consumer. Millennials and GenZ are tired of social media, online dating, AI slop, etc. The longevity trend started run clubs, social recovery clubs and alcohol free coffee raves. This is only the beginning of the wave 🌊
During the summer months some of you might have watched boats from the shoreline, or maybe even spent some time on a boat yourself. In sailing there is one core constraint: You can't argue with the wind. 🌬️⛵️
New post: how to name the constraint you keep fighting, and a 4-step exercise to sail it instead. 👇
gerybuilderandvc.substack.co…
The best teams find swing - the rowing word for when a crew locks in and the boat goes light. Faster, with less effort. 🚣
Link to my latest blog post about my experience finding swing 👇
gerythevc.substack.com/p/fin…
Gery_P retweeted
"We're still at the very experimental scale."
According to @GeryPollak (@threeVC), institutional agent-to-agent payments are far from production, despite growing interest in agentic commerce.
He notes that the underlying agent-to-agent economy itself hasn't matured yet.
"In theory, the agent could pay and get the snippet of information in return... fully autonomous onchain."
His concrete example (an AI agent autonomously paying to unlock paywalled video content) is meant to make an abstract concept tangible.
However, this is not happening in production today.
Gery_P retweeted
You might expect EU's clearer stablecoin framework under MiCA to help EUR stablecoins grow, but adoption is still far behind USD stablecoins.
@GeryPollak argues that regulation is not enough.
What matters is whether people and businesses actually use the currency in global trade.
In parallel, it might seem like issuing a stablecoin is where the value is, but the underlying technology becomes commoditized.
Therefore, the bigger opportunities may come from the applications built on top (payment processing, financial services, and so on).
Stablecoins are also part of the future competition between currencies.
Gerald states that if global commerce happens onchain using USD stablecoins, the EUR could gradually lose international relevance, even if it remains strong in TradFi.
Gery_P retweeted
New episode with @GeryPollak, Principal at @threeVC, is out!
We spoke about:
- Which layers of the stablecoin stack are defensible vs commoditized
- Why the euro stablecoin market is lagging despite MiCA
- AI agents, onchain payments at institutional scale & more
Timestamps:
00:00 Highlights
00:58 Introduction
01:50 Gerald’s Background
03:45 Investment Thesis
06:04 Blockchain as a Standard
10:28 Going Through Market Changes
12:52 The Role of a VC in Hiring
15:25 (Non-)Defensible Stablecoin Layer
18:36 EU Stablecoin Adoption
20:40 Stablecoins as Geopolitical Tools
22:09 Nasib Fathi & NFK Podcast
22:38 Qivalis & Consortium
24:54 Circle, AllUnity, and Others
28:00 Tokenised Asset vs Wrapper
30:00 Infra vs Capital Side of Tokenisation
31:29 Buyers/Market Makers/Settlement Infra
33:30 AI & Blockchain Use Cases
35:48 AI Agents Used at Institutional Scale
38:28 Deal Flow Patterns
40:07 Crypto/AI Infra Category That Never Works
43:40 Would He Start a Crypto Infra Company in the EU?
45:48 Closing Remarks
46:30 Ending
All links are below.
Beginning of this week Christian Neumann and I finally brought an idea to life we have been discussing for a bit: Vienna Builders Dinner — a small, curated table for technical founders, CTOs, and engineers building AI-native companies.
What stood out was the depth of talent in the room — builders from GitLab, Supabase, OpenAI, fal, Dynatrace, and a strong lineup of early-stage technical founders, all based in Vienna. Sharp perspectives, real talk, and a reminder that Vienna's technical scene is very serious.